All The Lonely People

by David Owen

  She wanted to show Dad what had happened. She wanted him to see and tell her that she would be okay. There had to be a not-crazy way to do it. Maybe she could wrap herself in a hooded cape, hurl a smoke bomb into the room, and then unveil herself – ta da! She had the cape (for cosplay reasons) but she was fresh out of smoke bombs.

  ‘Have a good day,’ said Dad, before he headed downstairs.

  Kat knew the real reason she couldn’t show him. It was one thing to be invisible to the world. Her dad not seeing her would be to lose a fundamental part of her existence.

  Once he had left, she went downstairs and stood behind the front door, trying to psyche herself up.

  In the Doctor Backwash episode ‘The QWOP Factory’, Vladimir is stung by an escaped genetically modified hornet and his hands swell to three times their normal size. The only way to fix it is to get back to his lab, except he can’t drive and his wallet is stuck in the hornet hive (long story). So he faces up to the ridicule he knows he’s going to face, and sets off across campus.

  ‘For science,’ Kat said, and opened the door.

  There was no sign of her in the canteen or the playground, in any of the classrooms where they sometimes played lunchtime games. The last place Wesley checked was the library, poking his head into all the nooks and crannies created by the shelves arranged around the computer tables. The MacBook was burning a hole in his bag, making him feel more like a thief with every passing second.

  He found Mutya, a girl from their year, in the corner reading a book with sperm on the cover.

  ‘Do you have any idea where Kat Waldgrave hangs out?’ Wesley asked, probably the first time he had ever spoken to her.

  Her face went blank. ‘No idea who you’re talking about.’

  Wesley found a quiet corner and opened the MacBook to watch a TrumourPixel video, a tirade about the evils of loot boxes in video games. It almost felt like Kat had disappeared from the face of the planet.

  A calendar notification popped in the corner of the screen. He fumbled the touchpad and opened it. The Lonely People. Drama rehearsal room. 3.45pm. There was no way of seeing when the entry was made, but it was the closest he had to a lead. Maybe Kat was planning to show up at the bell. If he went to the meeting himself she would know he had used her MacBook, but he couldn’t see any other choice.

  Wesley squinted at the calendar appointment. Whenever he turned his head he was sure he saw additional text there, filling up the Notes field, but whenever he looked square on it was gone.

  He needed to get to the bottom of this once and for all.

  Kat arrived at school just as the bell signalled the end of lunch. By the time she made it inside the corridors were quiet, most people already in registration. As Kat reached the second floor a couple of younger girls scurried past, and she found herself shrinking away, ashamed. The photos everybody had seen of her weren’t real, but she still felt – ironically – as if she had been exposed.

  Anxiety tightened inside her chest. If she was going to face this down she needed to be brave. She forced herself to keep moving, because she knew stopping meant she would turn back.

  Her registration room had two rows of desks, and everybody was already seated by the time Kat pushed open the door. A few glanced up at the movement, and then returned to staring into space. Mr Delaney insisted on five minutes of torturous silence before he took the register. Kat inhaled, determined to draw any loose pieces of herself back to the whole, and began the walk to her seat towards the rear of the room.

  Usually Mr Delaney made a show of chastising anybody for being late. Today he stayed focused on whatever he was reading, and nobody looked up at her as she passed. She had expected to find them all still talking about the photograph that had been sent around on her website the day before – the fallout of anything like that usually lasted for days – but it was as if it had never happened.

  It was fairly normal for people to ignore her at school, so she needed to push a little to test the boundaries of the fade. Before she reached her seat, Kat stopped at the desk of a boy engaged in drawing a painstakingly detailed penis in the margins of his homework, and knocked the exercise book to the floor.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, glaring up at her. Before they could settle his eyes grew unfocused and his gaze slipped away. He bent to retrieve his artwork without giving her a second glance.

  Some of the desks were old, their surfaces scratched and scrawled with graffiti, and when Kat reached her place she didn’t sit, instead laying her hands flat on the tabletop to read the tags and love notes through her skin. Mutya, her desk-mate, was engrossed in her phone hidden behind a stack of books.

  ‘Hey,’ said Kat, emboldened by desperation.

  Mutya didn’t look up. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I said hey.’

  It was like being teased by so-called friends – Do you hear something? I could swear I heard something but it must have been the wind.

  Kat had become the wind. She had always longed for the security of invisibility at school, but now she had it she felt only empty.

  Mr Delaney stood wearily to call the register. ‘Let’s do this so we can get the afternoon over with, shall we?’ he said, scanning the room. If he saw Kat still standing at the back of the room he didn’t show it.

  Her surname placed her near the foot of the register. Mr Delaney reeled off the names in a near-continuous drawl, punctuated by tired acknowledgements and the beeps of the electronic register.

  Finally, he called, ‘Kat Waldgrave.’

  ‘Here, sir,’ she said.

  Mr Delaney waited a beat, and then flicked his eyes up to the class. ‘Kat Waldgrave?’

  He spoke the name like it offended him. Kat took a steadying breath and walked towards him, but he aimed his frown right past her.

  ‘I’m sure I saw her earlier,’ he muttered to himself, and marked her as present.

  She might never need another mandatory attendance meeting if she was automatically considered here. It should be a blessing, a superpower she could twist to her advantage. Yet when the bell rang and everybody carefully avoided her while simultaneously not seeing her on their way out, she begged for somebody to concede to her presence.

  The usual crowd was heading to English, and she tagged along behind. While the rest of the class took their seats, Kat remained standing at the front of the room. The lesson began regardless, Miss Ellis enthusiastically reciting Shakespeare as if she was on stage. Every time Kat blocked her path the teacher threw her an irritated glance, and then stepped aside to find herself more space.

  It wasn’t that she was invisible, Kat was learning. Not quite. Everybody could see her, they just forgot her as soon as they looked. She had become an absence, a void that nobody could tolerate to stare into for even the most fleeting moment.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouted. ‘I’m right here!’

  The Shakespeare didn’t stop. It felt like Kat’s lungs had faded too, the air escaping before she could breathe it, and she ran out into the empty corridor, rushing back to the toilets where this had all started. She slammed into a cubicle and locked the door.

  She had thought that being outside and forcing people to see her would snap the fade like an over-stretched elastic band, leave it no choice but to loosen its grip and return her to the world. Seeing its power, its stubborn totality, felt like receiving a death sentence, or worse, being doomed to walk in limbo for the rest of her days.

  Home. She wanted to go home, and she knew nobody would stop her. Anxiety begged her to run for it. It was only the thought of meeting the Lonely People that kept her there. One of them had seen her. They might have answers. They might be able to stop this fade.

  The door to the toilets creaked open, and Kat listened to a single set of footsteps pace deliberately to her stall.

  ‘Occupied,’ she said timidly, knowing they wouldn’t hear.

  ‘My dude, I know you’re in there.’ A girl’s voice Kat didn’t recognise. ‘Open up.’

  It was su
ch a wonder to have somebody speaking directly to her that she didn’t think twice, and pulled the door open.

  The doorway framed a smaller girl with wavy brown hair and unruly eyebrows, grinning like they shared a secret. Unlike Kat, she wore a skirt with no leggings and shirt sleeves rolled proudly to the elbow. Every inch of her bare, pale skin looked cut from paper, pasted onto reality with too much glue so that the room shone through her.

  This girl was fading too.

  7

  Eurydice

  The girl reached out and took Kat’s hand even though it hadn’t been offered. Her touch felt electric, like it had always been missing from Kat’s life. Before she could stop herself she lurched forward and pulled the girl into a hug.

  ‘You can see me.’

  Laughing into Kat’s shoulder, the girl squeezed her tight. ‘And I can feel you.’

  Kat numbly pulled away. Witnessing the fade in somebody else gave her a sense of vertigo, as if the world was spinning off its axis. She wasn’t alone, and she had never felt so relieved.

  ‘I hope you washed your hands after whatever you did in there.’ The girl was shorter than Kat, but she held herself like she was much larger, hands on hips and elbows wide. It was like she thought there was too much space in the universe and wanted to claim as much of it for herself as she could. ‘I’m Safa.’

  ‘Kat.’

  ‘That I already knew. I still can’t believe it’s actually happened to somebody else at the same time. It’s true what they say about buses.’

  ‘I still don’t really know what’s happened to me,’ Kat said shyly.

  ‘You must have some idea. A fade like that,’ said Safa, arching a bushy eyebrow, ‘is brought on by something.’

  Kat forced herself to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong, that she wasn’t being accused of anything. ‘You left me that note.’

  ‘I’m the only person who can see you now, remember? I spotted you sneaking past Miss Jalloh. Figured I might be able to help. Tell me how it happened.’

  It was still humiliating to tell the story of being chased off the Internet, that it could cause something like this, but Safa listened with rapt attention, nodding along seriously like it was a story she’d heard before.

  ‘I still thought it could all be in my head,’ Kat finished. ‘Until I saw you.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, when I first heard about the fade I thought it was a stupid rumour, or an urban legend,’ said Safa. ‘It had always happened to a friend’s boyfriend’s sister’s wet nurse or whatever. Too good to be true, you know? Then I found the blog, and that’s how I met somebody who swore down it happened to her ex-girlfriend after they broke up. I looked into it – nobody else remembered this girl at all, even people I know were her friends, unless I showed them pictures and made them remember. Even then, they just accepted that she was gone, no body or goodbye note, like it was the most normal thing in the world.’

  Kat shivered, and decided to change the subject. ‘You don’t run the blog?’

  ‘I do now,’ said Safa. ‘It gets passed on to somebody new every time.’

  ‘If it’s happened to so many people, you must know what causes it.’

  Safa moved away to lean against the sinks and Kat followed, worrying for a second that somebody could walk in before remembering it apparently wouldn’t matter. They could never have anything but total privacy.

  ‘It’s not like catching a cold,’ said Safa. ‘The nature of it means it’s difficult to pass along any concrete info. Best we know is that it seems to happen when somebody feels completely alienated by life. When they lose any tangible connection to themselves and the world. When they absolutely, positively don’t want to be here any more, at least as themselves. They just . . . break free. But not all at once. It’s like gravity stops applying to them, except instead of floating away they begin to fade.’

  ‘So the fade’s going to get worse?’ said Kat, voicing a fear she had before now tried to suppress. ‘Until I’m just gone?’

  ‘There’s more to it than that.’

  Safa turned to study her reflection in the mirror. She looked at herself with relish, like she’d had a makeover and was admiring the results. It was enough to make Kat realise the truth.

  ‘You wanted this to happen. You’ve been trying to fade.’

  ‘I’ve been in the year below you for as long as I’ve been at this school. Safa Hargreaves. Did you know that?’

  Kat wracked her brain, but she couldn’t ever remember noticing her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I’m just proving my point. Fading into the background is what the Lonely People is all about.’ When Safa turned around, she was holding a tiny nesting doll locket that hung around her neck, rolling it gently between finger and thumb. ‘Let’s get out of here, it stinks.’

  ‘But—’

  She took Kat’s hand again, and the ecstasy of being touched was too powerful to resist. ‘For the first time in your life you don’t need to hide.’

  The corridor was quiet midway through final period, the only sound the muffled voices of orating teachers and unruly classes. As they passed a classroom Safa pushed open the door, hard enough for it to bash against the wall. Inside, the teacher frowned across but kept the rhythm of his ongoing lecture. Safa stuck her middle finger up at him and then laughed.

  ‘See?’

  The school belonged to them, an alternative reality laid close over the one Kat thought she had known. It should have terrified her, but as Safa threw open another classroom door she felt – almost – in control. Almost safe.

  Wesley was sure the equation in front of him was unsolvable, a jumble of numbers and letters selected specifically to make him feel like an idiot. He tried for a glimpse of his neighbour’s answers but found them similarly incomprehensible. Maths almost made him pine for that sad little candle flame of self worth that had flickered to life after waxing the car at the dealership, standing back to admire its shine.

  His mind turned to Luke and Justin, no doubt sitting together in the upper-set classroom thanks to expensive tutoring and unexpected maths genius respectively. Whatever Tru was planning couldn’t be bigger than #SelloutSelena. They had to be exaggerating to impress him. If they weren’t—

  The classroom door flew open and thudded into the wall loudly enough to make him jump. Nobody else did the same, or even looked up from their work. Peering across, there was nobody outside. A gust of wind, maybe.

  The equation refused to give up its secret. Wesley growled in frustration under his breath. Most important now was finding Kat Waldgrave and proving that she hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. He could worry about Luke and Justin later.

  ‘How did you feel, when it happened?’ asked Safa as they strolled away from the maths classrooms.

  ‘Scared,’ said Kat, as if that did it justice. ‘Like I was coming apart.’

  ‘After everything that happened I thought you might be relieved.’

  ‘It’s hard to explain. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve had abuse online – I was a girl in geek communities, for god’s sake.’ Kat didn’t quite manage to smile. ‘It’s always awful, but you only see how awful when you’re the target. You can’t ignore it when people are saying they want to punch you, kill you, rape you, even when it’s mostly coming from anonymous accounts you know don’t really mean it.’

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘I thought it would be bad for a while and then just fade—’ She pulled herself up at the poor choice of language. ‘Instead it followed me everywhere, even onto the Doctor Backwash forums. I guess my mistake was talking back, expecting other people to defend me. Like, some did, but these communities really just want to pretend everything is okay, that nothing like this happens on their platform. As soon as anything kicks off the good people go quiet so they won’t become targets too, while all the trolls are trying to one-up each other by getting nastier and nastier.’

  They had reached the stairs
now, their leisurely pace slowly taking them down towards the ground floor.

  ‘You’re not exactly selling the online experience,’ said Safa.

  ‘That’s the thing: a lot of the time it was brilliant,’ said Kat, finding it strange to talk in the past tense when only a day had passed since giving up her last online account. So much had changed. ‘I made real friends there, found people in these communities who were like me – who liked me – and I could actually be myself without worrying I was being judged for it. Well, I thought so, anyway. Now I’m not so sure any of it was real.’

  ‘It sounds like a lot to worry about,’ said Safa. ‘You can see why I asked if you were relieved when the fade started.’

  ‘Like this isn’t something to worry about,’ said Kat, holding up her hazy hands.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be.’ Safa had the mischievous grin of somebody used to causing trouble and getting away with it. They had reached the ground floor now, and Kat realised they had stopped outside Miss Jalloh’s office. Safa raised a fist to the door, ready to knock.

  Kat froze. ‘You’re about to make a poor life decision.’

  ‘That’s never stopped me before.’ Safa rapped her knuckles against the foggy glass. From inside they heard Miss Jalloh grunt as she got to her feet. As the teacher’s silhouette filled the window, Kat tried to duck away. Safa caught her sleeve and bundled her into the room as the door opened. Behind them, Miss Jalloh peered blankly into the corridor, before cursing under her breath and shutting them all inside. As she returned to her desk she glowered at them both, and then went back to her paperwork.

  ‘Keep absolutely still,’ whispered Kat. ‘Her vision is based on movement.’

  ‘It’s okay, she can’t hear us,’ Safa said significantly louder than was necessary. ‘Can you, Miss Jalloh?’

  The teacher pushed her glasses up her nose and began to hum, as if she was trying to drown them out.

  ‘Two years ago she gave me detention for talking in class when it wasn’t me,’ said Safa. ‘I swore I would have my revenge.’