The Girl With The Loudest Silence

Nobody believed in me. That was their first mistake. I was always considered the weird one in the family. The one who didn’t understand. Who didn’t do anything right. Everyone would give me pitying glances as I did what was asked of me-the minimum, of course-and inevitably messed it up. I always did, I would clumsily drop something heavy and watch as it fell to the ground with a loud bang. Everyone would wince at the sound, but I wouldn’t, I trained myself not to. You see, everyone thought I was deaf.

The story began when I was just three years old. I was smart, really smart. By the time I turned two I was reading complicated medical textbooks that people quadruple my age didn’t understand. But even so, it was always my sister Evelin who got the attention. It wasn’t like there was anything special about her, and I’m not just saying that out of bias. She was really dramatic. If I so much as looked at her wrong, she would start yelling. She once fabricated this whole story of me stepping on her hair while she was lying on the ground playing with her dolls because I supposedly wanted to take them. I never even liked dolls, but who would listen to me? Until one day, I decided to stop listening to them.

I pretended to trip down the stairs and land on my head. I was taken to the doctor who ran a series of tests to make sure I hadn’t suffered any long term damage. As he rang a bell next to my ear to see if I would respond, I pretended not to hear anything. No matter how loud of a sound the doctor made, I didn’t flinch. The doctor said to my grandparents (who my sister and I lived with) “Emmeline seems to have severe hearing loss. I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do”. Since that day, I had pretended I couldn’t hear a word anyone said. The thing about deaf people is that everyone feels comfortable talking about secrets around them. The difference with me was that I could hear everything they said. Every. Single.Thing.

Over the past nine and a half years I’ve learned many things. Grandma didn’t really like Grandpa, she was just waiting to inherit the fortune he had amassed over his lifetime once he died. Grandpa snuck out to the casino on those nights he claimed to be going to the lake to feed the ducks. Evelin took money from Grandpa’s wallet while he was asleep so she could buy herself a new hair clip. All of these stories and more. What came along with this perk was the fact that no one trusted me with anything anymore. Even the simplest of tasks. They would make a motion of sweeping the floor, and then hand me a broom. I would pretend I didn’t understand what was being asked of me. They would quickly fix up what I had done while they thought I wasn’t looking.

In school I would always be the first to understand the lesson. Everyone would be whining about how everything was so difficult while I just sat there quietly, absorbing everything. After the lesson my teacher would assign homework, though not to me, of course. If I supposedly couldn’t read, how could I complete any work? During every test, the assistant would sit next to me and slowly pronounce every word to the questions so I could read her lips. My tests never even had more than three multiple choice questions on the easiest material we had been taught. That was what the teacher thought was the extent of my mental capabilities.

The irony of pretending to be deaf was that I actually had excellent hearing. I could clearly hear the smallest little noise from across the house. That’s how I heard when someone was sneaking out at night. Over the years I had filled up two notebooks full of information while I was pretending to not hear a thing. Even the neighborhood girls thought I was strange, and they shot me pitying glances as they went out to play with Evelin while I just sat outside on the grass with a blank expression on my face. I collected information about them too. All of their secrets went straight into my ears and into my notebook when the family thought I was sleeping. I decided that I would reveal myself when I thought the time was right. When I could prove to everyone once and for all that I was not someone to be looked down upon.

My chance came one night at a family dinner. Our extended family had come from out of town, including one of my uncles who was studying in one of the most prestigious universities for medicine. As we were sitting at the table, my aunt decided to show off how much my uncle had learned. It was really simple, I had known these things before I had even entered preschool. “What is the part of the body that receives the most amount of blood?” my aunt asked. “Why it’s the kidneys, of course,” my uncle answered smugly, “that was an easy question”. The funny part about that answer was that it was completely and totally wrong. While the kidneys use the most blood relative to their size, the liver receives the most amount of blood overall. “What about DNA?”, my aunt continued, “who discovered the structure of DNA?”. “That would be Friedrich Miescher,” he replied. This was wrong as well. While Miescher discovered DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick were the first ones to actually figure out its structure. My uncle knew nothing.

“I knew those things,” said Evelin with a smile on her face. Grandma looked at her with pride, “maybe you’ll become a doctor one day, my smart girl,” she said while glancing disappointedly at me. “If only your sister could be like you”. This was my chance to show who I really was. “Actually,” I started slowly, having not spoken in a very long while, “you are both wrong, the liver receives the most blood, that’s obvious”.

Everybody turned to me in shock. “You can hear?!” Grandpa exclaimed, his face turning as white as his beard. “I always could,” I answered, “and by the way, Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA itself, not its actual structure”. Grandma, still recovering from the fact that everything she had thought about me was wrong, said, “but how do you even know that? Those things can’t be true, your uncle goes to university!”. “I always knew,” I replied, “you just wouldn’t care to listen to anyone but your precious Evelin, so I kept it all to myself”. I then began to rattle off the sources of my previous claims, huge books with names that these adults had never even heard of. “You’ve underestimated me for far too long”, I said to everyone who was gathered at the table, still looking at me, trying to process what had just happened. “It’s about time I leave and become who I held back from becoming all these years,” I continued, pulling out a packed suitcase from the closet in the hallway. I began slowly walking towards the door. “I’m leaving, I’ll find a place where I’m appreciated, not undermined, and Grandma?” I said, turning to face her, “you have nothing to inherit anymore, Grandpa gambled away all of his savings last week, you have nothing to be excited about”.

With one last glance at the guests, I walked through the door and left. I heard chaos ensue as I slowly walked towards the waiting taxi I had ordered to pick me up. I would pay for it using the money I had earned tutoring students from the university across town. I was not going to be a failure anymore. I believed in myself, and that’s where everyone failed.

The End