The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Kate scowled. “I don’t obsess about Matthew Holler. That’s dumb.”

  Now Lorna and Flannery rolled their eyes in unison. “Kate,” Lorna said, and Kate could tell she was trying to sound gentle, but not trying all that hard. “You spend every free minute of your day hanging out at the audio lab, listening to that awful World of Noise project Matthew’s working on. You drop his name into every conversation, like, ‘Oh yeah, when I was hanging out at Matthew’s the other day . . .’ You’re totally obsessed.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Kate insisted. “I need to be free. I’m tired of someone else controlling my life.”

  Flannery looked at Lorna. “Finally.”

  Lorna nodded at Flannery. “It’s about time.”

  “Have you guys been talking about me?” Kate clenched her fists. She hated when people talked about her! “Like, gossiping about me and Matthew?”

  “It’s helped cement our friendship,” Flannery said with a shrug.

  “It’s only because we care,” Lorna added.

  “Well, I guess now you’re going to have to find something else to talk about,” Kate said, sounding huffy. “Because Matthew Holler will no longer be a topic of conversation.” She turned to Lorna. “So what kind of snacks did you bring today?”

  “You’re just using me for food,” Lorna said, but she sounded happy about it. Lorna loved being famous for her cooking.

  What if all Kate was famous for was being that girl who hung out with Matthew Holler? If she got hit by a truck this afternoon, was that how people would remember her? Oh yeah, Kate Faber—she was the one who had that thing for Matthew. She was the one who followed Matthew Holler around like a puppy.

  Kate felt her face go red. How had she become that sort of person?

  Well, she wasn’t that sort of person anymore. From now on, she was the sort of person who wore what she felt like wearing, said what she felt like saying, and did what she felt like doing. She was the sort of person who was known for being independent and outspoken. That Kate Faber, people would say, she doesn’t care what anybody thinks. She just does exactly what she wants.

  Yep, that’s me, Kate thought, taking a swipe at the mission door with her paintbrush. Free as a bird. Free as a comet. Free as the Fourth of July.

  Kate was sitting on her bed that night, writing in her poetry notebook, when her dad came to the door, the phone in his hand. “Matthew called when you were in the bathroom earlier. He said to call him back when you got a chance.”

  “When I was in the bathroom? Like, thirty minutes ago? And you’re just telling me now?”

  Mr. Faber nodded. “I was on the phone with a client. I tried to ignore the call-waiting beep, but it kept going off until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “You know, if you’d let me get a cell phone, we wouldn’t be having these problems,” Kate pointed out. Her dad was totally against his children having cell phones. He had a folder full of articles about how cell phones gave you brain cancer. It was in his file cabinet, right next to the folder where he kept all his clipped newspaper articles about teenagers dying in drunk-driving accidents.

  “Not going to happen, Katie. We’ll just have to keep living like primitives.” Mr. Faber held up the phone like he was about to toss it to her. “You want to call him back? I’m done with my business.”

  Did Kate want to call Matthew Holler? How was she supposed to answer that question? Of course she wanted to call him! She wanted to call and ask him if he’d heard the new Midtown Dickens song on K-DUCK, the one where somebody played a saw, and how cool was that? She wanted to call and tell him about this book of poems she’d just checked out of the library, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. She wanted to call and read him a draft of the poem she was working on, which she was calling “Free as a Bird Who Just Discovered It Was Free.”

  The only problem was, the poem was sort of about being free from Matthew Holler.

  “I’ll see him at school tomorrow,” Kate told her dad. “It probably wasn’t anything important.”

  Mr. Faber gave Kate a long look. “Everything okay? Between you and Matthew, I mean?”

  “There is no me and Matthew,” Kate insisted. “He’s just a friend. There’s nothing between us. That makes it sound so—I don’t know, just not what it is.”

  Her dad leaned down to pull at a piece of tape stuck to the carpet. “I thought maybe he was—you know, your boyfriend.”

  Kate thought she might throw up. “Dad! I don’t want to talk about this stuff ! Do you have these kinds of talks with Tracie? Like, about who her boyfriend is?”

  “Tracie hasn’t spoken to me in three years,” Mr. Faber said. “Except to ask me for money, or for a ride to the mall. But a substantial conversation about her actual life? Nope. Hasn’t happened.”

  Now Kate felt guilty. Why did her dad always make her feel guilty? Like she was a terrible person, just because she didn’t want to play basketball on Saturday mornings or talk about her love life?

  “Maybe you and Mom should have another baby,” Kate said, doodling in her notebook. “Maybe this time you’d get a boy, and you guys could have lots of personal, manly talks about, I don’t know, antifungal cream.”

  Mr. Faber snorted. “One, I’m not sure your mom would think that was such a hot idea. Two, even if we have a hundred more babies, I’d still want to know about you, Katie. I know it’s not going to be the way it was when you were five and wanted to tell me every single thing that happened to you. I know you have to have your own life—”

  Then, abruptly, he shut up. He rubbed his eyes, and Kate thought her dad might be on the verge of crying. Oh, please don’t let him cry, she begged silently. Please, God or the universe or whoever’s out there, don’t let him cry. Kate was pretty sure that if her dad started crying, she would break into a hundred little pieces and no one would ever be able to put her together again.

  “Listen, I know you’re growing up,” Mr. Faber began again. “I get it. And your mom says I should give you a lot of space, which I’m trying to do. I just always thought—”

  “Always thought what?” Kate urged, hoping that if her dad kept talking, he’d be less likely to have an emotional breakdown.

  Mr. Faber sighed. “That we’d always have a good relationship. That you’d stay my pal.”

  Kate tried to make herself say it. She tried to make herself utter the words I am your pal, Dad. But she couldn’t do it. All she could offer was, “I’ll tell you some stuff, okay? Like, I could tell you about play rehearsal. Lots of interesting stuff happens at play rehearsal.”

  “That would be great,” Mr. Faber said. He nodded toward her desk chair, as if to ask, Mind if I take a seat? Kate gave him a magnanimous wave, as if to say, Sure, why not?

  “You know, I worked on the tech crew for some musicals in high school,” her dad said as he crossed the room. “Bye Bye Birdie, Fiddler on the Roof. Never Guys and Dolls, though.”

  “It’s a lot of fun,” Kate told him. “Well, except when Ms. South makes us do a song ten million times.”

  Mr. Faber was about to sit down when the phone in his hand rang. “Probably Matthew again,” he said, holding out the receiver to Kate. “You want to take it?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “No, that’s okay. Let the machine pick it up.”

  “Good girl,” her dad told her, and Kate sat back, surprised. The way he said it? It sounded like he knew exactly what she was thinking, that if she took this call, she’d take the next one and the next one and the next one. And if she kept taking Matthew’s calls, she’d never be free. She’d never be the bird in her poem.

  “I’m trying,” she told her dad. “It’s hard, but I’m trying.”

  Her dad nodded, and Kate realized they’d just had a conversation about her personal life without actually talking about it.

  Works for me, she thought.

  The problem was, Matthew Holler kept waiting for her at her locker. It was funny how now that she wasn’t going out o
f her way to hang out with him, he seemed to be waiting around for her a lot more. It sort of made Kate mad, to be honest, like Matthew was playing games with her. She was pretty sure that if she started showing up at the audio lab every morning, Matthew would go back to his old routine, where sometimes he seemed really happy to see her, and other times he acted like he couldn’t care less.

  And it was weird that something Kate used to actively wish for on a daily basis—that Matthew would be waiting for her at her locker, which he almost never had been—had turned into something she sort of dreaded. As soon as she saw Matthew at her locker, she felt self-conscious, and she was tired of feeling self-conscious. She was tired of spending 99 percent of her time worrying that she should have flossed after breakfast. She bet that Walt Whitman or Amelia Earhart never worried about that kind of stuff.

  “But you like it, too, don’t you?” Flannery asked after Kate complained at play rehearsal one afternoon. “It’s kind of cool that he’s waiting for you, right?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” Kate admitted. “I guess it means he cares.”

  But that was the real problem, Kate decided after thinking about it for a while. Matthew Holler cared, even if sometimes he acted like he didn’t. He thought that he and Kate were still friends. And they were, only Kate kind of needed a friendship vacation. She needed a few weeks, maybe a month, to practice not caring. To practice thinking her own thoughts without wondering if Matthew had the same sort of thoughts, or if he would think her thoughts were stupid or obvious or uncool.

  “You need a boyfriend,” Marylin advised her on the bus one morning. “You need to have another boy waiting at your locker. Guys are super territorial. Believe me, if Matthew sees a guy at your locker, he’ll back off.”

  “But I don’t want a boyfriend,” Kate complained.

  “So, get somebody to pretend he’s your boyfriend,” Marylin suggested. “At least for a week or two. I bet if I asked Daniel Wyncoop to do it, he would. Do you know him? He’s on the spring dance committee, and the other day he asked me for advice about girls. He’s pretty shy. You could be a practice girl for him, and he could be a fake boyfriend for you.”

  “Wow, that might be your worst idea yet,” Kate said, reaching into her backpack for a pen. “I’m going to start making a list, and at the end of the school year we’ll compare and contrast.”

  Marylin punched her in the arm. “Stop! My ideas are great. Okay, well, if you don’t like my fake boyfriend idea, how about this—why don’t you quit going to your locker first thing in the morning? Pack your first-period stuff the day before, and then in the morning you don’t have to go to your locker until second period. Maybe if you don’t show up for a few days, Matthew will start to think you have a boyfriend, and he’ll leave you alone.”

  The idea of Matthew leaving her alone made Kate sad, but she had to admit Marylin’s idea might actually work. “I just want to take a break from him. Just for a little while.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” Marylin said. “Not that I want to take a break from Benjamin or anything. At least, I don’t think I do. Everything’s just weird right now. I’m trying to reprioritize my life, now that I’m not a cheerleader anymore.”

  “Do you think that Benjamin cares? I mean, that you quit?”

  Marylin stared out the window. “Maybe a little? I think he liked the whole cheerleader mystique thing.”

  Kate almost said something sarcastic, but she decided not to. It was a big deal that Marylin had quit the squad, and Kate felt like she ought to be as supportive as she could.

  “Maybe he’s just getting used to the new you,” she proposed. “It took a lot of guts to quit. Maybe Benjamin didn’t know what kind of woman he was really dealing with.”

  “Or maybe Mazie’s telling him terrible things about me,” Marylin countered. “Who knows?”

  “Benjamin wouldn’t listen to Mazie. He’s too smart for that. Really, I don’t think you should worry about him.”

  “Really?” Marylin looked at Kate, her expression torn between hope and fear.

  “Really,” Kate assured her, and was surprised by how relieved Marylin looked. A lot of people probably thought that being pretty would protect her from worrying about whether her boyfriend liked her, but Kate knew Marylin well enough to know it didn’t.

  That’s why I want to be free, Kate told herself as she walked inside the school building and headed toward her locker. If you like somebody, they have too much control over you. Who wants that?

  Matthew was waiting for her. Why was he there, morning after morning? Did he miss Kate adoring him all the time?

  “I wish I could hang out and talk,” Kate said when she reached her locker. She began working the combination. “But I have to go meet someone. I have to go meet this—this guy I know.”

  “Oh yeah?” Matthew sounded like he was trying not to sound too interested. “Who’s that?”

  “Just this guy. He’s, uh, nobody.” Kate tugged at her earth sciences notebook, and Matthew reached over her shoulder and pulled it out for her. “Thanks,” she said. “Stuff just sort of gets wedged in there.”

  Matthew looked to his left, then to his right, like he was checking for spies. Then he leaned toward Kate and said, “Are you mad at me or something?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?” Kate asked, shoving her books into her backpack. “I can’t think of any reason.”

  “Me either,” Matthew agreed. “It’s just, you don’t call me anymore or come to the audio lab. And you haven’t written me a note all week. You know, ‘Who’s greater, Jack White or Jack Johnson?’ ”

  “That’s stupid,” Kate told him. She zipped her backpack closed. “I would never do one that stupid. Curious George Jack Johnson? Really?”

  “No, not really,” Matthew said, his cheeks reddening. “It was just an example. I just don’t think you should be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Kate said, trying to sound as grown-up as possible. “I’m really, truly not. I just have a lot going on. You know, the musical and everything, and I’m writing a lot. And you’re busy too, with World of Noise. It’s just a busy time.”

  “You sound like my mom,” Matthew complained. “Next thing you’ll be telling me you have to go to your book club meeting right after you make brownies for the PTA bake sale.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to tell you next,” Kate said. “How’d you guess?”

  Matthew snorted. “Quit, okay? Just quit being mad at me and quit being sarcastic and quit thinking that just because Emily is hanging out in the audio lab that it means anything.”

  “I don’t care about Emily hanging out with you,” Kate said, which was a lie, but it was a lie she wanted to believe more than anything in the world. “Why would I care?”

  Matthew leaned toward Kate’s locker and slammed the door shut. “You care because you care. You can’t help it. And I care, okay? In case you were wondering.”

  Kate didn’t know what to say. She stood there for a minute, staring past Matthew’s left shoulder. “But I don’t want to care,” she said finally. “And that’s why I need you to leave me alone.”

  “What?” Matthew looked at her like he couldn’t believe what she was saying, his cheeks getting even redder. “You want me to what?”

  Kate thought that he looked like he was about to cry, and maybe she was wrong about that, but she turned around and walked away anyway. Why is everything so stupid? she thought, walking into the girls’ room at the end of the hallway. Why is it so dumb? she wondered, locking herself in a stall and just standing there for a long, long time, until everything stopped hurting long enough for her to go to the office and ask them to call her house because she didn’t feel so good and needed to go home.

  Kate’s dad picked her up in front of the school. “Good thing I was working at home today, huh?” he asked as Kate slid into the front seat. “Your mom would have come except for that whole cupcake thing.”

  “Yeah, the Garden Club luncheon.
I can’t believe I forgot about that.”

  “Two hundred fifty cupcakes for seventy old ladies,” Mr. Faber said, shaking his head. “I don’t know, that seems extreme to me. So how’s your stomach? Do we need to stop at the drug store for some Pepto?”

  Kate had told the school nurse she had a bad stomachache. Stomachaches were her go-to excuse for getting out of school. You could have a stomachache and still have a normal temperature, not to mention that as soon as you said your stomach hurt, everyone got immediately concerned you were going to throw up. The throw-up factor packed quite a punch, in Kate’s experience.

  “I think I just need to eat some toast or something,” Kate told her dad. “Just something to settle my stomach down.”

  “Maybe we should stop at Elmo’s on the way home then. I don’t think Mom’s letting anyone in the kitchen right now. It’s cupcake central in there.”

  Elmo’s was the diner where Kate and her dad used to go after they played basketball on Saturday mornings. Mr. Faber always ordered a cheese omelet and an extra-large orange juice. For a while, Kate had been methodically working her way through the breakfast menu, but had given up when she got to the tofu and sprouts frittata. After that, she usually just got strawberry yogurt with granola and a Danish.

  Kate had never been to Elmo’s on a weekday morning and was surprised to see how busy it was. “Breakfast rush,” her dad said as he pushed open the door. “Expect to hear the clatter of silverware.”

  A waitress guided them to a booth, and as she took her seat Kate heard what her dad meant. It was like a symphony of spoons tapping against coffee cups and forks scraping plates. “It would be so cool to record this,” she told her dad as the waitress handed them their menus. “Matthew could totally use it for his World of Noise project.”

  As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t. The sad feeling started in her stomach and then it covered her all over, inside and out. In a weird way, it seemed like Matthew had died. He’s gone away from me, she thought, and then, because she was a poet and a songwriter and couldn’t help herself, she thought, My baby’s done gone away, done gone away from me.