Chapter 8
Right. So. Why I don’t talk.
Just to say first, being silent doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I go to school just like anybody else, and I’m smart enough to be going to the upper school in the city next week, and that’s after being mostly remote-schooled on a farm, so either the upper school is really desperate or I’m really smart.
It’s the latter.
But what happened was, Mom and Pop decided we’d get the cure when I was born and Max was adopted.
I’ve seen it in Pop’s Noise, and it’s not like they disagreed at the time, really.
Both of them knew firsthand the terrible things Noise can do, to a person and a world, and Pop remembered how hard it was to grow up with it.
Humans weren’t built for Noise, and exceptions like Pop–or Lee and Wilf, who run the Smith farm with their wives–are rare.
And also, if all the new settlers were going to take the cure (and they did), did Mom and Pop really want to leave their sons as oddballs, to be stared at and politely shunned like Pop is?
And more, Mom had seen firsthand how a world of Noisy men and non-Noisy women turned out.
So it’s not like there weren’t good reasons.
But things were bad enough with the new settlers that they started doling out the new cure before they were a hundred percent sure everything was going to be all right with the people who got it. And mostly they were. All right, I mean. The adults were, at least.
But some of us kids weren’t. They didn’t realize until I was three years old that I wasn’t just being slow to start talking, it was that I couldn’t talk at all.
My vocal cords theoretically work. When they did stimulus tests on them, they moved like they should.
And it’s not a psychological problem. Don’t get me started on all the psychological tests I took.
But when some other kids didn’t start talking either–not all of us, not even a lot, but enough–the scientists in Haven discovered it was neurological.
Our brains weren’t commanding our vocal cords to work.
Most of those kids were treated with different kinds of neurological stimuli and therapies and all that and were able to speak again.
Only one kid on this whole planet didn’t change.
Guess who.
Now don’t get any stupid ideas. This story, whatever it is, isn’t about me “finding my voice.” I have a voice just fine, thank you. It’s in my face and my gestures and my words. When I’m talking to people outside my family, I type them (pretty fast) into a comm that reads them out for me.
I can’t speak, but I’m not without a voice. Okay?
The problem is that over the years, Pop’s grown to think the cure was a mistake. He didn’t take it himself, after all, and the planet functions on Noise. He’s always thought it wasn’t Noise that was men’s problem. It was men themselves.
Mom, meanwhile, also thinks giving the cure to me was a mistake, but for different reasons.
She thinks their decision harmed me, and even though she couldn’t have known, I don’t think she ever forgave herself.
So she spends more and more time in the city trying to find out why my brain doesn’t connect to my vocal cords, and why it didn’t at first in those other few kids, too.
In other words, trying to perfect a cure that Pop doesn’t believe in.
And it’s caused a divide. Mom and Pop never yell at each other about it, but she stays in the city a lot and Pop stays on the farm and here are their sons whose Noise they can’t hear.
And their one son they can’t hear at all.
It’s not nice being a constant reminder of a mistake your parents think they made.