Invisible (12 page)

The effects of Proloftin wear off slowly. I spend most of the day in bed reading model railroading magazines. I am afraid to go into the basement. I remember hurting the bridge. I am afraid of what I might find down there.

Late in the afternoon I put my magazines aside and begin work on a new sigil. My brain is starting to work again, and guiding the felt tip pen over the lines and curves of the sigil seems to help me focus. By the time my mother calls me for dinner, I have completed it. It is an angry sigil.

“And how are you feeling this evening, Doug?” my father asks.

“Okay. I'm feeling okay. A little sleepy is all.”

“Well, you need the sleep,” my mother says. “You've had quite a week.”

I nod.

“Dr. Ahlstrom assures us that the new dose you're on will have you back in shape in no time.”

“Good.” I push green leaves into my mouth and chew.

My father says, “I've taken the day off from work tomorrow.”

I chew.

“I thought the three of us could take a drive.”

I look up. “Where?”

“Well, as you know, you can't go back to Fairview High. We need to find a new school for you. We'd like you to take a look at St. Stephen's Academy.”

I've heard of St. Stephen's Academy. It's where kids like Freddie Perdue get sent.

“Isn't that, like, some sort of prison?” I ask.

“Don't be ridiculous. It's a private school.”

I stare at my father, at his craggy features and whiskers and cavernous eyes. He is a stranger. A man who comes to our house at night and shouts and mows the lawn in a suit and tie and goes to work in the morning.

“I don't think I want to go,” I say.

Now he is going to start yelling, I think. But he only smiles a ghastly smile and says, “Why don't we just talk about it in the morning, Doug.”

“You want to get rid of me.”

“No, we don't,” my mother says. “We just want to do what's best for you.”

“Then forget about it. I'm not going.”

My father's eyes flicker and burn. “You'll DO what we TELL you to do.” The veins on his forehead start to show.

The yelling is about to begin.

I
go straight to bed after my father gets tired of yelling. I pull the covers over my face and stare into the dark. Images tumble through my brain like bedsheets and underwear in a clothes dryer: my father's red, veiny face; fire; and the people of Madham scurrying about. I see a long white hallway that frightens me. I try to think about Melissa Haverman, but her image is slippery; I can't grab hold. It must be the Proloftin. I grip the blanket and ride out the slide show.

After an hour or an eternity my mind settles, and I feel sleep rising up to engulf me. I fight it. I'm afraid that as soon as I drop off, something will come scratching at
my window, and I'll be too scared to look. What if it's Andy? What if it's not?

To fend off sleep, I start counting by 17s. I lose track somewhere around 1,003—the remnants of yesterday's Proloftin are still clogging up my head. I start over. This time I get up over 2,700 before I lose track. I start to get anxious. What if the Proloftin made me as permanently moronic as Freddie Perdue? I start again, slowly, fixing each number in my mind before moving on to the next.

I am at 10,166 when I hear my parents begin their nightly ritual. I hear the water running in the bathroom sink, the sound of my mother's electric toothbrush, and their low voices, talking about whatever it is they talk about. Probably me. I wait until I hear their bedroom door close, then quietly slip out of my room and down the basement stairs.

I want to cry. Godzilla, or whatever possessed me last night, has destroyed one end of the bridge. I survey the damage. The east end of the bridge deck is broken, the suspension cables torn, the deck plates broken, the railing crushed. For a long time I simply stand, staring.

Then I get to work, salvaging what I can and rebuilding as necessary. Most of the bridge deck sections are still usable, but some of them are completely broken. I have to scrape the heads off another box of matches to build two new deck sections. As always I put the scrapings into a Mason jar. After more than 20,000 matches, I have three jars full of red phosphorus.

I get into a rhythm. My hands do the work quickly.
The last molecules of Proloftin leave my body, and my mind spins free. I think about Andy.

I am not irrational. I remember the fire. I know that Andy was inside the house when it burned. I saw his obituary. I went to his funeral. Andy died. I remember that.

But I also remember sitting with him in the empty stadium last week. I know him as a seventeen-year-old, just like me—even though he died when he was fourteen. It is quite strange, I must admit.

Have I been talking to Andy's ghost?

I don't believe in ghosts.

More likely there is a parallel universe where Andy didn't die, and the two worlds are rubbing up against each other. I think I read a sci-fi book about something like that. I wonder if, in the living Andy's universe, I'm the one who died in the fire. Maybe in that universe I was a tiny bit braver, and I ran into the burning house on my own. And maybe the other Andy was not brave enough to come in after me. Does that mean that the Andy I've been talking to for the past few years is a lesser Andy? Possibly. Maybe that is why he didn't come forward and confess to making the phone call. Maybe that is why he let me be kicked out of school. I wonder what he is doing now.

I tighten the miniature clamp that holds the bridge sections together while the glue dries, then start restringing the suspender cables.

Another possibility—I don't know how I could have forgotten about this—is that Andy didn't die in the fire at all. He might have slipped out the back of the house
and then, as a joke, hidden out for a few days to watch his own funeral.

It must have been quite a scene when he showed up alive at his parents' door. Why don't I remember that? In fact, I wonder why I haven't seen Mr. and Mrs. Morrow lately. Is it true that they sold the house to George Fuller and moved out years ago? I wonder how George Fuller likes living with a ghost.

I have to trim one of the bridge sections, but I can't find my X-Acto knife. I start looking through boxes. Where did I put that thing? I think the dregs of the Proloftin must still be messing with my memory. Then I open one of the boxes and there it is. Not the X-Acto knife. Something much, much better.

I find the Victorinox Explorer that Andy gave to me. Bright red plastic handle. Seventeen shiny tools. Perfect.

“Douglas?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing down there at this time of morning?”

“Working on my bridge.”

“How long have you been up?”

“Not long.”

“Doug?”

“What?”

“Are you ready to go?”

“I'm busy.”

“Whatever you are doing, it can wait.”

“No it can't.”

“Doug…” I hear my father's feet on the basement steps. He reaches the middle of the steps and stops. “Come along, Doug.”

“I told you, I'm busy.” The bridge is almost complete.

My father descends to the bottom of the steps and stops with the bare bulb burning a few inches above his gray head. He is wearing his long dark gray wool coat and his dark gray wool hat with the brim all the way around. Nobody wears hats like that anymore. Except my father.

“You're just sitting there,” he says.

“I'm watching the paint dry. As soon as it's dry I can lay the track.”

“Doug, did you take your pill this morning?”

“Mom watched me take it.” I had to hold it under my tongue for almost five minutes before I was able to spit the pasty fragments into my palm.

He nods. “Well then, let's get going. We have an eleven o'clock appointment, and it will take us forty minutes to get there.”

“Why don't you and Mom go without me?”

“Doug, we're doing this for you. Please come along.” He waits, staring at me with a bland expression. Something is very wrong here. Why isn't he yelling?

“I don't want to go.”

“I'm sorry, Doug, but that is not acceptable.” My father should be shouting, but instead he is talking to me in this quiet, insistent voice.

I don't think I am going to talk him out of this.

W
e turn into a short driveway leading to a huge iron gate set into a stone wall twelve feet high. A brass plaque attached to the gate reads:

ST. STEPHEN'S ACADEMY
TOMORROW'S ADULTS TODAY

My father gets out of the car and opens a metal box beside the gate. Inside the box is a phone. He speaks into the phone, and a few seconds later the gate swings inward.

We drive through the gate, following a straight, narrow
asphalt driveway through a huge parklike area of rolling grassy hills, thick-trunked oaks, and tall elms. It reminds me of the greenway at Woodland Trails, only spread over a much larger area. After about a quarter of a mile we come to a group of low brick buildings with small windows and few doors.

I do not like this place.

We park in front of the largest and oldest of the buildings.

“I don't like it here,” I say. “I want to go home.”

My father opens the back door. “Doug, we've driven all the way down here. Let's go inside and take a look, shall we?”

“Why? There's no way I'm going to school here.”

Now they are both standing outside the car looking in at me.

“It won't hurt you to look,” says my mother.

The man in charge, Dr. Monahan, is average height, average weight, about forty or fifty years old, with a face so ordinary you would never notice him in a crowd. He has brown hair, a brown suit, and brown shoes. His tie is brown also, but his eyes are green and his smile is brilliantly, unnaturally white. I think he looks exactly the way an extraterrestrial would look if he wanted to pass as human. My parents seem quite impressed, but he gives me the creeps. After introducing himself to them, he turns his lighthouse smile on me.

“And this must be Doug. Welcome to St. Stephen's,” he says in his newscaster's voice.

“We're just visiting,” I say.

“I understand,” he says, showing me his teeth. He has a lot of them. “Well, as long as you're here, shall we take a tour of our facilities?”

St. Stephen's Academy is a state-of-the-art facility. I know this because Dr. Monahan tells us so. He tells us so about ten times. He has two favorite expressions: “state-of-the-art” and “I understand.” They should call the place the St. Stephen's State-of-the-Art Academy: We Understand.

“Our computer laboratory is state-of-the-art,” he says as we enter yet another classroom, this one with several long tables with computers bolted to them every three feet. Like all of the other classrooms we've visited, there are no people.

“And, of course, we have a permanent doctor and pharmacist on staff. Many of our kids have psychological problems, as you know, and we like to make sure that they get their meds.”

“Where are all the kids?” I ask. “All we've seen is a bunch of rooms.”

Dr. Monahan stretches his mouth into his biggest smile yet. “Of course you'd like to see our other residents, Doug. I understand.” He gets another centimeter out of his smile. “All of our students are confined to their rooms at this time. We had a little incident here this morning, and we're giving the kids a few hours to think about it.”

“What happened?” my mother asks.

“Two of our students got into a little scuffle after breakfast. A small matter, really, but we have a zero tolerance
policy when it comes to unacceptable behavior. Any form of violence results in a lockdown for the entire school. The students quickly learn that individual behavior has repercussions throughout the student body. A valuable lesson.”

I say, “A couple of kids get in a fight, so you punish everybody?”

“We give everyone some downtime,” he says through his smile. “Would you like to see our auditorium? It has a state-of-the-art sound system. …”

The last part of the tour is a walk through the housing facility, a long, low building containing 204 dorm rooms, Dr. Monahan tells us. One room for every two residents. At the building entrance we are greeted by two large men.

“This is Mr. Kloss, our physical education teacher, and Mr. Barrington, who teaches mathematics.”

“I thought maybe you were the guards,” I say.

They all laugh. Dr. Monahan walks us down the halls. The doors to all the rooms are wide open. I look in as we pass. There are two beds in each small room, with one person sitting or lying down on each bed. They look like ordinary kids at first, but after passing a few rooms I notice that none of them are smiling. Also, they are all wearing the same thing: khaki pants and light blue shirts. And they are all boys.