Isobelese

            by Milena K. Schaller

 

My friends have always been weird. Most had some incredible aspect to them that attracted me in the first place, whether in cruel fascination or honest amazement, I’m not sure. One of my friends walked in circles as she talked, her head pointed towards you but the rest of her body zigzagging outwards as she became more and more emphatic and finally ended by zooming round you in short hops, arms gesturing wildly. When she wasn’t twirling, she created elaborate projects out of beads, paper, and an inordinate amount of glue that were so detailed and showed so much talent that your breath was taken away with one glance. There was another boy who would fling himself off the top of the play-structure some 20 feet down to the ground and land prostrate, utterly silent and most certainly dead. As soon as anyone ran over to him, however, up he would spring, ready to do it again -- he claimed he was training to be a stuntman. Yet another friend would salute us heartily in Japanese during lunch time. We would reply with a volley of phrases in Welsh, French, Swedish, American Sign Language, and, of all things, Russian, although none of us were fluent in any language other than English. For some reason, we didn’t found this strange in the least. In fact, I am tempted to say that without such mayhem, we would have felt something oddly lacking in our lives.

            There was one person among our friends who unnerved me. I didn’t blink an eye at friends who traced loops around me as they spoke, flung themselves from play-structures or made working crossbows out of bits of wood and string that shot through three pieces of thick posterboard. But Isobel I could not fathom. Though I noticed her walking across the parking lot on the first day of school, we didn’t meet until a few days later, when one of our mutual friends pointed her out and left me alone with her.

“Hello.” I smiled slightly. “I’m Milena. You’re Isobel, right? I think we’re in the same class – er, no, I think you’re in my brother’s class. Anyway. Um. He said he had violin lessons with you? Something like that.”

There was something wrong with the way I was speaking, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I continued talking, but soon even I couldn’t deny it: She had not said one word.  I could see that she was hearing me by the occasional miniscule nods of her head, but she made no sound. I felt as though she were a ghost from another world, the way she stared at me, understood everything I said, but somehow could not communicate. This was heightened by her pale skin and long dark hair and the way she stood slightly on tiptoe, as though at any moment she would spring, leap nimbly to another place and disappear. Something about her told me she was intelligent, perhaps the steady way she stood there, taking everything in. If it had been someone different, someone who showed their eccentricities outwardly so that I could have simply added one more thing to my mental list of their oddities, I would have moved on, scampered off to class or made an excuse to leave her silent, standing alone. But because she looked so much like the sort of person who fades into the corners of rooms and watches the world around her, I kept on jabbering. It was an entirely one-sided conversation, and after ten full minutes of my own voice even I began to panic. In desperation I turned to the subject of books.

“Oh, I just read a book last week, it was, um – I forget the title, and the author, and – well, actually I’ve forgotten most of the book, but it was something about a cat and a… bauble…”

Faintly, as if from a long ways away, I heard a tiny voice say “Yes.” 

A few more words came stumbling out of my mouth before an enormous sound came shooting towards me from the supposed ghost.

“PRYDAIN CHRONICLES! With Gurgi and Eilonwy and the bauble – but it’s so unfair, she has to give up her bau – wait, have you read the last book? And I know it has to work that way, but it’s not fair, she could keep her bauble. She doesn’t have to give it up, just the magic– you haven’t read it, have you? Have you read the Vesper Holly ones? She goes on adventures and there’s the jungle one or was that a different book – no, that was Dido. Have you read about Dido? They’re by Joan Aiken -- the first is Wolves of Willoughby Chase. I like Battersea – Battersea, battersea, I can’t remember the title, something like boats or black hearts or – well, something in or of Battersea. I’ll write you a booklist. Oh – and Three Men in a Boat! They talk so wonderfully, you have to read that! And Montmorency!”

Her eyes flickering wildly, she danced from book to book, describing characters and events as though she lived among them and authors’ styles as though she had been looking over their shoulder as they wrote. Shocked at that first meeting, I never fully recovered. Isobel bowled me over with not only her weirdness, but with her knowledge, intelligence, and her inability to make anyone understand her when she wanted them to.

            It’s probably a good idea to explain at this point that Isobel has her own language. I don’t mean an actual language, with new verbs and new words and a group of people that speak it -- I mean Isobelese, a way that she has of talking that confuses everyone. Not that she talks this dialect of hers all the time. It comes up when she gets excited and wants to convey her thoughts on books or other issues that require passion -- namely, when she needs articulation the most. Her words, certainly, are English, but they break themselves into such fragments and twist themselves into such strange positions that your mind has to do a double-backflip and fall over backwards to catch her meaning. It’s like mind-exercise: just talk to Isobel for a few minutes and you’ll feel strengthened, enlightened, and utterly confused.

            For most people, talking to Isobel wasn’t that difficult– she didn’t talk about books all the time, and when she explained anything else her words became relatively normal. We talked pretty much only of books because both of us were passionate about them, and from time to time that could feel a bit like being dragged behind a runaway horse, desperately clutching the reins. After someone mentioned a rat, for example, Isobel and I would catch each other’s eye. Then we’re off.

            “Not a rat, because rats are intelligent,” says ­­­­­­Isobel tentatively.

            “I didn’t mean it that way!” I protest, catching the reference she’s making to an obscure conversation of some two weeks ago in which I ended up accidently insulting her.

            “Definitely a mouse.”

            “Well, at least it wasn’t a fish —“

            “Oh-oh-oh! I had a book to recommend to you – that book, with the fish, and the zappy floaty thingies in the, er, whatsit…”

            “You mean lightning?”

            “Yes! Yes, lightning, I mean, no. Kind of like lightning, only floating around and different. And the insect. With the eyes… and all the, um, timeness.”

            “Timeness?” I ask incredulously.

            “Er, I mean hours. Islands. In, um, book.”

            There is a slight pause.

            “Do you mean,” I say hesitantly, “Do you mean Abarat?”

            “Yes!” ­­­­­Isobel exclaims, and we spend the next hour talking about the book Abarat and the insect with “the eyes”.

            We became inseparable, despite, or perhaps because of, ­Isobel’s inability to make herself understood at certain points in our conversations. Within a week of meeting each other, we were mistaken for siblings or twins. Two weeks after our initial conversation, we made extensive book lists for each other and brought books to school to trade and read at lunch, quoting parts out loud and testing out weird words that we didn’t know the meaning of on our friends.

            It was therefore quite natural that we should end up writing stories together. But that requires a bit of background. At my middle school, we had “Academy” every Friday, a two-hour stretch at the end of the day in which the entire school divided itself into groups and the students did pretty much whatever they wanted. There was the Sports Academy, populated for the most part by students who utterly refused to pick up a ball, the Gardening Academy, which disappeared to a garden far away and made numerous paving stones that littered the English room’s desks, the Film Academy, which recruited the rest of the school as actors, and finally the Publishing Academy, with four members total (including Isobel and myself), the smallest Academy of them all. We met in an old dusty room that looked like something out of a picture book on the Victorian era. There were squashy couches with lace on them and curious curtains that looked like they were trying very hard to be rugs, and a lingering smell of moths and old sunlight that made most people sneeze and a few people smile. We loved it. But soon after we went there, the school couldn’t afford to rent the Victorian Room, and we had to move.

The first two members to arrive designed a student newspaper that would go on to become immensely popular and steal half the school for its second semester staff – as a result, they got an entire classroom to themselves. Meanwhile, Isobel and I found a storage closet in between the Film and Publishing Academies, grabbed some paper and pencils, and hid ourselves there for two years.

            Isobel was hopelessly old-fashioned so we wrote everything by hand, with faded pencils. She avoided computers like the plague, owned a typewriter which she occasionally used for assignments, and used obsolete words and spellings on purpose to encourage their use. She never had, and still does not have, e-mail, preferring instead to send long letters in calligraphic handwriting to the extraordinary number of pen pals she has all over the world. She talks on the phone in such a quiet voice that last week, when I called her and got the answering machine, I left a message and hung up without even knowing that Isobel had picked up the phone and was on the other end, saying “hullo” in that tiny voice of hers.

            We created worlds during Academy. As we talked and laughed, forests sprouted under our fingertips, dry hills rolled outwards, and flying hedgehogs flew by with collapsible libraries. Characters edged their way into existence, humoured us for a short while, then slipped through holes in our plots and ran off to start new stories, meet new characters, and add another ten pages to what were already rapidly becoming two very long stories. We made up a language called kaelessynn that only our characters could speak, a language of dark forests, shapeshifters, and jaguars who swore under their breath as they stalked majestically through the trees. It had, of course, no grammar whatsoever, and only the semblance of sense. We were, after all, both middle schoolers who had not the faintest idea what a language truly consisted of. Nonetheless, we published a booklet of our latest work every semester which no one but our friends read and understood -- our friends were the only ones willing to spend ten minutes painstakingly translating every conversation.

            As we wrote stories, a worry gnawed at the back of my mind. I watched her conversing with peers and noticed the specific group of people she was willing to talk to. People her own age didn’t bother her; after a few minutes she’d start talking just as she had done with me. Adults were a different matter. Her voice, vibrant and enthusiastic with her friends, fell away before the taller people. She started to fade, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Any attempts to bring her into the conversation would fail miserably or make situations worse. In our classes together, teachers sat me or other friends next to her so that they could read from her homework or convey what she had said after she whispered into their ear. I didn’t want it to be that way. Shortly after meeting her, we went to a concert. We went outside at intermission and didn’t go back in, partly because neither of us liked the music that was being played, but also because I was busy giving Isobel the lecture of her life on her extraordinary silence. She gave me no reasons, and predictably remained mostly silent. I didn’t give up.

            The English teacher at my middle school liked to believe that Isobel and I belonged to the only Academy that ever got things done. After all, we met every week in a closet, never came out for anything, and turned in completed stories by our deadline. What she didn’t know is that much of that time was spent talking, doodling, and lecturing Isobel on how she should talk to said English teacher.

Heloise was amazing. She had complete control over the class, yet all the kids loved her. She forced us to write an essay a week, but everyone made themselves enjoy it, for her sake. When Isobel and I aced a few vocabulary quizzes in a row, she let us pick our strange words from books to learn. We tested each other on them every week in the same closet. She stayed after class for fabulous conversations and gave us genuine good advice. She understood that Isobel wasn’t going to speak and didn’t push her – unlike me. I started making references to books during the conversation, hoping she’d forget herself. I gave her reasons to speak, speeches on the subject of words.

“You say them,” I’d tell her encouragingly, “to people. Like the people around you.” I would raise my eyebrows in an attempt to get a response. “Including adults.”

 I was always met with Isobel’s blank glare – it was a wonder she didn’t avoid me. If I were her, I might have spoken simply to stop the lectures.

            When it happened, I didn’t notice, though I was standing in the room at the time. I was so wrapped up in myself, or tired, or just so sick of lecturing Isobel that I had given up ever hearing a peep out of her in any adult’s presence. I was sure that I had gotten nowhere, wasted too much time, and made Isobel annoyed with me. But months later, when I could barely remember it, Isobel told me that she had talked to our wonderful English teacher – Heloise told me the same.

Perhaps if I had been more awake, I would have seen it happening before my eyes; a curious blossoming of speech, peppered with the odd words I knew so well, but in a new voice simply because it had never been used for this purpose before. Perhaps I would have seen the teacher’s eyebrows go up and up, her mouth rise into a smile. Or not. I suspect that it was quiet, calm, and completely matter-of-fact. When I incredulously ask her about it now, she responds calmly enough.

“Yes, I did. You just weren’t paying attention, I keep telling you that. And I think you have one of my books still.”

I’m easily distracted. “I gave all of your books back already! Which one was it?”

“Um… the one with the green goo and the castle-whatsit with the fire and the scarecrow – oh, and hats.”

“Hats?”

“Yes, with the personalities and the green one.”

I feel my brain beginning to give out. “Who’s the main character?” I ask weakly, grasping for titles all the while.

“The girl who’s old but she’s not really – she likes scarecrows or something.”

“Do you mean… Howl’s Moving Castle?”

“Yes!” exclaims Isobel. “And you’ve had it for months. Have you read it yet, or do I have to strangle you to get it back?”