The voices are different at my new school. Not too different, they mostly still talk about the same things. But just different enough for me to notice. They seem less… worried. The colors are less purple and blue than before, they’re more orange and yellow. Yellow voices are always happy and friendly. I really like yellow voices, but there’s never enough of them around me.
My name is Lizzy, which is one of those “blink and you’ll miss it” names. I like using that phrase because my mom said it would make me sound more mature. I don’t really like saying this, but I’m one of the “weird kids”. One of the kids who never fit into anything, who never understood how everyone else could just talk and be part of social groups and not have that be the most awkward experience of their lives. Now that’s not to say I don’t have friends, I do! It’s just that I can’t figure out how to be a part of one of those big friend groups where everyone has a great time with each other, like, genuinely.
I’m just bad at being social, I guess. Whenever I try to introduce myself to other people they always get weirded out by me. I think it might be the way I talk to them… or the way I can never maintain eye contact with them. Sometimes when I talk to people all I can hear in my head are the voices, and when I’m a little tired or bored I just pick the loudest voice I can hear and say it out loud. Whenever I do that though, the voice of the person I’m talking to gets purple and blue, and then they don’t want to talk to me anymore. Weird.
Alright, enough about my terrible social life, I started my first day at my new school today! My new teacher, Ms. Winter, is really really nice! She had me introduce myself to the rest of the class, and she was really supportive and gave me hints on what to say before I went up. I hate public speaking, but she actually made it really easy for me! I remember I said something like, “Hi, I’m Lizzy Culligan, I just moved to Eastwood, and I’m really excited to be here and meet all of you!” I didn’t want to say that last part because it didn’t sound genuine, but Ms. Winter told me that it would make me sound more friendly, and her voice said that too so I just decided to listen to it. I thought the other kids would laugh at me for that last part, but they didn’t. A lot of their voices turned yellow, actually! Ms. Winter is so smart!
Ms. Winter does this thing where she takes a picture of every student and prints them out on these little laminated pages and tapes them to our assigned seats. While the rest of the class was reading, she took a picture of me at my desk, and she said she would print it out that night. “That’s so sweet of you,” I said. I would never say something that… sophisticated… but her voice was saying that about me, so I just decided to repeat it out loud. Ms. Winter replied, “Oh, thank you Lizzy!”, but she seemed confused for some reason. After that, she went back to her desk and sat there with this weird look on her face for a few minutes.
Sometimes I really wish I could turn the voices off. I have these huge, pink, puffy headphones that I carry around in my bag. My therapist told me to try wearing them, and they really do help! If I wear them, the voices get really quiet, quiet enough to where I can’t make anything out. But I really don’t like wearing the headphones. At my old school, whenever I wore them, people would give me the weirdest looks. And even though they helped with the voices, I could still see colors around people. Whenever I wore the headphones the colors around some people became this strange mix of green and red. It almost looked like the color of puke. So, I never really wear my headphones, mostly just to avoid that color.
Speaking of Ms. Winter’s voice, it’s actually really similar to my previous teacher’s. Whenever Ms. Winter is talking to other students, her voice is all happy and cheerful and yellow, but whenever she was talking to me on that first day her voice got a little worried, even if I didn’t say anything. Early in the day, she was reading something on her desk and her voice was reading along, but I could only understand a few parts of it because there were a lot of big words that I don’t know yet. I caught things like “Keep an eye on her,” and “Tell her to look for the color red,” and “I know this is extremely strange, but you have an oblig-” Something something. Once she read that she looked up at me and her voice became really purple for a few seconds, but then it went back to normal.
Even though this is my first day of school, it’s actually the second day of classes, since I got to miss the first day because I was in Washington D.C. Cool, right?! I go down to D.C. a lot, but not because I have family who lives down there or anything. It’s because I actually have to go to a doctor down there every few months, but it’s different than my normal doctor who does my physicals and asks me questions like “Are you on your period?” when I’m obviously not. I thought periods went at the end of sentences, how could I be “on” a period? This doctor is actually way better because they never give me shots or look at me from weird angles. All they do is ask me a few questions, then give my parents a ton of forms to sign. I say “they” because it’s a different doctor every time. They also take pictures of me, but not pictures like Ms. Winter does. Here’s the picture they took of me yesterday:
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what you’re thinking because you’re reading this on a screen somewhere, but that’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot of people say recently and it makes me feel really satisfied whenever I say it, so I just said it. But, you’re probably thinking, “This looks like a mugshot, Lizzy!” And while you’re technically right, when I asked the doctor that exact question, he said that it wasn’t a mugshot, and even let me keep the picture! Also, you know it’s not a mugshot because they let me smile, and they made me stand on a 2-foot tall stool because I was too short.
Whenever I go to D.C. the voices there are always really loud and sharp. Especially near the Capitol building, the voices are really loud and red and strange. I have to go by the Capitol building to get to the doctor’s office because it’s close by so I hear their voices a lot. Maybe someday I should go in there and tell everybody to chill out and be friendly.
More recently though, the doctors have been doing this thing where they put me in a brightly lit room with a one-way mirror. Fun fact, I only know there’s a mirror because the voices there told me there was. It literally looks exactly like a normal wall. Anyways, they put me in that room for around an hour, and just tell me to write down any voices I hear in a notebook on a table in the middle of the room. I thought it would be cool to just mind my own business for an hour, but the voices in that room are always really strange.
A lot of the time they aren’t in English so I can’t understand them, but when they are in English they’re usually really red and scary, but not the same red as the Capitol building. I just write down what I can understand in the notebook and after the hour is over they take me out of the room and look over the notebook. One time two years ago they asked me to listen and see if the voices said the names of any countries or cities. The only location the voices said that day was somewhere in, like, Pakistan? I’ve never heard of that country though…
When I explained to them one time that I couldn’t understand what the voice was saying because it was in another language, they all went into this big room for a few minutes and came out telling my parents that they would pay for me to take lessons in Arabic so I could understand what the voices were saying. I just started those lessons a few weeks ago, but I’m not really paying attention to them because they’re boring. Why learn a language I’ll never use in real life when I could be paying attention to my actual schoolwork or trying to make new friends?
Anyways, back to talking about today. After Ms. Winter read that paper, she got up and told me to come out into the hallway with her. There, she said, “Lizzy, make sure to look out for red, okay?”. It was the exact same thing my teacher at the last school told me to do and the exact thing the paper just told Ms. Winter to tell me to do. Wow, that was a weird sentence. Anyways, I just shrugged and nodded and said, “Okay”, and Ms. Winter gave me this funny look before turning around and going back into the classroom.
Later in the day, we’re doing math and learning about division and decimals and things that my last school already taught me. I can tell everyone else is engaged because their voices are just thinking about what we’re learning, so I’m sort of left to wander off in my own thoughts. As I’m thinking though, the craziest thing happens! I see red! It’s moving down the road outside of the school. I put down my pencil and glance out of the window, trying to get a better look at what’s causing the red light.
I can see a car going down the road, a little bit too fast. The car is almost painted with red light, it’s like the brightest color I’ve ever seen! It turns into the school’s parking lot a little bit too hard, and its wheel hits the curb on the way in. My mom says that’s called “curbing it” because my dad did that once and ruined one of the tires on his Toyota Prius and my mom has never stopped teasing him over it.
I raise my hand to tell Ms. Winter that I can see red, but she’s busy helping someone on the other side of the classroom. As I keep watching the car, it stops across two parking spaces. My mom hates people who do that. She told me that it’s “inconsiderate”, but her voice said, “People who do that are fucking assholes, Lizzy”, to which I said, “Mom, language!”, to which my mom just smiled at me and said, “It’s okay, nobody could hear that”. I don’t know if I should write down bad language in this journal… It’s not like I’d share this anywhere unless I was all grown up and thought it was okay…
At this point the red is nearly blinding me, it’s so bright! As the car door opens, the redness spills out of the car and through the window and into my eyes, forcing me to look away. All of the voices around me of the kids and Ms. Winter are drowned out by a new voice, the red voice. It’s low, deep, and slow, but I can’t make out what it’s saying. I raise my hand higher, trying to get Ms. Winter’s attention.
Finally, she sees me. At this point, somebody has gotten out of the car with a big backpack, but I can barely even look in that direction anymore because of the red light. She slowly walks over to me, but I lose my patience first and shout, “I see red in the parking lot!” Ms. Winter gets really still for a moment before rushing to my side and glancing out the window. I don’t know what she saw, but an instant later she’s rushing to the phone and calling the main office in a frantic tone. Her voice is too jumbled up to make out any sensible words. All of the other kids in the class just sit there wondering what the hell is going on.
Everything after this is just a blur for me. The intercom comes on to call a lockdown drill. I remember that they make it clear that it’s just a drill. Then, our entire class is hiding in a corner, and Ms. Winter is constantly glancing between me and the door. Her voice is really, really purple. The red light from the parking lot makes its way inside the school, heading toward us. But then, a lot of orange colors suddenly appear and surround the main entrance. When they burst into the school, I can hear a few noises like somebody popping bubble wrap, then nothing. The bright red light slowly gets darker until it’s gone, and I can finally hear other voices again. One of the new orange ones says, “What the actual fuck..?”
After like an hour of being on lockdown, it’s lifted, and we all get to go home early. As I’m leaving, Ms. Winter takes me aside. It looks like she’s about to say something, but she just shakes her head and sits down at her desk. Her voice is completely silent, and I can’t tell what color it is. It’s like a mix of yellow, purple, and blue. For some reason, they tell us to go out of the back side of the school and walk around the playground. The voices in the school’s entrance are all blue and quiet.
Now, I’m sitting in bed, watching Youtube on my iPad. When I came home, my parents seemed a little different. They were hastily whispering to each other and pointing at me. Eventually, they told me to go to my room, but not because I was in trouble. As I sat in bed, my mom’s voice said from downstairs, “We can’t let her watch the news tonight, right?”, and a few minutes later my dad’s voice said, “She just saved hundreds of people, and we’re locking her in her room? Tina’s right, though, and she doesn’t mind being up there, I guess”.
As I sit there, I try to listen for other voices. I can hear my parents talking out loud downstairs over dinner. I can hear their voices saying “How long do I have to keep faking this until she goes to bed?” My neighbor’s voice thinks about how he is so excited to get the day off from school today as he plays video games.
My neighbor’s parents’ voices are purple. Not because of me, though, for perhaps the first time in my life. They’re purple because of what they just watched on the news. I can hear the reporters through their voices. I can hear it through all my neighbors’ voices. The reporters worm their way into my brain, filling my head with every possible angle of what happened. I can’t take it anymore. I stumble out of my room, go downstairs, and fall into my parents’ open arms. They don’t tell me to go back to my room.
The TV goes on about how the quick actions of Ms. Winter prevented a tragedy that day. I cry, but not because of what the TV is saying. I know Ms. Winter knows what really happened. I don’t cry because I can’t feel proud of myself or something. I do feel proud of myself, but who could I possibly say that to? I cry… because I know what happened today, and… I wish I didn’t.
I can’t turn the voices off. I can’t stop listening to everyone’s thoughts. I wish I could, but I’m stuck with this stupid fucking curse. It keeps getting worse as I’ve gotten older, I can hear thoughts from farther and farther away, and it’s just getting louder and louder and I can’t make it STOP!! I don’t know how to make it stop! The doctors and the people in the Capitol building in D.C. call me “unusual” when they think they’re far enough away. I hate that name…
The voices were different at my new school, on that first day. They were yellow, orange, happy… determined. As I try to go to sleep in my parent’s arms, I think about how people’s thoughts will change tomorrow. For the next few days, people’s thoughts will be different, I’m sure. But… whenever we hear about this on the news, everyone’s thoughts always go back to normal way too quickly. People don’t care about this kind of thing, even… even…
They don’t care about this even when it happens in their own backyard. I’m scared… I’m scared about… what would have happened if I wasn’t paying attention? What if I had been sick? What would have happened to my friends, or Ms. Winter, or the rest of the school?