They named her Katherine. She started out as Emily Ann, a premature baby girl weighing three pounds four ounces. Her features were perfect except for a slight dip in the bridge of her nose, but her parents weren’t worried. She would grow up to be beautiful. At the age of four, Emily began to hear the voices. The talking started in bits and pieces; a word here, a phrase there, but soon turned into full-blown conversations. On the nights that she couldn’t sleep, these invisible people would softly whisper to one another, oftentimes stopping to remind the others that Emily was sleeping and not to wake her. They began to refer to her as “Katherine” rather than Emily, and she soon adopted the name as her own. Though she couldn’t take part in the fascinating late-night conversations about politics, classical music, and literature, she listened intently until she drifted off to sleep. Soon enough, it became hard for Emily to tell the difference between people around her talking and the voices in her mind. She would often be listening so intently to a young boy or a father figure in her mind that she was unable to hear her mother calling her for dinner. Though she was quite bright, her parents wondered why she often didn’t respond to their beckoning, but passed it off as daydreaming. There was nothing wrong with their precious Emily. As she grew older, she kept the voices to herself, never even mentioning them to her best friend, Alisha. The conversations continued regularly every night, and soon she was able to tell the difference between the voices. She could easily distinguish those of a young mother with a baby, a small boy, a father, a teenage girl, and an older boy. Their names were a mystery to her, but their late-night whispering continued to fascinate her. She learned much from their conversations. She would often be sitting in class and know the answer to a question that the teacher had asked, even if she had never studied the subject. Music, especially Mozart, was a favorite of the voices, and Emily soaked in the information quickly as she listened and slumbered. Though they are slowly beginning to fade, she waits in the dead of night for their comments to come back to her. Waiting silently, she focuses on the whispering that used to exist, and sometimes catches the smallest bit of a phrase or a random word. She misses them. As a teenager now, they seem to come to her less and less, and some nights she cries herself to sleep, homesick. She misses the ones that named her “Katherine”.