Speaking in Tongues

having eaten half a box of her favorite cereal—Raisin Bran—and drunk two Pepsis.
    Listening.
    There!
    She heard a shuffle, a few steps of Peter’s feet. Maybe a whisper of breath.
    Another shuffle. A voice.
    Was he muttering her name?
    Yes, no?
    She couldn’t tell.
    This could be it! Got a good grip on the knife?
    Be quiet! Megan thought. She shivered and felt aburst of nausea from the fear. Wished she hadn’t eaten so fast. If I puke he’ll hear and that’ll be it . . .
    She inhaled slowly.
    A clunk nearby. More footsteps. These were close.
    Megan gasped and closed her eyes, remaining completely still, huddling behind an orange fiberglass chair.
    She pressed into the wall and began mentally working her way through Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits album line by line. She cried noiselessly throughout “Me and Bobby McGee,” then grew defiant once more when she mind-sang “Down on Me.”
    Peter Matthews wandered away, back toward his room, and she continued on. Ten endless minutes later she made it to the end of the corridor she’d decided to use.
    It was here that she was going to lay the trap.
    She needed a dead end—she had to be sure of which direction he’d come from. Crazy Megan points out, though, that it also means she’ll have no escape route if the trap doesn’t work.
    Who’s the pussy now? Megan asked.
    Like, excuse me, C.M. snaps in response. Just letting you know.
    She rubbed her hand over the wall.
    Sheetrock.
    Megan had recalled one time she’d been at her father’s house. A few years ago. He’d been dating a woman with three children. As usual he’d been thinking about marrying her—he always did that, it was so weird—and had gone so far as to actually hire a contractor to divide the downstairs bedroominto two smaller ones for her young twins. Halfway through the project they’d broken up; the construction went unfinished but Megan recalled watching the contractors easily slice through the Sheetrock with small saws. The material had seemed as insubstantial as cardboard.
    She took a plastic dinner knife from the box. It was like a toy tool. And for a moment the hopelessness of her plan overwhelmed her. But then she started to cut. Yes! In five minutes she’d sliced a good-sized slit into the wall. The blades were sharper than she’d expected.
    For about fifteen minutes the cutting went well. Then, almost all at once, the serrated edge of the knife wore smooth and dull. She tossed it aside and took a new one. Started cutting again.
    She lowered her head to the plasterboard and inhaled its stony moist smell. It brought back a memory of Joshua. She’d helped him move into his cheap apartment near George Mason University. The workmen were fixing holes in the walls with plasterboard and this smell reminded her of his studio. Tears flooded into her eyes.
    What’re you doing? an impatient Crazy Megan asks.
    I miss him, Megan answered silently.
    Shut up and saw. Time for that later.
    Cutting, cutting . . . Blisters formed on the palm of her right hand. She ignored them and kept up the hypnotic motion. Resting her forehead against the Sheetrock, smelling mold and wet plaster. Hand moving back and forth by itself. Thoughts tumbling . . .
    Thinking about her parents.
    Thinking about bears . . .
    No, bears can’t talk. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t learn something from them.
    She thought of the Whispering Bears story, the illustration in the book of the two big animals watching the town burn to the ground. Megan thought about the point of the story. She liked her version better than Dr. Matthews’s; the moral to her was: people fuck up.
    But it didn’t have to be that way. Somebody in the village could have said right up front, “Bears can’t talk. Forget about ’em.” Then the story would have ended: “And they lived happily ever after.”
    Working with her left hand now, which was growing a crop of its own blisters. Her knees were on fire and her forehead too, which she’d pressed into the wall for leverage. Her back also was in agony. But Megan McCall felt curiously buoyant. From the food and caffeine inside her, from the simple satisfaction of cutting through the wall, from the fact that she was doing something to get out of this shithole.
    Megan was thinking too about what she’d do when she got out.
    Dr. Matthews had tricked her—to get her to write those letters. But the awesome thing was that what she’d written had been true. Oh, she was pissed at