The Invisible Girl

Mrs Terwiliger egg-whisked over to the boy. “Stop that! Since when do we accost people who are walking down the street?” She pursed red lips. “Never, that’s when. Now apologise to the young lady.”

The boy crossed his arms. “She was staring. She was watching me fly.”

“Ya call that flying?” shouted the woman. “I seen better lift on a block of cement!” She got on her flycycle and took off.

“I’ll show you!” the boy yelled. He turned away from the woman and from Mrs Terwiliger. He crouched, then jumped. Gurl winced, seeing that he barely made it a foot off the ground. He tried again, his face twisted with the effort, and got about six inches off the ground. Then four. Then two. It seemed that the angrier he got, the heavier he got. Soon he looked as if someone had glued the bottoms of his sneakers to the pavement. The other kids, whom you might expect to make fun of the boy, said nothing. His failure reminded them of their own and who wanted to think about that?

Mrs Terwiliger put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think that’s about enough for today. We’ll try again tomorrow, Chicken.”

“What did you call me?”

Mrs Terwiliger sighed and brushed a bleached strand of hair from her thick, fake eyelashes. “You can’t fly. Neither can chickens. In ancient times the Indians who used to roam these lands liked to name—”

The boy cut her off. “Nobody calls me ‘Chicken’.” Redcheeked, his light brown hair lank with sweat, the boy shook free of her and shuffled from the tarmac, kicking rocks so hard that they rang against the chain-link fence.

“ZOOT!” Dillydally said. “Boy needs to pop a pill and chill.”

“Right on,” said Coach Bob, who knew that Dillydally was obsessed with old TV shows and his speech was littered with peculiar slang.

“Chicken is having a bad day. We all have bad days, don’t we, Ruckus? Lunchmeat? Dillydally? We have to be understanding at times like these.” Mrs Terwiliger looked thoughtfully at the gate, where the notice the woman had hung flapped in the wind. “Gurl, be a dear and fetch that notice for me, would you?”

“I’ll get it,” cried Ruckus, preparing to leap.

“I asked Gurl to do it, Ruckus.”

“Awww,” said Dillydally. “That’s so establishment.”

Gurl walked over and pulled the notice off the fence. She nearly tripped and fell when she saw what it said:

MISSING CAT!

Very rare! Grey, with white belly. Green eyes. Answers to the name “Laverna” (but only when she feels like it). Owner frantic! Reward offered! No questions asked! Call 555-1919!

“Gurl,” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Bring it over here, dear.”

Gurl reluctantly handed the paper to the matron.

“A missing cat!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “My stars! I haven’t seen a cat in years!” Her eyes scanned the notice. “Nasty animals.”

“They’re not nasty!” said Gurl before she could think about it.

Mrs Terwiliger patted Gurl on the head. “I know you children fancy yourselves worldly and sophisticated, but I daresay I know a bit more about wild animals than you do. Cats are bird-killers.” She tapped a long red fingernail on her teeth. “Though I wouldn’t mind finding this one. I wonder how big this reward is.”

“Can I go to my room? I’m not feeling too well,” said Gurl, doing her best to sound ill. She had to get inside the dorm; she had to check on the cat.

“Oh, of course, Gurl,” Mrs Terwiliger enunciated, her plump lips shining like slugs. “I know how hard these Wing practices must be for you, with your condition. Fly along, then. Oh! I mean, run along.”

Gurl turned and walked slowly to the main building, holding her stomach, sick for real with the thought of having stolen someone else’s pet. Gurl could not bring herself to give the cat back, not yet. For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had made a friend (even if it was a fuzzy, nonhuman friend). Just a little while, she thought. I’ll just keep her a little while. That’s not so bad, is it?

Once she got inside, however, she ran down the hallway to the girls’ dormitory and raced to her bed. “Please be here, please be here,” she whispered, pulling out the old sweater box and opening the flaps.

But she knew what she’d find even before she opened the box because it was what she expected each and every day.

Nothing.

Chapter 4 Bugged

THE BOY BOUNCED DOWN THE corridor, punching the wall every few feet or so. Feline Face. Bug Eye. Lizard Man. Any of those names would have been all right with him; he knew his eyes were so big and far apart they were practically on the sides of his head. So, fine. Bug. Bugs were cool. Bugs could fly. Some, like praying mantises, even had those sweet backward scythes for arms. He wondered why grown-ups had operations to have their eyebrows pasted up on their foreheads or fat vacuumed from their butts but never got anything practical. Like antennae. Or fangs. Or scythes for arms. The boy would have enjoyed having scythes for arms because then he could slash through the fence around Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless and fly away for ever. Instead, he was stuck here with Mrs Terwiliger. Mrs Terwiliger looked like a flying Pez sweet dispenser.

He stopped and jumped as high as he could, but his feet were so heavy. It was like he had been chained to the ground. Wham! He punched the wall so hard he bloodied his knuckles and had to stuff his fist in his mouth.

She named him Chicken. Chicken! Chickens couldn’t fly. Why chickens were even considered birds was a mystery. They were more like walking cushions or fat clucking possums or something.

He tried to jump again, his feet sticking to the floor. Wham! Wham! Wham! He didn’t cry out at the pain in his hands; he welcomed it. It kept his mind off everything else. This stupid place. His stupid new name. The stupid food, worse than monkey chow. The fact that he could hardly get his feet off the ground when in his mind and in his dreams, he could soar.

If only he knew who he was. Who he really was. The other kids said that no one ever remembered much about who they were when they came to Hope House, not even their own names, that your memories faded as soon as you crossed the threshold. Bug did remember crossing the threshold, sitting in Mrs Terwiliger’s office and being snarky when she asked for his name: “Mary Poppins! Harry Potter! Stanley Yelnats!” He also remembered hearing music—maracas or cymbals or something—and whispering in someone’s ear. But whispering in whose ear? And whispering what? His real name? His address? His favourite colour? He just didn’t know. But it was better that way, the other kids told him. Otherwise, you’d spend all day crying over the fact that your parents died or your Aunt Lucy gave you away like a pet parrot who talks too much and poops all over the floor. And who’d want to know that? Better to forget. Better to jump up and down like an idiot in the playground at Hope House, wishing that one day you’d make it more than a couple of feet.

“Meeow.”

Bug—if he had to have a name, that was the one he wanted, thank you very much—swung around, bloody fists high. Something small and fuzzy was sitting at the end of the hallway, near the entrance to the girls’ dormitory. What the heck was that, he thought. A rat? City rats could grow big, he knew. The subways were overrun with them. Hairy, dog-sized things with long yellow teeth, all the better to gnaw you with, my dear.

He walked cautiously towards the animal, whatever it was, ready to kick. (He wasn’t about to get gnawed on by an overgrown rodent. Nuh-uh.)

But it wasn’t a rat. It was a cat. He’d never seen one before. Not a real one.

Bug lowered his fists and stared at the cat. The cat stared back. Then it dropped to the floor and rolled around in what Bug thought was a sort of happy way. A friendly way. A hello, how-are-you-I’m-fine kind of way. It looked like fun, or at least distracting. Since no one was around, since flying was futile and since he’d probably break his knuckles if he kept punching the walls, Bug dropped to the floor too and rolled from one side to the other. Encouraged, the cat rolled back the other way, and soon they were both rolling at the same time and in the same direction, back and forth, back and forth. Bug could have sworn the cat was smiling.

A girl ran out of the dormitory and into the hallway, almost tripping over Bug and the happily rolling cat. The cat got to its feet and wound itself around the girl’s ankles. After scooping up the cat, she glared down at Bug as if he were…a bug.

He was embarrassed to have been caught rolling around on the floor, but not too embarrassed to notice how tightly the girl was holding on to the cat. As if she thought it belonged to her. “What’s your problem?” Bug asked her.

The girl bit her lip. She was that weird girl, the one just called Gurl. The one who watched everyone. The other kids said that since she didn’t look like any particular thing and couldn’t seem to do any particular thing, Mrs Terwiliger chose the obvious name. Bug himself might have tried to be a little bit more creative. Pasty Face would work, he thought. Or Ghost. Spooky! Now that was a good name for her. Her skin was white and her long dishevelled hair was almost the same. Her eyes were grey and almost as big as his own, but you could hardly see them through the curtain of hair. They were like headlights glaring through fog. Even her lips were colourless. Bug wondered if she had any blood at all.

Gurl clutched the cat close. “She’s not your cat.” Her voice was low and sort of scratchy, as if she didn’t use it much.

“Sure she is,” said Bug, getting to his feet. “I found her.”

She tried again. “This is the girls’ dorm.”

“No, this is the hallway.”

“This is the entrance to the girls’ dorm. You have to leave.”

Bug laughed. “You gonna make me?”

She gripped the cat tighter in her arms. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said.

“About what?” He looked down at his mangled knuckles, red and scraped from punching the walls. She saw them too and took a step back.

“You can’t tell anyone about the cat.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” the girl blurted. She looked as if she might burst into sloppy tears, which just made Bug think of an even better name for her: Dishwater. Weepy Dishwater Pasty Face.

“She’s mine,” said Bug. “She chose me.”

“She did not!”

“She did too! She was rolling around with me. You saw her.”

“That’s doesn’t mean she chose you,” said Gurl. She seemed to think a minute and then she said, “Listen, Chicken—”

But Bug cut her off. “Don’t call me Chicken!” he shouted, punching the wall. “That’s not my name!” Wham! “I have a real name.” Wham!

The girl took another step away from him. “OK, OK,” she said. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

“What do you think?” he said, opening his eyes as wide as he could. “It’s Bug.”

The cat began to wriggle and struggle in the girl’s arms until she was forced to let it go. “See?” Bug told her. “She wants to come back to me. She plays a mean game of rolling pin.”

But the cat trotted past both children and strode into the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. Bug followed, the pasty girl on his heels, but the cat ran behind the door and pushed it shut.

“What’s she doing?” Bug said, pressing an ear to the door.

“She’s fine,” the girl told him. But she seemed just as confused as Bug was.

After a few minutes, they heard the toilet flush.

“Come on!” said Bug. “Cats use toilets?”

“Of course they do,” the girl said, obviously surprised as well. Soon they heard the sound of water splashing in the sink. “Anyway, you can go now. I’ll catch her when she comes out.”

“No, how about you can go and I’ll catch her when she comes out,” Bug said. Not only was the cat rare, it was some sort of super-genius, toilet-flushing cat. Maybe she could fetch! Maybe she could balance pineapples on her nose! Maybe she could juggle chipmunks! He wasn’t going anywhere.

“She’s not yours!” the girl hissed. Suddenly, she got paler—if that was even possible—and her grey eyes went all silvery, like two nickels. Quickly, she pulled the sleeves of her red sweatshirt over her hands.

The girl was weirder than everyone said she was. “What’s wrong with you?” Bug said.

“What’s wrong with who?” said a voice. Mrs Terwiliger glided down the hallway. “Chicken! I’ve been looking for you. What are you two doing loitering near the girls’ dormitory?”

“Nothing,” Gurl and Bug said at once.

Mrs Terwiliger’s eyes narrowed, staring down at them both. “Gurl, you look pale,” she said, sounding more accusatory than compassionate. (And she enunciated the word “pale” with so much force that she spat.)

“I’m just tired,” croaked the girl. “I think I need a nap.” She tugged at the sleeve of her sweatshirt again. Was it Bug’s imagination or did the sweatshirt seem to be fading somehow? It had been red, but now it looked pink. And there was a faint pattern in it that he hadn’t noticed before, like the lines in a brick wall. Just like the painted brick of the hallway.

Mrs Terwiliger’s overwide lips turned down at the corners and Bug wondered if she had noticed the same strange things. But all she said was, “A nap is a wonderful idea. Go.” She waved her bony hand and Gurl practically ran into the girls’ dorm.

Then Mrs Terwiliger crooked a finger at Bug, the fluorescent lights shining off her tight, waxy skin. “Come, Chicken. Instead of punching the walls, I’d like you to help me move a filing cabinet. There’s a good boy!”

She turned and floated off. Bug started to follow, peeking inside the open door of the girls’ dormitory as he passed. And that’s when he saw her. Uh, didn’t see her. Because the girl wasn’t there. The room was empty.

Bug opened his mouth to shout—because what else do you do when a weird, weepy girl ups and totally disappears?—but then he thought better of it. Something extremely funky was going on with Pasty Gurl, but he’d keep his mouth shut.

That is, he would keep it shut in exchange for a certain toilet-flushing, rolling pin-playing, very rare, genius cat.

“Chicken!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Move it along!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a sly grin on his buggy face. “I’m moving it as fast as I can.”

Chapter 5 Attack of the Umbrella Man

GURL HURRIED ALONG THE CITY streets, the cat peeking out from an old backpack. She’d had to wait nearly an hour for the other orphans to fall asleep. (Digger kept untucking the sheets on Persnickety’s bed, just to make her cry, and stealing Tot’s doll, just to make her cry.) When Gurl finally slipped from the window and out of the front gate of Hope House, it was close to eleven.

The air outside was crisp and fresh, and Gurl welcomed it. Inside the orphanage everything seemed confused and difficult to figure out, so much so that she rarely tried. Outside the orphanage, however, her thoughts were clear. Something was happening to her, something weird and scary and important, and she needed to understand it, control it. For that, she’d go back to the place it first happened: the alley behind Luigi’s. She needed to see if it would happen again.

Plus, she needed a snack.

Luigi’s Dumpster yielded a feast. Tangy Italian meat loaf, delicate squash ravioli, fettucini with peas, prosciutto and cream sauce. Gurl offered the meat loaf to the cat, who ate a few bites before turning her attention to the fettucini. Gurl munched on the meat loaf as she watched the cat drag a long noodle from the packet and proceed to shorten it, bite by bite. “You know, I’ve been doing the same thing Mrs Terwiliger does,” Gurl said. “I’ve been calling you ‘cat’, the most obvious thing, even in my own head!” She smacked her forehead to demonstrate the foolishness of this. The cat stopped nibbling on the noodle to stare. “I could call you Laverna, like that flyer said. Hey, Laverna!” The cat blinked, bored. “Maybe not,” said Gurl. “So, instead of calling you what you are, which is easy, or calling you something that describes you, which is boring, why don’t I call you something that you like?” The cat blinked slowly in the way of cats, the way that said they were listening carefully and you had better say something interesting for a change. “Why don’t I call you Noodle?”

The newly named Noodle uttered a short mew, which Gurl took as an OK, before getting back to her fettucini. “Noodle it is, then,” Gurl said, feeling immensely pleased with herself. She had never named anything before. No wonder Mrs Terwiliger liked it so much, even though she was awful at it.

Gurl finished the meat loaf and polished off the ravioli in a couple of swift bites, eyeing her own hand as she did. She wondered what triggered it, what exactly made her fade. She could feel the tingling in her skin that afternoon, knew it was happening and was terrified that Mrs Terwiliger or that crazy boy—Bug or Chicken or whatever his name was—would notice. They didn’t seem to, or at least neither of them said anything. But she didn’t like the look on Bug Boy’s face as he turned to follow Mrs Terwiliger. It was a smug, self-satisfied look, the one everyone seemed to give her. A look that said Gurl was doomed, beaten before she even started.

“No, I’m not,” she said and her words echoed in the dark alley. Noodle’s whiskers twitched in disapproval. “Sorry,” she said, softer now. If she had to choose between being noticed and being ignored, she would take ignored any day. Bad things happened when she was noticed.

Noodle curled up in Gurl’s lap and Gurl leaned back against the brick, just as she did that first night, and stared up at the sky and the buildings that reached ecstatically towards it. A newspaper wafted on the wind, looking beautiful and fluttering and alive. Gurl felt a thousand things at once. Small and big. Safe and free. Invisible and yet exposed. In her mind, she rifled through her daydreams and found a favourite: a girl stands ankle-deep on a beach with the ocean roaring in front of her. Behind her, a boy shuffles out of a cozy cottage and calls out to the girl: “Mom and Dad say it’s time to come inside now.”

Noodle shifted in Gurl’s lap and mewled softly. “I know,” said Gurl. “We have to do what we came to do.” She held up her hands. “They look the same, Noodle. Just regular old hands.” With her nose, Noodle nudged her fingers. “Yes, concentrate. That’s a good idea.” Gurl focused all her attention on her hands, willing them to fade. She tried harder, squinting with the effort. After a while, her right wrist seemed to look a bit nubby like the pavement beneath her, but it hadn’t changed colour and nothing else seemed different at all. Her hands dropped to nestle in Noodle’s fur. “This is not going to work,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it both times it happened before. It just happened. Maybe it was because I was scared?”

Gurl sat in the alley until her butt and the cat fell asleep. Now what should she do? Would she just keep blinking on and off like a light bulb, never knowing when it was going to happen next? But she couldn’t sit here all night. Though it was only September, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and she was getting a little cold. She tapped the cat to wake her and helped her into the backpack. Gurl would have to try again on another night, maybe in another place.

Gurl slipped the pack on, careful not to jostle Noodle. At least the ravioli was good, she told herself. The trip was not a total waste. She paused at the entrance to the street and looked right and left. It was so late that the city seemed deserted and Gurl felt a flutter of nervousness in her stomach, a flutter that matched the trash dancing in the wind. Even Noodle seemed to sense Gurl’s anxiety and pulled her head inside the bag.

Nothing to worry about, Gurl thought. You’ll be fine. She straightened the straps of the pack before heading out on to the street. Walking briskly, Gurl glanced behind her every so often. Wan light pooled beneath the street lamps, giving the air a sickly, yellowish hue, while the bulbs themselves issued a low, eerie buzz.

Plink!

Gurl whirled around, scanning the street. The trash danced, slick puddles glistened, but no one followed her. This is the city and it never sleeps, she thought. Probably someone kicking a stone down the sidewalk blocks away. She told herself that she was being paranoid. And then she told herself to walk faster. For about the billionth time in her life, she wished she could fly.

Pssst!

Again, Gurl turned to face an empty street. But wait: there, in the darkened doorway of a shuttered shop, was someone lurking in the shadows? She stared, straining to see. On the opposite side of the street, a black dome rose from the subway entrance and Gurl’s stomach clenched. But the black dome turned out to be an umbrella, an overcoat-clad person beneath it. Gurl sighed with relief. Some businessman coming home late from the office. Well, if he thought it was OK to be out this late at night, then she was probably fine. She glanced back at the businessman, who held the umbrella so low that she couldn’t see his face. Like Gurl, he didn’t fly, but walked in a swaying lurch that favoured one leg. She felt a little sorry for him, not only unable to fly but also barely limping along. Imagine if the weather were bad. If it were stormy? It would take him for ever to walk a few blocks!

Gurl frowned. But if it wasn’t stormy, why was he carrying an umbrella?

She turned and started to walk again, a little faster than before. So the guy was a little strange; it didn’t mean he was dangerous. Maybe he just liked to be prepared.

From the backpack, a paw batted her ear. “Yeah,” Gurl whispered. Noodle tapped her again. “What is it?” The cat growled low in her throat, reared up from the backpack and nipped Gurl on the earlobe. “Ouch!” Gurl yelped.

Behind her, a gurgling voice said, “Ouch!”

Gurl whirled around so fast that Noodle almost fell from the pack. The man, who had been at least a block and a half away, now stood just a few feet from her. His overcoat, which had looked fine from a distance, was torn and stained with food and mud and things that Gurl didn’t want to think about. He wore two different shoes, one black, one brown, both slashed at the top to make room for long horny toenails. The umbrella, which he still held low over his face, was lacy with holes, as if someone had sprayed acid on it.

The man giggled, lifting the umbrella just a little, so that she could see the fine grey down that covered his cheeks, the teeth that he had filed to points. “Nice kitty,” he whispered. “Nice, nice kitty.”

And then he said: “Run.”

Gurl took off, running faster than she ever thought she could, Noodle bouncing in the pack on her back. But she could hear the man-thing panting and giggling, the slap-drag of his worn shoes on the sidewalk as he lurched after her. Frantic now, her heart pounding so hard that she thought it would pop out of her mouth, she feinted left but ran right. She could feel something tug at the backpack and heard Noodle’s hiss. “No!” she screamed and stumbled as the pack was wrenched from her shoulders. Reaching back to grab it, she fell to the ground, hitting her funny bone on the pavement and badly bruising her hip. She flipped to her back and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the giggling toothy thing to attack. She could smell his hot breath, stinking of trash and bones and rot.

“Nice?” said the thing. She opened her eyes to see him standing over her, cradling the backpack in one arm. He lifted the umbrella and sniffed the air with a nose that seemed unusually long and mobile, like the nose of a rat. And that’s when she felt the tingling in her hands, in her face, across her whole body, and knew that it had happened again. That the thing couldn’t see her any more.

Slowly and as quietly as she could, Gurl got to her feet. Noodle poked her face from the top of the pack and mewled. Burbling absently, the thing pulled the flap down, sniffing the air. Then he started to shamble back the way he came. Slapdrag, slap-drag. Gurl tiptoed behind him and gave his overcoat a rough tug. The thing grunted and twirled on its short leg, almost stumbling itself. “Bad,” he said. “Bad, bad, bad.”