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Your Voice is All I Hear
By Leah Scheier Sourcebooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2015 Leah Scheier
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4926-1442-5
CHAPTER 1
Six months earlier
I'd lost the homeschooling argument again. Also the school transfer argument, the study abroad argument, and finally (in a pathetic, last-ditch effort that stank of desperation), the chronic fatigue syndrome argument.
The truth was that I hadn't really expected to win. I knew what my mother was going to say before she said it. Simplified, her points were: single parent, can't afford it; can't afford that; can't afford that either; you don't have that illness or any other, April, so stop being ridiculous and get your books ready for school and don't forget to set your alarm, please, good night.
"But I can't, I just can't go without Kristin," I wailed, unleashing my last and final weapon — honesty. That has to get through to her, I thought. She couldn't ignore her only daughter baring her soul. My mom was all about "sharing your emotions," "listening to your primal voice," and "nursing your inner baby" — or whatever. (She reads a lot of self-help books.) So maybe if I dumped a buttload of truth and suffering on her, she'd celebrate my personal growth, shed a couple of cleansing tears, and let me stay home. "Mom, please, you know how hard it's been for me to make friends at Fallstaff High," I pleaded. "I just can't go back there tomorrow; I need a little bit more time — "
I should have expected the next part, I guess. She'd just gotten through her latest favorite: Face Your Fear by some celebrity healer. What did I think was going to happen? Fast-forward half an hour, and we were still in the same position on the living room rug. I was tired. She was just getting started. Somewhere between "fighting back against the darkness" (you've never been to Fallstaff High, have you, Mom?) and "knotting the spiritual umbilical cord" (knotting my spiritualwhat?), I humbly admitted defeat. Or exhaustion. Same result.
Bottom line: I was going to start tenth grade tomorrow (Mom's words).
I was going to "connect with others" and "strengthen my inner immunity" (Mom again).
I was going to end up sitting alone at lunch, everyone was going to treat me like I had leprosy, and I was going to be miserable (me — obviously).
CHAPTER 2
It's not that the other sophomores at Fallstaff High wanted me dead or anything. There were no "I hate April Wesley" clubs that I knew of. I hadn't made any great embarrassing fails (boob-baring wardrobe malfunction, accidental pants-wetting, etc.) or offended the popular kids in any way. But if you mentioned my name, most of that crowd would have to think for a minute, and then they'd probably say, "Oh, yeah. She's in math class with me. Brown hair, right?"
But my relative invisibility hadn't bothered me before. I'd always relied on my best friend, Kristin, so I hadn't really needed them to notice me. Kris and I had been inseparable since the second grade. When I entered high school, Mom started worrying about my dependence on my only friend and kept encouraging me to "branch out" and meet new people. "What about Briana, your lab partner?" she asked. "Maybe she could come by for a movie sometime?"
So I tried, I really did. It's just that casual small talk somehow got harder and harder for me as I got older. It's not that I had nothing to say. It's that somewhere inside me lived a tiny nagging fear that no one really wanted to hear anything I had to say. And new people never gave me a chance to relax and be myself. So, in an effort to appear more natural, I began to jot conversation topics on my hand and rehearse clever jokes in front of the mirror.
Problem was, my reflection was always attentive and happy to see me. Briana, on the other hand, started to fidget before I opened my mouth. She didn't want to talk about English class. Or music. Or The Big Bang Theory. I finally gave up when I realized she was searching the hallway for an escape.
"Sorry, I'm really late," she said, glancing at her wrist. (She wasn't wearing a watch. And we were on our way to lunch.)
As she hurried away, I unclenched my fist and looked at the black smear across my palm. The words "Watch a movie together?" had washed away completely, and only the question mark was left.
It was pretty much the same story any time I tried to get to know somebody new. So to keep from torturing my classmates with my blurry banter, I chose not to bother them too much. And they didn't bother me.
But with Kristin by my side, I didn't really care. She was safe; she never gave me a bored or baffled look, and I never felt out of place when she was next to me. I had someone to eat lunch with, to watch movies with, to share secrets with. To be honest, they were mostly her secrets, because Kris always had drama in her life. But I loved listening to her stories, and she loved being listened to. She had accepted my plain, girl-next-door self the day we'd met, and I'd never stopped to wonder why she preferred to hang out with me when she could have easily slipped into the popular crowd with a single flip of her shiny hair. But that was my best friend — easygoing, charming, pretty-as-a-model Kristin, whose loyalty I never questioned until the morning after ninth grade finals when she dropped the bomb.
She was leaving Fallstaff High to attend a fancy private school.
To be fair, the school switch had not been her choice. But her father had recently been promoted at work, so he decided that public school was no longer good enough for his only girl, and their semidetached house on our street was no longer big enough for his family. Kristin was going to be a bus ride away from me instead of my next-door neighbor, and lunch was going to be the longest hour of the day.
I spent the summer banging out whiny chords on my keyboard, composing pages of depressing lyrics, and staring at the incoming tenth grade roster. There were three new students on the list: two girls and a boy. I scribbled down their names and did a little harmless Facebook stalking. Tessa Gilberts was going to be a "popular," I could see that right away. She was from LA, and there were about five hundred pictures of her in a bikini with her arms around blond dudes. She was pursing her lips and pushing out her boobs in all of the shots. I would have to roast my pale skin and torture my brown hair with bleach and lemons to get her look, and I still wouldn't make the cut.
Tori Nadle was an honor student at her old school, president of the debate and drama clubs, and an amateur dog trainer. It was possible that she was friend material, but I would have to find an amazing hidden talent in the next few weeks, or else take on the role of Supergirl's mediocre sidekick. That wasn't going to happen.
I was less interested in the boy, because the guys at Fallstaff High tended to hang out with each other, except when one of them hooked up with one of the popular girls (never me). The new boy's name was Jonah, and he had privacy- protected everything on his wall except his hometown (Boston) and his profile picture, which was a close-up of a cocker spaniel's snout. Nothing to be learned there.
So when the first day of school arrived, I wasn't exactly racing for the door. Naturally, I took more time than usual with my clothes, just in case this Jonah guy turned out to be super hot, but I didn't have very high hopes. Hot guys usually posted their selfies proudly on their profile page for everyone to see; he had put up a picture of a dog, which meant that he probably looked like one. I finally settled on the dark-green tee, which Kristin said brought out the hazel in my eyes, and medium hoop earrings, which made me look like I was trying but not too hard. It didn't matter what I wore or how much mousse weighed down my forest of hair though. Somehow I always wound up looking like the pale, fluffy-haired "before" picture in a makeover ad. Jonah would end up staring at Bikini Tessa, like everybody else.
Five minutes before my bus arrived, my cell phone rang.
"April-I-have-so-much-to-tell-you-I-don't-know-where-to-start!" Kristin's sentences were usually breathless run-on phrases.
"Seriously, have you even gotten to school yet?" I slung my bag over my shoulder and shouted a good-bye to my mom.
"Yeah, my father dropped me off. But, April, you won't believe how awesome this place is. I have to tell you —"
I sighed and balanced the phone against my ear, pulled the door shut behind me, and headed for the bus stop. As I trudged along, Kris chattered on about the clubs and programs at her new school — junior modeling, fashion design, filmmaking. I listened to her bubble happily for the entire bus ride and into homeroom period, when the teacher finally forced me to hang up.
I wasn't all that sorry when I told her I had to go. Her enthusiasm was beginning to grate on me. It was selfish, I know, but it would have been easier if she hadn't been so obviously thrilled by everyone and everything she saw. Three months ago when she first told me about the transfer, we'd shared some days of mutual crying, but her tears dried up when the packet from Fancy Private High arrived. I couldn't blame her, really. It's always easier to be the one who's leaving.
Homeroom period was a confused half hour, during which I (unofficially) met the two new girls. Tessa was everything I'd expected her to be. Cora, Fallstaff High's Miss Popular, took the new recruit under her wing immediately, and Tessa slid into her assistant princess role easily, as if she'd been trained for it. She had a list of phone numbers before the bell rang. Miles, the hottest guy in school, took one look at her and planted himself in a nearby seat, as if staking out his territory.
I stared at my books and tried to ignore the rabid flirting going on across the room. I'd promised myself that I wouldn't think about Miles anymore, despite my lengthy and completely hopeless crush on him. It was totally over between us. I'd ended it (in my head) the day after finals when I stumbled in on him making out with Cora in the girls' bathroom. That had been a really bad day for me. I'd found out that my best friend was switching schools and witnessed my imaginary boyfriend sucking face with Princess Cora on the same morning.
Okay, I'd known that they were going out. But you know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, a sound is worth a million, and that sound will echo in my ears forever. I heard him slurp.
The second girl, Tori, didn't stay long enough for me to form an opinion of her. It was long enough for her though, because she hovered by the door for fifteen minutes with a condescending scowl on her face, like a bored visitor in a zoo, before finally stalking out. No one was sorry to see her go.
Homeroom ended, and the new boy didn't show. As we gathered our stuff, Michael, a tiny nerdy guy who I suspected was the only one in Fallstaff to have ever had a crush on me, sidled up and poked my elbow.
"April, have you heard the news?" he asked, grinning eagerly at me.
I shrugged my shoulders and pretended to be busy with my bag. Michael was always raking up bits of gossip for me. He liked to use his knowledge as an excuse to poke me.
"Ms. Lowry is coming back," he said. "I've heard she's teaching history again."
Okay, this was interesting. "Are you sure?" I asked him. "I thought she was still in the ICU."
Ms. Lowry scared us to death last year. Suddenly, without warning, she stopped mid sentence, hand still pointing to the board, and dropped like lead to the ground. It took us a few seconds to realize what was happening. Ms. Lowry was the kookiest teacher in the school, and her unusual lesson plans had sometimes gotten her into trouble. So for a moment, we all thought that she was acting out the fall of the Roman Empire. I'd never seen a seizure before, so I didn't understand what I was witnessing, but later, after the sirens died down and everyone stopped hyperventilating, we learned that Ms. Lowry had some rare heart problem that caused the seizure and that she'd almost died right there in front of us.
I loved Ms. Lowry's history class. She knew how to make wars and dates and dead kings interesting. She'd split the students up into aristocrats and peasants and then stage an uprising. She'd encourage half the class to fast all day, and then she'd make the hungry students watch their "wealthy" classmates eat. Then when we were really pissed and cranky, she'd help us plan the storming of the Bastille and the murder of our enemies.
She got into a bit of trouble for that. Some parents complained that she was encouraging violence and anorexia; she'd almost been suspended. But for us, that only made her that much cooler. So when she'd collapsed so suddenly in front of us, we couldn't believe it. Ms. Lowry was too awesome to get sick like that.
We visited her in the hospital, but she was in and out of the cardiac unit so many times that we'd given up hope that she'd ever stand in front of us again.
And now she was back.
"We have her next period," Michael said, peering over my shoulder and poking at the schedule in my hand. "This should be very interesting."
"Why?" I asked him. "She was making jokes even when she had all those tubes and wires sticking out all over her. She'll be the same old Lowry."
She was the same, I saw, as we filed into her classroom. A little thinner and a whole lot paler, but her hennaed hair still stuck out in red-and-purple spikes around her face, she was still draped in spotted scarves and beads, and she'd sneaked in a few more piercings than was strictly allowed. Good for her, I thought as I slid into my chair. The principal had probably been too nervous to comment on the onyx nose ring; better to let that slide than risk another heart attack.
Ms. Lowry scanned our faces and smiled at us as we squirmed uncomfortably in our seats. None of us would have admitted it, but I think we were all a little scared. She looked like a shadow of her former self. But when she spoke in that singsong, raspy voice of hers, I felt myself relax. She sounded the same as always, even if she looked a little bit like the undead.
"Most of you probably remember me," she began with a faint smirk, "as the one who pulled the Harry-Potter-meets-Voldemort spastic fit." She threw her head back and flailed her arms out in a mock convulsion. A couple of people moaned, and someone snickered nervously. I smiled to myself. Only Ms. Lowry would make fun of her own near-death experience. "Well, class, I'm happy to report that I've rejoined the land of the living. And after much thought, I've decided to turn my medical scare into a learning opportunity for you."
There was a unanimous groan.
"But you're a history teacher," Michael protested. "Wouldn't that be a biology lesson or something?"
She shook her head. "We're going to start off the year with a special assignment focusing on the history of medicine. Don't worry, the presentation won't be due until after spring break, so you'll all have plenty of time. I want each of you to choose an illness that's affected you or someone in your family. You don't have to go nuts researching neurotransmitters and muscle fibers, because, as Michael pointed out, this is not biology class. Instead, I want you to tell your fellow students the story of the disease, famous people who suffered from it, treatments throughout history — all the way to the current day. For example, did you know that during the Middle Ages, children who suffered from seizures were thought to be possessed by demons? The parents would call exorcists and sometimes beat or starve their kid to exorcise Satan from his soul? These are the kinds of details I want to hear from you. Sickness can be a story too, one that we can all learn from."
I stared blankly at Cora, who was furiously scribbling the assignment down in her floral binder. What would she be writing about, I wondered. Her miraculous nose job? "In the olden days, people suffered terribly from gigantic schnozzes ..."
I raised my hand. "But, Ms. Lowry, my family's pretty healthy. What should I write about?"
She took out a dry-erase marker from her drawer.
"You've never had the flu? Did you know that over forty million people died of Spanish influenza in 1918? Or you can pick something more chronic if you want. Maybe someone in your family had diabetes, for example? Or migraines? Stomach ulcers?"
"Hemorrhoids?" Miles craned his head back and grinned at me. "Or crabs?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Your Voice is All I Hear by Leah Scheier. Copyright © 2015 Leah Scheier. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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