The Invisibles Read Online Free

man in line at the bank, a girl crying by a painting in the museum. The library crawling with them.
    â€œRemember, Cynthia, you’re an invisible, too,” she said. “Just like me. We’re in it together. Forever.”
    That summer I collected her sayings and built a personality with them. I mastered my bicycle and braved the creeks and abandoned barns that lay within an hour’s journey of home, never doubtingthat if a bad guy appeared, he wouldn’t see me and, if he happened to be an invisible, that I moved in the aura of my all-knowing mother. Then, one August day when the corn crop was blowing, giving glimpses of sweet ears ripe for the picking, she disappeared from our house.
    Over a decade after she vanished, a strange van appeared in the old parking lot at the Great Skate Arena. At once I knew an invisible drove the thing. Around the corner, in the main lot, honking cars inched forward. The grouchy cop waved his ticket book at drivers seeking a place to release excited children. No one had noticed this van, faded maroon with a custom heart-shaped bubble window on the passenger side near the back. Scabs of rust clung to the lower body, over new tires. It wasn’t the sort of car you liked to see outside a skating rink or anyplace where the typical patron was twelve years old.
    â€œFirst of all it should go without saying that a guy drives that thing. But mainly I wonder how he it got into the lot.” Randall was our tall, brainy boy. He lived for logical problems like this one; the old parking lot where we smoked was separated from the new parking lot by a row of massive iron blocks with thick cable handles that only a crane could have lifted. The back of the old parking lot was closed in by a tangle of vines and meager trees. Beyond this dark thicket, from below, came the sounds of the highway.
    â€œHe must have come from down there.” Brianna squinted at the wall of vegetation. I’d put the purplish paint around her eyes. “There must be a bare patch we can’t see.”
    â€œI would bet that a pervert drives that baby,” Randall observed of the van.
    â€œVans are too obvious for pervs these days.” Brianna took a stance in her vintage black and white stockings. She was little, hot,and adept at finding killer vintage clothes in thrift stores. “He’s probably some poor escapee from the psycho ward.”
    They turned to me to decide, these two kids who didn’t know what invisibles were, even though they were in the club. They bore the symptoms of invisibles in denial, dying their hair black, punching steel through their lips and nostrils, wearing shirts that pictured corpses. They hung out with me. We hung out at a skating rink with junior high schoolers. No one ever caught us smoking. The list went on. Rather than try to explain our metaphysical plight — I’d never been comfortable talking about my mother — I shrugged, faked a smile, and ignored the sickening presence I sensed in the van’s heart-shaped window. The mind I detected in that window was that of an all-knowing bully waiting for you to contradict him. “I don’t know, but he’s probably sleeping in there, and either way we don’t want to wake him up. Can we go inside now and skate?”
    I puffed at my cigarette between breaths, trying to hurry things along, confident that under the dome of the skating rink I’d shake my fear that a knife-swinging but otherwise unremarkable oddball lurked behind one of the dormant air-conditioning units lined up behind the skating rink.
    Randall absentmindedly played with his recent nose piercing. “Look at that creepy window. If he’s in there he’s probably watching us right now.”
    Through the dusty window we could see the surface of an opaque space. In our own ways we acknowledged the disadvantage of the unknowing souls we’d spied on from behind unlighted glass. Our spines all twitched a