The Whispers

26: The End

We would have peace from the mourners and stares from the neighbours. Peace from a Mom who would cry about Dad every day. Peace from all the judgement, horrible home life, and pitiful looks we'd get. Maggie was probably too young to even register what was happening but she wanted to have space from everything just as much as I did. 

Silence became a thing to cherish not only at home but at school, as well. Dallas talked to me but he wasn't in all of my classes. Kids would be as loud as possible to piss off the teacher, to get a reaction out of the quiet kids, and to tease their targets; specifically me. Things got a bit better once I went into grade eleven - kids started focusing less on being complete assholes and more on their schoolwork, and if they didn't they would end up dropping out, anyway. Stella was my friend by then, the bugs were under control for a little bit, and Dallas would spend every day after school with me.

For a while, things seemed well. Good enough that I wouldn't think anything extraordinarily bad would happen to my life or Maggie's.

Clearly, I was wrong.

Maybe it was inevitable.  You can't go through life in poverty with a neglectful mother, a father who's absent and mentally ill, a sister with anxiety and no friends, and constantly being lonely without something happening; good or bad. Maybe my life is a cautionary tale meant for someone else to hear.

Caution to always help others when they're being bullied so that they aren't fucking murdered at school. Caution to admit that something is wrong - to not let the voices in your head control you. Caution not to take hard drugs as a distraction from the shit going on around you.

It's easier said than done, though.

***

I once read about the butterfly effect. It's a concept invented by Edward N. Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, who invented chaos theory, that states that small causes can create a momentous effect. His example was an imagined butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon.

Of course, a butterfly simply flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. A typhoon forms where the wind blows into warm areas of the ocean, collects moisture and rises, cold air moves below causing pressure to build, which causes the winds to spin. I suppose that in itself is a butterfly effect - if it weren't for a gust of air blowing, a typhoon wouldn't happen.

Perhaps my whole life is a butterfly effect. One little whisper and my mental health goes to shit, my dad is in a hospital, my mom abandoned me, and my sister was killed.

Dallas parked between two minivans, no doubt belonging to people with a large, happy family. Maybe the purple van to my right has at least three kids, their parents are strong-minded and together, and they're only here for a check-up because nothing is ever actually wrong with any of them.

The black van to my left has stickers on the back window to let strangers know what their family looks like.  Two parents, the mom is pregnant, they have two girls and a little boy and a baby. I'm sure they're either all named something very traditional like Mary, Anne, Adam, and John, or they're a family of hippies that don't believe in birth control and named them Lightning, Flowers, Pillow, and Chocolate. I'm probably wrong for both vans but thinking about it gives me something to do other than sit awkwardly in the parking lot of a hospital with Dallas.

"Are you ready to go in?" He asks, fiddling with the keys in his hands. We've been sitting here in silence for about twenty minutes now. It was peaceful.