by Ali Benjamin
We are outside, and it is summer. Your mother is letting us stay up later than we usually do—later, she says, than seven-year-olds should. You and I started the evening at my house. We planned a sleepover there—it would be the first time you slept away from your own home. But after dinner you changed your mind and cried, and so my mom called your mom, and then your mom picked us up.
Now we are sleeping at your house instead.
We are running and running in circles. The sky above us grows dim, and dark figures swoop around in the air above us. I am pretty sure they are bats. I tell you this, and you squeal. We run faster.
I know some things about bats. I know that bats are the only mammal that can fly, because that is something I read in a book.
I am a good reader now, and sometimes I tell you about the things I read, and you ask me to tell you even more. Like when I told you that rabbits’ teeth never stop growing, you wanted me to tell you everything else I knew about rabbits—that they cannot throw up and that they will eat their own poop and that the longest rabbit ears ever seen were thirty-one inches.
My parents have a word for what I do—constant-talking, like that is a single word—and they explain to me that it is important to let others talk, too. Ask people questions, my mom always says. It’s not a conversation if you’re constant-talking. And I try to remember that, to ask people things.
But you like it when I tell you things. You don’t need me to ask you questions. You have never once called what I do constant-talking.
We spread our arms like wings, and when we fall down in the grass, we breathe hard and laugh and the world moves around us in dizzy ways.
Fluffernutter, your dog, watches. She is still just a puppy, a little ball of white fur. As we run, she yips and wags her tail, which is really just a stump because someone cut it off when she was born. Fluffernutter is tied to a leash, which is looped over a stick in the ground; it would take nothing at all for Fluffernutter to pull the stick out and come running after us, but she doesn’t. She thinks she is more trapped than she actually is.
And you know what? I don’t care that we are not at my house like we planned, and I don’t care that you still use a sippy cup at night, even though we are almost in second grade. I don’t care that you sometimes cry because you miss your daddy, who you don’t even remember. I don’t care that you write your Ns backward and that you sometimes read nap instead of pan, which means you have to go to summer school this year. I don’t care that your cheeks and your neck and your ears flush bright pink when you are asked to read out loud in class, or that you sometimes have trouble coming up with ideas for a story. I have plenty of ideas for both of us.
I also don’t care that at the end of the school year, a girl named Aubrey said, loudly enough that everyone could hear, “Franny Jackson isn’t pretty or smart.”
I saw your face when she said that. I saw the way your cheeks got blotchy, saw the way you stared at the ground as if you could hold the tears in. But you couldn’t, and you started crying, and you cried for almost all of recess, until I whispered to you that the playground was really ancient Egypt and that the space between the swing set and the slide was the Nile River. If we ran through that space fast enough, maybe we could avoid the crocodiles. And that made you smile even though you still had some snot in your nose, and it didn’t take long before we were both running and laughing like usual.
So I don’t care about those other girls, just like I don’t
care that in my end-of-first-grade report card the teacher
said perhaps you and I should try to make some other
friends, that perhaps “branching out” would help me
with my “social skills,” whatever those things mean.
The teacher doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand that we have everything we need, exactly as we are. Like right now: We have the grass under our feet and Fluffernutter’s wagging stump and the spinning and the laughter and the sky growing dark above our heads.
Mom and i sat in the car, in the parking lot of the First Street Schoolhouse building. Which, for the record, is actually on Garis Street, and it isn’t a school at all. It’s a bunch of offices, one of which happens to belong to Dr. M. Legler, child psychologist.
Through the windshield, I saw my dad waiting for us to get out of the car.
“Zu,” my mom said. “Please don’t make us any later than we already are.”
I folded my arms across my chest. Otherwise, I stayed exactly still.
“Listen, Zu. The fact that we’re here doesn’t mean we think something’s wrong with you.”
You think I’m cray cray. That’s why we’re here.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Mom added, “I know you’re sad, Zu, but I’m also sure you’re going to be okay. But your dad and I—”
She sighed and looked out at him. Held up her index finger, as if to say, Just a moment. He nodded and waved.
“We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to help you.” She sighed again. “Other than giving you time, this is the only thing we could think to do.”
When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I know you don’t want to be here, Zu. But I’m going to ask you to get out of the car anyway.”
I frowned. But I opened the car door.
“Hey, kiddo,” Dad greeted me. “How are you?” His voice was all friendly, as if we weren’t in that parking lot because of my cracks and flaws. As if he didn’t call my mom to talk about my not-talking all the time. Mom always pretended she was getting a work call, but I could hear her saying things like I don’t know, Jim. . . . No, I have no earthly idea why. . . . I swear. . . . Yes, I’m trying. Of course I have told her that.
My dad wrapped his arm around me and pulled me toward him in a half-hug, as if I might just answer, Great, Dad, I’m doing great.
We walked through the door and up to suite 307, which is the one with Dr. M. Legler’s name on it.
The doctor I could talk to was different than I expected. For one thing, Dr. M. Legler was a woman. For another, she had jet-black hair, straight, like a vampire’s. Her legs stretched long and thin beneath a short skirt, and she wore lacy black tights, which I frankly didn’t think was very professional.
Dr. Legs, I thought. I frowned.
She led us into an office with a thick carpet and leather chairs and gestured for us to sit.
The chair squeaked as I settled into it.
Dr. Legs looked directly at me. “Your parents called me, Suzanne, because they’re worried about you.”
I looked away, toward the window, even though all I could see was a different window, shade drawn, surrounded by a brick wall.
“They tell me you’re pretty quiet these days. Is that right?”
I folded my arms, my eyes still on that window. If she knew that, why in the world would she think I would answer her question? For that matter, why was she asking a question she clearly already had the answer to?
“And they say you stopped talking soon after the loss of your friend, is that right?”
Not my friend, I thought. Not when it happened, anyway.
“Well, I want you to know,” she continued, as if I’d answered her, “everybody grieves in different ways. There’s not a right way or a wrong way to grieve for someone you loved.”
I looked at her bookshelf. It was filled with books that had titles like The Miracle of Mindfulness. Victims No Longer. Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time. No More Bedwetting.
As Dr. Legs spoke, I imagined rearranging the words in the titles.
No More Time.
One-Step Depression.
Victims of the Bedwetting Miracle.
“Meg.” Dr. Legs turned to my mom. “How does Suzanne’s refusal to talk affect you?”
Sometimes my mother’s tears are sad tears, sometimes they’re happy tears, and sometimes they’re what she calls love tears, but I can’t always tell the difference between them. I watched her eyes fill, and I thought: Th
ese are probably the sad kind.
“Suzy just seems so . . . unhappy,” my mom said. Her voice was quieter and heavier than I wanted it to be.
It seemed mean to ask my mom to talk about something that made her cry. Frankly, I didn’t much care for Dr. Legs’s character.
When my mom was done explaining how she just really wanted to be let in, Dr. Legs turned to my dad.
“Tell me, Jim,” she said. “How often do you see Suzanne?”
“Every week,” he said. “Every Saturday night.”
“And you stick to that routine?”
“Always.”
It was true. Every Saturday, without fail, Dad and I went to Ming Palace, a Chinese restaurant wedged between Planet Fitness and the Price Chopper supermarket out on Route 24. It was a promise Dad had made when he moved out: that no matter how much he had to travel the rest of the week, he would be there on Saturday at 6 p.m. Every single week.
“Do you see the same thing as Meg?” Dr. Legs asked. “Do you think Suzanne is unhappy?”
“What do you think?” he snapped. He frowned and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. But I mean . . . of course she’s unhappy. That’s why we’re here.”
He looked at the floor. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Maybe I could deal with the silence better if we still lived together,” he said. “But I’m not at the house to tell her good night. And I’m not there when she’s getting ready for school in the morning. And I’m not there when she does her homework. I travel all the time, and I spend all week looking forward to weekends. But now—now she doesn’t even talk to me, and it’s like I’ve got nothing at all. Like she’s just . . . gone.”
Sometimes, when I don’t like what is happening, I make lists of things in my head. I decided right then to make a list of the most interesting things I could remember seeing online.
I once saw pictures of two blonde girls, laughing and making faces at each other, and it all looked very friendly and usual, except that their two necks stemmed out of a single body.
I once saw a man with devil horns surgically implanted in his head and tattoos all over his face. I didn’t especially enjoy seeing that.
I once saw a polar bear that had starved to death. The bear had needed ice to find food, but all the ice had melted. The bear was skin and bones, like a lumpy white rug, lying on green grass with one paw lifted up in a kind of salute.
I hated seeing that.
“Suzanne,” Dr. Legs was saying. “I’m going to ask you to try to trust me. You can say anything here. Anything at all. I won’t judge.”
I nodded, because it seemed like that was what the situation called for. But by then I had stopped listening. All I really wanted to do was get back to a computer and start looking up everything I could about jellyfish. I wasn’t sure how a person even begins to go about testing a hypothesis like the one I’d formed, and I knew I didn’t have any time to waste.
Dr. Legs finished whatever she was saying with the words “. . . and that’s why we sometimes need the help of a professional.”
I looked up. I wasn’t sure what exactly she had been saying, but that word, professional, seemed important.
“You see, professionals are trained to recognize patterns,” she continued. “Both good patterns and the patterns that a person might want to change. Professionals are trained to help people figure out things they struggle to understand on their own.”
Right then, an idea dawned on me.
“I mean,” Dr. Legs continued, “a twelve-year-old can’t be expected to solve every problem herself, can she?”
She was absolutely right. I did need a professional. Not for the not-talking, of course. But to help me with my hypothesis.
There had to be jellyfish experts out there—people who knew about migration patterns, or stings, or other things I wouldn’t even think to wonder about on my own.
Jellyologists, I thought. / need a jellyologist.
I was going to find some. And one of them was going to help me prove the thing I needed to prove: that Franny had been stung by a jellyfish.
If any part of me questioned this mission right then, if any part of me thought, This is a crazy notion—it is filled with cracks and flaws, I pushed it out of my brain immediately.
The thing is, a person gets so few chances to really fix something, to make it right. When one of those opportunities comes along, you can’t overthink it. You’ve got to grab hold of it and cling to it with all your might, no matter how cray cray it might seem.
Outside, in the parking lot, Dad gave me a hug. “See you on Saturday,” he said. He had picked up a brochure in the office: Children and Grief: Big Issues for Little Hearts. “Same time, same place.”
Then he kissed me on the top of my head. He got into his car, and my mom and I got into her car, and everybody drove away from the First Street Schoolhouse building.
For now.
Ming palace was the place where my not-talking began. It was just a few days after seventh grade started, which was just a few days after Franny’s funeral. When I arrived at the restaurant that night, Dad was outside, cradling a phone between his neck and his shoulder. “Uh-huh,” he said. He held up one finger as if to say, I’ll be just a moment.
Dad’s job is something confusing with computers and universities. His travel involves something called systems checks, which sounds kind of tedious to me.
“Yeah, that’s what I was saying,” he said into the phone. “Yup. Seems to be isolated to that server. . . . Yeah, they’ve got all their resources on it.”
He smiled at me and rolled his eyes, as if to say, These guys, about whoever he was talking to.
I smiled back and rolled my own eyes, as if to say, Yeah, I know just what you mean.
I had no idea who he was talking to.
When he finally hung up, he put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in for a quick hug. “Sorry about that, kiddo. Crisis resolved for the moment.”
I followed him into the restaurant, and we sat down in the pink vinyl booth we always chose. The waitress came over. “You want the usual?” she asked. After more than a year of Saturday dinners out, she knows our order by heart: wonton soup (me), hot and sour (Dad), honey chicken with rice (me), moo shu pork (Dad), Shirley Temple (me), Rolling Rock (Dad).
I nodded, and Dad nodded. Then he turned to me. “So what did you think about your first couple of days of school?”
By now I was twelve years old and starting my second year of middle school. I knew a few things about grown-ups. And here’s one of the things I knew: Grown-ups are like everybody else—they don’t actually want you to say what you’re thinking.
Once, when my dad asked me what I was thinking, I told him about the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex, which is like a stew of plastic trash that gets swirled together smack-dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I told him that some people think the Garbage Vortex is two times the size of the state of Texas, and that it’s filled with plastic that people dump in the ocean, and that the plastic chokes the coral and gets rocked by the waves, and then breaks down into tiny pieces. Then grown-up birds confuse those plastic scraps with food and feed them to their chicks, and the babies die of starvation even though their parents are feeding them just like they should.
My dad had sighed when I told him that. I guess he wanted me to tell him about gym class instead.
My dad’s question hung in the air. What did I think about my first couple of days of school?
What my dad wanted, I suspect, was the thing everybody seems to want: small talk. But I don’t understand small talk. I don’t even understand why it’s called that—small talk—when it fills up so much space.
Most of all, I don’t understand why small talk is considered more polite than not-talking. It’s like when people applaud after a performance. Have you ever heard someone not clap after a performance? People clap every time, no matter whether it was good or bad. They even applaud after the Eugene Field band plays its annual concert, a
nd that’s really saying something. So wouldn’t it be easier and take less time and effort to just not clap? Because it would mean the same thing, which is nothing at all.
In the end, not-talking means the same thing, more or less, as small talk. Nothing. Besides, I’ll bet so-called small talk has ended more friendships than silence ever did.
After a while, my dad tried again. “Anyone you especially like? Teachers? New kids?”
I thought about that. For the most part, it was a lot of the same kids I knew from previous years: wretched Dylan Parker and messy-always-messing-up Justin Maloney. That new girl, Sarah Johnston, seemed okay, I guess. And I was pretty sure I liked Mrs. Turton, the seventh-grade science teacher. When we walked in the door on the first day, she wore an Albert Einstein wig and tried to explain that time moves at different speeds depending on how fast you’re traveling. I liked the way she made it seem like the world around us, even the normal everyday stuff, was actually kind of amazing. Already, she’d told us there are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in a single human body, enough to circle Earth two and a half times. She told us that ants sleep for just eight minutes a day but that snails can sleep for three years. She also said that each of us has at least 20 billion atoms from William Shakespeare inside our body. At least 20 billion, she emphasized, and she showed us some complicated math to prove it.
I tried feeling those atoms, tried to sense if there was anything inside me that might inspire me to burst out with To be, or not to be or Wherefore art thou, but I couldn’t. Then I realized that if we all had Shakespeare’s atoms inside us, we probably also had atoms from Adolf Hitler, who was probably the worst human who ever lived. And I didn’t really want to think about that.
I liked that we were going to write research papers for Mrs. Turton’s class and that we could choose any subject we wanted as long as it related to science. Past students, she explained, had studied orcas, diabetes, astronaut food, the Black Death, velociraptors, solar hurricanes, and bioterrorism. The point, she said, was to learn how to research, how to find out more about anything we wondered about. “That’s what science is,” she explained. “It’s learning what others have discovered about the world, and then—when you bump up against a question that no one has ever answered before—figuring out how to get the answer you need.”