Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? Read Online Free Page A

anything else, I touched one of the mannequins to double-check it didn’t turn invisible. It didn’t. Good. It was definitely just me and my clothes that disappeared. OK, time to have some fun.
    “Watch this,” I whispered to Izzy.
    I raised the female mannequin’s arm up to her mouth before letting out a huge sneeze.
    A woman walking past with a stroller nearly jumped out of her skin. A man in a suit hurrying by said, “Bless you,” without breaking his stride. A couple of young girls just stared. Izzy guffawed.
    I looked around the store. “I’ve got another one,” I said. We headed over to the sportswear department and I took my place behind a female mannequin wearing a tennis outfit.
    A few minutes later, two bored-looking teenage boys were heading toward me, both wearing low-slung jeans and baggy T-shirts. One of them was lanky and tall; the other was shorter, with an acne-covered face and a backward baseball cap.
    I cleared my throat and put on a super girlie voice.
    “Hey, guys, does my butt look big in this?” I asked.
    The two boys stared at the mannequin. The tall one turned bright red and clammed up.
    The one in the cap tried to speak: “Umm, do you, does your, did you . . . ?” he said.
    “I said, does my butt look big in this?” I repeated. This time I even moved the mannequin’s arm so she was pointing at her little tennis skirt.
    The tall boy turned to his friend. “The . . . the . . .” he said, pointing at the mannequin.
    “Yeah,” his friend replied.
    They both stared, openmouthed, at the mannequin for another couple of moments. Then, at the same time, they both suddenly remembered they were supposed to be cool and pulled themselves together.
    “Obviously a marketing stunt,” the cap boy said.
    “Didn’t fool me for a second,” the other one agreed as they turned around and walked away.
    “We should get out of here,” I whispered to Izzy. “Or someone’s going to catch us.”
    We made our way out of the store and ran around the corner into a deserted alleyway, where I turned myself visible again.
    Izzy had tears streaming from her eyes. “That was so funny!” she said. “Did you see those boys actually check out the mannequin’s butt?” She burst out laughing all over again. “This is too much fun.”
    “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go to the town center and see what else we can do.”
    Over the next hour, I discovered I had a particular affinity with pets. One little boy had quite a lengthy conversation with his dog, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to discuss the latest computer games with a Yorkshire terrier.
    My favorite moment was when I knelt next to a German shepherd, and, in a deep voice, politely asked when the next bus was due. Then all twenty people waiting at the bus stop turned, as one, to stare at the dog. It was the way he stared back at them that cracked me up. His expression seemed to say, “Yes, I did ask about bus times. You have a problem with that?”
    Unfortunately, the dog didn’t actually say that, because I was laughing too much to make him say anything at that point.
    I even managed to do something slightly superhero-y.
    We were cutting through Bertram’s to get back to the town center. As we passed the jewelry department, I spotted a little girl checking out a stand of watches while her mom talked to a shop assistant.
    “Mommy, I like this one!” the girl said, holding up a watch with a hefty price tag.
    Her mom didn’t even look up. “Annabelle, leave the watches alone! If you break one of those, you’ll be paying for it in allowance for the next ten years,” she said, and went back to her conversation.
    I watched Annabelle put the watch back in its box. The only trouble was, she didn’t put it in correctly, and as she raised her hand to hook it back on the stand, the watch slipped out of the box.
    Without stopping to think, I bent down and caught the watch, a millisecond before it would have smashed to pieces on