Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free

little afterward. I shook my head, as if someone had punched me hard enough to rattle me, and realized that I wasn’t breathing. Maybe I hadn’t been for a minute, because I was starting to gasp like a fish out of water, feeling like I might drown out there in the open air.
    I calmed myself down, though, and after I caught my breath, I turned to stare at my house through the grimy driver’s-side window. This was the only place I’d ever lived in all my seventeen years, but right then for some reason it felt like I’d just crash-landed on another planet.
    The curtains had been pulled tight in all the windows, blocking out the late-autumn light, and the weather vane up on the roof squealed a little as a breeze pushed it a few inches to the west. And in the next moment, as I sat there in my car halfway down the drive, an awful idea came to me:
Something is wrong with me,
I told myself. I could feel it. I could feel something inside me indicate that, the same way the weather vane rooster blew westward with the wind.
    We had a two-story farmhouse, goldenrod-colored, with a rusted tin roof that looked like someone had sprinkled it with cinnamon. A gingerbread house, my mom sometimes called it, usually over holiday breaks, when she’d be baking a pie or making a turkey dinner and she’d get nostalgic and start telling stories about how she and my dad met, or what life was like back when she was a little girl. She always said she could remember seeing the Lockwood farm on the bus ride home when she was in grade school. “I think I fell in love with this house before I ever fell in love with your father,” she once told me, and my dad had interrupted to say it was her plan all along to marry him and steal the family fortune. “Family fortune,” my mother had snorted. “Is that what you call your mother’s debts we’re still paying off ?”
    To the right of the house was the barn, where the cattle gathered, waiting for the afternoon grain I’d eventually bring. It was an old barn, built from some kind of wood that hadn’t been painted in so many years it had gone gray as driftwood, worn down by the waves of time and neglect. Behind the barn was the pasture, and behind the pasture were the woods that led down into Marrow’s Ravine, where my dad and brother hunted during deer season. The golden stubble of a cornfield, already harvested this late in the fall, lay off to the right of the farm, and to the left, Sugar Creek flowed, a trickle dark as tea, separating the house from the old orchard, where the Living Death Tree loomed in the distance like a scarecrow.
    “This is my home,” I whispered within the quiet of my car, as if I needed to remind myself of something so ordinary. My voice shook as I repeated those words. “This is my home, and I know it,” I said.
    It felt like there were more words to say, words that were meaningful, words that would somehow set everything back in place. But what those words were, I couldn’t recall. And I didn’t even know why I was saying any of this out loud in the first place.
    “Snap out of it, Lockwood,” I told myself. “You’re losing it.”
    Or had I already lost it, whatever
it
was? Because something was off. It was the kind of feeling you get when something is wrong, but the wrongness is so subtle you can’t pick out the flaw. A picture-frame-hanging-askew kind of feeling. A hairline-fracture-in-a-window-that-looks-perfectly-fine kind of feeling. I’d lost something, but I didn’t know what. And I could only sense that because Jarrod Doyle had appeared out of nowhere and told me things about myself I couldn’t remember. Pieces of me, it seemed, were missing.
    I finally got myself together and drove the rest of the way up the drive. Then I made myself leave the car and went inside through the back door. Kicking off my shoes in the mudroom a second later, I suddenly understood the feeling Jarrod had mentioned earlier. How sometimes you could be made to feel like a