What I Didn't Say (12 page)

As I looked around at my fellow students, I was surprised to see that each of them meant it when they signed that pledge.  I saw it in each of their faces.  They really were sorry for what happened to me. 

I knew a lot of them wouldn’t really keep that pledge the entire year.  But this was a step.  They really were willing to try.  At least for a while.

Out of all the bad that had happened the last few weeks, at least one good thing had come around.  Maybe with what had happened to me, I could keep something worse from happening to someone else.

1 hour since the assembly

I caught a ride home with Carter after school.  How he’d managed to get a new car already I didn’t know.  It kind of bugged me if I was being honest.  But it felt nice to get back to normal just a little, riding home from school with one of my best friends.

Carter dropped me off at my house, Mom’s gargantuan van already parked back in the driveway.  I noticed a beat up bike with a trailer attached to the back of it parked next to it.  I’d seen that bike before.

I opened the front door and walked in to see Mom talking to a familiar face.

“Jake,” Mom said, jumping as if she’d been caught doing something bad.  “You’re home.  You remember Kali?”

I wouldn’t say I remembered him.  Everyone always saw Kali riding around town on his bike with his trailer hooked up.  Kali had ink dark skin, and a headful of some serious dreadlocks.  Kali was hard to miss.

I just nodded.

“Well,” Mom said, looking slightly uncomfortable.  “Kali has known sign language since he was a child and when he heard what happened to you, he volunteered to help teach you.”

A hard knot formed in my stomach.

“My mother was born deaf, as was my younger sister,” Kali said.  He had a Haitian accent that made some of his words difficult to understand.  “I was lucky enough to be born hearing but with just the three of us, I knew sign language better than I knew how to speak.  I thought maybe I could help.”

I was already getting so sick of all this attention.  I wanted nothing more than for life to just go back to normal, back to the days when I spent afternoons practicing football and procrastinating my homework.  Not days of freaking out around Sam and having the town crazy man offering me his help.

“Is that okay, Jake?” Mom asked.

How was I supposed to say no?  That would have been rude and uncomfortable.

I gave just the smallest of nods.

“Great,” Mom said, her shoulders relaxing noticeably.  “I’ll leave you two to it then.”

And just like that, Mom walked out of the room and into the kitchen, leaving just the two of us alone. 

Awkward.

“You want to shoot some hoops?” Kali said, a small smile on his dark face.

I furrowed my brow at Kali, not sure I’d heard him right.  I thought we were supposed to be going over how to talk with our hands, not using them to throw a ball around.

“I haven’t played in a long time,” he said, heading for the front door.  “I figure you probably haven’t either.”

I glanced in the direction of the kitchen, catching a glimpse of Mom spying.  She just nodded her head and waved me away.  So I dropped my backpack on the floor and followed Kali outside.

Dad had installed a heavy duty basketball hoop over our driveway just after we had moved to the island fourteen years ago.  It was pretty beat up and was in need of a new net, but it had held up pretty good considering how much use it had gotten over the years.

Kali grabbed a ball that sat at the base of the hoop and started dribbling.  He shot and it made a quiet swoosh as it dropped through the net.  Kali flashed me a blinding smile and pumped his fists in the air.  I couldn’t help but smile back as I chased after the ball.

I turned back to the hoop, about to shoot when Kali caught my attention.  He made a motion with his hands, repeating it three times.  “That’s the sign for score,” he said, nodding for me to go ahead and shoot.  I tossed it up.  It circled around the rim twice before dropping through the net.

“And this,” Kali said, making another motion.  “Means basketball.”

I made another shot, letting the ball bounce into the side of the van harmlessly as I repeated the motions Kali made.

“Good,” Kali said, smiling as he nodded.  “And this,” he made another motion.  “Means to play.  You put them together to say ‘to play basketball.’”  He put the two signs together.  I watched his hands closely, making sure I would get it right when I tried it.

Much more slowly, I repeated Kali’s hand motions.

“You got it!” Kali said encouragingly.  “Won’t be too long and we’ll be having this entire conversation in sign.”

I tried to give him a small smile, grabbing the ball again.  I threw it up, watching as it fell through the net.  Basketball season would be starting again in about a month.  Would I be able to play?

As we continued to play basketball for the next hour, Kali taught me other sports terms in sign, laughing and joking the entire time.

It wasn’t too long before I was silently laughing along with him.

Maybe Kali wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought.

Maybe sometimes I was as guilty as anyone else of placing judgments too quickly.

The psychologist told me to write, so here I am.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to say.  I think she wanted me to write about how I’m so angry with the world, or maybe angry with myself.  I think I’m supposed to spill all my feelings out on this page, the one’s I don’t feel like I say to anyone else.

But I don’t really know what to say.

Not being able to talk sucks.  There’s no doubt about that.  There’s a lot of times when I almost feel like I’m trapped inside of myself.  Like if I don’t talk or yell or scream or laugh I’m going to explode.  A lot of the time it almost feels like I’m suffocating.

And when I think about the fact that I won’t be able to talk for the rest of my life… that feels like too long to even comprehend.  I can deal with not being able to talk for the next week, the next month.  But forever…?

Of course I regret that night we all got drunk.  So many times I just think, well,
what was I thinking
?  Mom was right.  All the grown-ups were right.  About staying away from drugs and alcohol.  And the stupid thing is that I think every teenager knows that.  We all know we aren’t supposed to do the things our parents tell us not to do.  But that’s why we do them.  Cause they tell us not to.

How stupid is it that my biggest regret about all of this is what I didn’t say to Sam?  I just keep thinking about it, over and over, every hour of every day, how I was such a chicken.  I’ve wanted to tell Samantha that I loved her for how many years now?  And now I’ll never get the chance to tell her.

My biggest regret is what I didn’t say…

Guess that should teach me a lesson about procrastination or something, right?  About not putting the really important things in life off?

Life can be pretty cruel sometimes.

7 months ‘til graduation

And then what?

My leg bounced up and down as I sat in Physics.  It had been three weeks since I’d gone back to school.  Norah had finally backed off, she and Blake getting hot and heavy.  Eyes still stared at the hole in my neck, but they didn’t linger like they used to.  I wasn’t quite the spectacle I’d been before.  I wasn’t picking up on the sign language very quickly, but I wasn’t going to complain, at least I was getting to spend a lot of time with Samantha.

It seemed weird that she wasn’t in class that day.  Samantha never missed classes.  Ever.  But we were half way through Physics, and she hadn’t shown up.  What was I going to do in our independent study class during third hour?  I wasn’t exactly great at turning the pictures in our books into actual hand motions.

I sat with my forehead resting against the palm of my hand, pretending to be working through the worksheet Mr. Roy had given us when someone slid into the seat next to me.  My head jerked up to see Samantha settle into her chair. 

She looked tired.  Her hair was a mess, her clothes wrinkled.

You okay?
I wrote in the notebook with the red cover, the one I only ever used to write to her in.  I stealthily slid it across to her desk.

Samantha glanced at me once, something like fear or the look of being caught flashing in her eyes.  She turned her attention to the notebook and pulled out a pencil.

I had never noticed until then, how Samantha’s physical appearance had gotten a little rougher every day since the first day of school.  Her clothes always looked wrinkled and worn.  There were always bags under her eyes these days it seemed.  She looked thinner than she did at the end of last year.

Maybe I had just dismissed it as stress from the school year, or that her mom was gone for work and Sam had to take care of herself.  I really hoped that was all it was.

Samantha pushed the notebook back onto my desk and turned her attention to her work.

Yeah,
she wrote. 
Just tired.  The power went out at our house last night and I didn’t sleep very well.  Got kinda cold.

I glanced over at her, though she didn’t meet my eyes as she worked.  Somehow I thought that was a lie.  The power didn’t just go out at one house on the island unless there was a serious problem, right at the house.  When the power went out, it went out for most of the entire island.

For the rest of the class period, I couldn’t help but wonder if something serious was going on with Sam.  It actually felt kind of nice, worrying about someone else, instead of being the one that was being worried about all the time.

The bell rang and Sam and I went separate ways to our lockers.  Carter and Rain gathered around my locker between classes, griping about being bored since the football season had been canceled.  They were actually seriously talking about going hiking that weekend.

We hadn’t gone hiking since about sixth grade.

I suggested the lake instead.  With Halloween only one week away it was going to be freezing, but at least it was something to do.

As the warning bell rang, I finally headed to the far end of the building.

Samantha was already there, reading through one of the books we’d been assigned in AP English.  She didn’t even notice me as I walked in and turned my desk towards hers.  I watched her as she read, chewing on her lower lip, making it red and slightly swollen.  Her face looked totally engaged.  She used her thumb on her free hand to twist the ring on her index finger in a slow circle.  Her feet were propped up on her desk, making her looked crammed and wedged in her seat.

Deciding not to bother her, I pulled out the notebook she’d written in earlier and set it and my ASL book on the desk.  Opening to the section we were in, I set to studying the pictures, attempting to make my three-dimensional hands look like the flat, two-dimensional ones.  A book was a ridiculous way to learn sign language.

I hadn’t noticed that Sam had taken my notebook until she pushed it in front of me again, more of her handwriting scrawled below what she’d written the period before.

So I wanted to try something different today,
she’d written. 
I’m not going to talk the entire period either.  So it’s either writing or signing.  Maybe that will help you to pick up on it faster.