Chapter 5: Listening vs. Hearing

Jaime

THE NEW ARRANGEMENT worked well for Jaime. To start with, he was no longer deposited into the slowest learning class. He could understand why Belle had chosen computer instruction, but Jaime often got more from the teacher’s thoughts than he did from the words. He was becoming better at filtering out thoughts from his classmates, while letting the thoughts of his teacher through.

Selective hearing, he thought. In the early days of his education, some teachers had determined that he had selective muteness and tried to force him to talk aloud. He read up on the subject online and one search led to another.

His research showed that selective hearing was practiced by almost everyone who could pay attention to one aural input while ignoring all or most others. People often did it in environments where several people were talking, but they were only paying attention to one. People let themselves get so absorbed by movies or television or even music that they didn’t hear anything else. In fact, that was the technique Jaime had used when he put on his headphones.

He had to practice selective hearing in his head as well as his ears.

Of course, sometimes a stray thought caught his attention. It wasn’t intentional, but he found himself suddenly listening to another person. At first, it was difficult to zero in on who he was listening to. By the end of middle school, he was able to identify the thinker almost as readily as his ears could identify a speaker.

Everyone had what he considered a different head taste. It was like the pitch, tone, and accent of an out-loud voice that would distinguish between one person and another. He made a practice of sampling the head taste of the people around him so he could tell quickly who was thinking when he heard something in his head.

David did not believe in restricting Jaime’s internet access through parental controls. He felt children in general self-regulated what they looked at through their own interests. If Jaime saw something like a discussion of transsexuality, he would read it if it interested him and would not read it if he found it uninteresting. They talked about what was online a lot. Jaime recognized the dangers of social media and really didn’t use it much. He found talking to people he couldn’t read mentally was exhausting and undependable.

While home was a refuge in the evening after a day of filtering out thoughts, Jaime still sought out ways to make his filters easier and more automatic. He’d practiced using music as a means of filtering out extraneous mental input since he was very young. As a result, he’d fallen in love with orchestral music. When the music didn’t have words, he was free to just float on its melody and release his thoughts. It was like meditation to him.

He also discovered that anything that focused people’s thoughts on a single subject tended to quiet a room full of noisy minds. He wondered if teachers knew how few people in their classroom focused on what they were saying. There were a couple of classes that were really interesting and people’s minds were occupied with a single thing. Most classes left students’ minds scattered to the wind, so to speak.

Whenever a group of people were caught in a single experience, like a movie, they focused on that experience to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Or at least of most other thoughts. The movie theater was a place of mental quiet for Jaime as he merely rode the waves of people’s emotions as they watched the movie.

He spent at least one afternoon or evening each weekend at a concert or a movie. But once back in school on Monday, he would be bombarded with the typical thoughts of teenagers. Here he found sporting events were almost as good as concerts. The day of a school sporting event, most thoughts ran in the same channels—some deeper than others. It was like listening to people speaking in unison instead of all speaking about different things at the same time.

Jaime had never encountered another person who could communicate in their head. At least, no one but his dying mother had ever spoken to him. He often tested his theory that people were generally head deaf by speaking in his head to someone. Occasionally, a person would pause, but then would continue on their way without acknowledging the idea. Jaime modified his opinion to believing there were people who weren’t originally head deaf but had trained themselves not to accept mental communication.

He would have been surprised to find a teen in a school across town who had a different experience.

Trayce

Trayce had an active imagination. She was very creative and had begun writing little stories when she was in elementary school. In middle school, her imagination had been lit on fire. She discovered web sites where people posted fan fiction for some of her favorite stories. She began writing stories herself and posting them online.

Of course, biology caught up with her in middle school as well. Her mother told her it was all just part of becoming a young woman and had given her hygiene instructions and talked to her lovingly about how her body was changing. Trayce caught overtones from her mother that said she was very concerned about her daughter maturing and would talk to her father about whether she was handling it right. Trayce thought it was odd how she had those impressions from her mother, but she often got them from her father as well. She always knew what kind of mood he was in and what he wanted to do on the weekend.

One day she had decided to ship a story about a relationship between two boys in her favorite fantasy novel. ‘To ship,’ she had found out the year before, was to create a story about a relationship between two characters in a story who didn’t have that type of relationship in the original.

She was in her study hall and had finished her math assignment, so decided to start writing the story about the two boys. She hadn’t gone far when one of her characters came to life in her head and began talking to her.

I really like him. Yeah, we compete on the football field, but it’s a game. Trash talking is just part of the game. I don’t really hate him. But what can I do about it? If the guys found out I liked him, I’d be finished. As it is, I have to leave the showers when he walks in or I’d be rock hard in an instant. I think I might love him.