Not with a Bang but a Whisper (Part III)

Author's Note: This is the third part of a story I wrote this semester for a short story writing class. While I never wrote a fourth part for class, I plan to write one from the cat's perspective and post it next week! Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year :)

Trigger Warning: This story deals with anxiety and contains a short scene of physical abuse.

I need ice cream. Something cold and comforting. Familiar.

           Harmony tries to force her thoughts to stop spiraling, breathing in the comforting scent of the pine tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. She’s not sure what brought on the sudden anxiety attack, but she does know that ice cream is a wonderful coping mechanism. And basketball, but she hasn’t played basketball since freshman year, when a group of girls on the team at her brother’s school made fun of her for being deaf.

           Her mother taps Harmony’s shoulder. “We’ll go to Cravings, okay?” she says, and Harmony nods after taking a second to decipher her words.

           Asad says something from the back seat. Harmony can tell he says something because her mother’s face gets all scrunched up as she exhales a long sigh. Harmony’s almost glad Asad can’t say anything directly to her right now. While she’s gotten pretty good at lip-reading, some people—like her brother—speak too fast and without enough sign language for her to catch most of it. Although she’s pretty sure Asad does that on purpose.

           When Harmony had first detected the telltale signs of an anxiety attack—shortness of breath, racing heart, a sudden, dull ringing in her left ear—her mom had ventured to suggest that Harmony just eat the rest of the old frozen yogurt in the freezer, but Harmony knew that wouldn’t help much. So now they’re in the car, Harmony in the passenger seat, Asad in the back by himself, bouncing his knee in annoyance as he jams his AirPods into his ears, and Mom in the driver’s seat, playing with the radio like she always does when she’s stressed.

           Music is one thing Harmony misses from her auditory days—music, podcasts, and funny YouTube compilations of TikToks about cartoon TV shows. All of that disappeared in seventh grade, and even though she’s a sophomore in high school now, sometimes it still hurts to remember.

           Add chronic anxiety to all that? No, thank you. But Harmony is used to it by now—well, almost used to the sudden tightness in her chest, the constricted breathing, the pounding heart and racing thoughts.

           Harmony touches the rope necklace around her throat, fingering the charm dangling not too far from her neck, but not too close to feel like it’s choking her. Managing her anxiety is a very precise science, and once the experiment gets out of control, there are few things that can keep her from having a full breakdown.

           Her butterfly charm necklace is one of those things. Her mother gave it to her, along with a few stress balls, when Harmony’s anxiety was first diagnosed. She’d loved the therapist who had helped her toward the beginning of the diagnosis and through middle school, but then he’d skipped town, and it was hard to find another good therapist who knew sign language.

           Why did all the important men in Harmony’s life decide to leave?

           Not that she’s upset about her dad being out of the picture. She prefers not to think of him and is glad she’s guaranteed never to hear him yelling at her mom ever again.

           I saw my father standing—no, looming—over Mom, his palm raised to hit her as he spat out an obscene word. My mom, who would never hurt a fly. My mom, who’d never even raised her voice at us. What could she have possibly done to deserve this?

           Nothing, my six-year-old mind realized as his hand came down, Mom muffling her sounds of pain in a way that told me she’d been doing this for years.

           Nothing.

           Sometimes, Harmony wishes she could call her father up and give him a piece of her mind. Since she went deaf at a later age, she can still speak without struggling too much. It’s weird not to hear her own voice, to feel only the vibrations in her throat, but it makes communicating a lot easier.

           But being deaf hasn’t changed her memory. She can still remember the whimpers her mom couldn’t stifle, the sound of her father’s hand meeting soft, tanned skin.

           Her mother doesn’t know that Harmony saw, but Asad knows. He’d rushed to her bedroom after it happened, putting aside their sibling rivalry to take care of her. And he’d been…nice. Upset, of course, but calming. Everything an older sibling should be, even though he was under ten years old at the time.

           So what’s changed?

           The car jolts over a bump in the road, and Harmony jumps with it. She clutches her necklace in a death grip, forcing herself to take a deep breath.

           Just some road construction. That’s all. You’re safe, you’re going to be fine.

           She performs all her calming actions: twisting the warm metal of the ring on her thumb, tugging gently on one of her curls, taking a deep breath.

           Finding what calms you down is key. These small actions are unique to each person and will generally work very well for people with anxiety, her therapist had told her.

           None of them seems to be working as well as they’re supposed to.

           It’s only a few minutes to Cravings, but maybe she can squeeze in a chapter of her favorite book, The Selection, before they get there. It’s the only book she has both in paperback and on her phone, and the only reason she got the e-book was for moments like these, when all else failed and reading Kiera Cass’s familiar words could hold her over until another solution—like ice cream—presented itself.

When we got the letter in the post, my mother was ecstatic. She had already decided that all our problems were solved, gone forever. The big hitch in her brilliant plan was me.

           Sometimes Harmony thinks she relates a little too much to America, the protagonist of the story. Because if it wasn’t for Harmony’s deafness, a lot of her family’s problems probably would be solved, gone forever.

           She glances at the time at the top of her screen. 1:40. Maybe she doesn’t need the ice cream anymore; she’s already feeling a lot better. As long as nothing else goes wrong within the next two minutes or so, maybe she can tell Sheila to turn around, and they can finally get Asad to his game on time. Maybe then he’ll stop ignoring her, like the fact that she can’t hear anymore makes her invisible.

           Harmony leans back against the worn cloth of the seat rest, ready to lose herself in a few more pages. But then, for a second, she thinks she hears something.

           It’s not much. Just the barest hint of a whistle, a sharp keening sound, almost like a scream or a screech. Harmony looks up, eager, hopeful, only to catch the last moment before the bumper slams into the car in front of them, and the airbag puffs out suddenly and silently.

[Excerpt taken from The Selection by Kiera Cass, HarperTeen, 2012, p. 1.]