Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (2 page)

“Iz, what’s going on?” I asked. “You’re worrying me.”

“
I’m
worrying
you
?” she said with a laugh. And not a
ha-ha-you’re-so-funny
laugh. More of an
I’m-sitting-with-a-crazy-person-and-I-need-to-escape-without-letting-them-know-I’m-scared
laugh.

“Izzy,” I said firmly, “I’m your best friend. If there’s something wrong, you can tell me.”

She turned away and nodded. Eventually, she looked back at me. “Something weird happened, back there, in geography class,” she said finally.

“You mean my falling asleep and getting into trouble? That’s not weird. It happens all the — ”

“Not that,” she said. She pointed at my arm. “Your elbow.”

“My
elbow
?” I repeated, lifting my arm to look at it. “What’s wrong with my elbow?”

“Nothing now,” Izzy said. “But back then, it . . . it . . .”

“It what?”

Izzy took another breath. “It disappeared,” she said.

“My elbow disappeared,” I echoed.

Izzy nodded. “And it wasn’t just your elbow. It started there, but it was beginning to spread along your arm.” She paused and leaned toward me. “Something weird was happening.”

Something weird was
definitely
happening. My best friend was going crazy. “
What
was happening?” I asked.

“I think . . .” She leaned closer and glanced over her shoulder to check that we were alone. Then she lowered her voice and spoke again, and this time, her words made me shudder: “I think you were turning invisible.”

Which is not what you expect your best friend to say to you, sitting in the park at 4:05 on a Friday afternoon. Or at any other time on any other day, in fact.

I stared at Izzy and tried to find some words that might form themselves into a sentence that could possibly pass as an adequate reply. I finally came up with
“Whaaa?
”

Which didn’t really pass the test of being either a sentence or an adequate reply, but it was all I had.

Izzy at least had the courtesy to blush. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, OK? I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“Or didn’t see, more to the point,” I replied.

Izzy laughed. I glared at her. She stopped laughing.

“Look, I’m probably wrong,” she said. “I mean, it was most likely the light or something. You know, the sun shining in my eyes.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Izzy laughed again. This time I didn’t glare at her. “I mean, imagine thinking you were turning invisible!” she said.

I laughed, too, beginning to relax. “I know. Crazy, huh?”

“What an idiot! In fact, now that I think about it, I’m
certain
it was the light. The sun was shining right on you. That’s definitely what it was.”

“Good. I’m glad we figured that out,” I said, delving into my bag and pulling out my lunch box. “Now, are we going to feed the ducks or what?”

We threw our crusts into the lake and watched the ducks come flying over, then quack as they slid into their watery landings and pecked up the bread.

We laughed and pointed and gossiped and chatted the whole time. Like we normally do. When the bread was all gone, we made plans for meeting up the next day and texting each other the minute we got home. Like we normally do.

In fact, if you’d been watching us, you wouldn’t have noticed anything different from usual.

You’d only have known anything was different if you were inside my mind.

See, Izzy had hit on something that I didn’t want to say out loud. The thing was, I’d been having some odd feelings lately. Mainly when I was tired. I couldn’t really put the feelings into words. If I tried to, I’d probably use words like
fuzzy
or
woozy
or
weird
.

I told you: not exactly much to go on. All I knew was that I hadn’t been feeling a hundred percent my normal self lately. And Izzy’s words had made me admit that.

Not out loud. I wasn’t ready to do that yet. But to myself. And that was bad enough.

I went straight to my bedroom after dinner. I told Mom and Dad I wanted to get all my homework out of the way before the weekend, which was enough to keep them off my back.

What I really wanted to do was try to find a way to prove — or preferably
dis
prove — what Izzy had said. She’d said it had started when I was falling asleep, so I figured all I had to do was lie down and start nodding off, and see what happened.

I took off my shoes and drew the curtains. Then I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. My mind was spinning with questions. What if Izzy was right? What if something really weird
was
happening to me? What then?

I shook my head and forced myself not to focus on what Izzy had said. It was crazy. It was impossible.

I made myself yawn and tried to convince myself I was tired. After a few more minutes, I realized that, actually, I
was
quite tired. I could feel myself nodding off. This was it. I was going to find out. I just needed to . . .

Which was when it hit me. How on earth was I supposed to see what was happening to my body while I was falling asleep? The moment I opened my eyes to see what was going on, I wouldn’t be falling asleep anymore!

There was only one way I could do this.

I went downstairs. Mom and Dad were on the love seat with the TV on.

“Can Izzy come for a sleepover?”

“I thought you wanted to get all your homework done,” Mom said.

“I’ve done most of it.”

“That was quick,” Dad said as he flicked through the channels with the remote.

“Izzy can help. We can do the rest together. Anyway, it’s Friday. It’s not like it’s a school night.”

Dad looked at Mom and shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” he said.

“As long as it’s OK with her parents,” Mom added.

I was already out the door and halfway through a text to Izzy. “Thank you!” I yelled behind me.

So, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it turns out that trying to go to sleep, at least three hours before bedtime, while someone is staring at you, is not actually all that easy.

“Close your eyes!” Izzy yelled for the seventeenth time.

“I can’t sleep while you’re looking at me!”

“But that’s the whole point! How am I supposed to see what’s happening if I’m not looking?”

I sighed and sat up. “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “I’m not even tired.”

“Shall we go for a jog?” Izzy offered.

I gave her a look that I hoped communicated an adequate level of horror and disgust.

“I’m just trying to think of ways to make you tired.”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I powered up my laptop.

Izzy craned her neck to look over my shoulder while I typed. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a boring video to watch,” I explained.

“Ooh, good idea. Something about politics or the weather or history.” Then she pointed at the screen. “How about that one?” She was pointing at a program called
Money Wars
, described as “an in-depth look at Britain’s economic strategy in the 1930s.”

“That ought to do it,” I agreed, and clicked on the button to start the program.

It worked like a charm. Within five minutes, my eyes began to close.

Almost immediately, I heard my name being called as something grabbed my arm and shook me. I opened my eyes with a start. Sitting up, I stared at Izzy. She was still holding on to my arm, her fingernails digging into my sweater.

I stretched and yawned. Izzy let go of my sleeve.

“So?” I asked. “Anything happen? Why were you shaking my arm?”

“To wake you up,” she said, not looking at me. Before I had the chance to tell her I hadn’t actually fallen asleep in the space of the twenty seconds I’d had my eyes closed, she added, “But it took me a few tries to find it.”

“I’m guessing you eventually tracked it down, hanging from my shoulder as usual?” I replied in as light a tone as I could manage.

Izzy finally looked at me. “Your arm was completely invisible,” she said.

I stared at Izzy. “My arm . . .” I said limply.

“Was invisible, yes. Both of them, in fact. And your feet.”

“My feet,” I repeated, nodding slowly.

“Your head was starting to go, too,” Izzy went on. “That was when I yelled your name. It was getting freaky.”

“It was
getting
freaky?”

“Well, it was getting beyond freaky,” Izzy admitted.

We sat without speaking for . . . how long? Five minutes? An hour? Neither of us knew what to say. Unsurprisingly. Would you?

So instead, we took turns opening our mouths, realizing we still didn’t have any words to describe or explain what was happening, then closing them again.

“We need a strategy,” I said eventually.

Izzy smiled. I was finally talking her language. Izzy
loves
strategies. For her, they’re the next best thing to new notebooks or chess clubs.

See, Izzy and I are kind of soul sisters and kind of complete opposites at the same time. She isn’t big on thrift shops, and I don’t hyperventilate over shelves full of stationery, but we’re happy to put up with both if it means spending a Saturday afternoon in town together. Equally, I do not get what’s exciting about moving knights (which don’t look anything like knights), kings (which don’t look anything like kings), and bishops (etc.) around a checkered board. Izzy likes nothing more. Good thing we have Tom in our lives for that.

Tom Johnson is a boy I grew up with. Our moms were in the same maternity ward, and Tom and I were born on the same day. Tom’s grandparents live in Jamaica and his dad was away visiting them, since Tom wasn’t due for another three weeks, so his mom was on her own and she and my mom got to know each other. Our moms have remained good friends ever since.

I think they had this idea that Tom and I would get married one day if they took us to playgroup together often enough. Tom is cute. He has gorgeous brown skin, big brown eyes, and crazy black, ringletty hair. He’s smaller than me. Actually, he’s the smallest boy in the class. He makes up for his small body with a big brain, though. He’s into gadgets and computers and math. And he
loves
chess. Which is cool, because it means I don’t have to go to chess club with Izzy. It also means that they’re good friends, too, so the three of us hang out together a lot.

Anyway. Izzy had gotten a notebook out of her bag, opened it, and written — and underlined — the date in the top right-hand corner.

Izzy likes to do things properly.

“Let’s start with a list,” she said. “Or maybe a flowchart.” She smiled. “Yes, a flowchart. That’ll be fun.”

“My limbs are disappearing, one by one, and you think we could describe this as fun?”

“Absolutely! Once we’ve established why it’s happening, you just need to figure out how to harness it so you can control when it happens.”

“Oh! Is that
all
? Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Come on, think about it. You’ve got a superpower!”

I laughed. “Superpower? I wouldn’t exactly call it — ”

“Jess, you can turn invisible! What’s that if it’s not a superpower?”

“Well . . . OK, I guess.”

Izzy grinned. “See! And once you’ve learned how to control it, who knows what you could do? You could go around the world doing good deeds. You could be a superhero!”