The Invisible Girl

by Laura Ruby

  He walked cautiously towards the animal, whatever it was, ready to kick. (He wasn’t about to get gnawed on by an overgrown rodent. Nuh-uh.)

  But it wasn’t a rat. It was a cat. He’d never seen one before. Not a real one.

  Bug lowered his fists and stared at the cat. The cat stared back. Then it dropped to the floor and rolled around in what Bug thought was a sort of happy way. A friendly way. A hello, how-are-you-I’m-fine kind of way. It looked like fun, or at least distracting. Since no one was around, since flying was futile and since he’d probably break his knuckles if he kept punching the walls, Bug dropped to the floor too and rolled from one side to the other. Encouraged, the cat rolled back the other way, and soon they were both rolling at the same time and in the same direction, back and forth, back and forth. Bug could have sworn the cat was smiling.

  A girl ran out of the dormitory and into the hallway, almost tripping over Bug and the happily rolling cat. The cat got to its feet and wound itself around the girl’s ankles. After scooping up the cat, she glared down at Bug as if he were…a bug.

  He was embarrassed to have been caught rolling around on the floor, but not too embarrassed to notice how tightly the girl was holding on to the cat. As if she thought it belonged to her. “What’s your problem?” Bug asked her.

  The girl bit her lip. She was that weird girl, the one just called Gurl. The one who watched everyone. The other kids said that since she didn’t look like any particular thing and couldn’t seem to do any particular thing, Mrs Terwiliger chose the obvious name. Bug himself might have tried to be a little bit more creative. Pasty Face would work, he thought. Or Ghost. Spooky! Now that was a good name for her. Her skin was white and her long dishevelled hair was almost the same. Her eyes were grey and almost as big as his own, but you could hardly see them through the curtain of hair. They were like headlights glaring through fog. Even her lips were colourless. Bug wondered if she had any blood at all.

  Gurl clutched the cat close. “She’s not your cat.” Her voice was low and sort of scratchy, as if she didn’t use it much.

  “Sure she is,” said Bug, getting to his feet. “I found her.”

  She tried again. “This is the girls’ dorm.”

  “No, this is the hallway.”

  “This is the entrance to the girls’ dorm. You have to leave.”

  Bug laughed. “You gonna make me?”

  She gripped the cat tighter in her arms. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said.

  “About what?” He looked down at his mangled knuckles, red and scraped from punching the walls. She saw them too and took a step back.

  “You can’t tell anyone about the cat.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because!” the girl blurted. She looked as if she might burst into sloppy tears, which just made Bug think of an even better name for her: Dishwater. Weepy Dishwater Pasty Face.

  “She’s mine,” said Bug. “She chose me.”

  “She did not!”

  “She did too! She was rolling around with me. You saw her.”

  “That’s doesn’t mean she chose you,” said Gurl. She seemed to think a minute and then she said, “Listen, Chicken—”

  But Bug cut her off. “Don’t call me Chicken!” he shouted, punching the wall. “That’s not my name!” Wham! “I have a real name.” Wham!

  The girl took another step away from him. “OK, OK,” she said. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “What do you think?” he said, opening his eyes as wide as he could. “It’s Bug.”

  The cat began to wriggle and struggle in the girl’s arms until she was forced to let it go. “See?” Bug told her. “She wants to come back to me. She plays a mean game of rolling pin.”

  But the cat trotted past both children and strode into the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. Bug followed, the pasty girl on his heels, but the cat ran behind the door and pushed it shut.

  “What’s she doing?” Bug said, pressing an ear to the door.

  “She’s fine,” the girl told him. But she seemed just as confused as Bug was.

  After a few minutes, they heard the toilet flush.

  “Come on!” said Bug. “Cats use toilets?”

  “Of course they do,” the girl said, obviously surprised as well. Soon they heard the sound of water splashing in the sink. “Anyway, you can go now. I’ll catch her when she comes out.”

  “No, how about you can go and I’ll catch her when she comes out,” Bug said. Not only was the cat rare, it was some sort of super-genius, toilet-flushing cat. Maybe she could fetch! Maybe she could balance pineapples on her nose! Maybe she could juggle chipmunks! He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “She’s not yours!” the girl hissed. Suddenly, she got paler—if that was even possible—and her grey eyes went all silvery, like two nickels. Quickly, she pulled the sleeves of her red sweatshirt over her hands.

  The girl was weirder than everyone said she was. “What’s wrong with you?” Bug said.

  “What’s wrong with who?” said a voice. Mrs Terwiliger glided down the hallway. “Chicken! I’ve been looking for you. What are you two doing loitering near the girls’ dormitory?”

  “Nothing,” Gurl and Bug said at once.

  Mrs Terwiliger’s eyes narrowed, staring down at them both. “Gurl, you look pale,” she said, sounding more accusatory than compassionate. (And she enunciated the word “pale” with so much force that she spat.)

  “I’m just tired,” croaked the girl. “I think I need a nap.” She tugged at the sleeve of her sweatshirt again. Was it Bug’s imagination or did the sweatshirt seem to be fading somehow? It had been red, but now it looked pink. And there was a faint pattern in it that he hadn’t noticed before, like the lines in a brick wall. Just like the painted brick of the hallway.

  Mrs Terwiliger’s overwide lips turned down at the corners and Bug wondered if she had noticed the same strange things. But all she said was, “A nap is a wonderful idea. Go.” She waved her bony hand and Gurl practically ran into the girls’ dorm.

  Then Mrs Terwiliger crooked a finger at Bug, the fluorescent lights shining off her tight, waxy skin. “Come, Chicken. Instead of punching the walls, I’d like you to help me move a filing cabinet. There’s a good boy!”

  She turned and floated off. Bug started to follow, peeking inside the open door of the girls’ dormitory as he passed. And that’s when he saw her. Uh, didn’t see her. Because the girl wasn’t there. The room was empty.

  Bug opened his mouth to shout—because what else do you do when a weird, weepy girl ups and totally disappears?—but then he thought better of it. Something extremely funky was going on with Pasty Gurl, but he’d keep his mouth shut.

  That is, he would keep it shut in exchange for a certain toilet-flushing, rolling pin-playing, very rare, genius cat.

  “Chicken!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Move it along!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, a sly grin on his buggy face. “I’m moving it as fast as I can.”

  Chapter 5

  Attack of the Umbrella Man

  GURL HURRIED ALONG THE CITY streets, the cat peeking out from an old backpack. She’d had to wait nearly an hour for the other orphans to fall asleep. (Digger kept untucking the sheets on Persnickety’s bed, just to make her cry, and stealing Tot’s doll, just to make her cry.) When Gurl finally slipped from the window and out of the front gate of Hope House, it was close to eleven.

  The air outside was crisp and fresh, and Gurl welcomed it. Inside the orphanage everything seemed confused and difficult to figure out, so much so that she rarely tried. Outside the orphanage, however, her thoughts were clear. Something was happening to her, something weird and scary and important, and she needed to understand it, control it. For that, she’d go back to the place it first happened: the alley behind Luigi’s. She needed to see if it would happen again.

  Plus, she needed a snack.

  Luigi’s Dumpster yielded a feast. Tangy Italian meat loaf, delicate squash ravioli, fettucini wi
th peas, prosciutto and cream sauce. Gurl offered the meat loaf to the cat, who ate a few bites before turning her attention to the fettucini. Gurl munched on the meat loaf as she watched the cat drag a long noodle from the packet and proceed to shorten it, bite by bite. “You know, I’ve been doing the same thing Mrs Terwiliger does,” Gurl said. “I’ve been calling you ‘cat’, the most obvious thing, even in my own head!” She smacked her forehead to demonstrate the foolishness of this. The cat stopped nibbling on the noodle to stare. “I could call you Laverna, like that flyer said. Hey, Laverna!” The cat blinked, bored. “Maybe not,” said Gurl. “So, instead of calling you what you are, which is easy, or calling you something that describes you, which is boring, why don’t I call you something that you like?” The cat blinked slowly in the way of cats, the way that said they were listening carefully and you had better say something interesting for a change. “Why don’t I call you Noodle?”

  The newly named Noodle uttered a short mew, which Gurl took as an OK, before getting back to her fettucini. “Noodle it is, then,” Gurl said, feeling immensely pleased with herself. She had never named anything before. No wonder Mrs Terwiliger liked it so much, even though she was awful at it.

  Gurl finished the meat loaf and polished off the ravioli in a couple of swift bites, eyeing her own hand as she did. She wondered what triggered it, what exactly made her fade. She could feel the tingling in her skin that afternoon, knew it was happening and was terrified that Mrs Terwiliger or that crazy boy—Bug or Chicken or whatever his name was—would notice. They didn’t seem to, or at least neither of them said anything. But she didn’t like the look on Bug Boy’s face as he turned to follow Mrs Terwiliger. It was a smug, self-satisfied look, the one everyone seemed to give her. A look that said Gurl was doomed, beaten before she even started.

  “No, I’m not,” she said and her words echoed in the dark alley. Noodle’s whiskers twitched in disapproval. “Sorry,” she said, softer now. If she had to choose between being noticed and being ignored, she would take ignored any day. Bad things happened when she was noticed.

  Noodle curled up in Gurl’s lap and Gurl leaned back against the brick, just as she did that first night, and stared up at the sky and the buildings that reached ecstatically towards it. A newspaper wafted on the wind, looking beautiful and fluttering and alive. Gurl felt a thousand things at once. Small and big. Safe and free. Invisible and yet exposed. In her mind, she rifled through her daydreams and found a favourite: a girl stands ankle-deep on a beach with the ocean roaring in front of her. Behind her, a boy shuffles out of a cozy cottage and calls out to the girl: “Mom and Dad say it’s time to come inside now.”

  Noodle shifted in Gurl’s lap and mewled softly. “I know,” said Gurl. “We have to do what we came to do.” She held up her hands. “They look the same, Noodle. Just regular old hands.” With her nose, Noodle nudged her fingers. “Yes, concentrate. That’s a good idea.” Gurl focused all her attention on her hands, willing them to fade. She tried harder, squinting with the effort. After a while, her right wrist seemed to look a bit nubby like the pavement beneath her, but it hadn’t changed colour and nothing else seemed different at all. Her hands dropped to nestle in Noodle’s fur. “This is not going to work,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it both times it happened before. It just happened. Maybe it was because I was scared?”

  Gurl sat in the alley until her butt and the cat fell asleep. Now what should she do? Would she just keep blinking on and off like a light bulb, never knowing when it was going to happen next? But she couldn’t sit here all night. Though it was only September, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and she was getting a little cold. She tapped the cat to wake her and helped her into the backpack. Gurl would have to try again on another night, maybe in another place.

  Gurl slipped the pack on, careful not to jostle Noodle. At least the ravioli was good, she told herself. The trip was not a total waste. She paused at the entrance to the street and looked right and left. It was so late that the city seemed deserted and Gurl felt a flutter of nervousness in her stomach, a flutter that matched the trash dancing in the wind. Even Noodle seemed to sense Gurl’s anxiety and pulled her head inside the bag.

  Nothing to worry about, Gurl thought. You’ll be fine. She straightened the straps of the pack before heading out on to the street. Walking briskly, Gurl glanced behind her every so often. Wan light pooled beneath the street lamps, giving the air a sickly, yellowish hue, while the bulbs themselves issued a low, eerie buzz.

  Plink!

  Gurl whirled around, scanning the street. The trash danced, slick puddles glistened, but no one followed her. This is the city and it never sleeps, she thought. Probably someone kicking a stone down the sidewalk blocks away. She told herself that she was being paranoid. And then she told herself to walk faster. For about the billionth time in her life, she wished she could fly.

  Pssst!

  Again, Gurl turned to face an empty street. But wait: there, in the darkened doorway of a shuttered shop, was someone lurking in the shadows? She stared, straining to see. On the opposite side of the street, a black dome rose from the subway entrance and Gurl’s stomach clenched. But the black dome turned out to be an umbrella, an overcoat-clad person beneath it. Gurl sighed with relief. Some businessman coming home late from the office. Well, if he thought it was OK to be out this late at night, then she was probably fine. She glanced back at the businessman, who held the umbrella so low that she couldn’t see his face. Like Gurl, he didn’t fly, but walked in a swaying lurch that favoured one leg. She felt a little sorry for him, not only unable to fly but also barely limping along. Imagine if the weather were bad. If it were stormy? It would take him for ever to walk a few blocks!

  Gurl frowned. But if it wasn’t stormy, why was he carrying an umbrella?

  She turned and started to walk again, a little faster than before. So the guy was a little strange; it didn’t mean he was dangerous. Maybe he just liked to be prepared.

  From the backpack, a paw batted her ear. “Yeah,” Gurl whispered. Noodle tapped her again. “What is it?” The cat growled low in her throat, reared up from the backpack and nipped Gurl on the earlobe. “Ouch!” Gurl yelped.

  Behind her, a gurgling voice said, “Ouch!”

  Gurl whirled around so fast that Noodle almost fell from the pack. The man, who had been at least a block and a half away, now stood just a few feet from her. His overcoat, which had looked fine from a distance, was torn and stained with food and mud and things that Gurl didn’t want to think about. He wore two different shoes, one black, one brown, both slashed at the top to make room for long horny toenails. The umbrella, which he still held low over his face, was lacy with holes, as if someone had sprayed acid on it.

  The man giggled, lifting the umbrella just a little, so that she could see the fine grey down that covered his cheeks, the teeth that he had filed to points. “Nice kitty,” he whispered. “Nice, nice kitty.”

  And then he said: “Run.”

  Gurl took off, running faster than she ever thought she could, Noodle bouncing in the pack on her back. But she could hear the man-thing panting and giggling, the slap-drag of his worn shoes on the sidewalk as he lurched after her. Frantic now, her heart pounding so hard that she thought it would pop out of her mouth, she feinted left but ran right. She could feel something tug at the backpack and heard Noodle’s hiss. “No!” she screamed and stumbled as the pack was wrenched from her shoulders. Reaching back to grab it, she fell to the ground, hitting her funny bone on the pavement and badly bruising her hip. She flipped to her back and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the giggling toothy thing to attack. She could smell his hot breath, stinking of trash and bones and rot.

  “Nice?” said the thing. She opened her eyes to see him standing over her, cradling the backpack in one arm. He lifted the umbrella and sniffed the air with a nose that seemed unusually long and mobile, like the nose of a rat. And that’s when she felt the tingling in her hands, in her face,
across her whole body, and knew that it had happened again. That the thing couldn’t see her any more.

  Slowly and as quietly as she could, Gurl got to her feet. Noodle poked her face from the top of the pack and mewled. Burbling absently, the thing pulled the flap down, sniffing the air. Then he started to shamble back the way he came. Slapdrag, slap-drag. Gurl tiptoed behind him and gave his overcoat a rough tug. The thing grunted and twirled on its short leg, almost stumbling itself. “Bad,” he said. “Bad, bad, bad.”

  He clutched the cat tighter and Gurl could hear Noodle’s plaintive mews through the canvas.

  “Give me my cat!” said Gurl and she ripped the umbrella out of his hand.

  The thing gasped and covered his red eyes with his forearm, as if against a strong light. Gurl dropped the umbrella and grabbed the backpack, which promptly disappeared in her grip. The thing gibbered and wailed, “Kitty! Kitty! Kitteeeee!” She could still hear him wailing two, three, five blocks away. And then she was standing at the gates of Hope House, chest heaving like a bellows, and she couldn’t hear him any more. But she could see herself again, her own arms and legs plainly visible in the dim light. She hugged Noodle close and the animal’s low purr filled her with joy.

  “It was you,” she whispered in Noodle’s ear. “Every time I changed it was because I was afraid—not for me, but for you.”

  Armed with this realisation, she opened the gate and crossed the yard. She had just slipped around the side of the dormitory when a hot white light blinded her. Someone snatched the backpack and then grabbed the lapel of her jacket.

  “Hello, my dear,” Mrs Terwiliger said, reeling Gurl in close.

  Chapter 6

  Mrs Terwiliger’s Monkeys

  MRS TERWILIGER HAD ONE HAND on the strap of the backpack and one hand on Gurl’s arm in a death grip as she half flew, half dragged Gurl across the yard to the main building. “I don’t know what gets into you children. After all I do for you, to just run off like that! And you can stop struggling,” she said. “I might lose sight of you, but I won’t lose you altogether.” She lifted the backpack so that Gurl could see it. “I won’t lose your little friend either.”