Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free Page A

stranger in your own house. For me, though, I was starting to feel more like a stranger in my own life.
    I found my mom sitting at my grandmother’s old Formica table in the kitchen, a relic from who knows how long ago, reading the news on her tablet—one of the few trinkets of current technology my mom embraced wholeheartedly—as she drank her afternoon cup of coffee. She didn’t look up as I came in, just continued tapping and swiping her finger across the glass, even as she said, “Hello, stranger. How was school today?”
    And I thought,
Act normal. Act normal and things will be normal.
    “It was okay,” I said. “It was, you know, school.” She nodded while she scanned the screen in front of her. But as I went to the fridge to pull out a can of soda, she turned away from whatever online article she’d been reading to look at me more carefully.
    “Did something happen?” she asked. Her green eyes, the same color as mine, the eyes she always said she gave me, narrowed a little, as if she were trying to see something far away. But I was right there in front of her, of course. She tucked a piece of her auburn hair behind one ear then, as if she needed to move it to hear me better.
    I was going to tell her about Jarrod Doyle coming back to Temperance—I was, I really meant to—but something stopped me before I could. A voice, actually. A voice, deep down inside me, suddenly spoke, as if it were traveling up from the bottom of a well, and stopped me cold.
    Don’t tell her,
the voice inside me said, and I shivered as I stood in front of my mom, who sat there blinking, waiting for me to answer. The voice wasn’t my own—I knew that immediately—but somehow it was inside me all the same. And it was a woman’s voice, which made me feel even stranger.
    Don’t tell her,
the voice whispered for a second time, like it knew I might defy its order.
    “No,” I finally said, shaking my head. “I mean, no, nothing out of the ordinary. Why?”
    My mom cocked her head and continued to narrow her eyes, as if she didn’t believe me. “You just seem off a little,” she said. “That’s all.”
    “That’s because I killed a man on the way home,” I said. “Hit and run. Don’t check the grille of the Blue Bomb. It’s a mess right now. I need to wash it.”
    She laughed at that, holding one hand to her chest like her heart might jump out of her throat if she didn’t, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes grew deeper. She and my dad were already fifty-two when I was seventeen. They looked a bit older than most of my classmates’ parents, but I usually forgot about that until I made one of them laugh and their wrinkles showed up.
    “You are so bad,” my mom said, finally waving me and her suspicions away. That was what my mother always said about anyone who could make her laugh at something she felt she shouldn’t, which was one of the few minor talents I possessed. “I don’t know who you get your sense of humor from. Certainly not from me or your dad.”
    “Grandma Bennie,” I said after cracking open my can of pop and swallowing a fizzy gulp.
    “Not possible,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Bennie was serious as the grave, rest her sweet soul.”
    That was what my mother always said about anyone she liked who had passed on. Their souls were always sweet, and she always hoped they were resting peacefully. My grandma had died two years ago, when I was fifteen, and my mom was right: Grandma Bennie hadn’t been much of a stand-up comedian. She’d grown up on a farm out in Cherry Valley, a half hour north of Temperance, and had been forced by her family to quit school at sixteen and go to work in the factory where she met my grandfather, John Lockwood Jr., a man who died long before Toby and I ever came into the world. His photo, grayish-green in color, was preserved in an oval frame on a wall in our living room: a serious-looking guy with a mustache like a handlebar, wearing a button-down