The Quiet One

I think it’s safe to tell this story now.

When you’re a youth leader, you meet lots of kids. There’s lots of loud ones, and always a few whose necks you wouldn’t mind wringing. There are quiet ones, too, though, especially those in junior high who don’t know who they are yet and don’t dare make a fool of themselves. They open up eventually.

A girl there, I’ll call her Janice, was one of these, almost your stereotypical bespectacled, pony-tailed little mouse of a girl who sat in the corner and said nothing at all. Except, if you watched her closely, she moved with a confidence that belied any social anxiety, and her eyes showed how attentive she was to everything going on around her. The other kids took it for a sort of aloofness, and mocked her, like tourists sticking their tongues out at the guards at Buckingham Palace.

The tentativeness that marked her was not anxiety, but sorrow.

I’d try to speak with her, make some lame joke, and she’d smile and hold my gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment before walking away. I couldn’t get the others to stop talking long enough to explain what sanctification meant, and I couldn’t get a syllable out of her. I used to wonder if she was mute, but no one said so. She was just quiet, apparently, like it was a psychological thing and not some disability.

One night, sometime during the hours of purgatory between three and five in the morning during a lock-in, I returned from the bathroom to find the youth all asleep, even the ones pumped full of Monsters, and Janice sitting up in her sleeping bag staring at me, as if she wanted to say something. She lay down and went to sleep.

I received a note that summer thanking me for all my time and effort and that, if they didn’t end up moving, her parents wanted to invite me over for dinner.

I knocked on their door mid-August. They lived on a piece of land surrounded by trees, so that though it was almost in the city, it felt isolated. They received me with a sort of hesitancy, and I braced myself for some revelation, a sin or addiction their daughter had that they hoped I would fix.

Janice greeted me with a nervous smile and sat, looking more self-conscious than I had ever seen her.

Janice is special, they told me. She can talk, they said, but she chooses not to. They handed me a pair of headphone, nice ones, ones that canceled sound. Her father put on a pair as well. Her mother leaned back in the sofa.

Janice spoke. I couldn’t hear her, of course, but I saw her lips move. I thought maybe she said, “Hello.”

Her father removed his headphones and motioned for me to do the same. Her mother had fallen asleep.

I didn’t understand what was going on. I looked to Janice. Her eyes sparkled suddenly, mischievously, and she opened her mouth…

When I woke, she was there, hand on my shoulder, shaking me. Her mother and father were asleep. I understood.

With a word, she could subdue her parents. She could silence her classroom or a gym of spectators. A bully would fall unconscious at her feet with a single syllable.

There she sat on a worn couch, staring at me meekly, and I realized how powerful she was.

She had notebooks full of conversations with her parents, and other notebooks with poetry and sketches, and still others full of all her anger and hurt. But, as far as I know, she had spoken very few words in public.

What her father feared was that someone would find out. The world is sleepless, restless, anxious, and if someone discovered a cure, if someone found a way to record her voice or analyze her genes, who knew what would come of it?

She had wanted me to know because she trusted me, because she knew I had allegiances beyond myself, and she wanted desperately to be able to share herself with someone.

As I taught and knew her those next years, I wondered to myself: Does she lay awake at night, unable to sleep, thinking of everything she wants to say but can’t? She can talk to herself, of course. She can sing when she’s alone, and she does, she admitted once in a letter. But if someday she finds a young man, she will say “I love you” and he will not hear. No one has ever heard her voice, and no one can.

She wrote me once that she loves to pray aloud.

They did finally move during her junior year because of her father’s job. It was best, she wrote me. Friendships were too deep here, and deep friendships hurt when you can’t share yourself.

She kept in contact through the mail. She avoided social media because she knew she would write and write. I think she really was afraid of sharing herself with others, even in normal ways, after years of silence.

She became a nurse, and she would whisper in the ears of her patients when they were in too much pain to rest. She liked the job, thought it was a calling, to give rest to the weary. I think she’s right.

She doesn’t write much anymore. I suppose after awhile, silence catches up with you, becomes part of you. Maybe she’s found a new confidant, but I don’t think so. I hope, though, that she still talks when she’s alone, still talks to the God she loved so much when I knew her because “like a sheep before its shearer is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”

Somewhere out there, she is still there with bright eyes and confident step, sliding through a noisy world alone and murmuring words we will never hear.