The Quiet That Says More Than Words

The first time Kasia sees Marlie, she is ten years old and everything is wrong.

Not really everything, of course - that would be impossible - but for Kasia it might as well be. Life, she’s known for what seems like forever, is very similar to a play. Everyone acts out their part, and everyone ignores the fact that that’s what they’re doing - acting. Following a script. Hiding behind predetermined roles and predetermined lines.

Kasia has always been very good at it. She’s always been able to carve her lips into warm smiles and shape her words into plain, repetitive sayings with no true meaning and no real life. Oh, yes, they don’t mean a thing - not to her, anyways. But to others...well, those warm, worthless words can sometimes make them do exactly what she wants.

It’s a part of her - a bad part, some people would say, but a part of her nonetheless. “You shouldn’t lie.” They instruct. But none of them - not one! - give voice to the fact that that’s what, in the end, they wanted you to do all along.

Oh, not big lies, of course. Just little ones. “Your nails look so pretty!” “I wish Momma would let me have a bracelet like that.” “Your hair looks nice today, Mrs. Grant.”

“Oh, thank you, dear.” Mrs. Grant had smiled proudly at a then-six-year-old Kasia, patting her large, grey curls in satisfaction. “Here - I just baked some raisin cookies, would you like one?”

A sweet smile, two-year-old Kasia easily learned, got her things easier than a sullen frown. 

A shy wave, four-year-old Kasia noted, was much more appreciated by kind older ladies than rambunctious laughter.

And so it went on. Kasia always knew exactly what to say, how to act, who to be. 

But then the stage broke a little bit, and the props shifted, and everything everything everything is wrong.

(Yes, Kasia is ten when she sees a blonde-haired girl smiling and jumping rope with two friends, something sweet and innocent and lovely in her brown eyes)

  (She is ten when the girl catches Kasia’s gaze and simply beams in return, happy and pure and bright as the sun. Kasia has never had friends before - only associates - and now she wishes, maybe, almost, that she did)

(But the stage is broken, and so Kasia doesn’t walk over and say, “Hello.” Instead, she lets her thoughts drift to a girl who looks just like the blonde)

(No, wait. That isn’t quite right)

(Kasia used the wrong word)

(Kasia meant to say looked)

_

It had been cloudy.

The river had been high, raging along past the small pool to the side that Ari had been playing in.

Kasia was supposed to be watching her.

_

“Momma, can’t I collect flowers instead?”

“She’s your sister. Ari comes first.”

“Momma…”

“Ari is your sister. You wouldn’t want her to get hurt, would you?”

“Why can’t you go with her?”

“I’m busy, Kasia. Please?”

“...fine.”

_

Kasia told herself nothing would happen.

Ari was six now; she could take care of herself. She wouldn’t even notice if Kasia left for a bit to find wildflowers, and collecting nature would certainly be more interesting than watching Ari smear mud all over her pale skin in little swirls the width of fingerprints.

Right?

Right?

_

Wrong.

_

They told Kasia her sister died almost instantly.

Her tiny form had been caught by a rock, stopping her before she got swept away too far. The stone had been in the way. The water bashed little Ari against it again and again. 

(Kasia could just imagine it. Her baby sister, golden hair wet and limp, blood spurting from the injury on her forehead. Water bubbling from her lips. Pale as death)

Ari must have gotten curious, they told her. She must have wanted to go and play in the deeper water, like she’d be able to later that summer, when the river would calm.

(and then- and then - and then -)

_

No one else will get hurt, Kasia tells herself as she sits watching the blonde girl who looks so much like Ari jump rope, if she never gets close to anyone.

(Because she played her parts and spoke her lines, but oh, she loved her sister too)

_

Kasia plans to stay isolated and alone.

She plans to pick apart her role and shape it, change it enough in the eyes of others that no one questions a thing.

She plans on being the shadow in the back of the room, ignored for the most part, the receiver of quick smiles but no words.

But of course, that isn’t what happens.

_

At lunchtime, the blonde girl who isn’t Ari but could be her so easily sits down at a mostly empty table.

(Mostly empty, because Kasia is sitting there too)

“Hello,” Says the girl. “My name is Marlie.” and for a second Kasia thinks she said Ari and her world begins to spiral out of control.

“What?” She chokes out.

Not-Ari frowns a bit. “Marlie.” She repeats slowly, as if Kasia is a small child.

“Oh.” Kasia says, and because Marlie is smiling again, that warm smile, and because her eyes are so sparkly and sweet and Ari, she replies, “I’m Kasia.”

_

Marlie, Kasia learns over the course of several weeks, is very hard to get rid of.

The day after, Kasia comes back to school with a renewed determination to dismiss the smiling blonde girl from her life. She comes back ready to ignore Marlie’s offers of friendship (because she doesn’t need friends, because she doesn’t want them, because she can’t afford to have them). She comes back prepared for almost anything.

She comes back to find Marlie waiting with a saran-wrapped cookie on her extended palm.

_

“We look kind of similar.” Marlie remarks one day as the two sit on the swings together. 

Kasia can’t disagree more.

They might have the same blonde hair and brown eyes, but Kasia is broken in ways Marlie never will be. She’s a girl holding all her pieces together, a girl with splinters for eyes and serrated edges where there should be only warmth.

Meanwhile, Marlie is all smiles. Her face almost never crumples into a frown or a pout. She’s a bright, welcoming light in contrast to Kasia’s darkness, and sometimes Kasia wonders how they fit together at all.

(Because they do. Somehow, they do)

_

Kasia keeps expecting Marlie to leave.

After all, Marlie is outgoing and confident and unmarred by grief. She’s sweet and pretty and has so many friends it’s almost laughable, almost makes Kasia want to collapse and roll around hysterically, because why would Marlie, prefect, lovely Marlie, hang around her? Why would she stay with the broken girl who killed her sister?

(Okay, she didn’t kill her. But she might as well have) 

But Marlie doesn’t. Leave, that is. She stays, day after day, week after week, not abandoning Kasia’s side even as months bleed together, and Kasia - Kasia has never been happier.

(She shouldn’t be, of course. She berates herself once she’s home again, because she doesn’t deserve happiness, not now that Ari’s gone, not now that it’s all her fault.)

_

Sometimes Kasia slips and calls Marlie by her sister’s name.

Sometimes Marlie finds her alone, crumpled on the sidewalk while the rest of her class plays tag, sobbing silently into her knees.

Sometimes they just sit together, silently, taking comfort in the other’s presence.

Marlie doesn’t leave.

_

“Sometimes I get tired.” Marlie confesses.

"Of what?" Kasia asks.

“Of people.”

Kasia nods, because she understands exactly.

_

“My birthday is coming up.” Marlie tells Kasia. “I’m having a party. Will you come?”

“I don’t like people.” Kasia says stiffly.

“Kasia, please?” 

Silence.

“Please, please, please?”

“...okay.”

Kasia is hesitant. This feels too much like friendship. 

_

As expected, the party is loud, and there are too many people. Kasia stands near the wall, swirling the lemonade inside her paper cup so the pulp sticks to the sides.

The music blares into her ears. A girl - Jessica, Kasia thinks her name is - shuffles past, chatting loudly with another girl called Mimi. 

She shouldn’t have come.

_

Marlie drags her to the side. “We’re watching a movie.” She says, pulling Kasia up the stairs to the lounge. The carpet is soft against Kasia’s bare feet. “Sit with me?”

Kasia says nothing, but when Marlie pulls her onto a sofa and plops down right beside her, heedless of the five other girls in the room, she gives an odd little twist of her lips that could be categorized as a smile.

She shouldn’t have come, but she doesn’t regret it.

_

“It’s my fault my sister is dead.” Kasia sobs to Marlie one afternoon when they are both alone. It’s the anniversary of the day Ari want into the raging water alone, and Kasia is breaking with each passing hour, bit by bit. “I should have watched her. I was supposed to watch her!”

“It’s not your fault.” Marlie says, and it should feel meaningless, like every other false thing Kasia’s heard before, but it doesn’t. “You didn’t push her in. It isn’t your fault.”

“But she was under my watch. That makes it my fault, right?”

“Wrong.” Marlie says firmly.

Kasia wants to believe her.

Oh, she wants to believe her so badly it hurts.

_

Ice-cream.

Gatherings.

Days alone, just the two of them.

Entering sixth grade together, holding hands, ready to face a new school and new people together.

“We are best friends, aren’t we, Kasia?” Marlie asks.

“...yes.” Kasia says. “Yes, we are.”

_

Note this:

Kasia loves Marlie, even if she denies it. She loves that Marlie is there for her when she cries. She loves, even if she pretends she doesn’t, when Marlie drags her along on group outings, because that means Marlie wants her, and after Ari’s death, she’s pretty sure her parents feel the opposite.

(Oh, they pretend they don’t. But Kasia can tell. She can tell by the way her mother ducks out of any conversation with her a little too soon. She can tell by the glances in her direction her father gives instinctively whenever someone brings up Ari’s passing. She can tell, and she pretends it doesn’t hurt her, but it does.)

When Marlie moves away in Kasia’s seventh grade, it tears her apart.

For a little while - with Marlie - the wrongness was gone, and Kasia was held together by Marlie’s smiles and hugs and presence.

All of that is gone now.

“We’re best friends, aren’t we, Kasia?”

“...yes.”

All of it but memories.

“Right?”

“Wrong.”

Oh, yes. Everything is wrong.