Alert the media: Martha spoke to me today.
I was sitting with her on the couch, reading, and out of nowhere she put her hand on my wrist and said, “Frex.”
I was so shocked that I stopped reading and just looked at her. She touched my wrist again. “Frex,” she said, like she was telling me the name of something.
“Frex,” I said, and she nodded. Then she touched her chest and said it again.
At first I thought I should call for Cat Poop, but then I decided it might scare Martha if I got all excited. So I waited, and she rubbed her fingers along the cuts on one of my wrists. “Frex,” she said. “Frex.”
I didn’t know if she was talking about my wrist, my cut, or nothing in particular. It was sort of like a scene in one of those sci-fi movies where a human and an alien are trying to communicate and neither really knows what the other is saying. Like the alien says “Frex,” and the human doesn’t know if it means “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you” or “I’ve laid an egg in your stomach and it’s about to hatch, so kiss your butt good-bye.”
Martha touched her chest again, where her heart is, and repeated herself a couple of times—“frex, frex, frex”—just like that. She said it almost like she was singing a song.
That’s when I got it. All of a sudden it made sense. She was talking about hurting. My scar and her heart. Whatever “frex” is to her, it means something that hurts. Who knows how she came up with that word. I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s her word, and now I know what it means.
That’s all that happened. There wasn’t any big emotional scene or anything. Martha didn’t all of a sudden tell me her life story and solve the mystery of why she doesn’t talk. But it was kind of cool anyway.
Later on I told Cat Poop what had happened. I thought he’d jump up and down and push his glasses up, but he just smiled and nodded.
“Did you already know?” I asked him, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself. She opened up to you.”
“Why should I feel proud?” I asked him. “I didn’t do anything. She’s the one who did the talking.”
“You let her know it was okay to tell you,” he said.
Whatever. I hate to rain on his parade, but I didn’t do anything. I’m not going to get all excited about her saying “frex.” I still don’t know why she would talk to me and not other people. But how weird is it that she made up that word? Frex. Hurt. I guess she was saying that her heart hurts because of what happened to her. I wonder if she’ll ever really be able to talk about it, or if she’s so inside herself that this is as good as it gets. Like Alice.
In other news, I forgot that Allie’s birthday was yesterday. Not that it’s really my fault. You don’t exactly keep track of the date so well around here. The days all kind of run into each other, like one big long one that never ends. But today I happened to look at the date on the newspaper at the nurses’ station and realized I’d missed Allie’s birthday. She turned sixteen. I’ll be sixteen this summer, so she’s got half a year on me. That never bothered her, though. She always called herself “the older woman.”
I wonder what she did for her birthday. Actually, I don’t wonder at all. I know what she did. She spent it with Burke. He’s her boyfriend. He probably took her to the movies or maybe out for pizza. I bet he bought her some stupid present she normally wouldn’t even like, and I bet she gushed over it like it was the best thing ever.
It makes me sick how she gets all stupid over him. She was never like that before. She never let a guy turn her into something she’s not. Then Burke came along and everything changed. Everything.
I don’t get how someone can become a different person overnight, but Allie did. It was like there was this whole other girl living inside of her, and one night that girl broke through and took over. One day we were doing everything together, and the next everything was over. She just threw it all away.
The worst part is, you know they’re not going to be together forever. I mean, come on, she’s fifteen. Okay, sixteen. Still. It’s not like they’re going to get married or anything. Even if they last a couple of years—which they won’t—she’ll go to one college and he’ll go to another, and pretty soon they’ll forget all about each other. That’s what always happens. That’s why teenage dating is so dumb, because it’s doomed to fail. You’d think people would have learned that by now, but I guess they haven’t. They go right on falling in love and thinking it’s going to survive high school. Allie and Burke, true love always.
Whatever.
Anyway, happy birthday, Allie. I hope it was a good one.