The Invisibles Read Online Free Page B

gentleness.
    The detective tried to disguise his pity with a perplexed smile. He looked at me as if reading my thoughts, then reached for aRolodex. “I can direct you to someone who’s good at talking about this sort of thing.”
    My father flinched away from these words, said no, thank you.
    Early that winter my father told me not to expect her to come home. I stopped asking him about it but continued to watch milk cartons and mail flyers for her face. I’d just begun kindergarten and wanted to tell her she had been right all along. I was an invisible. My new teacher couldn’t bring herself to remember my name. Other children never looked at me and seemed to avoid the spaces where I played at recess. I was stuck wearing my name written on a construction paper label strung around my neck with yarn, long after the teacher had memorized my classmates. For weeks I felt like a unit of space in which a sign floated: “Cynthia invisible here.”
    My mother would have laughed. But by then it was just me and my noninvisible father and the noninvisible woman who had begun to hang around, in a restored farmhouse out in the cornfields that ran to forgettable stretches outside the city.
    After the rink let us out with a drove of children to waiting parents, Brianna and Randall left in his car to go screw in their latest secluded spot. With a mild case of virgin’s blues, I drove off alone, with a scentless, yellow, leaf-shaped air freshener swinging above my head. My drive toured the well-lighted streets of suburbs, and no headlights followed long enough to make me more than a little cold. For a few years now my fear of the dark had been completely relocated to a fear of people and especially to the signs of them in the dark, like the headlights of solitary cars and the sound of footsteps on a sidewalk. The full, rustling fields of corn I drove among on the road to my township had long been reassuring company. Though I’d seen enough horror films to envision thetravel van pulling out of the vegetables, I’d ceased to think much about it.
    Before leaving the rink I’d checked the old parking lot and seen only weeds bent to the gravel by new autumn winds. I’d asked the police officer who oversaw Great Skate’s traffic if the van had been towed. A tall, sour-mouthed man with a crab-red face, he considered me as if I’d claimed to have seen a UFO .
    â€œWhat van?” he said. “I’ve been here all night, and there hasn’t been any van. Believe me, I would have noticed a van like that.”
    â€œNever mind,” I told him. “I must have it mixed up with a creepy van in another abandoned parking lot.”
    The memory of this snappy comeback kept me happy while I drank a chocolate malt in a booth beside a tinted diner window and watched drunk older kids come blaring in to devour large sandwiches and plates of chili cheese fries. They spilled food on their faces, shirts, and arms while getting most of it into their mouths. It was disappointing that the boy my imagination blessed with charm and intelligence stood up to belch with greater force than he could muster sitting down. Completely unseen, I made my careful exit through a fray of shouting and reckless gestures. It was after three by then, and I felt snug in my sleepiness and invisibility.
    At home the lights were on, the ceiling fans spinning, but the rooms were empty, the doors that should have been closed, open. The air felt charged with a panic that made me run around the ground level, looking for someone.
    On the patio I found my stepmother, an impressive work of self-made beauty with big pale hair, smoking in her black robe. She stood beneath the moon and gazed out over a mile of dark, shining corn. She’d been asleep and since getting up had poured herself a glass of wine. When I came up to the rail near her, she gasped and took a step back.
    â€œJust me,” I said. “No psycho