Your Voice Is All I Hear

by Leah Scheier

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “Come again?”

  “I mean it shouldn’t matter to me, right? I’ve only just met him. I’m not in love with him or anything. And if it turns out that he’s gay, then we’ll just be friends.”

  She didn’t look convinced. “That’s very mature of you.”

  I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Yeah, Kris, I’m really growing. Look, let’s stop talking about this, okay? Why don’t you tell me about your school?”

  Her face lit up. “Well, it’s just the first day, of course, but I’ve got some pictures to show you too.” She scooted closer to me and placed the computer on our laps. “Some of these friend requests are totally drool-worthy. Want to go through them together and do pros and cons?”

  I nodded eagerly, and she clicked on her “friend” icon. “First bachelor is Marty Price,” I read out.

  “Pro,” she announced, skimming over his photos. “Boy is tall and hot. And not afraid to pose without a shirt, apparently.”

  I frowned. “Yeah…but in all of his pictures?”

  “Huh. Okay, so maybe that’s a con. Marty, my dear, you like to be naked too often.” She smacked her lips. “But he’s so shiny. Check out those biceps.”

  “Kris, look at his birth date. Has he been held back a year?”

  “Umm, two.”

  “So basically he’s kind of a sparkly mimbo?”

  “Pretty much.” We stared at him for a few seconds, Kris’s manicured fingers tapping thoughtfully against the keyboard. “Okay then, next! Danny Gorman.” Her expression grew serious. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  I clicked back and forth across his time line. “There isn’t a single photo of him here. Just links to metal bands and pictures of guitars.”

  “Yeah. He’s probably not my type. But I’m not sure. You can decide for me.”

  I stared at her and shook my head. “You do realize I’ve never met him, don’t you? We go to different schools, remember?”

  “Right. I know.” She blinked at me in surprise, like I’d just shaken her awake. “But you know what’s funny?” she remarked after a pause. “Every time I met a new kid or teacher, I could hear your snarky little voice commenting about them in my head.”

  I slipped my arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick hug. “I missed you too.”

  “April, this isn’t going to be easy,” she told me glumly.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “But you have to promise me that we’re not going to grow apart. I don’t want to be like those friends who swear they’ll keep in touch and then never do.”

  I nodded. “So let’s make a deal. From now on, Saturday afternoons will be sacred Kris and April time. No matter how busy we are during the week, we’ll always get together. No excuses. What do you think?”

  “It still won’t be the same.”

  I smiled. “Kris, you just made me very happy.”

  She rolled her eyes and gave me a playful shove. “My misery makes you happy?”

  “A little,” I said, turning back to the computer on my lap. “Come on, let’s get back to the important stuff or I’ll just get depressed again. Don’t you want to hear my opinions about Mr. Piercings and Hair Cream here? Now he looks like a real winner.”

  Chapter 6

  When I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found my mom toasting multigrain bread and pureeing a mess of fruit in the blender. She’d gotten home from work very late the night before, and Kris had ordered greasy pizza for our dinner. My mother was going to be overcompensating for my unhealthy meal for the remainder of the week.

  Mom has actually been overcompensating for most of my life. She suffers from a mutated form of Jewish mother’s guilt, which she directs at herself, not at me.

  When my father moved out ten years ago, my mother found herself completely alone. She’d been disowned by her religious family for marrying outside the faith. Her clan of siblings and cousins had all turned their backs on her. So, with no one else to love, she channeled all of her energy in my direction. She memorized The Whole-Brain Child, quoting liberally from it when I misbehaved. She participated in three different parenting groups. Even though she worked as a secretary in a pediatrician’s office, she took me to an herbalist when I was ill. She engineered my meals, constructing them out of organic, preservative-free whole grains, flavorless tofu strips, homemade barley bread, wheatgrass, and every kind of seed. As a child, I had the healthiest colon in all of Baltimore.

  She worked hard, but lately, between her job and trying to be an entire family to her only daughter, she was starting to look a little frazzled.

  “Don’t worry about making me anything,” I told her as I stuffed my notebooks into my bag. “I’ll just grab lunch at school.”

  She looked horrified. “You know what they put in those deep-frying vats, don’t you?”

  “Animal fat, I know. It’s okay, Mom. I could use a little lard.”

  I was baiting her a little, mostly to keep her from asking me about my first day. I didn’t feel like talking about it yet.

  “That’s disgusting, April,” she huffed.

  “Why?” I demanded. “We aren’t vegans. And we don’t keep kosher.”

  She stared grimly at me and then hit the pulse button on the blender one more time. “So, how was your first day?” she asked, ignoring my challenge. “Did you meet any new people?”

  Despite the granola crunchiness, my mom is surprisingly in tune with what’s going on in my life. If it wasn’t for the incessant worrying, I would actually consider her a good friend.

  “A couple, yeah. A girl named Tessa and a guy.”

  She looked up from her fruit mountain. “Tessa, huh? Does she seem nice?”

  I shook my head. “No, definitely not.”

  “Oh. Well, okay then. I’m sorry to hear that.” She was suddenly very busy peeling things.

  Oh, for God’s sake, I thought. I had to give her something. I took a deep breath and leaned a little deeper into my cereal bowl. “The new boy seems pretty decent. For a guy.”

  The peeler clattered to the counter. Damn it. Why did I think this would be a good idea? Why?

  “A boy!” she exclaimed. “What kind of boy?”

  Why do parents ask questions like that? And how do they expect us to answer them? The kind of boy, Mom, who will treat me with respect and let me make my own decisions, never pressure me to have sex, be responsible with motor vehicles, always drug and alcohol free, and who eventually will propose marriage when we are old enough. Is that what she wanted to hear?

  “I think he’s a regular human boy, Mom, but I’ll have to wait until the next full moon to be absolutely sure.”

  “Very funny, April.”

  “Look, I’m going to be late for school, so I’ll get going now, okay?”

  She swept a few apple peels into a plastic bag and tied off the ends for me. She packed me apple peels, not the actual apple. A while back, she’d read that the peel was the healthiest part of fruit, so I’d been eating compost lunches for a few months now.

  “You look very nice this morning,” she told me. “Are you wearing makeup?”

  All right, so I’d spent a little time on my appearance. “Just some eye shadow,” I admitted, scraping the remainder of my cereal into the trash.

  She sniffed the air and smiled knowingly. “And perfume?”

  “Mom! It’s scented soap!” Okay, so I’d spent a lot of time. I’d gotten up at dawn. I’d scrubbed and buffed and shined myself like a new Porsche. But she didn’t need to stare at me as if she was used to seeing Jabba the Hutt at the breakfast table.

  “Well,” she said after a short silence, “I’ll be home in time for dinner tonight, so if you like, maybe you can bring over your new friend? I’d love to meet him.” She was trying her best to sound cool and casual. I wasn’t buy
ing it.

  “Mom, I met him yesterday. Please don’t make a bigger deal of this than it is.”

  “Of course, I know, I know. But I’m here for you if you have any questions—”

  “What questions could I possibly have at this point?”

  She paused uncertainly and gave me a terrified look, as if she’d suddenly decided that her entire parenting career hinged on giving me the correct answer. I was actually sorry for her. She couldn’t use her own experiences to guide her. I knew she’d never had talks about boys with her mother when she was growing up. As I understand it, the first long conversation she’d had with her mom had also been her last. I had to give her credit for trying.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” I told her as I headed for the door. “I learned the basics in sex ed years ago.”

  Chapter 7

  I had overanalyzed everything, I told myself as I entered the school building. I should never have spent so much time thinking about Jonah. How could I act naturally around him now? Why couldn’t I be more like other teens, who wandered in and out of friendships easily and traded boyfriends like playing cards? Why was I looking for him around every corner? This isn’t healthy, I decided. I was going to stop caring.

  Except then I saw Jonah by the lockers, chatting with some junior boys. His hair was still damp from his morning shower, his arms were folded across his chest, and he was laughing at something one of the other guys was saying. And suddenly I cared so much I almost fled in the opposite direction.

  He turned around and saw me, then waved me over with a smile. “April, you have to help me. Robby wants me to join the basketball team. And I’m trying to explain to them that I can’t play. What do you think? Should I sign up and make a fool of myself?”

  “You just need a little practice,” Robby suggested. “You’re taller than most of us—and we really need more players.”

  “Yeah, and you couldn’t possibly make them any worse,” I chimed in. “Last season wasn’t exactly Fallstaff’s best.”

  (They’d actually lost each and every single game. There had been jokes about pitting them against the girls’ team.)

  Jonah shrugged and shook his head. “All right, but you’ll be sorry when I trip over the ball.”

  “Oh, come on,” Robby exclaimed. “You can’t be that bad. You must have played something at your old school.”

  Jonah laughed shortly and slammed his locker shut. “I went to an art school. I mostly sketched and painted.”

  They took a step back, as if he’d just admitted to having Ebola.

  “You’re, like, some sort of artist then?”

  “Well, I try to be.”

  Robby’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “So, what are you—some kind of fag?”

  A sick knot of anger turned over in my stomach, and I felt my fists clench. But Jonah barely moved. There was a bored and patient expression on his face, as if he was used to answering this question. “No, Robby, I usually draw naked chicks,” he responded coldly. “It keeps the gay off.”

  One of the guys snickered. “Yeah, sure. Whatever, man.”

  Jonah smiled stiffly at him, shoved his hands into his pockets, and stalked off down the hall. I hurried after him and caught up to him by the classroom entrance. “Why weren’t you angry at that jerk?” I asked him. “Most guys would have punched him.”

  “Most guys care what people like Robby think. I don’t.”

  “I don’t care about Robby either,” I said. “But what about the rest of the school? What if they start spreading rumors?”

  “So what if they do? It wouldn’t be the first time.” He smiled and leaned closer to me, then reached out for my hand and shaped my fingers into a ball. “But next time you’re thinking of punching someone, make sure you make a decent fist, okay? Thumb goes on the outside. Unless you want to break your knuckles.”

  I glanced down at our hands, and suddenly I was ready to be the female Evander Holyfield if it meant that Jonah would hold my hand forever. He was warm and close; he smelled faintly of chocolate mint and aftershave. I was beginning to feel a little dizzy.

  He held my fingers for a few seconds longer—maybe a shade longer than he really needed to. “Look, it’s really sweet of you to care so much,” he said. “But honestly, I checked out the minute I walked into this place.” He swallowed hard and seemed about to speak again, but then a group of students began to push past us, and he dropped my hand and hurried into the classroom after them.

  I inhaled deeply, tugged my sleeve back into place, and slowly floated into history class.

  The first thing Ms. Lowry talked about that morning was the composition of history essays; she said that our goal was proving our main hypothesis. Then she said a lot of other things, but I wasn’t really listening after that. I had an important hypothesis of my own to prove—namely, that Jonah wasn’t gay.

  I constructed a simple chart and jotted down the currently known facts about my new friend.

  The page was split into two columns and read something like this:

  Jonah

  Not Gay

  Gay

  Fistfights?

  Artsy stuff (admits this openly)

  His clothes are nothing special

  Apparently not attracted to Cora

  Held my hand for a few seconds

  Smells really good

  Complimented me twice

  Complimented me twice

  Says he’s straight

  Says he’s straight

  I needed to show my chart to Kristin and ask her for help. But I’d recently pulled a mature and progressive attitude and declared that I didn’t care one way or the other. I couldn’t show up at her door with my neurotic notes. Asking my mom’s opinion was out of the question. She’d probably faint and then check out twenty books on teen sexuality from the library and make me read them. I needed more data, I decided. I’d try to take things as they came.

  Still, I probably shouldn’t have written Jonah’s name at the top of my chart. That was truly an advanced level of stupid. Or I should have at least hidden the paper.

  Oops.

  We were gathering up our books after the bell rang when Jonah leaned back to say something to me. I realized suddenly that my gay analysis chart was sitting in plain view on top of my open binder. With a quick motion, I slammed the cover down to hide the page. My movement was too sudden; the loose sheets fluttered out onto the floor. I made a mad dive for them and caught one just in time—only to realize that I was holding the first page of my history syllabus. And Jonah had kindly picked up the other sheet—and was now staring at it quietly. I made a futile grab for it, but he stepped quickly aside, his eyes still fixed on the paper in front of him.

  Then he raised his eyes to look at me, and I felt the blood rush to my face. How bad was it? I wondered, trying desperately to remember what I’d written. I hadn’t said anything negative about him. He might think it funny and maybe even complimentary—I had, after all, mentioned that he smelled nice. Maybe we would laugh at this over lunch.

  And maybe not.

  The room got slowly quieter as the other students filed out. I stared at him, hoping for him to speak and dreading it at the same time. I couldn’t interpret his expression; it seemed absolutely blank. Was it shock? Disappointment? Why wouldn’t he say something? Get mad, like a normal guy, tear up the sheet, call me a moron? Was he waiting for me to talk? What did he want me to say? I’d ruined our friendship before it had even started. If he was gay, I realized, then that page would look like I was judging him. If he was straight and he’d actually been attracted to me—well, he wouldn’t be anymore
.

  I cleared my throat and tried to say his name, but I only managed a strangled raspy noise. Without a word, Jonah held the sheet out to me, dropped it at my feet, then turned and walked slowly out of the classroom. The door shut behind him softly, and his retreating footsteps faded into the rumble of the students in the hall. I picked up the page, crumpled it in my hand, and crept miserably to the girls’ bathroom.

  Chapter 8

  I missed math completely; I did bathroom independent study instead. To the outside eye, I was looking at my reflection and trying not to cry. But a lot actually happened on the inside. After forty minutes of intense mirror-staring, I made an important decision. I wasn’t going to give this friendship up, not without a fight. I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself. I was going to admit my feelings openly, and if that wasn’t enough, then screw it. Things couldn’t get any worse anyway.

  Spanish was a total blur, and English was miserable because Jonah sat next to me and didn’t look at me once. It doesn’t matter, I thought as I watched the clock and chewed my pen. I was going to do this. During lunch. Even if it killed me.

  I was shaking by the time the bell rang. My hands were numb, and there was a strange metallic flavor in my mouth. Jonah fled the classroom before I had a chance to speak. It doesn’t matter, I told myself again. I would find him in the cafeteria whether he liked it or not.

  He was standing by the salad bar when I came in. Cora was hovering behind him, whispering and pointing at her table. I pushed through the room toward them. My knees were weak, my skin felt cold, and my stomach was churning. But I was going to go through with it, no matter what. When I reached them, I put my hand out and touched Jonah’s sleeve. They both turned around and stared at me.

  “Jonah, can I speak to you—alone?”

  He nodded dumbly and, ignoring Cora’s malicious smile, led me to the corner of the room. I glanced around us to make sure that nobody was listening and swallowed slowly. I would need a drink when this was over; I didn’t know that fear could taste so bitter.