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Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

The night of the explosion was the night I began to hear voices in my head. They bumped around in my skull, leaving traces of words behind that were mere pieces of a puzzle.

The voices started when I was half asleep, lying in bed.

At first I thought I was dreaming, because they started out as whispers and then they slowly started to crescendo into screams. I was under the assumption that the voices in my dreams were an afterthought to the explosion early that day, until I realized that I wasn’t dreaming. I was wide awake.

I jolted myself from the bed and ran to the mirror.

The voices began their chorus again, their words weaving in and out of my ears. I shut my eyes tightly and tried my best to listen to what they had to say.

There was nothing to begin with except for words that sounded as if they were in a foreign language. Then, within a few minutes, I was able to pick out random English sentences being formed fluently. The voices talked about nothing serious, and seemed just to have ideal small talk with each other.

“Where am I?” some asked.

“Do you know where I am?”

“Wasn’t I just at the Bechman’s party?”

After the small talk came the wailing—the heart-crunching, my-mother-just-died, thoroughly depressed wailing that stripped my heart of its heartstrings.

The voices in my head no longer spoke; they instead chose to bawl and scream with such intensity that I was forced to cover my head with a pillow. The pillow blocked absolutely none of the racket.

Suddenly, with absolutely no warning, the wailing dropped to a pianissimo. It was to the point where I could still hear the cries but it was very vague, like someone had decreased the volume on a radio.

For some reason, the occurrence left me thinking about Marley’s cryptic statement earlier that day. I wondered if the voices had anything to do with what he had said.

…

When I awoke the next morning, I was lying on the floor with my face in a puddle of drool, and I discovered that the voices in my head were non-existent.

I sat up, snatched up my cell phone and hurriedly dialed Marley’s number. The other side rang six times before leaving me with a voicemail message with Marley awkwardly telling callers to “leave a message after the beep.” Frustrated, I hung up and redialed with the same result.

I knew I had to get ahold of him. I knew that he knew what was going on, and I needed answers before I exploded.

My last resort was to text him.

“Marley,” I typed quickly. “Call me ASAP. I have questions for you.”

I sent the message with a severe feeling of anxiety in my gut.

A half an hour was spent sitting in my room, waiting anxiously for my cell phone to vibrate with a text message. But Marley never texted me back. Another half an hour was spent sending Marley three more texts and two more calls. After that, though, there was hardly any point to wait around any longer for a call or a text that wasn’t going to come.

Grabbing my jacket, I ran out the door and to the sidewalk. I needed to take a walk to clear my mind.

The cool morning breeze sliced through the air and forced me to put on my jacket, though the sun was warm enough that when it poked through the clouds, it caused me to remove my jacket again.