Keeping Up With the Wind: A 'Burban Tale by Suleyma Moon

2.

Whisper and I were in the sixth grade, and Blaze and Faith were in the seventh when Whisper's father died. Whisper had just moved into the neighborhood a few months before and, like the missing piece of a puzzle, she just seemed to fit. You see, the rest of the group had already been formed, aside from Shadow, and we immediately took her in. Blaze told me once that he really wanted to ask her out, but he never did.

            It's funny how Blaze and Whisper had such a hard time telling each other how they felt about one another when, as a group, we used to sit around and talk for hours. Faith told us that the more we communicated, the better we'd understand each other. Of course, we all listened to her, and ended up knowing even more than we ever wanted to know about one another. There were few secrets in our group. We found it both therapeutic and calming to be able to dump all of our problems onto someone else. Even Shadow ended up talking after a while.

Now that I think about it, we all dumped our problems more onto Faith than she did onto us. Even though it had been her idea to "talk," she spoke the least out of us all. She would listen to everyone else's problems and give advice, but she never had a whole lot to say about herself.

Maybe she just never had any problems. At least, none that she let take over her whole world like we did.

            One day, we were all hanging out in the old condemned building that Faith and I found across town when we were little. They had never torn the place down and we decided to make it our unofficial hangout. Now that I'm older, I see how dangerous it was for us to even be out there in the first place. Especially since we had to cross over a busy expressway to get there. I'm surprised that we never came across any homeless people living there, and that our "hangout" never collapsed right down on top of us.

It was there, right in the middle of one of our "therapy" sessions that Whisper decided to tell us about her family.

            There was a pause in the conversation, all of us waiting for Whisper to finally say something, while she was probably waiting for someone else to speak. Faith was standing at the door, looking out at the rain, and Blaze was sitting across the room gazing at his twin "big" sister the same way that she was looking at the rain. Li'l Jay and I were lying on the floor looking up at the rafters and wondering how long it would take for them to collapse and fall right down on top of us. Spider was doing coin tricks (keeping his reflexes quick he'd say), and his brother was practicing dealing cards the "Ace" way.

I rolled over with a content sigh, thinking just how much like a family we really were when I noticed Whisper. I think Blaze and I noticed her at the same time. She was sitting in an old armchair staring at the floor, totally absorbed in thoughts that had apparently taken her a million miles away.

            "My father," she began, "wasn't too nice. He had a really bad temper and used to hit my mom all the time. She would fight back, but that just made him even angrier. I thought that one day he would kill her. The police were the worst. They would never do anything about it when she called because my uncle was a cop in the same city...I used to think of all the different ways I could kill my dad and finally take care of it myself." She looked at Blaze with a cynical smile. He tried to smile back. "Because, because he wasn't too nice to me either. He used to..." she stopped and started picking at her nails.

            Faith had turned from the door and was now watching Whisper intently. I think that Whisper felt her gaze, because she stiffened and suddenly became aware that everyone in the room was listening. It thundered loudly. Everyone jumped but Faith, who glanced calmly back out of the open door behind her, and then back at Whisper.

            "Do you know why my parents named me Whisper?" Whisper asked, from way out in left field. "Because when I was a baby I never cried loud. It was more like a whisper. Even when I learned to talk, I'd sit all alone in my room and whisper quietly...like I was telling secrets to an invisible friend." She paused and it thundered once again, more softly this time.