Invisible Girl (8 page)

During all of my tales, Annie keeps her eyes on me as if I were an old necklace she found in a drawer and didn’t expect to like, only to discover that with a little rub, I became an opal, shooting iridescent sparks into her whirling light, making her even more blinding.

After a while, I refuse to answer any more questions, insisting I’d just bore them. When I say this, Andrew tosses a rock that tears a leaf off of a tree and says, “Senator, you’re anything but boring.”

Annie immediately pounces on my new title, as it only adds to her own luminescence. Every time she addresses me now, it’s as “Senator” and so, of course, the other girls do it too. All except Eva. She makes a point of calling me Stephanie in a tight, precise voice, as if the power of her authoritative tone will steer everyone back to calling me only by my name.

Brian says, “I’ve thought about politics,” and tosses a rock higher than Andrew’s and looks satisfied when we hear a little thwack.

Andrew says, “If you want to go into politics, you’d better recapitulate her philosophy or whatever the hell she said,” and grabs another stone.

While he and Brian fight for dominance, throwing rocks higher and higher against the tree, Annie says, “Mind your manners” to JKIII in that schoolteacher voice she and Leslie use. Leslie starts packing up snacks and cigarettes in her backpack and I know it’s time to go.

As we stand, I want to freeze the moment and hold on to it like the snow on Christmas Eve, when each ice crystal shimmers in expectation, hiding the fact that Santa is really my mom, who’ll be in bed all of Christmas Day, still drunk from the rum in the eggnog, splayed half naked on her bed, with smeared lipstick and clumps of hairsprayed hair hanging down, like someone’s bad idea of ornaments.

I have a new name for Aunt Sarah: The Digester. At dinner, she passes up the roast chicken, mashed potatoes and bread only to heap endless servings of salad and vegetables on her plate until I picture her, an hour after dinner, lying glazed in front of the television set, thin like a snake but for the enormous bulge around her middle.

Uncle Michael eats with perfectly cut bites, pausing between them to tell stories and ask questions. He never looks as if he’s hungry, just as if eating were something interesting to do while he has a conversation. I wish I could blink and he would be my father, Carson Drew, and we could be with Chief McGinnis from the River Heights Police force, who would shake his head and say, kind of marveling at me, “Stephanie, just how did you determine the painting was a forgery?”

An elbow jabs me in the ribs. “Can you believe how he’s eating?” Annie hisses. “He’s such a pig.”

I look over in the direction where she’s staring. Her brother Patrick is shoving a huge bite of chicken into a mouth already brimming with mashed potatoes. Annie takes a tiny bite from the tip of her fork. “They are so gross,” she says furiously. “Don’t you dare tell anyone how they eat.”

I feel a blast of rage. This is all she has to be horrified about? This is her dark secret? Jealousy claws at my chest. I want her life so badly I could tear her face off with my bare hands and plaster my own over her network of blood and veins if I thought it would be a successful way for us to trade places.

At the other end of the table by Aunt Sarah, Megan spills her milk. Subconsciously, I brace myself for hollering and blows. Megan starts to cry as the milk trickles down her leg and Aunt Sarah only says, “Shush, honey, it’s okay. It just scared you.”

Carmen comes and cleans up the mess. Immediately, a new milk is set in front of Megan, who still sniffles like a victim. I hate Megan all over again, and so I look over at Michael Jr. and try to hear what he’s saying to Daniel. I pick up the words
unbe-LIEV-ably hot.

Aunt Sarah doesn’t hear this because she’s too busy telling Megan how proud of her she is for holding her new milk like a good girl. The expression hasn’t escaped Annie though, who sets her eyes upon her brothers like lasers and demands, “Who? Who is?”

Daniel says, “None of your beeswax.”

Patrick, with more mashed potatoes in his mouth, says to his brother in complete wonder, “You met her?”

Now everyone’s focusing on their conversation. Annie says scornfully, “Who, some stupid actress?”

Michael Jr. now addresses the whole table but mostly his father. “New family, bought the Taylors’ house. Just moved here from Georgia. Some kind of crazy Arab last name—”

“Michael.” Aunt Sarah flashes him an angry teacher look. Michael Jr. ignores her. “I met their daughter at the club today. James Mattson got them a guest pass. He wants to sponsor them as members—”

“Really,” Aunt Sarah says, no longer the angry teacher, but a club member excited to be the bearer of fresh gossip for her girlfriends.

“Oh, I heard about them,” Uncle Michael cuts in. “The father’s supposed to be some sort of genius in chemistry—all the pharmaceuticals were fighting over him.”

Michael Jr. doesn’t seem the least bit interested in the genius father. He leans over to Patrick and whistles softly. “What’s truly a crime is, the daughter is only fourteen.”

“Get out,” Patrick says. “May the Lord strike me dead. Or at least blind.”

Daniel punches him in the arm and they do a mini-wrestle at the table. I’m distracted for a moment until I realize that Annie is tensing beside me. “Who is she?” she says with a huff of sheer boredom, but I recognize the tone. It’s the same one she uses when anyone at the pool admires a model in a magazine. She asks to see the picture as if she couldn’t care less, then she scrutinizes it with her breath coming out her nose in harsh, tiny puffs. When she finds what she’s looking for, something wrong with the model, like too-thin lips or too wide of a forehead, she shouts out her discovery and makes everyone agree. On the one occasion where she couldn’t find anything wrong, she tossed the magazine back at Emily and said, “Jesus, do you realize how much makeup they put on these girls? She’d probably look like hell if you just ran into her shopping or something.”

“I think her name is Amal,” Michael Jr. continues. “As they used to say in your day, Dad, ‘foxy.’ ”

“Amal,” Annie says scornfully, but it’s drowned out by her brothers’ laughter. I laugh too, just to be in on it, until I feel Annie seething beside me. I stop laughing and take a tiny peek at her. She’s hunched over her plate, spearing a green bean, but with her mouth closed like a gate so I know she’s not going to eat it. When she screeches her chair back to indicate she’s through, I wonder what blood lies ahead as she prepares to enter prettiest-girl battle.

Annie’s texting furiously as I walk by her room. Her face is tight and she doesn’t even notice me go by. I finally have the opportunity I’ve been praying for. I walk out onto the patio where Uncle Michael reads through the parts of the paper he didn’t have time to touch in the morning.

The clatter of Carmen doing the dishes and Aunt Sarah reading to Megan is behind me as I slip out the double doors. Uncle Michael takes a sip of his drink and looks up at me. “So where are you two hooligans running off to tonight?”

I shrug. “Not sure yet. Annie’s still on the phone. I was just hoping to catch up on the paper. Mind if I take a section?”

His eyebrows shoot up in surprise and then he catches himself. “Which one?”

I sit stiffly on one of the green chairs across from him. “Are you done with the front page?”

He takes a sip of his drink, and I’m nervous because I think he’s laughing at me and trying to hide it. “Or, any other section is fine,” I add, quickly looking off at the wide spread of trees, as if some small animal caught my attention.

“No, I’m done with the front section.” He hands it to me. “Anything in particular that interests you?”

I consider tossing out my newly designed senatorial aspirations of the afternoon, but then I fear I’ll be asked questions about things that I know nothing about. “Law,” I say decisively. “I love any stories about legal stuff.”

His face brightens like I just put a surprise birthday cake in front of him and told him it was his turn to blow out the candles. “Really? You know, I was already interested in the law at your age too.”

He tells me a story about when he was fifteen and he heard about a man getting his leg smashed in a car accident and the drunken driver refused to pay for all the days he missed at work.

“That did it for me,” he says. “Right then and there, I decided to be a lawyer.”

I’m listening as hard as I can, hoping that he’ll feel just how interested I am. At the same time though, I’m trying to figure out how to ask the big question. I wish he would tell another story so I’d have more time to think, but he’s looking at me now as if it’s my turn to speak. Since I have no game plan I just blurt out, “Maybe I could work for you? Like help you with your cases? But, um, for free, of course.”

I’m blushing profusely now at the thought that maybe he thought I wanted him to pay me money.

I can’t look at his eyes because I’m so embarrassed, so I stare at his temple, thinking that it’s the exact amount of gray Carson Drew has. He frowns and clears his throat.

“And what kind of work would you want to do?” he asks, and his mouth tightens at the sides like he’s holding in a huge laugh.

I’m about to cry and know I could never tell him that I want to actually solve cases with him, that my childish dream of solving “mysteries” has matured into a real passion to work on real law stuff. I just shrug and blink really fast so the tears dry before they spill out.

“Well,” he says in a serious voice. “Let me give it some thought.”

Annie runs out onto the patio and all of a sudden I realize that in the back of my ear, I’ve been hearing her call me for the last couple of minutes. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees me sitting right across from her dad with my face all red. “You coming or not?” she says. Her voice has none of its usual hey-cousin friendliness.

I get up from my chair, and as we walk through the laundry room and into the garage, I see Uncle Michael’s briefcase sitting next to the back door. While we get on our bikes, the idea sparks. Maybe I can get into his briefcase, see what kind of case he’s working on and figure it out on my own? My favorite teacher at school, Sister Margaret, used to say, “Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you’re wrong.” Maybe that’s what I can show him I could bring to the table, a fresh perspective.

I smile as we pedal up to Mulholland, picturing his face, creased with an incredulous smile, standing with me, my dad and somehow my mom saying, “And this little dickens figured out the money was counterfeit all by herself.”

I descend back into reality when my bike hits a bump. I realize that Annie’s been talking nonstop since we left the house and is now saying, “I don’t know if I’ll ever speak to him again. As far as I’m concerned, we’re totally broken up.”

Our cigarettes glow red against the black night. The guys aren’t here yet, so the girls have all had time to hear Annie’s story about what a jerk JKIII was on the phone. When she asked him if he had met the new girl, Amal, he had said, “Who, that really hot chick? Yeah, my parents invited her and her parents over for dinner last night.”

Annie goes on to describe how she first acted as if she didn’t hear him say that and just said, “So what’s she like?” And then he had the unbelievable nerve to call her hot again. Like her hotness wasn’t an opinion but an established fact. Like she was some sort of well-known Hollywood bombshell. At which point Annie told him that maybe things weren’t working out anymore, and when he’d asked her why, she’d said, “Just because.” But what she was really thinking was, Duh!