Chapter 01 --- Enter Kaitlin ---

The beginning of the voices... This Chapter has been edited and freed from grammatical mistakes by the wonderful Macs (aka the chescire cat for anyone who has read my poem "Down The Rabbit Hole")

{Does he know??}

{I'm sooo gonna get in trouble for this!!}

 

{She's hiding something from me...}

 

{Why are we still married??}

 

{I can't do this alone}

{Why is my daughter such a little freak?}

 

Kaitlin sat in the dark, huddled between clothes and bags and god-knows-what-else at the bottom of her closet.  She hugged her knees, ignoring the sting of her thighs pressing together so tight, knowing she'd probably tear open the scabs that were barely even twenty-four hours old. She thought she was crazy, she thought that she had to be, because sane people don't hear voices. Kaitlin couldn’t be insane, she was plain and boring, she didn’t have an exciting atom in her body, not an interesting electron in the entire equation of who Kaitlin was.

 

It had started about a month ago, just a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday when she had been in the cafeteria at school, sitting in the back-left corner on a windowsill as usual.  She ate her chicken-mayo sandwich, as usual, and she sat alone, as usual. She had had a headache for the past two days, and it had slowly been getting worse as the day went on; it was a Tuesday, nonetheless, the day where life was supposed to take no random and unseen turns, where excitement was sure to be absent, and where monotony and normalcy took hold of everyone. This Tuesday however, was unlike all of the previous Tuesdays of Kaitlin's life, because on this particular Tuesday, where the February skies where gray and the wind had a biting chill to it, Kaitlin began to hear the first of the whispers.

 

That's what they had been back then, nothing but faint whispers, almost as if her mind was flirting with insanity, using secret and rushed whispers to hide the illicit affair. The voices would whisper random things that didn’t mean anything at all, and her mind would tell them to shut up.

 

 

{I'm too fat for that dress}

 

 

{Kathy is SUTCH a b***h!}

 

{Hopefully, I'll be able to retire in a few years and leave all of these goddamn brats behind me}

 

Kaitlin ignored them at first, and tried to tell herself that they weren't there, that her subconscious was bored with itself and wanted to play a trick on her. For a few weeks Kaitlin managed to live in a state of denial, with the odd screaming moment of doubt piercing the inner silence that she tried to create. If things had remained the same, perhaps she would have been able to live like that forever, but nothing remains the same, life is host to a myriad of changes and developments; life doesn't like to sit still, it is not content in just sitting there and watching things work themselves out. Life is the fat kid with a magnifying glass on a summer day, and we are the ants, nothing more than hapless victims lined up on the pyres, waiting for our chance to burst into flames.  Kaitlin, in particular, seemed to be a very unfortunate ant, unable to recover from one set of burns before the next beam of searing light hit her full in the face.

 

The whispers began to get louder, more frequent, and they began to overlap. Kaitlin was not amused, to say the least. She thought that she was crazy, and for the first time Kaitlin’s life became interesting enough so that she had something that she needed to keep secret from people, as opposed to the 17 years that had passed by without a single thing about her that was interesting enough to be worth secrets. Unfortunately for Kaitlin, this new and interesting secret of hers was one that could get her institutionalized. Kaitlin became even more withdrawn than usual, a feat that no one would have thought possible, although to be honest no one really noticed.  She was invisible at her school, nothing more than a quiet roommate at home; she was “The Invisible Woman”, and she was slowly becoming “The Non Compos Mentis Girl,”

 

{Who’s she kidding? College? She’d be a better fit in rehab…}

{When will he realize that what he did to me was wrong??}

{Just a few more hundred dollars, just one more summer of working and I’m gone…}

{Does he know? He can’t know! I’m on the football team for Chrissake! Of course everyone thinks I’m normal…}

 

Kaitlin’s homework became sloppy, her once infallible concentration was gone, and her grades, that were the only things she had ever really been able to be proud of, were slipping. Her efforts at trying to keep the voices out were futile: no matter how loud she listened to her music, no matter how much she read or watched TV she couldn’t keep them out. There were times when she would be free of the voices, but these times rarely lasted more than ten minutes or so. Kaitlin began to fall apart.  Her once immaculately clean room began to look like a dirty-clothes and misplaced-books dump site; her obsession with hygiene was gone, with her only showering when she remembered to - which, with her level of distraction, was not more than once every two days at best. Her once clean and straight dark-brown hair was now dirty and unkempt. Kaitlin’s sleep became erratic, only coming at the latest hours of the night when the voices seemed to almost die down. Her weight began to drop, as one’s appetite usually does when one cannot even concentrate enough to shower daily.

If Kaitlin had had friends, someone would have noticed that she was falling apart.  If Kaitlin’s parents had cared about more than their careers or their affairs they would have been worried.  If Kaitlin’s teachers had not been overworked, underpaid and exhausted, then maybe one of them would have talked to her.  But Kaitlin was one of the very few teenagers who had the right to say that no one cared about her, because no one DID care about her. Kaitlin had been an unexceptional, unambitious and most of all uninteresting person for the duration of her short life. She was merely a tax deduction for her parents, and nothing at her school. Her social life was non-existent, with Kaitlin refusing to even try to make friends online. Kaitlin’s total and utter lack of social contact made her oblivious to how other people think, and if Kaitlin had had friends, if she had had any idea of how people act or think, then maybe she would have realized that she wasn’t a freak because she heard voices that weren’t there.  She might have realized that she was a freak because she heard thoughts that weren’t hers.

You see, Life, having been bored watching Kaitlin, decided to create some ripples in her otherwise stagnant existence. Whether this was the plan all along or not, I don’t know - after all, I’m just the narrator, and I only appear to be omniscient because I know more than you do. Life had grown tired of watching Kaitlin’s utter lack of interestingness, so Life decided to MAKE her interesting. Unfortunately for Kaitlin, however, she had no concept of being interesting or (as I already mentioned) how people think, so Kaitlin was under the impression that she was going crazy.  And if someone thinks that they’re crazy, they eventually become crazy…

 

Reviews

[Emily Elizabeth]

Such an original idea!
The story itself was interesting, enjoyable and entertaining. A very wonderful piece. However, it was rough in some places, and definitely needs working on. It's uneven- in some places it's tricky and awkward and in others its extremely well-written. However, you have the makings of something brilliant here, and I can't wait to find out what happens next! A very original story with an original idea and concept- you have a brilliant foundation to work on!
Thanks for sharing this!

[yinseriv]

As the other two reviews state there is something here to build upon. I like the plot device of introducing you as the Narrator. There does need to be a little work. I hope you don't mind if I add some notes.

V5C

[Dianne]

What a fascinating story line, Life deciding that Katlin was too boring. I like the way you've used type size to show how quiet or loud the voices are that Kaitlin is hearing. I also like the way you've put blank lines between the paragraphs, that makes it much easier to read long writings off of the monitor.

This is a story that could go in lots of diferent directions. I'm intersted to see where you decide to take it. Is she crazy, or does she start recognizing the voices as coming from people around her? What will she do about it? Will she confront those people with their thoughts or will she use them against them? You've got lots of stuff to play with here. Nice start.

VC5