Read The Quality of Silence for Free Online

and laptops too; it’s not an either/or thing. And someone’s bound to have taken their laptop when they got out of the fire. I would. After Bosley who’s our dog and Tripod our cat, my laptop would be the next thing I’d take. So Dad’ll be able to check his emails.
    Dad and I think that when I go to secondary school I’ll be too grown up to be called Puggle, as it’s a baby name. But he agrees that I can’t become a grown-up Puggle and be called Platypus; so we’re still working out what he’ll call me.
    When I emailed Dad I saw I’d got emails from people at school, but when I’m actually AT school most of them don’t talk to me. It’s not coolio AT ALL to talk to ‘the-deaf-girl’, which they say like it’s one word, like that’s my name.
    Tanya, head of the girl gang, is the most nasty – ‘Oh look, here comes the-deaf-girl wanting a goss’ – I can read her lips really clearly and she’s started wearing pinky lip balm and that’s what I look at while the girl gang laugh. And then I say, ‘Why would I want to goss with you? You have the personality of a toaster! And anyway gossiping is horrible.’
    They go on laughing because they don’t understand sign and think it’s funny I’m doing-weird-things-with-her-hands. But Jimmy understands signs and he laughed because ‘personality of a toaster’ was funny.
    * * *
    (NASTY: feels like barbed-wire; looks like a rabbit with its leg in a trap; tastes like whispering glittery lip balm.)
    When I email or Facebook, people who can’t sign understand me straight away and get my jokes. Also they tell me jokes and I get them straight away too, which is important for a joke. (Not people like Tanya, but people who email or Facebook me.) And people tell me private things too. Max, who’s been in my class since Reception, is upset we’ve only got two and a half terms left in Wycliff Primary. He’s really worried about secondary school; like me. But at school we don’t ever talk to each other. It’s like there’s two worlds, the typed one, (like emails and Facebook and Twitter and blogging) and then the ‘real’ one. So there are two me’s. And I’d like the real world to be the typed one because that’s where I can properly be me.
    Dad got me my laptop. Mum hates it and right away called it thatbloodylaptop. She always glares at it, like the laptop could glare back at her and she could win the glaring competition.
    Mum thinks if I could mouth-talk everything will be better. She tells me that almost every time we walk home from school. Instead of arguing, I hold her hand. But sometimes I do argue with my voice – my hand-voice so I can’t hold her hand any more – and I say, ‘No it won’t,’ or ‘You don’t understand!’ Because
    for one) I’ll never sound like they do.
    for two) that’ll be the other thing about me; I’ll be the-deaf-girl-with-the-stupid-voice; and it’s bad enough being the-deaf-girl without being the anything-else-girl too.
    I’d rather be the-showy-off-brat-girl, the-nerdy-know-it-all-girl, any of those sorts of things, because those sorts of things you can try and change, if you want to. Or not. Up to you.
    Being deaf isn’t something I can change. Mum doesn’t understand this but I don’t know if I even want to. It’s my Ruby-world; a quiet world that I look at and touch and sometimes taste but don’t hear. Dad says quietness is beautiful. So maybe my world is lovelier than other people’s. And maybe making sounds I can’t hear in my quiet world would spoil everything.
    Max is really worried about changing schools; has an upset tummy about it and everything. I’m worried too, but my tummy’s been OK.
    Yasmin reached the front of the queue and the hostile woman.
    ‘I need to get to Anaktue.’
    ‘I don’t know where that is, ma’am.’
    ‘About five hundred miles north of here.’
    ‘We don’t cover it.’
    ‘The nearest town then? Deadhorse, I think?’
    She’d remembered it was the place Matt