River: A Novel (5 page)

 If he
hadn’t been such a loudmouthed social-butterfly, we never would have met. I was
the wallflower. He had even sung to get me out on the dance floor at whatever
party Petra had dragged me to the night before she’d left. I had been horribly
depressed by the imminent loneliness Petra’s absence would bring. That had been
the night when I’d known we were truly friends, Danny and I. Before long, I’d
been waltzing on the dance floor, being dipped by my newly minted friend,
smiling so much that it hurt.

 I jumped a
foot off the sofa when possible pod Danny walked through the door, coffee and
doughnuts in his hands. Although a potentially evil imposter, he sat across
from me and handed me coffee while placing the plain doughnut box on a table
between us. They looked really good.  Mouth still dry, I took a drink of coffee
with cream and sugar, just how I liked it. 

 “Dan, where
are we?” I blurted out after a moment of awkward silence. He stared at me with
eyes slightly squinted, as if
searching for something under my skin. A mirror of my own expression, I
must have seemed as alien to him as he did to me. 

 He took my
hand again. 

 W-E  A-R-E  I-N  R-I-V-E-R

 “
River?” I
sounded surprised; as if expecting him to say Mars, and the normalcy of the word
threw me. “Are we in New York?” Though intrigued, I was also a little angry, but
more at my own unshakable confusion. “What did you give me last night? I can’t
remember much… of anything, really. Did it mess with my memory?”

 He shook
his head slowly, side to side; in the way he had after kissing me. His eyes
narrowed to near-slits.

 “Not in New
York?” My voice was very soft and the desperation gone, replaced by fragility
that made me feel small and alone. I wasn’t sure which question he’d answered,
but I had the sinking feeling that it was to all three. From the look on his
face, cold and puzzled, I could tell he had no clue what I was talking about. He
was taking my hand, about
to tap out more answers, when I asked, “Why can’t you speak?” This was
the strangest of all the questions—I should have expected a strange answer. 

W-E  A-R-E  A-L-L  M-U-T-E
-
D
 
H-E-R-E

 Staring at
his hand on mine, I translated the code into words, turning them around in my
mind. While what seemed to be reality sank in, my head shot up, and I furtively
glanced around the room. As good at coding as I was, I could have misunderstood.
On a table sat paper with music notes on it. “Do you think you could write
instead of code?” He shook his head slowly and looked at me as if I’d grown another,
effectively shooting down my request. “What do you mean by ‘muted’?” I barely whispered.

 I  H-A-V-E  T-O  G-O

 He stood. I
was frozen. 

 “Will you
be back?” I couldn’t look at him. Everything was wrong and frightening, even
Danny.

 He took my
chin in his hand, gently pulling my eyes up to his. Smiling with sympathy, he
pointed again to the clock. After moving around my right side, he reached over and
touched the glass surface at eleven o’clock. 

 When I
finally nodded, Dan crouched down, placing his hands on my shoulders and his
forehead against mine. I needed to say something. This silence was killing me. 

 “I’ll
stay.”

 He agreed
and turned to go. Did I have a choice? Where else would I end up if I tried to
leave, or even if I fell asleep? The tears began to run as soon as I heard the
door close.

..................

I never cry.
Almost never. Frustration and stress were taking their toll, however, and I was
curled up in a ball, shaking…
crying.
I was such a wuss. Obviously not on
my deathbed,
I was
just extremely frustrated and
angry at something unnamed. We were in a place called River, and Danny didn’t
speak. Muted. “
We are all muted here.”  
What did that mean? He’d
included me, but clearly I had speech. I always had, as did Danny. Somehow we
had ended up somewhere very wrong, or we were simultaneously having a very bad
trip. Whatever was happening, I had to pull myself together. My head throbbed with
each unanswered question.

 Sitting up,
I spied the doughnuts. The coffee was cold, but I didn’t care. I needed to
clear my spinning head. It felt as if I were facing a ridiculously difficult
algebra problem with no clue how to figure it out. Chewing the sugary dough and
calming down slightly, I settled on the idea that the universe and this world
were mystifying places that usually wavered toward the negative. After being
put in impossible situations again and again, I was still around, being tested by
forces unknown. This was just another test. I needed to stop questioning my
existence while fighting this unbelievable circumstance in order to simply
survive.

 It was easy
to think this way, but when Danny came back unable to talk… I wasn’t so sure that
I could handle it. The lack of communication was a massive, troubling problem. Danny
wasn’t being detailed about why he’d lost his speech, or why he’d locked the
door again. Having been too terrified to move off the couch, I hadn’t tried it,
but I knew I was trapped
.

 And then
there was the kissing. Evidently, he felt he had the right to kiss me, even
though we never had before. It hadn’t been
terribly
uncomfortable. I was
just so plagued with confusion that a kiss didn’t have the hugest effect on me
at the moment. Never one to kiss randomly, the handful of time spent with mediocre
boyfriend-types in my life had always been brief because I’d never been enthralled.
The relationships with those few had numbered in weeks, if not days, and had
always been because they’d asked me. Danny was something else. He was my best friend;
someone I actually liked to hang out with. I couldn’t see him as anything more,
could I? I shook my head
, u
nable to go there.

 The sugar
and caffeine had made me less fuzzy-headed, and suddenly I couldn’t sit still. My
stiff legs wobbled when I tried to walk to a desk behind the sound equipment. A
laptop sat in the middle. Computers were not my forte, but I could at least see
if the Internet made it to the town of River, and maybe figure out how to get
us back to New York. I flipped the top
up, and the screen came to life. A little confused at first,
I assumed I was rifling through more sound gear when I saw a keyboard, but with
only a few keys. It was all in music notes, symbols, dashes and dots. No
letters. Well, Dan’s puzzled look when I’d asked him to write made more sense—it
seemed that the standard ways of speaking or typing were not available here. The
idea was incredibly foreign and startling to me; it was all I could do to not hyperventilate.
I quickly closed the device and sat back down on the sofa. 

 I didn’t
want to know anything more. It was major culture shock as it was. One thing more
and I would need to breathe into a paper bag. I curled my legs up and stayed
very still. A few minutes passed before the distant vibration of bass noise
made my spine tingle. Drawing in a deep, broken breath, I was fairly sure the
room was sound-proof due to previous experience in New York; they’d had the
same vault-like feel.

 After being
alone for a time, I suddenly wished to see Dan again for some reassurance that
I wasn’t in an eternal waiting room, the next in line to meet my Maker. With
reservations, I also felt ready for more answers. My brain had settled and decided
I needed to know more about where we were, about River, and why Dan couldn’t
talk. Apparently stuck for the time being, I resolved that the more information
I gathered, the better probability of survival. So far, I felt my chances were
fifty-fifty. If this Dan was really my best friend, as opposed to an evil pod-person,
my odds would increase considerably.

 I glanced
at the clock again. Quarter to eleven. I hoped Dan would be back on time, though
punctuality wasn’t in his vocabulary, at least before. The air thinned as
something inside me, intuition maybe, cornered my denial and forced it to
acknowledge that this Dan was a different person than the one I knew. Paralyzed
by that concept, I tried to think of things that would get me through the next
block of time, like the weather. I could tell it was getting colder with the
deepening night. When the nervous clamminess wore off, my fingers became icy as
I slowly distracted my panicking thoughts.
 

 I have always
preferred winter to summer. The colors of summer were nice, but my body acclimated
to the cold better, and my mind was clearer somehow. Petra and I had gone ice skating
in the park a few times. We had drunk outrageously fancy hot chocolate, on Petra
of course, and laughed at each other as we’d attempted to look like real ice
skaters, though Petra had been a natural, gliding as if she’d been doing it
forever. She’d flirted with whatever cute guys had been around while I’d stayed
on the sidelines, laughing when she’d made secret faces in my direction. Sometimes
her conquests had talked to me with eyes unabashedly fixated on her gilded form,
yet aware
she’d been out
of their league. “
She’s something, eh?”
I’d quipped to fervent nodding.

 The
pleasant ice skating daydream was interrupted by a jolt of fear.
God, if I
could only be Petra right now… I would have nothing to worry about
. If I
could only have half her confidence and charisma, maybe Danny would lose the frightening
distance in his eyes and look at me the way he used to.

 Squeaking
in simultaneous alarm and relief, I nearly jumped out of my skin when the door clicked
open. Dan was back a little early. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

 I nodded
toward him, too afraid to speak. Danny smiled, but it was sort of a frown at
the same time. He closed the door with sad eyes locked on mine. Sorrow was out
of place on him in any form, period.

 “What’s
going on?” I asked in a low, tense voice. Although I was going for cool Petra-like,
my strained question came out mostly frightened-mouse.

 Dan walked
slowly to the couch. I was uncomfortably curled in a ball, but too tense to
move a muscle. He reached behind where I sat and touched the clock again to midnight
before pointing to the door.

 “We leave
at midnight?” I translated as he nodded. “Why not now?” 

 He crouched
down and studied me as if he’d just discovered an archaeological find. His hand
was on his chin, calculating a response. He then tapped on my knee.   

T-O-O  D-A-N-G-E-R-O-U-S
 

 Shrinking tighter
into a ball, I lamented, “But, I didn’t
do
anything.” How had my recreational
drug use been a danger to anyone else? I vowed to go clean immediately—not even
a wine cooler, ever again. 

Y-O-U  S-P-E-A-K
 

 He then
mouthed,
Lodie
, breaking out his new grin.

 “Since when
is it against the law to
speak
?” Disbelief shook my voice, smashing my
cool routine to bits. 

 He pointed
at the clock again. 

 M-I-G-H-T  S-E-E  Y-O-U

 “Who might
see me?” I asked quietly and then answered my own question. “The people you
told that I am sick, I’m guessing.” He nodded. I thought of something that sped
my pulse and inundated my mind with apocalyptic imagery. “They are regular people,
right? Not some alien race invading Earth to steal our voices and reproductive
organs?” 

 He laughed
silently. At least that took alien attack out of the equation.
For now
. He
stopped shaking with laughter after a few embarrassing seconds on my end, and
then his smile turned into the frown that fit his face. Dan must frown a lot here.

 P-E-O-P-L-E  W-H-O  W-I-L-L  K
-
I-L-L  Y-O-U

 It took him
such a long time to tap out his answer; it seemed like hours. I was wishing he
wouldn’t finish the whole time. One of his hands rested on my knee after, as
though it had just gone through an arduous journey, while the other wrapped
around his chin. He was detached
and distant.

 “Why would
anybody want to kill
me
?” I barely whispered after what he’d coded had
come together in my mind. “Because I can talk? Seriously?” Who were these
people? I had never been in any kind of trouble before. In fact, I’d made it
through fifteen years of foster care without a write up of any kind. My
invisibility skills had been honed so well that neither authority figures nor
choreographers had ever really noticed me.

 A minute
passed, and Dan still hadn’t answered, though I knew he’d heard me. Anyone
could have heard the metaphorical pin drop in the room. “Danny.” Needing to get
his attention, I placed my hand on his. “Who are they?”

S
-
P-E-A-K-E-R-S

 “Speakers.”
I repeated the strange term as if it all made sense to me. Dan nodded slowly. 

 “What does
that mean?” While asking in a whisper, I began feeling more frightened than before.
My jaw ached from clenching my teeth, and I worked to relax the rigid joints.

 Dan stood,
then walked away and ran his hands through his thick, curly hair. Suddenly
antsy, I stood up as well, just to move. People would kill me because I could
talk… I couldn’t wrap my mind around that idea. I decided I needed to know more
about my situation; if I feigned amnesia, maybe I could persuade Dan to somehow
describe his past here. It suddenly dawned on me that I wouldn’t have to fake
it. Our memories did not seem to coincide. The last memory I had was leaving a
party, though that seemed to be irrelevant. Yet, instinct told me that I should
remember something important from that night. Something that would bring
clarity to my situation, and maybe even how I’d arrived in River.