The Voices in Our Heads Read online

  Then it dripped to the hardwood floor beneath.

  Splat.

  There was no one in the suit. For a few seconds that seemed like hours, Becky had retained her position on the floor, both afraid to touch what seemed a suicide, and amazed that she had been able to commit what she thought at the time was murder, defensive or no. First she reached up and touched it. Then she shoved at it, went and got a chair from the office, took it down.

  And now, of course, the biggest question was why, coming in just slightly ahead of who. Still, her fascination with the outfit, or rather the contraption, had gained a strange sort of priority there in Becky Buckingham’s upstairs hallway, where she’d laid the thing out under the harsh blare of the overhead bulb she’d finally flicked on.

  She measured it again, just to be sure. Yep. Ten feet nine inches. Apparently, the boots were stilts, adding a foot and a half, and the hood (the “face”—a tightly woven, recessed cast-iron black mesh) wasn’t even where the operator would put his head. The peephole was in the top chest button, sort of like the Philly Phanatic or some of these other larger-than-life mascots or parade creatures.

  Inside the right arm was a rod that manipulated the headpiece, and the forearms had inner gloves where the wearer would rest his hands. The outer wrists and gloves dangling so far down appeared to be rubber-filled.

  But the most intriguing (and frightening) things were the many tatters in the material, those made prior to the episode here in her closet doorway. Becky remembered that when she’d stabbed the thing herself there had been no real penetration past the surface, just a firm sort of resistance; and here she saw that the chest and arms were riddled with rips and tears, and even a few bullet holes. She’d dug her fingers into one of the jagged fissures and concluded the jacket was lined with some sort of steel, like chain mail, bullet-proof army-type stuff.

  She dragged the dirty thing into her bedroom. She put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. She had to know.

  When she slid her feet in and worked in her arms, she was amazed at the craft of this thing, how easy it was to fit inside, how well it balanced as you stood an odd two or three feet off the ground. Of course, there was a convenient inner zipper, and the minute she pulled it shut she noticed it, inside the enclosed face area with the peephole. She smelled girl. Oh yes, that was girl-sweat and perfume, and not just from one. There were a lot of girls in here, each of whom had left her scent, heavily, purposefully.

  She looked in the mirror and a chill whispered across her shoulders.

  She got it. She didn’t know if she liked it, but change sometimes wasn’t meant to tickle. And change she had, oh, there was no way of denying it. Faced with the darkest of literal and metaphorical monstrosities, she had gone and stabbed it right in the face. And the neck. And the heart. She’d been through the fire now, and though sobered, hardened, empowered, she felt a part of her, a part she loved dearly, die right there in front of her bedroom mirror.

  She got out of the thing and walked down the hall. Got the cordless and dialed Bruce. When he came to the phone he sounded annoyed, and Becky matched his tone perfectly.

  “Lawyer up,” she said. “We’re switching houses, and I’m keeping Julie. You can have the leaky roof, the Shakespeare sculpture, and the ugly fucking African masks.”

  She hung up abruptly and dialed in Dr. Laure’s cell. The real work had begun.

  The only question now was whether or not she would pass the baton.

  One year later

  They were all crammed in Courtney Coontz’s dorm room, and she was glad to have the company. College was hard, she missed her mother, and she hadn’t made too many friends. It was second semester already, and she was starting to panic. She had pale skin, a fairly large cheek mole she’d never quite come to terms with, stringy dark black hair she couldn’t get to “fluff out” no matter what conditioners she tried, and big breasts that looked nice yet were more of a pain to lug around than they were worth. From nowhere, it seemed, she’d developed a goofy, nervous laugh that people here tended to measure with distaste, and to top it all off, she kept the stuffed panda she adored in the closet because someone had scrawled “DORK” on its tummy in magic marker. Late last semester, Brittany Fletcher had spread the rumor that Courtney left a fish smell in the bathroom, and it had gone around the text gauntlet like wildfire. For a month people talked about her with smirks and called her “Tuna” in savage little stage whispers. Most girls treated her coldly, and the boys were just rude for the most part, loud as all hell, smoking and drinking and kicking soccer balls in the hallway and playing cards in the lounge. The guy above her bounced a basketball on the floor and kept her up until all hours, and she often found herself staring at nothing, listless and depressed. She’d met Missy Schindler in a reader’s club she’d joined, and Tim Richardson in the book store. He’d helped her find an elusive Psych 101 textbook and had talked to her with a smooth, easy warmth. And he had such pretty eyes! She thought he might even ask her out, but she was afraid he’d want to do it, like on the first date. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t want it to hurt.

  “Hey,” she said. “Anyone here good with Englishy stuff?”

  “Why?” Justin said. She pulled up her knees and tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “102 is kinda hard.”

  “Who do you have?”

  She sighed.

  “Buckingham.”

  Tim Richardson looked up from her CD collection and grinned wryly.

  “You have my sympathies,” he said. “Last year I tried to worm a better grade out of her and she tore me a new asshole. I went to her office after the weekend, and she’d cleared out all the nerdy stuff. I didn’t recognize her at first, ’cause she’d ditched this old Klondike hat she’d been addicted to. Now she had her hair all free-fall and she was wearing this long leather skirt and all these belts and boots and buckles and braids.”

  Denny Savitz snorted, still looking at his Blackberry.

  “Don’t let the glam fool you. That cold bitch was meant for pants suits and Hitler knickers. Has been since the day she was born.”

  “No, not always,” Missy said. “She used to be cool.”

  Richardson laughed. “Yeah. So I go in there expecting an easy ‘A,’ and she marches me down to the Dean’s office accusing me of accusing her of sexual harassment. Calls me a cheap hustler. Almost got me expelled.”

  He plunked himself down on the floor next to Courtney and inadvertently let the back of his hand touch hers. She didn’t know whether to move her hand or not. She didn’t want to be insulting . . .

  “Anyway,” Richardson continued. “I was going to run that game on her, but didn’t think she’d have the balls to bring it out into the open herself. And then she rips through my paper a paragraph at a time, bashing the shit out of me, coming up with detail after detail proving my work was a piece of crap, which it was, but I mean, she must have spent all weekend memorizing the thing. She didn’t have to reference it once. Straight from the brain with a vengeance.”

  He took Courtney’s hand. She tried to remove it, and he held it a bit tight for a second. She looked at him, embarrassed. He grinned back, let go of her hand grudgingly.

  “Sorry. Need comfort.”

  Justin laughed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Someone in my class ‘addressed’ her as Professor and she went ice cold. Said that was a biased term celebrating the patriarchy.”

  Richardson snickered.

  “I used to call her Bucky.”

  Then they all said through their teeth,

  “My proper name is Rebecca.”

  They laughed at the strange little tag Dr. Buckingham had become known for, but they didn’t laugh all too loud. Missy looked sad all of a sudden.

  “I miss the old Becky Buckingham, the one you could visit in her office and tease a little and giggle with.”

  “I don’t,” Richardson said. “I think she’s sexy now.”

  No one disagreed. Ric
hardson looked at Courtney and moved his eyebrows up and down.

  “I like sexy, don’t you?”

  Courtney felt her face flush. She liked Tim, but he was too fast. He made her stomach hurt. Suddenly she wished he would leave, that they all would go so she could get out her defaced panda and hold it a bit. It was a snow day, after all, classes canceled, and she wanted to be alone, to call Mom, to go back to bed. But she didn’t want to be rude to her new friends, and this wave of depression felt somehow unjustified.

  She pushed up off the floor and went to the window. The snow was so pretty, coming down in jumbo flakes, making patterns across and between the trees.

  Something moved out there, from behind her favorite elm. It was a man. A huge man in a parka. He raised one of his long arms, and a thrill of pure dread ran up Courtney Coontz’s spine.

  He was pointing at her.

  The Trickster

  March

  Ben Marcus wore gloves.

  He wore them when he raked up the purple leaves under the pear tree in the front yard, and he had them on when he grabbed an armful of cut wood off the pile he’d bought at Home Depot and stacked out back by the red cedar storage shed. He wore his gloves when he dug out the Toyota following those wet and dense February snowstorms teachers loved so dearly, and had them on in early March, when the wind knifed down Trent Road hard enough to rattle the windows, disengage a few gutter pipes, and blow off a roof shingle or two.

  He also wore them in May when he sat out on the porch under the green awning, drinking Killians at four in the afternoon, and he wore them in June when he stood in line at Sears buying yet another fifty-foot extension cord because he always seemed to run the damned things over when he mowed down in the corner made by the hedge and the hydrangea bush. He wore them to Phillies games and he wore them down the shore, wore them in synagogue, at the gym, in the car, and even on those long trips when they went and visited the Cleveland cousins.

  He wore them in bed too. Back in the early days of their relationship, Kimberly thought them quite odd, but that was the seventies, and everyone wore weird shit back then, and those days were ancient and blurry, and by now Ben didn’t even remember the lies he had told her about his strange little habit or condition or whatever one might call it. In the end, the touch of them didn’t really bother her at all, well, not on her breasts thank you, but she loved the feel of them on her vagina. Good friction, she called it. He only bought the finest, form-fitting black leather gloves and he made sure to clean them regularly and change them a few times a year. Max didn’t even ask about them anymore; he hadn’t done so since he was six. Of course, the kid’s newest friends razzed him about his old man just as they joked to Ben’s face like skinny, smart-assed, straggly-haired fourteen-year-olds were bound to do, but like everyone else they forgot about this little eccentricity as soon as he roped them into a conversation.

  They could have named the cliché phrase “he has a good personality” after Ben Marcus: friend, joker, social politician, storyteller, he made people laugh, make them think, made them feel good about expressing opinions. It was easy to shoot the breeze with Ben Marcus, even easier to forget the fact that he was playing basketball (he affectionately called it “Jew Ball”) with the other dads down Powder Mill Park on the hottest day in August, bandana no less, no shirt (oh, please), shorts, sneakers, no socks, yet wearing those stifling “painted on” black leather gloves like a second skin.

  He’d lived in Wynnewood for ten years now, and he’d used a number of excuses when someone was bold enough to ask (and it was amazing how many just didn’t). A strange skin condition—that was big for awhile. A rare disease that kept his fingernails from growing in—that was a contender, but it grossed people out more than the skin condition, he could see it in their eyes, so he dropped it sooner than later. Besides, many of Max’s playmates through the years had parents in the medical field who were just dying to help him out, and he couldn’t have that, not then, not now, not ever.

  O.C.D. wound up being the most solid, long-term excuse, since it was a mental deficiency that didn’t ring too many alarms, especially in a social climate where twenty percent of the students in the district claimed some sort of disability. It was different from when Ben was a boy, that was for sure. Forget the stigma of going to school on the “dummy bus” or hanging your head when you were pulled out of math to trudge down to the resource room. Shit, disabilities nowadays made for trendy cocktail party conversation, free tickets to accommodations and easier assessments, we all knew the drill. Ben’s little glove obsession raised an eyebrow or two, then went basically unnoticed. Even Ben’s students over at People First Charter didn’t trash him over the peculiarity, not many anyway (a few Michael Jackson comments here or there, but what could you do?), and if someone tried to really take him on, he’d unleash a wave of harsh wit that made even the toughest thug struggle for a comeback. And the class was usually behind him, not only for his reputation for making senior year in the inner city a blast, but mainly because he just had that ability, that knack of finding the insult just edgy enough to cut, yet sly enough to make the kid laugh a bit in the end. The inverse of the anecdotal storytelling, yes, Ben Marcus had it both ways. He’d been told he would make a great rapper if he could rhyme. A few kids had also said he was “black inside.” That, Ben thought, was the greatest compliment a teacher could ever receive, especially coming from students who knew to put Vaseline on their cheeks if they gang-fought (the punches slipped off easier), from students who had kids, students who might have sold drugs at one time or another, students who worked at McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A or Checkers not only to guarantee themselves one good hot one a day, but to help pay the bills Grandpa and Uncle Romeo and cousin Rahim couldn’t cover.

  Students at this institution had to wear uniforms, ties for the boys and long skirts for the girls, blazers and polished shoes, but that didn’t mean that this was any military academy or Catholic school, hell no. Ben’s B section all got suspended because they danced on the tables in science class. When they did it up in Ben’s room, he snickered, then clapped along, and begged for an encore. They were magnificent, and Shakespeare could wait. When he finally did get down to talking about Macbeth, and Duncan’s femininity, and his need to “plant things” like a real mother-figure, they took notes, some in their cells, some on paper, a few on napkins left over from lunch. It was cool to pay attention to Marcus, because he made each and every one of them important at the moment. Yes, he was the moment guy. He wasn’t going to win any Emmys or Pulitzers, but in the heat of the moment in the heart of the city when every other teenager in America was looking at the clock and counting the seconds, Ben Marcus was Lord of it all. It was his gift, and it had been earned in more ways than anyone would have ever imagined.

  And he was never taking his gloves off in public. Ever. He’d also sworn to himself that he would die before divulging the reason for this, the real reason, and up until that day in mid-March, he’d kept his personal vow.

  He finally broke it because of Tanner and his formulaic, theory-based, graduate school stupidity. That, and the fact that the fucking idiot’s round-robin reading technique trashed a kid, no, utterly destroyed a life right there in front of them all.

  Marcus was on prep and sitting at his desk all the way to the right of the space, his classroom filling in with students scheduled for the accounting academy. Chivan, fat cheeks bunched up in a silly, toothy grin, was singing a sarcastic, operatic version of some Rent song as loud as she could. Fiona and Shiela were smacking their hyped-up form of speed-pattie-cake in front of the white board. Mikal Jennings ran up behind Joey Porter, slapped him hard on the ass, and shouted, “Stay on defense, bro!” Porter gave chase and Mikal ripped open the red accordion divider that separated Ben’s classroom from the law academy. Three boys followed, knocking over a couple of chairs, and Zyheeda Smith looked up from her cell phone, complaining a bit too loudly about the “Simple-ass crazy niggiz ’round here.” Rasheed Coomb
s, no blazer, shirt untucked, stood under the ceiling-mounted TV trying to find something, and the Baldwin twins were in the corner by the cubbies trying out a new cheer. Ben could have brought them all to order rather quickly, walking between, shaking hands in the various ritualistic combinations different students preferred, guiding, laughing, lightly pushing so to speak. But it wasn’t “his room” right now, at least not technically, and he didn’t like to jump anyone’s bones.

  The accounting teacher, Mr. Tanner, was on guard all the way to the right in the doorway to the stairwell, because that’s what Mrs. Johnson, the C.A.O., had told them all to do in her speech during staff development at the beginning of the year. Yes, you were to greet your students as they entered, set a standard, and of course Ben had started the year this way too like he did every new term. But he’d noticed rather quickly (really, how could you miss it?) that this particular crew was social as all hell, bustling past and taking over the area the minute they noticed he wasn’t in the center of it directing traffic. Oh, they weren’t bad kids, not by a long shot, just a bit wacky, a bit talky. They were actually a joy most times if you had patience, a sense of humor, and a willingness to adjust. But Tanner was a new guy, fresh out of Cheney with his master’s and his game plans, and he was going to do stuff by the book if it killed him.

  The kids couldn’t stand him, and they complained to Marcus about him constantly. They even admitted outright that they tried to skew his lessons—you know, the usual shit, breaking out into uproarious laughter for no reason during the quiet moments, asking what page everyone was on when he’d said it five times, coming up with irrelevant questions right when he was about to make a closing point, throwing stuff when he wasn’t looking, erasing his pre-class questions when he was trying to give personal assistance to a student doing desk work, the usual menagerie shit, all because he enforced rules mercilessly and literally, never reading the situation, never adjusting.