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Sean Cassidy grows up in the suburbs of Boston. His father has an office job in the city. His mother is stay-at-home.
--
Sean figures out that his talking can break glass when his voice starts to break, finally deepening from a kid’s squeak. He’s around twelve at the time. His voice breaks while he’s helping his mom dry up dishes after dinner—meatloaf and steamed green beans, yummy—he’s talking about soccer practice at school, and then his mom stares in surprise at the wineglass stem in her hand and at the shattered bell of the cup.
Sean stares at it too.
And while his mother says something about how strange this is, and careful, Sean, of the glass, Sean’s hunched over a little because he keeps expecting his mom to verbally thrash him for destroying her glassware. It’s stupid and crazy, but somehow he knows that he did it. He just does. His voice breaks, and he can feel the vibration like a tickle in his throat that moves to the surface of his tongue and through his teeth.
It’s crazy, and he clamps his mouth shut, and just nods or shakes his head vigorously at anything his mom says, through cleaning up the glass fragments and washing up the rest of the dishes and even sweeping out the kitchen, until she says, “For Pete’s sake, Sean, why are you acting like a mute fish all of a sudden?”
She’s giving him some kind of look and he has to talk then. He has to. “Sorry mum,” he mumbles at the floor, and he can feel his voice breaking again, can hear it like a vibration through his throat bones or whatever’s in there, and then it tries to get across his tongue, across his deliberately slurred mumble, but there it stops. He can hear it stopping, and then he lets out a little hiccupping squeak of surprise. A dent appears in the linoleum, and he steps forward with one foot to rub at it with his sock like a crazy person, as if that would make it disappear.
His mum makes a sympathetic noise. “Ah, yes. Your voice is breaking, isn’t it? No need to look so embarrassed, you remember your brothers.”
Sean looks down miserably at the dent in the floor.
Somehow, he doesn’t think any of this is going to go away, soon. Or maybe ever.
--
When the initial panic has gone, and he’s been lying on his bed, throwing a baseball at the ceiling until his dad yells at him to stop making that goshdarn thumping noise--anyway, he lies in bed with his baseball in his hands, and he starts to think about his voice breaking. And, well, the only reasonable (“reasonable”) explanation is that he’s got a magic voice. It sounds so stupid when he puts it like that, and there goes his dreams (among myriad others) of being a famous rock-and-roll singer and winning all the swooning girls that way.
He’s got a magic voice that can break things, and beginning the next morning, over breakfast, he starts to mumbling and slurring his words all the time. Soon enough, his mum and dad are annoyed that already he’s growing up into such a slovenly kid, but there’s nothing to be done.
“Sean, dear, you need to speak clearly when spoken to.” His mom’s voice is a warning, as he’s heading to the door to go out to the bus stop.
Sean looks at her, at the way she’s frowning at him, and disappointed already.
Sean shifts his lunch sack to his other hand, and then mumbles, “Yes’m,” before running out the front door.
--
He mumbles all the time, and it makes him sound like a moron, he knows it, but there are very few places he feels safe opening his mouth for real.
He starts taking baths.
He likes to sit in the murky water and then he sings softly, clearly across the surface, watching the ripples so that his eyes can begin to follow the sound.
He’s been cursed with a magic voice that makes his parents think he’s a hooligan at the very fine age of twelve (twelve-and-a-half), and the only books he can find in the library about magic voices have to do with mermaids. This is stupider than the stupidest thing, and he has to go hide at a corner table in the fear that anyone might catch him actually reading girls’ fairy tales about mermaids.
In the privacy of his bathtub, though, the idea of it begins to make more sense.
He practices on water, and then he practices on the old rubber duckie, steering it across the lake of the bathtub without touching it, and then he looks at his progress studiously.
Well, girls could always be won over with dancing, probably.