The 6th Power (4 page)

Invisible. Invisible Woman, Invisible Kid, Phantom Lady, Martian Manhunter, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, so many others. In a moment, every instance of invisibility in every book or comic book that I had ever read swirled through my mind. In the comic books, invisible people are always drawn as just a faded outline, as if their bodies have suddenly changed into a sheet of plastic wrap. But it occurred to me that that wasn’t right. We’d talked about how an eye works in science class a couple of years ago. We see something when the light that bounces off of that thing comes back to our eye and our brain processes the image and you say, “Hey, there’s a mongoose!” If you are invisible, however, light just curves around you, so your image never makes its way back to the eye of the person looking to pound you.

All of this came to me in a second, and as it did, a warm feeling spread through my body, starting in my head and moving down into my chest. It was a familiar kind of feeling. A hug-from-your-grandma kind of feeling. A first-sight-of-the-presents under the tree-on-Christmas-morning kind of feeling. A walk-in-the-house-and-smell-cookies-baking kind of feeling. With the feeling came an absolute surety that I understood exactly what it was like to be invisible, as if being invisible was just one of my own memories that I could now so easily call up.

Chet and Robert came into view. Chet’s face was red. He had his bat in his hands, squeezing it like it was the neck of a turkey. Robert was a pace behind, hands in pockets, nodding along to Chet’s rant.

I had known they were coming, but the sight of them still made me gasp. Chet whirled around and looked right at me…

… and kept on looking, turning his head, as if he were trying to figure out from where the sound was coming.

He frowned, shook his head and continued walking down the sidewalk, right past where I was sitting. I could have reached out and grabbed his ankle if, you know, I was feeling suicidal. I sat there, mouth open, wondering why I was still alive. What had just happened? There was no way he couldn’t have seen me.

I looked down. Oh. Okay. I guess Chet hadn’t seen me.

‘Cause I wasn’t there anymore.

Chapter 5

M
y eyeballs told me that I didn’t exist. I was pretty sure that they were wrong. It felt like I was sitting on the lawn. I could see the grass smooshed down under my butt. I just couldn’t see my butt, or anything else of me.

I flailed around and grabbed my leg. Okay. I was still there. That was good. I managed to push down some of the rising panic and tried to get my brain working again. What was going on here?

I was invisible. Check. Just like Frodo and all of those comic book characters. Check. Light was bending around me so that no one, not even me, could see me. Checkerino. Since turning invisible was not a normal thing for me, it must have had something to do with the pill. Check-a-roonie. But… how?

My brain really didn’t have an answer for that one.

If this was a possible side-effect, you’d think that Mr. Magellan would have mentioned it. Maybe the results vary, you know, depending on who takes the pill. That’s what all those pharmaceutical commercials always say. But if invisibility was a side effect of the pill, what if there were others? What if the invisibility was permanent? What if my body was going to disintegrate or something? What if… what if…?

I was in trouble. I needed help.

Typically, when a kid is in trouble, they go to their parents. I didn’t have a lot of experience with Mom and Dad actually assisting me during a personal crisis, but I supposed that I didn’t have a lot of other options.

I jumped up and immediately fell over. It turns out that it can be kind of difficult to stand if you can’t see yourself do it, but I eventually got my feet under me. The sun overhead shot needles right into my brain. I squinted and held up a hand to shade my eyes. Duh. An invisible hand didn’t work any better than invisible eyelids. No wonder the Invisible Man wore sunglasses in those old movies.

I started heading for home. Part of me wanted to run, but since I couldn’t see my feet, I was pretty sure that I’d trip, fall, kill myself, and decompose before anyone found my body.

So I walked back towards Rosenberg Street. I also started to calm down, to think things through. Going and telling Mom what had happened started to seem like a really bad idea. If I told her that I’d taken a pill given to me by a stranger, even if that stranger was our kindly old neighbor that I’d known my entire life, she would hit the roof. Oh sure, she’d probably get me medical attention, but she’d also make sure that I never read another comic book for the rest of my life.

Yeah, it was weird to worry about comic books when I was in danger of disintegrating or exploding or something, but as I thought about it, I didn’t actually feel too bad. Other than my head pounding. So, yes, I needed to talk to someone about my condition, but Mom wasn’t the best candidate. That left the origin of my problem: Mr. Magellan.

I looked up and realized that I’d made it to my backyard. I also realized that I wasn’t alone.

You know how, in those old westerns, the cowboys would be riding through a valley and someone would say, “This looks like a good spot for an ambush,” right before getting a bullet in their big hat? Well, the oak tree in our backyard was the valley and my big hat was riddled with holes. More times than I could count, the twins had hidden behind that tree until I got close, then they would jump out and grab me. Good times would follow. Good for the twins, not so much for me.

I always knew when it was going to happen. The tree was big, but it couldn’t hide both of them. This time, as I approached, I could see Robert’s elbow poking out and Chet’s fingers gripping the bark. Their ambushes had become such a habit that I almost did something to let the twins know that I was there. Be a shame to spoil their fun, right?

Instead, I walked softly around the tree and looked at my brothers. They were squeezed together, whispering and chortling. They looked completely ridiculous. As I stood there, I found myself getting more and more annoyed. Then my perfect memory dialed up the events of the morning that led to Mom trimming one of my eyebrows down to the nub. Not to mention the little show out in the street in front of the neighbor kids. So annoyance turned to anger, and I realized that this invisibility was just a problem that needed solving.

It was also an opportunity.

My hands shook as I knelt down behind the twins, sure that at any moment, I’d reappear and they’d grab me. Fortunately, the job took only a few seconds. I stood up and, preparing to run in case things went horribly wrong, I tapped Robert hard on the shoulder.

“Wha?” he grunted, turning, taking a step back. His foot only made it halfway there, though. Robert sprawled backward, grabbing for Chet, snagging the waist of his uniform pants. Robert fell, pulling his bro down to the ground with him.

I backed away from them, my fist stuffed in my mouth to keep from howling.

“What the heck?” Chet barked. He tried to kick Robert off of him, but their shoes got tangled up. Chet struggled and pushed, then stopped and looked.

“Are your… are your shoelaces tied together?” he asked.

Robert pushed the hair out of his eyes and investigated. “Uh, yeah.”

Chet gritted his teeth. “Why would you be stupid enough to tie your shoelaces together?”

“I didn’t!”

“Well, who else could have done it, moron?” Chet pulled out his pocket knife and, in seconds, they were free of each other. He jumped to his feet and looked around.

“The shrimp isn’t coming.” Chet stalked off to the house, not sparing his twin another glance. Robert just sat there and looked at his sliced shoelaces.

That was so cool! I can’t believe that I did that! Was I nuts? No, I… was… invisible!

I told myself to calm down and I followed Chet into the house.

He was drinking a glass of water. Mom was folding laundry at the kitchen table, asking him how practice went.

“Fine. I’m gonna go shower.”

“’I’m going to go shower,’” Mom corrected. She was an English major in college, so she was always doing stuff like that. “Kiki is down for a nap. Please don’t wake her.”

Chet favored her with one of his best “Good Son” smiles, gave her a kiss on the forehead and said, “I won’t.”

Ah, wasn’t that sweet? The love between a mother and a son. How special.

I followed Chet upstairs. He threw his dirty uniform down the laundry chute and hit the showers. I averted my eyes until after he’d closed the curtain because, well, gross. As I took a seat on the toilet, it occurred to me that I had never taken a peaceful shower in my life. The memories flowed through my mind of every time that the twins had replaced my underwear with one of Kiki’s diapers or put my towel in the toilet or didn’t do anything at all. Sometimes the anticipation that they were going to prank me was almost worse than the prank itself. Of course, one of their favorite tortures was also the most simple.

I reached over my shoulder and flushed the toilet.

With a shriek, Chet leapt out of the shower, got tangled in the curtain and fell to the floor with a crash. The whole house seemed to shake with the impact. I silently counted to three and, right on cue, Kiki started to cry.

Well, my work was done. I stood up and headed for the door. Chet was still flailing about, trying to free himself from the shower curtain. I averted my eyes again and he ended up bumping into me. We both jumped back. Chet looked around, eyes wide.

“Who… who’s there?” he gasped. He took a step towards me, hands out.

I huddled against the wall. Had he seen me? How could he see me? I looked down. Yep. Still invisible. But I also noticed that the bathroom was really steamy and the air seemed to swirl around every time Chet moved. Which meant that it swirled around when I moved. Had Chet seen that? He stepped towards me, which I guess answered my question.

I dropped down to the floor. Chet waved his hands where I’d been just a moment before. The look on his face had gone from fear to suspicion to anger. He knew that someone was in the bathroom with him and that someone had flushed the toilet on him and, let’s be honest, the list of suspects was pretty short. If Chet got his hands on me, all the transparency in the world wasn’t going to save me.

But, oddly enough, my mother could save me. She burst into the room, a wailing Kiki in her arms, and started to rip into my brother. I sat in the corner for a few minutes, watching the show and catching my breath, then took advantage of the uproar and slipped out.

Chapter 6

C
losed.

I pressed my face to the glass door of Mr. Magellan’s shop, but the lights were off. I couldn’t see a thing.

Great.

After my little bathroom adventure, I’d needed to get out of the house. Sure, it could have been fun to use the invisibility to freak the twins out all afternoon, but the close call with Chet reminded me that I should just stay away from my brothers. So, since I still wanted to ask Mr. Magellan what in the world he’d gotten me in to, I’d headed back downtown.

But no such luck. Still, I wasn’t too worried. Mr. Magellan frequently closed down the shop over the noon hour. Sometimes he went to the little pizza shop next door, but when I looked in that window, there was no sign of him.

The smells coming from the restaurant reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. A slice and a soda would really hit the spot. Shame that I’d spent all of my allowance already. Also, it would have been kind of hard to place my order. It occurred to me that I could just waltz in and sneak some food out, but I pushed the temptation aside. I was fairly sure that Susan Richards had never used her power to steal some lunch, so I wasn’t about to, either.

I had time to kill until Mr. Magellan returned, so I headed over to the park. Coralberry’s downtown is made up of four roads that form a square, with a small park in the middle. It’s a sit-downy kind of park, with trees and grass and benches, and a gazebo in the middle where people can picnic or even hold a wedding. There are some businesses around the square, including the comic book shop and the pizza place on the north side and a sporting goods store on the south side. Two of the four roads that make up the square are highways that continue out of town and in to the next counties. The east-west highway goes either to Westertonville or out past the lake. The north-south highway winds through miles of farmland and other small towns. So despite the smallness of our community, downtown was usually a busy place, even if it’s only busy with people passing through.

I pushed the cross-walk button on the southeast corner of the square and chuckled as the lights changed and everyone had to stop for a pedestrian that no one could see. Ah, invisible humor. No one gets it but me. Speaking of humor, as I walked across the street, I replayed with perfect clarity the memory of Mom yelling at Chet. He had tried to cover himself with the bathroom rug as he stood there, dripping, protesting that it wasn’t his fault, that there was someone in the bathroom with him. It was so nice, having that vein pop out on Mom’s forehead at someone other than me. This time, I wasn’t the one set up to take the fall. This time, I wasn’t the one whose excuses were rejected. This time, I wasn’t the one who got grounded.

Just southeast of the little postage stamp of green in the town square was Coralberry Park, a proper run-around-and-have-fun kind of park, and it was crowded with people doing just that. School was out, the sun was up, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Unfortunately. I stood under the canopy of a large tree, hoping the shade would help my ever-growing headache, and watched. Younger kids crawled over the playground equipment. Older kids cruised around on their bikes or on skateboards. Pickup games littered the basketball courts.

The girl was there, practicing layups by herself. The red-haired girl who had stuck up for me. The crazy girl. I leaned up against the tree and watched her. She was the only one on the courts who didn’t look like she was having fun. As she practiced, she kept checking her watch.