Whispers and Words

Everybody whispered about Brittany, but nobody had the courage to talk to her.

It wasn’t as though Brittany didn’t know it, either. If she didn’t, it might have been a different conversation. But she did, and they did. They all knew. Still, Brittany remained the ever talked-about and seldom talked-to girl with the oversized round glasses and dirty blonde hair.

She didn’t seem to care particularly much about it, either. They talked. Sometimes they even had the decency to look anywhere else when they talked about her. Most of the time, though, the eye contact remained. She didn’t care. So, the whispers kept swirling around her, ever-present in the air that seemed to follow her through the halls.

With this behavior, one might be led to believe that Brittany was a teenager and the others were hormonal and catty, maybe even mean. But one would be wrong.

No, Brittany lived her life in contemporary America, with a typical secretarial job, if any of them can be called typical. She just seemed to be…often on people’s minds.

Brittany hadn’t figured out exactly why people seemed so eager to talk about her and not to her, but she had remembered it happening from her earliest memories. One such memory, sitting in the doctor’s office at a check-up, old enough to be starting school and speak for herself, but young enough that the doctors and nurses continued to direct all their questions to Brittany’s mother, who probably didn’t know the answers, anyway, as little attention as she paid to Brittany and her antics. However, it seemed like it all began there and continued throughout, so much so that Brittany was used to not being addressed but often being the topic of conversation.

Brittany saw the change in her classmates. Saw when they spoke up for themselves, advocated for themselves, wanted their own things. Brittany wasn’t sure what she wanted or needed, but she knew that people knew she was there. Sensing something in the air, even her teachers didn’t directly address her, but saw fit to give her decent grades on her work. So, she mostly floated through life this way. Because no one said anything to her, she didn’t say much at all, either. Why speak if she wasn’t sure anyone was going to respond? After a while, she wasn’t sure she even remembered how to speak, getting by with smiles, nods, or a vexed look, nose crinkled up and forehead creased. It was surprising, actually, how many situations only called for one of those looks.

At one point, Brittany had hopes that this rhythm of her life would end when she started working, but it seemed everyone was content with her facial expressions as responses and whispering about her to others while giving her instructions through written handbooks or video trainings.

So, she was used to it. It suited her just fine. She never needed to speak or fear being misunderstood. No one really cared to get to know her, so she had no need to blend in for the sake of popularity. There were probably some wild stories circulating about her and her life. She thought it might be fun to let people think whatever they heard was true but never really know who she was, the person, rather than the hastily passed whispers. She had even come up with a few of her own wild stories for herself, in the early days when she had felt self-conscious about what people might be whispering about her.

I could be a spy, she thought. No one would be able to identify my voice. Maybe a little cliché, but she was five, so let it slide. No one would give me any secrets, either, so I’d be a pretty bad one.

Maybe I was cursed by a dragon-demon whose gift at my birthday party was turned away by parents for being too much like love, she thought another time, realizing it was her own weird twist on Sleeping Beauty and shooting down that theory immediately.

My father made a deal with the devil, she knew it, when she was about 10, and figuring out that good and evil were maybe real and maybe they were just stories people told kids to keep them from doing something truly dangerous. And the deal meant that everyone would see me as a princess behind a wall of glass, impossible to talk to but incredibly easy to talk about.

Maybe I took the wrong pill, she wondered, as a toddler, I popped one of my mother’s pills for mental illness and instead of just wearing it, it made other people think I was crazy.

Alas, though, as time ticked by, slowly to her, she realized that no story she could steal from others’ tomes would really be quite as weird as hers, so, why try?

People continued to whisper when she was around, sometimes visibly shaking when an opportunity arose to speak to her. They shook, sometimes they coughed or cried. One lady even laughed. Just massive guffaws right in Brittany’s face. She was uncomfortable. And she couldn’t even apologize afterward. People just never quite knew what to say to her, and so…they didn’t.

It was this life Brittany had settled into, at her desk at the dental offices of C. Cheshire and E. Namel when that life changed.

“Right then. I’m here for my 2 o’clock with Cheshire. Put me in the system real quick, will you?”

Brittany looked around. The receptionists whose actual jobs it was to check people in were sitting at their desks, ready, no one else waiting, but here was a man in front of her desk, requesting she check him in.

“…because honestly I haven’t a clue why they think they can fit me in in half an hour when they know that there’s no possible way I can stop talking, even if I want to, and they know it takes the space of at least two, sometimes three, appointments to fit in everything they need to do with my mouth chatting away as though I’ll never not have anything to talk about. Even though sometimes I’m quite sure I’ve run out of things to say. I take a breathe and back at it again, wouldn’t you know, like some kind of awkward verbal diarrhea. I know I shouldn’t say those words together because it’s a totally disgusting mental image, but, as I’ve said, there’s no way I can stop talking. It’s a curse, and it never stops. I’ve been told I don’t even stop talking in my sleep and…”

Brittany looked around. Surely he wasn’t talking to…her? No one spoke to her. Ever. And here was this man, whose name she still didn’t know (How was he expecting her to check him in?), unable to stop rambling while all she could do was sit and watch it happen, too certainly that there was no way he could be talking to her.

She pointed at herself with raised eyebrows, and peeked around the man to the desk on the other side of the room, hoping to catch an eye of an actual receptionist and not the secretary of sorts that she was.

She saw them whispering among themselves. Because of course they were whispering about her again, rather than to her. The man was still babbling.

“Anyway, sorry about all this, I really can’t help it. My parents said I was kissed by a troll and never stopped talking again, other than to take a few breaths once in a while, and it makes going on dinner dates rather uncomfortable, not that you asked or care, but I can’t seem to help letting anything and everything tumble out whenever it wants to, so, as long as it takes you to check my in, here I will be, non-stop chatter…”

Dinner date. How odd. It wasn’t as if Brittany was trying to date the man. What an absurd thing to bring up to a stranger. The man was handing over his I.D. for her to check him in.

Smith, John. Was this an actual joke? No one was actually named John Smith anymore, right?

“So the last one I was on, dinner date, I mean, we went to a restaurant that served seafood and I couldn’t stop talking to eat, of course, so right into my mouth went a crab leg with the hardened shell of a leg still on, and I just chewed away like my teeth were going to be able to destroy this massive crab shell and I wasn’t a human rather a shark. Obviously it didn’t work out well for me. I’m here, after all, unsurprisingly date-free because no one really cares about dating you when you’re so busy talking you can’t bother to get the crab out of the leg before you start chewing it. It's usually something like this that keeps me from second dates, but somehow my family has managed being around me just fine. I have 20 brothers and sisters, so maybe they are just all used to the chaos. I had to keep talking anyway I could to be heard over 20 other kids, so it turned out to be a good thing that I can’t really make myself stop because if I had ever stopped no one would have heard a thing I said. You haven’t said a word, yet, how’s that check in coming…”

Brittany realized she had been staring at the man, mouth open to catch flies, the entire time he’d been speaking and while she hadn’t really needed to say a word to him yet, she also hadn’t checked him in for his appointment, yet, either. Not that she knew how to do it. So, instead, she got up with the man’s ID and began walking across the room to the actual reception desk where they knew how to work the system that checked people in for appointments rather than the one where Brittany could keep track of notes, to do lists, correspondence to be mailed, and other such boring paperwork that always fell to her to be done. She set the ID on the counter and turn around to face John Smith, who had followed her over from the desk.

“Of course, my parents are sort of forcing me on these dates, hoping I’ll find someone who can put up with all the chatter and move out of their house so they don’t have to listen to it anymore,”

Brittany stared at him, in awe that he was talking directly to her, not about her or around her. She felt something warm that she didn’t remember ever feeling before. Like what she remembered hugs to be, before people were too scared to give her those, too.

“…but I find it to be quite a far fetched idea when…” John Smith was quiet.

Well, sort of quiet. More like his talking sounds turned into mumbling sounds because his mouth was suddenly very busy not talking.

Brittany realized the warmth was a belonging. That wouldn’t it just make some kind of karmic sense for the girl who didn’t talk and to whom no one talked to be the girl who fit just perfectly with the guy who never stopped talking, not even long enough to probably ever kiss anyone else in his life. So, she did it.

Because she didn’t care what they whispered about her. It turned out that being talked about wasn’t nearly as fun as everyone imagined it would when they imagined being famous and discussed in the gossip magazines. It meant you were basically invisible and when someone was willing to ignore your invisibility and see you…well. That warms you up from the inside out, and it turns out you don’t even care about your job, anymore, or if you get fired.

It worked, Brittany thought, though, as the mumbling sounds subsided and, God-his-name-is-really-John-Smith sank in. She leaned back, effectively ending the kiss and meeting John’s eyes, now widened and looking at her as if she was the answer he looked over 237 times and missed until now.

They parted and stood together, seeing the receptionists’ mouths just as wide as Brittany’s had been a few minutes ago.

“Right then, well, I…” John Smith was speechless.

“need to check in for your appointment,” Brittany finished for him.