Excerpt: Volume Control

Shell (I wonder where Xandra is this morning) passes around slips of paper to everyone in the circle. Apparently, we're supposed to write what our biggest fear is in letting this cast get to know and trust us. I don't want to get too deep into that because I am afraid that no matter what I write, somehow someone is going to know my handwriting.

I am afraid of letting people know the real me.

I try to make my handwriting as different from my normal handwriting as possible. It's barely legible now, but that might be a good thing. Maybe no one will be able to read it, and they'll have to skip it. That would be fine with me.

Shell passes a hat around circle, and everyone folds or crumples up their paper as if they could make the words and letters disappear by making the paper really, really tiny. I doubt that will work, but I try to do the same thing, not wanting my paper to look different from anyone else's.

I don't know quite why, but my heart pounds as Shell explains the next part of the exercise. We're supposed to read them aloud now. If I pick my own by accident, I'm supposed to throw it back in and pick another. I wonder if I'll be able to guess my person's paper by his or her writing style.

“I don't want friends, because friends let you down every time,” someone reads.

“I had a best friend and she went behind my back and told my secrets.”

“No one trusts me, so why should I trust anyone else?”

“I spread a rumor about someone and the whole school found out. I didn't have friends anymore and I had to change schools.”

“I don't even trust myself,” Connor reads this one. He does it as if it is his own, putting emphasis in all the right places. He's acting, but it sounds real.

“I am afraid of letting people know the real me,” the next person reads. I freeze. I don't want to look around because I'm worried that someone will be looking back at me, so I stare at the person instead. It's another girl, who I think is named Imaiya or something. She's black, pretty, and looks as if she hasn't ever had a problem in her life. Trust issues? Ha! Who needs em. Right away, I despise her.

The entire circle goes around and I try to read mine like Connor did, though I'm sure I fail. I get nervous reading out loud, too.

“How did everyone feel about that?” Shell asks, and I wonder again where Xandra is, not that I have anything against Shell. But I feel bad for missing the announcement and I really wish she was here.

“Nervous,” Imaiya speaks up. I find myself paying attention to her. “I put something really personal on mine, and as soon as I put it in the hat, I feel like I had given a piece of myself away, a piece that I wasn't ready to share yet. I wanted to snatch back the hat and write a fake one instead.”

“Hmm...” Shell says. “What do you mean by a fake one?”

“Well, one that doesn't make me feel vulnerable, like I put myself 'out there',” Imaiya says. I get a sudden mental image of a glass wall with all of us contained, and her on the outside, lonely, cold, and shivering. I wonder if that's how she feels, but I don't want to talk to her because she read mine, and I don't want her to know. Plus, I'm too busy despising her.

I look for Connor again and wish that I was sitting next to him. My mind drifts off because I don't want to be a part of this conversation and I think about places we could go to eat for lunch break. Then I realize that I don't know if he'll go to lunch break with me at all because we never actually talked about that. But it should be a given, right? I mean, I'm his girlfriend.

As I sit with my thoughts in other places, lunch break starts, and I am taken by surprise. The girl who was sitting next to me, named Lacey, helps me up and asks where Bryan and I are going to eat because she wants to tag along.

“I don't know,” I reply, truthfully. Only because I don't know if I'm going to eat with Bryan. I want to go up to Connor, but he's in a group of people, and I am suddenly feeling really shy. Also, Lacey is kind of following me around.

“I'll wait for you guys,” she says after a minute or two of me being distracted. She heads in the direction of the door.

I look around for Bryan, but he is in a group of people, social butterfly that he is. Connor is in the kitchen. My heart sinks. Maybe he's not going out to lunch after all. I head for the bathroom, hoping that maybe he's watching me leave and that maybe he'll come after me. He doesn't, and he doesn't.

Disappointed, and still shy, I go to find Lacey and Bryan, and a group of other people waiting for me by the door.

“Hurry up, slowpoke,” Bryan says, and I suddenly fight the urge to cry.

All the way to McDonald's, Bryan and I walk with our arms linked. All the way back from McDonald's, Bryan and I walk with our arms linked.