Silence Speaks Louder

Some days, the Center for Hearing and Speech was, ironically, a not-so-quiet place.

As per the usual, Emilee and Nick had walked the three blocks after school, a question-and-answer session ensuing. Things had seemed normal (at least, as normal as things could be in Emilee Taylor's life) until they entered the building. No one was there to greet them at the front desk, which was odd for a weekday. Even in the lobby there was a tangible strain in the air, and Emilee didn't need sounds to tell her that something was very seriously wrong.

She glanced through the bay window that allowed visitors to clearly view the front room where she usually worked, only to see Denise and an aide from the program next door standing stiffly with their backs to Emilee. A couple of children milled around their legs, looking frightened as they glanced at the furthest back wall of the room. It appeared that someone was shouting, because Frankie walked past the area and covered his ears as he cringed.

Emilee turned to Nick, whose face looked just as bewildered as she felt. He shrugged, so she opened the door carefully and stepped inside. Nick followed her apprehensively, keeping a few feet behind. Though his mom worked here, he had told Emilee once, he always felt like a complete stranger in the building.

The other aide excused herself with a polite nod as Emilee came level with her boss.

"Oh Emilee, you're on time, thank goodness!" Denise said in a rush, her lips moving almost too fast for Emilee to follow. "I don't know what to do..." She waved her arm to indicate the commotion before her, and finally Emilee saw what the problem was: Ayla.

The girl was huddled in the corner, signing furiously to herself, kicking the wall. The tears that ran down her face plastered locks of her blonde hair to her cheeks.

"I haven't seen her like this in ages," Denise muttered, knotting a hand into her dark curls. "I don't understand!" Her frustration was evident in the crease between her eyebrows—a rarity, to be sure. This had to be one of the most patient women Emilee had ever met. "She used to have difficult days like this when her parents first started bringing her here. Well..." Denise looked upward, searching for the right words. "Not bringing. Dumping is more like it. They just didn't know how to deal with her. But she hasn't thrown a tantrum this severe since I don't know when!"

Ayla let out another tortured wail and slumped against the wall, letting herself fall and come to rest on the floor.

"Nick, take the kids out into the lobby, please," Denise requested, looking harried.

"Oh, uhm, okay," Nick said, glancing around unsurely. "Come on, everyone... let's go... outside..." The kids made no motion to follow him, and he bit his bottom lip. "Mom, how do I—"

"For goodness' sake, Nicholas! Honestly, sometimes I swear you are quite as dense as Joseph. They can't hear you." His mother stomped one foot, sending vibrations through the floor, and the kids all turned automatically to their teacher. When she had their attention, she signed instructions to them, and one by one they began to abandon their toys and head towards the lobby.

Nick shrugged, presumably embarrassed, and followed the kids through the door.

Emilee turned towards Ayla, who was now sobbing on the floor. Her heart went out to the girl—Denise had mentioned that her parents didn't know how to handle a deaf child, much like how Emilee's father had felt. There was so much shared between the two girls; though years apart in age, their similarities were astonishing. The way they thought, the books they read, the pain they both felt, the fact that they were both struggling with a handicap... Emilee wanted to help her young friend. It was a sudden rush of motherly feelings that she seemed to experience only when working at the Center.

She approached the child, who was whimpering to herself. Ayla looked up miserably as Emilee signed to her with caution.

What happened?

Ayla used one of her fists to rub tears from her cheek before replying.

I can't do it, Emilee. I hate being deaf, I hate it! No one understands what I'm going through. And no one cares.

Emilee considered this for a moment, the distinctions between this little girl and herself now coming to mind. The biggest difference was that Emilee had grown up with at least one parent who cared, one parent who nurtured, one parent who allowed her daughter to be herself. Emilee had never been forced to go to a specialized center because her mother didn’t know how to take care of her; she had simply been allowed to grow up and deal with her disability as she saw fit. She was a stronger human being because of it, and Mrs. Taylor understood that Emilee was her own person because she dealt with hardships in a unique way.

But neither of Ayla’s parents tried to understand their daughter, from the looks of it. And sometimes that neglect catches up with a child…

Something occurred to Emilee just then, and she slowly knelt down in front of the girl.

I understand you, she signed. I care. And sometimes all you need is justone person who cares to change your entire perspective on life.

This was the truth. For just as Emilee had been trying to come up with some sort of response to Ayla’s woes, she had glanced up and saw Nick peering through the separating window at her. Nick… And she realized that he had been the individual who took an interest in her, disabilities and all. He saw that Emilee was a teenage girl with thoughts and feelings, dreams and fears. He was her one person.

And Emilee wanted to be that one person for Ayla.

Her little friend looked up at her with searching eyes, assessing the value of this last statement in her young mind.

But one person out of millions is so little. Can just one make that much of a difference?

Emilee knew the answer.

One makes all the difference in the world. Think about it: how much has your life changed since I started coming here? And aren’t I just one measly deaf person?

Ayla actually managed a weak smile this time.

So much has changed. She sniffled, and pulled the back of her hand underneath her nose. But thank you for being so nice. Ayla sat up straighter and Emilee reached across to tuck the girl’s hair behind her ears. You do listen to me, even though I don’t know why you’d want to.

You’re the smartest ten-year-old I’ve ever known, Ayla. You’ll figure it out someday.

All Emilee saw were the newly formed tears in the little girl’s eyes before she leaned forward and enveloped her in a hug.

[&silence]

Time for English class, and once again, bookworm Emilee was reading on the sly. She flipped page ninety-seven of Libba Brae's A Great and Terrible Beauty over, looking up furtively to see if Mrs. Hammond was paying attention. Once she had determined that the coast was clear, she delved back into the task at hand—only to be interrupted almost immediately.

There was a soft tap on her shoulder; a moment later, a folded slip of lined paper with jagged edges fluttered into Emilee's lap.

This bothered her in two ways. One, she recognized the paper. It was a leaf from one of her music notebooks—the same notebook, in fact, that had been sitting on her bed the morning Nick snuck into her house.

The second reason was that Nick had passed her the sheet, and she had most certainly never given it to him. So how could he explain his possession of it? Why would he want that piece of her paper so desperately that it would drive him to steal it? He could have just asked her to borrow a sheet and she would have obliged.

She unfolded it, and bit her lip as she looked down at the page, remembering precisely what she had written on it. Lyrics. Emilee cringed. This was the exact paper she had hidden from him that Saturday morning.

Kindly unspoken,
You show your emotion
And silence speaks louder than words.
It's lucky I'm clever
'cause if I didn't know better,
I'd believe only that which I heard.

Emilee blushed involuntarily. Nick had obviously read this—any normal person would have, and anyways, how else would he have known that it belonged to her? It was embarrassing that he had caught her writing lyrics. The idea of her putting words to music that she couldn't hear—or worse yet, singing them—was perfectly absurd. It was one of those things that made Emilee wish above all that she could hear, so her musings wouldn't seem so ridiculous.

She was careful not to look backwards at the teen, and made to fold the paper back into fourths and stuff it inside her backpack. But as she creased it in half, Emilee noticed a series of three lines carefully penciled in at the bottom of the page.

So don’t keep me up 'til the dawn
Withyour words that’ll keep leading me on
I know much better than to wait for an answer from you.

He had added onto the song.

He had added onto the song?

[&silence]

"I have something to show you."

Nick's face poked around the edge of Emilee's locker door a couple of hours later; he looked out-of-breath. She raised one eyebrow as she slid off her backpack and bit her tongue. Yeah, I'll bet you do, thief, came her thoughts, feeling slightly vindictive towards him for the first time. But bringing up the lyrics from earlier in the school day would only make things awkward.

Oh, who was she kidding? Awkward was the word that defined the base of their friendship.

"What is it?" she decided to ask tentatively. It looked like Nick was trying to keep a straight face, but the corners of his mouth twitched up ever so slightly.

"You'll see. Are you done here yet?" He eyed the books in her arms as she slowly put them one-by-one into a neat row in her locker. Emilee wanted to laugh a little at him—so sue her if she wanted to keep her locker space organized.

"Almost." She deposited the last book and then dug into the bottom of her pack for a stick of chapstick. Nick drummed his fingers against the red-painted aluminum; was it impatience, or excitement?

"That's it," he announced, placing a hand on Emilee's upper arm and moving her out of the way. He handed her the backpack, shut the locker door firmly, and steered her in the opposite direction.

"But I wasn't done," Emilee half-complained, trying to zip her bag and walk as Nick maintained the grip on her shoulder. "Where are we going?" This time, Nick didn't answer—or if he did, his words were wasted on her because she couldn't see his mouth move. The smile was fully evident on his lips by now; he led her down the hallway though a crowd of people, many of whom could not help but stare at the passing rockstar. Their eyes quickly but uncomfortably passed over the girl he was pulling behind him.

It was a few more minutes before Emilee realized exactly where they were headed: the music room. She could see the door from their end of the hall. How could she not recognize it; she spent all her free periods there, after all. But Nick still offered no explanation. It wasn't like he had to ask her twice to go to the music center—ever—so what compelled him to drag her here?

But Emilee answered this question for herself a moment later, when they had finally grown close enough for her to read the new sheet of fluorescent green paper taped to the door. Unfortunately for her, she knew exactly what Nick had wanted to show her. For on that sheet of paper, clearly visible in bolded letters, were four words that Emilee found very frightening:

Talent Show Sign-Ups.

She tried to stop on her heels, but Nick was a lot stronger than she gave him credit for. Every inch that they got closer to the door, impending doom seemed to creep towards Emilee. Nick was insane if he thought she was going to write her name on that list--or get anywhere near it willingly, for that matter.

Nick finally released the hold on her arm and she straightened the sleeve of her coat. Emilee tossed a sideways glance at the boy next to her, who looked very pleased with himself, and she leaned closer to the sheet.

Sure enough, there was the thing she had been dreading as soon as she caught sight of the page. Two blanks up from the bottom of the first column, a name was scribbled in the same handwriting that had added the lyrics onto her notebook page. It made Emilee draw a slow breath as she tried to fight off the sudden wave of anxious nausea.

Emilee Taylor- violin.

The boy had a lot of nerve.

"That's not my... I didn't write that..." she moaned, placing her finger on the list. The pen did not smudge like she had hoped. "There is no way I'm going to do the talent show. You can't just enter me against my will."

"You're crazy if you say no," Nick said, as she turned to face him. "All the people in this school are going to live hollow, unenriched lives if they don't hear you play—"

"Well technically, I haven't heard myself and I think I'm going to go on with life just fine," Emilee muttered bitterly. Her arms were shaking, her palms a little cold.

Nick did not appear to find her irony very funny. There was an evident amount of determination in his eyes as he reached for her hand, and Emilee hated the intensity. It was too serious for her taste. But even more serious was the way it felt when their fingers touched…

“Trust me. You’re good—remarkable, even—and you deserved to be recognized for it. You’ve got something that I haven’t seen in any other musician, and I’ve met a lot of them.”

Emilee was busier trying to avoid the flush that was rising in her cheeks than actually watching what Nick was saying. She looked anywhere but at him; her eyes flickered over the crowd of students in the hallway instead, and she caught one particular face.

That face just so happened to belong to Joe Jonas.

Emilee had never run into this particular brother at school, so she was a little put-off. Joe was leaning up against the wall, chatting with a short girl whose back was to Emilee. Every few seconds or so, however, his eyes glanced over the girl's head and in his younger brother's direction. His mouth formed a tiny 'o' of surprise and his eyes narrowed, as if he was having trouble comprehending what he was seeing.

A sudden pressure on her hand snapped her attention back to the Jonas in front of her for only a moment. That was another problem with being deaf--when she wasn't paying attention to someone who was talking to her, it was painfully obvious.

"Emilee?" Nick was saying. He squeezed her hand a little more, to get her attention.

She saw Joe's lips form the words "I'll catch up with you later, Cole"; the girl's head bobbed up and down in a nod, and the boy began striding towards his brother. Emilee dropped Nick's hand like it was white-hot, stuffing her own fists into her coat pocket. He shifted uncomfortably.

"What's up, guys?" Joe said amiably, eying his brother's reddening cheeks. He tossed a wistful look back over his shoulder at the girl he had just parted with while waiting for one of the sophomores to answer.

"N-nothing," Emilee finally stuttered. The less people who knew about Nick's far-fetched audacity, the better. This way, there would be less pressure to give in, and giving in was something that Emilee was certainly not ready to do.

Nick's older brother looked the girl up and down, biting his lip as if there was something he wanted to comment on. He glanced out the window instead.

"Em, you want a ride home from school? It's still pretty snowy out."

"Sure, thanks," she said, seeing no other option. It would be rude to say 'no' when it was clearly, as Joe had said, still snowy. But the last thing she wanted to do was share a vehicle with Nick, who had suddenly become a traitor in her mind.

Joe, who had seemingly sensed the palpable tension between his brother and this girl, looked back and forth in amusement.

"Let's get going before there's too much traffic."

Nick tugged on Emilee's sleeve again as she began to follow Joe down the hall.

"This isn't over," he said, like it was a warning. "Don't just say no to the talent show outright. Please?" Nick's imploring eyes caused Emilee to hesitate, but only for a moment. "At least think about it?"

"I'm thinking about it right now," she replied, preparing to turn in the other direction. "And I'm still thinking the answer is 'no.'"

But the look on Nick's face clearly showed that he wasn't going to give up without a fight.