Write Before Your Eyes (8 page)

They headed through the backyard.

“Okay, I was able to pick up my backpack, so that means that when we get the journal back, it should be no problem to pick it up and write in it. Right?”

“Logically speaking, I would say that we are simply invisible. None of the other aspects of life are affected, such as gravity, our ability to write or hold things, eating, sleeping, fooling around.”

“Dylan, you dork, you would think about fooling around.”

“Sorry, that’s just me.”

“Hey, being invisible isn’t so bad from an appearance point of view,” she said, as they stepped onto the apartment’s patio. “You don’t have to worry about your weight, or what you’re wearing, or if your hair is dirty, or about that zit in the crease where your nostril meets your cheek.”

“I concur,” Dylan said. “Being invisible negates a number of time-consuming insecurities. Also, we can sneak into R-rated movies. We could walk right by any sign that reads ‘No Admittance’ or ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’”

“We can get on any plane we want,” Gracie added. “We could go to England or Australia or Tahiti for free.”

“We could have front-row seats for any band we want,” Dylan added.

“We could become spies.”

“We could sleep in each other’s bedrooms.”

“Do you ever stop thinking about that?”

“Not really.” Dylan sighed. They were both silent for a moment.

“If you think about it,” Gracie said, “I’ve been invisible my whole life.”

“I know you’re speaking metaphorically, Gracie, but come on. Maybe you’re not the center of attention in your family, but as families go, yours is no more dysfunctional than any other. In all probability, less so. I mean, your parents are still married, unlike mine.”

“Well, technically.”

“There’s no murder or incest in your family, no psychotic family members are imprisoned in your attic that I know of, and no one has any fatal diseases. And neither you nor your siblings have been thrown in jail or sent to reform school.”

“Jen would be in jail right now if I hadn’t saved her with the journal.”

“That’s a matter of personal faith.” Dylan’s voice was a bit more hollow than usual, but other than that he sounded perfectly normal. “Maybe you thought you were invisible before, but believe me, that was nothing compared to now.”

“Dylan?” Gracie found her house key, which disappeared the moment she picked it up, and carefully slid it into the lock.

“Yeah?”

“Everyone’s going to wonder where we are.”

“I know,” Dylan said. “Unless we
tell
them we’re invisible, which I would warn against unless we want to be tossed into the psych ward at Dorothea Dix. But I’m quite confident that once Dad gets home from golf, this will be easy to fix, right, Gracie?”

“Right.” Gracie pushed open her back door. Her voice, even to herself, sounded lacking in confidence.

It’s like in
Tom Sawyer, she thought.
When everyone thought Tom and Huck were dead
.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Gracie and Dylan tiptoed through her family room, holding hands. They had started upstairs with her backpack when the door to the garage slammed.

“Kids? I’m home.” Mom dropped her briefcase on the floor, then headed for the stairs. Gracie squeezed Dylan’s hand as Mom walked right past them on the landing. She didn’t see them at all! They followed her down the hall as she knocked on Alex’s door before pushing it open.

“So? How bad was detention?”

Alex, lying on his bed playing his Game Boy, shrugged. “She yelled at us to shut up the whole time. We didn’t and now everyone has another day of detention.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope.”

“That’s horrible!” Mom said. “Why didn’t the school call me?”

“They said they tried.”

Mom took out her BlackBerry, stared at the screen, then went down the hall, knocked, and opened Jen’s door. “Jen! What happened to your face?”

Jen was lying on her bed in her pj’s, and she’d put Band-Aids over the inflamed scratches on her cheek and neck. Her stained clothes lay in a pile on the floor. Jen told Mom everything that had happened in the cafeteria.

“And get this,” Jen finished. “Gracie comes into the lunchroom, and I’m getting beat up by this girl, I mean totally smacked around, and Gracie doesn’t even try to get her off of me or anything.”

“Th—” Gracie started, but Dylan squeezed her hand and she bit her invisible lip.

“She just stands there like a complete idiot and stares at me like I’ve got three heads, and then turns around and runs the other way. I mean, it’s bad enough to have this space-cadet sister who’s like a
total
social liability, but the fact that she’s not even
loyal
really ticks me off. Plus, she stole my earrings.”

“Jen, I find this entire episode appalling. You were suspended, and that other girl was expelled? Why wasn’t I called?” Mom punched a few more buttons on her BlackBerry.

“They said they tried. And I didn’t even do anything, Mom; I was just carrying my tray across the lunchroom, minding my own business.”

“Oh, gosh. I have three messages. They must have called during that staff meeting when I turned my phone to vibrate,” Mom said. “Jen, how do I get my messages?”

“Mom, you’re such a dork,” Jen said. She took the BlackBerry, pressed two buttons, and handed it back to Mom. “You’re never going to learn to use that thing.”

Gracie was stung beyond words. After all Gracie had done for Jen, Jen had called her a “social liability.” And Mom hadn’t even yelled at her!

“I’m still going out with Sean tonight,” Jen said. “Candy Bobinski will have to kill me first.”

“Over my dead body!” Mom said.

“Mom! This is Sean we’re talking about. He’s my dream.”

“Oh, God,” Dylan whispered. “Girls think I’m a leper, and the Fridge is your sister’s dream. I hate middle school.”

“I’m not even wasting my time discussing this,” Mom said, looking into Gracie’s empty room. “Alex, Jen, where’s Gracie?”

“No clue,” Alex said. A few rapid beeps came from his Game Boy.

“Don’t know and don’t care, that traitor,” Jen said, and slammed her door.

And Mom, rather than getting worried, glanced at her watch and shrugged. “She’s probably over at Dylan’s. Or maybe they called an extra cross-country practice.” She had just started down the stairs when the door to the garage slammed again.

“C’mon,” Gracie said to Dylan, and they followed.

Dad stood in the kitchen.

“Steven! You’re home!” Mom stopped on the landing and clapped her hands to her head, almost hitting Gracie in the face.

Dad’s face was alive with excitement. “Pamela, you are looking at the new sports announcer for WBRQ Radio. I got it! I got the job!”

“Fantas—” Gracie started to exclaim, before Dylan clapped his hand over her mouth.

“Steven Rawley shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild!”

Mom ran to the bottom of the stairs and threw her arms around Dad’s neck. Gracie and Dylan watched from the landing. It was very weird, knowing that they didn’t even need to try and hide. They could just stand there. Nobody would see them.

“Steven, did you really? You got the job?”

Gracie hadn’t seen Mom and Dad hug in months. She discovered yet another advantage of invisibility: nobody could see her swiping at the tears running down her cheeks.

“Oh, that’s so exciting, I am so thrilled. When do you start?”

“Well, Garrett wanted me to stay and announce an Emory soccer game tomorrow afternoon, but I told him I had to come home and spend the weekend with my family. I’ve got to be in Atlanta first thing Monday morning. Honey, it was uncanny; it was as though velvet words rolled from my tongue. I couldn’t say anything wrong the entire day. Garrett took me to look at some month-to-month studio apartments. Obviously, for a while, I’ll have to commute on weekends.”

“Lots of families do it,” Mom said, patting his chest. “It’ll be a challenge, but we’ll make it.”

“Just until you guys can move down.”

“Move down?” Mom untangled her arms and stepped back. “Steven, I love my job, I love this community. We have friends here. The kids love their school.”

“Now, that’s somewhat of a stretch,” said Dylan, in Gracie’s ear.

“But this is a good job, Pam, with excellent benefits—and the family ought to be together.”

“You haven’t even started it yet. Who knows what might happen.”

“I resent that implication. My whole career, I’ve had no passion for the work. And now I’ve finally landed the job of my dreams.”

“Still, I think we should just wait and see.” Mom turned and headed upstairs. Gracie and Dylan dodged her, wedging themselves into a corner. Gracie stiffened, seeing the guarded look on Mom’s face.

“Uh-oh,” murmured Dylan.

Dad took the stairs two at a time. Dylan and Gracie, who had just crept out of the corner, ducked back into it as Dad raced by, but Gracie was a split second too late and Dad’s hand brushed against her hair. She swallowed a gasp, but Dad just waved his hand around, the way he did when he walked through cobwebs or a swarm of gnats while mowing the yard, and continued up the stairs. “Pam, wait a minute. I know with all that’s happened in the past year or so you’ve lost faith in me. But are you saying you don’t think I should have taken it? I ask you this, when a man doesn’t have a dream, what does he have left?”

Alex and Jen came out into the upstairs hall with expressions of amazement on their faces.

“Steven, I know about dreams,” Mom went on. “Why do you think our daughter is named Gracie? I wanted to be a singer, remember? But we have three kids and a mortgage. So I work in marketing at a bank, and I read
Rolling Stone
every month, and once in a blue moon I go to a karaoke bar and sing my heart out!” Mom shut the bedroom door and locked it.

“Pam!” Dad pounded on the door. “Let me in!”

Gracie could not stop herself. “Mom—”

Dylan clapped his hand over her mouth again, but he needn’t have worried. Only Alex looked vaguely in Gracie’s direction for a confused second, then focused again on Dad pounding on the door.

“I wish we could do something,” Dylan whispered.

Dad whirled around and looked at Alex and Jen, who had both faded back into the doorways of their rooms. “What are
you
whispering about?” He marched past them, then stopped and kissed Jen’s forehead and put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Sorry. I’ll call you guys, okay?” Then he barged past Gracie and Dylan at the top of the landing. At the bottom of the stairs he picked up the suitcase and raincoat he’d dropped by the door.

Alex ran to the landing, his hands gripping the banister. “Dad, where are you going?”

Dad looked up at him, and seemed not to be able to think of what to say. Then he said, “I have a job in Atlanta,” and stalked into the garage, slamming the door. A minute later his car engine roared and the tires squealed as he drove away.

Afterward, there was silence. Alex and Jen, after staring at Mom’s closed door for long seconds, looked at each other.

“If Dad can go to Atlanta, I can go out with Sean tonight,” Jen said to Alex, scrubbing tears from her cheeks. “She can’t stop me.”

“Don’t you even care about Dad leaving?” Alex said, his voice cracking.

“Shut up!” Jen shouted, and slammed her door.

“You shut up!” Alex shouted back, and slammed his.

Gracie stood, invisible, beside Dylan, and looked down the empty hallway, with closed doors in every direction.

“Gracie, are you still here?” Dylan asked.

“Yeah,” she whispered, feeling too scared and sad even to talk. The headache above her left eye throbbed like a lightning bolt trapped in her brain.

“C’mon,” Dylan whispered. “Let’s go sit in your room for a minute and think about what to do next.”

“Fine, I’ll leave my backpack in there.” The fact that Dylan was being so helpful and attentive dulled the pain in her head just a bit.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, taking her hand and patting the back of it lightly.

“We’ll go to your house and get the journal back from your dad,” Gracie said, shifting her backpack and beginning to feel hopeful. “I’ll make us visible again. I can write something in it about my parents making up. And then I’m going to add something about Jen being attacked by giant leeches. I can’t believe she called me a social liability!”

“What I’m wondering is, what is ‘temporary’ in the lexicon of the journal?” Dylan whispered as they headed down the hall. “How old do you think the journal is? We could extrapolate that a temporary case of invisibility could last fifty years or more. Which is rather disconcerting.”

“You’re not kidding.” Gracie went into her room and let her backpack slide to the floor beside her bed.

And muffled a scream.

Sitting on the windowsill outside, peering into her room, was the Cheshire cat. He pressed his orange nose against the screen and showed his very shiny, square human teeth the moment he saw her.

And a good afternoon to both of you.

Apparently he could see Gracie and Dylan just fine. He clawed the screen and gave a very insistent meow.

“Omigod, it’s him!” Gracie hissed. She bumped into Dylan as she backed out of her room. “Run!” She had already pulled Dylan halfway down the hall.

I’m getting a complex. Is it my breath?

“Why? Where are you going?” Dylan skimmed down the stairs behind her, gripping her shoulder.

Mom’s bedroom door opened behind them. “Steven, is that you?”

Gracie hesitated for a second, then felt around until she found Dylan’s elbow and pulled him through the kitchen. They stumbled out the back door onto the patio.

“What about Jen and Alex and your mom?”

“It’s me he wants, not them.”

“Who?”

“The Cheshire cat. Couldn’t you see him?”

“No!”

“You’re kidding!” Gracie pulled Dylan by the hand, through the backyard, past the weeping willow, and along the creek. Gracie could hear Dylan wheezing behind her. They ended up in Dylan’s backyard, beside a small pond with a fountain Dylan’s dad had built.

“Wait, I have to stop,” Dylan said. Gracie sat down on a boulder. She knew Dylan sat on the one next to her, because she heard him panting, and then he coughed a few times, trying to catch his breath. Clear water in the fountain burbled over artfully arranged rocks, and a few lily pads floated on the surface. One white lily bloomed. On the edge, a statue of Saint Francis with his hands spread and animals at his feet stood next to a sitting Buddha. Gracie’s heart began to slow, and she felt calmer listening to the water’s soothing sounds.

“Okay, my family can’t see us. But the Cheshire cat definitely could. He said hello to us.”

“But I couldn’t see him,” Dylan said.

“It’s the cat from Miss Alice’s mailbox.” Gracie’s heart thudded and a sour dryness licked the back of her throat. “Was the Cheshire cat in
Alice in Wonderland
evil?”

“Not evil, just…mischievous. Always appearing and disappearing. Offering advice that didn’t seem to make any sense. Oh, and no one could see him but Alice.”

“Very interesting,” Gracie said. “You okay now?”

Dylan took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

“Do you think the journal is evil?” She looked over her shoulder at a shadowed grove of trees lining the golf fairway and shivered. “Is there someone somewhere laughing at the bad things that are happening, like Jen being attacked in the lunchroom, or Mom and Dad getting in that fight?”

“I’m a secular humanist, Gracie. I don’t believe in evil.”

Gracie wanted to glare at Dylan but couldn’t because they were both invisible. “Dylan, what are you talking about?”

“People are people. Sometimes they’re capable of extreme goodness and sometimes of extreme evil. But in my lexicon there are no spirits and no forces of good and evil. It’s all religious hooey concocted to control the proletariat.”

“Is
lexicon
one of your vocabulary words this week or something?” Gracie said irritably. “And how do you explain a see-through Cheshire cat that can read minds?” She wasn’t sure what she believed.

“I’m going to say a hologram projected from something in your brother’s room? And there’s a possibility that you’re excessively stressed. Maybe you just thought you saw it.”

“So you ran like a chicken escaping the nugget factory to get away from a hologram or a figment of my imagination?” Gracie couldn’t believe Dylan was so smart but could be so dumb when bizarre things were staring him right in the face.

“Well,
you
were running. I never saw the thing. I was just…providing moral support.”

“And you and I are invisible because…?”

“That definitely is a tiny fly in the ointment of my theory.” There was a moment of silence. “Not that I blame you a bit for this invisibility issue, Gracie, but I wish you’d written that we became invisible for fifteen minutes or something a bit more specific,” Dylan said.

Gracie groaned. “As soon as your dad gets home, we’ll get the journal back and I can fix everything.”

The sun dropped lower and a faint breeze stirred the surface of the water in the fountain. Dylan’s hand lay on top of hers.