Whisper by Chris Struyk-Bonn

Author:Chris Struyk-Bonn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: JUV059000, JUV031040, JUV015020
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

As I stood in my room, my body open to the music, I began to see fireflies against the lids of my eyes. My head resonated with the music from the park, the notes winging through the air. I emptied myself of the last few days, and I began to see the music. The notes were as tangible to me as my own hand. They flitted through the air like hummingbirds and I watched the patterns they made. I saw birds flying in formation, the notes fitting together.

But the pattern began to dissolve when the door to room 13 slammed shut. Candela looked up at me as I stood in the middle of the room with my arms spread wide. She reminded me of Eva, with her watchful eyes, but Eva was quick to laugh, quick to be silly, and I didn’t think Candela had been silly for a very long time.

“How much did you make?”

The music in my head dissipated, and all that beauty rushed out of me. I was left with the reality of my life—sitting on a street corner, losing the money I’d earned and living in a house full of rejects. I reached into my pocket and felt the cold metal edge of the one coin.

“Why’d you have your eyes closed when I came in?”

I looked around the room, trying to find a way to describe the music I had seen in my head. I didn’t know how to explain that music made me feel real and whole. But maybe I could show her.

“May I play my violin beside you tomorrow?”

“I don’t work with other rejects.”

“Just one day?” I asked. “One day.”

“I thought you were different from Rosa, but you’re not, are you?”

I blinked and felt a jolt. Rosa. The idea of Rosa made me feel small again, exposed. I had always been the dumb unrelated sister, the one who wet her bed and cried out for her mother. Rosa had wanted to be beautiful more than any of us. She’d hated her face, hated herself, and I remembered how when we’d looked into the creek together, watching our broken faces appear on the surface of the water, she’d held a handkerchief over the right side of her face, hiding the deepred discoloration. She’d winked at the image of herself and said, “Buried beauty, but beauty all the same.”

“You know Rosa?” I said now.

Candela looked at me with her lips drawn into a tight line. Her hands were still on her hips and she looked like a cat, wary and aloof, ready to flee or pounce.

“Why should I be nice to you? You’ll end up selling sex just like she does. My friends never stay.”

The words floated in the air between us, hovered and then dropped. When I understood what she’d said, my chest began to squeeze tight. Rosa sold sex. Rosa had been the one who’d told me about sex, about male body parts, about how babies were made. When she had gotten her period, she had declared herself a woman.

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