Now You See It . . .

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Now You See It...

  Vivian Vande Velde

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2005 by Vande Velde, Vivian

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

  recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

  in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

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  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vande Velde, Vivian.

  Now you see it.../by Vivian Vande Velde.

  p. cm.

  Summary: With Wendy's new glasses, she begins to see cheerful corpses,

  old crones disguised as teenyboppers, and portals to another world—

  a place where everyone knows of the glasses' powers and will do anything

  they can to get them.

  [1. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V2627No 2005

  [Fic]—dc22 2004006681

  ISBN 0-15-205311-5

  Text set in Bembo

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  First edition

  A C E G H F D B

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  For everyone who has ever

  resented wearing glasses

  * * *

  Contents

  Prologue 1

  1 Glasses 3

  2 Do You See What I See? 12

  3 Vroom, Vroom 25

  4 An Even-Worse-than-Usual Day at School 30

  5 A Bad Day Gets Worse 38

  6 Some Guys Need Magic Glasses to Look Cute 47

  7 Conspiracy 57

  8 School Bus Madness 67

  9 Escape to the Nursing Home 77

  10 Escape to the Garden 87

  11 The More I Escape, the Deeper Trouble I Get Into 93

  12 Magic Lesson 108

  13 An Unexpected Side Trip 115

  14 In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time 128

  15 The Relative Sizes of Hearts 145

  16 So Close... 155

  17 ...And Yet So Far 167

  18 Of Course More Complications 172

  19 History and Bribes 184

  20 The Fellowship of the Lens 194

  21 The Bluebird of Unhappiness 204

  22 Any Plan Is Better Than None—Isn't It? 212

  23 A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing 228

  24 The Plan: Part II, Stage C ... or Was That Part III, Stage A? Or ... Never Mind 236

  25 Einstein's Theory of Relativity Didn't Include Bad Relatives 246

  26 Letting Go 262

  Epilogue 277

  * * *

  Prologue

  HOW CAN parents who've named their daughter Wendy ever expect her to be taken seriously?

  1. Glasses

  One way to look at what happened is that everything is the fault of my optometrist and his enthusiasm for those miserable eye-drops that make your eyes supersensitive to light. But if I've learned one thing from all this, it's that there's generally more than one way to look at anything.

  So, from the beginning, a few points to remember:

  (1) Without glasses, I can't see farther away than about a foot and a half beyond the tip of my nose.

  (2) Glasses may improve someone's seeing, but they've never improved anyone's looks.

  Sure, parents, grandparents, and eyeglass salesmen will assure you that you're cute as a button with your glasses on—if what you want to look like is a cute button, though that's not my idea of a big selling point. But in any case, what's the first thing a movie director does to a gorgeous actress when he needs her to look plain for a role?

  I've been bugging my mom for contact lenses since about when I was in kindergarten and realized exactly how stupid glasses made me look. That was when I got my first hint that boys don't go for girls who wear glasses—when Nicholas Bonafini, the most popular boy in kindergarten, ran into the LEGO tower I'd spent the last fifteen minutes building, turned around, looked at me, and said, "You're dumb."

  It was the glasses, I'm convinced.

  Mom is sure I wouldn't take proper care of contact lenses and is worried my eyeballs would rot and fall out as a result. She says I can get contact lenses when I'm eighteen, which is another three years. Eighteen. Big deal. At eighteen, people are considered old enough to vote, move away from home, get a credit card, join the army, and/or get married. Not that anybody wants to marry someone who wears stupid glasses.

  (3) I hate those eye doctor eyedrops.

  They sting. They make my eyes water, which makes my mascara run, which makes the doctor lecture against the evils of eye makeup (a lecture I've already gotten from Mom). And they make me look stupider than even glasses make me look.

  Eye doctors like eyedrops either because you have to be a certifiable sadist to go into the business (I'm convinced that's what half those certificates on their office walls say), or because the drops make your pupils big enough the doctor gets a chance to see to the back of your brain.

  While slightly big pupils give girls a kind of doe-eyed innocence, which—while not my first choice—isn't the worst of all possible looks, huge pupils that only leave a tiny rim of iris showing give girls a what-the-heck's-wrong-with-her? look that's only appealing to drug pushers and eye doctors.

  So the eyedrops sting going in, then they make you look and feel like you're auditioning for a role in Return of the Mole People, and—isn't this a nice touch?—the effects last a good ten or twelve hours. Even indoors in Rochester, New York—where, by the way, gray days were invented—the afternoon light is too bright for someone who's had eyedrops.

  Plus, as a bonus side effect, with your pupils that big, your close-up vision evaporates. In fact, you can no longer focus on anything that's closer to you than about a foot and a half away.

  Refer back to points one and two.

  Sigh.

  So, my mother was driving me home from my eye doctor appointment, and I was not pleased. My prescription had not changed, meaning I was stuck with the same ugly glasses I had picked last year. (Yes, I picked them, but how can you tell how bad glasses look when—without the lenses in—you can't see as far away as the mirror? Besides, my mother refuses to buy designer frames, claiming it's against her principles to pay as much for glasses as it would cost to fly the designer to our house to see me in them. My mother is prone to exaggeration.)

  I didn't own sunglasses because, in Rochester, there's only about five days in the whole year that you need sunglasses—and the majority of those days are for snow glare rather than actual sunlight. The eye doctor had offered me a pair of construction-paper-and-plastic-film sunglasses about as classy as the ones you get at the 3-D attractions at Disney World, except without the Disney characters. You'd think for what an eye doctor charges, he could give you glasses that don't look as though they cost about fourteen cents a gross.

  I'd declined the sunglasses and instead kept my eyes closed as Mom led me out of the doctor's office and to the car. But by the time we pulled into the driveway at home, her patience was wearing thin. She gets that way sometimes. When, as she stopped the car, I told her she might want to seriously consider buying a Seeing Eye dog for me for these annual checkups, she told me to stop sulking.

  "No, no, that's all right," I said, flinging my arms up to protect my a
bused eyeballs from the piercing rays of the sun. "If Helen Keller could manage, I suppose I can, too."

  "Oh, Wendy," Mom sighed in a tone like it was my fault I couldn't see. She headed for the house, abandoning me in the front yard.

  I staggered across the lawn, alternating between having my eyes tightly closed for maximum protection against the light, and peeking through my fingers for maximum protection against walking into a tree.

  The glint of something in the grass caught my attention, which was a wonder no matter how you look at it: I'd given Mom my glasses to carry in her purse, and without them and with my eyes watering I was lucky I could make out my feet.

  I leaned over and saw a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

  Normally, I would have kept on walking. About 10 percent of the people who wear mirrored sunglasses look really cool. The other 90 percent look like jerks trying to look cool.

  But I figured that squinting and staggering around the front yard was doing nothing for me in the cool-looks department, anyway, so I picked them up. I knew they didn't belong to anybody in our household. Our household used to consist of me and my mother. Now you have to add my mother's current husband, Bill, and—on a part-time basis—my wicked stepsister, Bill's daughter, Gia. She lives with us during the week and with her mother on weekends. The nicest thing I have to say about her is that I get along best with her on weekends. Our friends—Gia's and my separate friends—all know, as our parents can't quite seem to grasp, that our being the same age is not a fortunate coincidence.

  We live right across the street from Highland Park, and even though the Lilac Festival wasn't until the following week, a lot of people who are more interested in the lilacs than in the bands and the craft booths and the fried dough come early to beat the crowds. I figured one of these lilac enthusiasts had dropped the sunglasses, and I squinted up and down the sidewalk to see if any likely looking person might have just lost them. Nobody. At least not within my admittedly limited range of sight. So I put them on, figuring that would make finding our front door easier.

  My eyeballs were instantly happier. The sunglasses cut out all the glare. And the lenses gave everything a nice pinkish glow, even the statue our next-door neighbor Mrs. Freelander put up by her front stoop in memory of her beloved, dearly departed Pekingese dog of twenty-five years ago, Mr. Tassels. The glasses made the lilacs across the street look stunning. The park has hundreds of varieties of lilacs in shades of dark purple, light purple, bluish purple, pink, and—if I hadn't been wearing those rosy glasses—white. The lenses made them all look gorgeous. I could see an archway among the lilac bushes, which was probably something the festival committee had just put up because I'd never seen it before. It looked like stone though it was more likely granite-colored Styrofoam. Pretty. Everything looked pretty.

  "Wendy!" my mother called from inside the house. "Dinner's almost ready!"

  I ran up to our front door and was greeted by Bill, who apparently has stronger parental instincts than my own mother, for he seemed to be there specifically to find out what had happened to me.

  "Nice shades," he commented, opening the screen door for me.

  "Somebody lost them in our front yard," I said.

  Mom, heading for the kitchen, detoured to pluck the glasses off my face, saying, "Eww. Germs, Wendy." She held them away from her with an expression like she was holding a pooper-scooper bag.

  I squinted against the bright light in the front hall and realized, now that the glasses were off my face, that they must have been prescription lenses, and that they must have been pretty close to my own prescription—or I'd never have been able to see Bill, much less the archway across the street.

  "Set the table, dear," Mom said, which I guess just went to prove dinner wasn't nearly as almost ready as she'd led me to believe.

  "My eyes, my eyes," I groaned, and Bill was the one who took pity on me.

  "Gia," he called, "set the table."

  "Not my turn," the wicked stepsister yelled back from the living room, where she was getting life tips from the afternoon talk shows.

  "Do it anyway," her father said.

  Gia came, curling her lip at me when our parents weren't looking. Even without my glasses, I could see that.

  "Your glasses are in my purse," Mom told me.

  But I didn't need them indoors. I was used to getting around the house without the benefit of being able to see much.

  I went up to my room and reapplied the mascara the eyedrops had washed away and didn't think again about the sunglasses until the next day.

  2. Do You See What I See?

  At breakfast the next morning, I poured skim milk into my bowl of cereal—the kind of cereal that's so healthy, all you can taste is the vitamins. The wicked stepsister was eating a warmed cinnamon bun with half a stick of butter melted over the icing: one of the many reasons I hate her. Besides the sexy name, she has a figure like a fashion model; I, on the other hand, have a figure like a duffel bag.

  "I'm ready whenever you are," Bill announced to Mom with a meaningful glance at the wall clock. Her car was behind his in the driveway, so she had to leave first, or he had to play musical cars. I'd once pointed out to Mom that life had gotten more complicated when she remarried, but she didn't appreciate my insight.

  "Ready," Mom said, though it was obvious she wasn't. While Bill headed for the garage, she went to rinse out her coffee cup in the sink. She told me, "I put your glasses in your backpack."

  I knew she was talking to me because, of course, the wicked stepsister has perfect eyesight.

  On the other hand, I was currently wearing my glasses.

  I said, "Was this before or after I put them on this morning?"

  My mother gave me The Look.

  Anyone with a mother knows The Look.

  She sighed. "Your sunglasses."

  For a second I was lost, then I remembered. I'd had no inclination to keep the mirrored sunglasses I'd found, or ever to wear them again—they'd been strictly to get me indoors. Though my pupils were still slightly dilated this morning, my eyeballs no longer looked deformed and I figured that, despite still being a little sensitive to light, I could survive.

  "Thanks," I said, anyway.

  My mother added, "I disinfected them." Of course she had. I was lucky she hadn't disinfected me.

  "Thanks," I repeated.

  She seemed abnormally reluctant to leave.

  "Anything wrong?" the wicked stepsister asked.

  "No." Finally Mom said what was on her mind: "I'm planning on visiting my mother after work today. Anybody want to meet me there?"

  "There" was the nursing home, which we could get to if we took a different bus home, which the school allowed because they knew the situation.

  "Sure," the stepsister said. Fine for her: She's planning on going into geriatric nursing—not a career any normal fifteen-year-old aspires to. Besides, she's not related. For her, Nana is a test subject, the same as any other Alzheimer's patient. Gia is a suck-up, trying to impress my mother, because she knows how I hate to go to the nursing home.

  "I need to catch up after missing yesterday afternoon's classes," I explained.

  "Some other time then," Mom told me mildly. "See you there," she said to Gia. To both of us she added, "Don't be late for your bus," even though she was the one who had struck up the conversation.

  Of course the wicked stepsister is beautiful enough she can pull herself together at a moment's notice. I ended up running to the stop after the bus beeped its horn, which was no surprise to me or the bus driver.

  I sat in the seat my best friend, Shelley, had saved for me, while the wicked stepsister took the first empty seat because half the kids on the bus are her best friends.

  I took my glasses off since Parker Henks gets on the stop after I do. Even though we've been in a lot of the same classes since middle school so he's probably noticed by now that I wear glasses, I always like to look my best for him, whether he glances my way or not.

  M
y backpack was on my lap, my glasses on top of my backpack, and I was talking to Shelley, because I didn't want Parker thinking I was sitting around waiting for him to notice me. Parker didn't even glance in my direction, which might have meant that he really, truly hadn't noticed me or it might have meant that he hadn't noticed me in the same way I hadn't noticed him. But because I wasn't noticing him, it was hard to work out. In any case, he was headed for the back of the bus, followed by three ninth-grade boys who were laughing and poking and shoving one another as they walked down the aisle, and the next thing I knew one of them jostled me, knocking my backpack to the floor.

  I looked down just in time to see a size twelve Adidas come down on my glasses.

  "Stop!" I yelled, but the guys were still goofing around and I nearly lost my fingers when I reached down.

  "See what you've done!" Shelley told them.

  I held up my maimed glasses. The lenses were all right, but the arms of the frame were both broken—one cracked but still dangling, the other snapped entirely off—and one of those little whatever-they're-called things that hold the glasses off your nose was smushed flat against the lens.

  "Wasn't me," all three of the boys said simultaneously. Each accused another of being the one with big feet and no inkling where he was stepping. Each accused another of starting the shoving. "Duct tape'll fix that," one of them suggested.

  The bus driver yelled, "Find a seat!" and the boys moved toward the back of the bus, still spreading the blame around, saying things like, "Wouldn't've happened if she'd been wearing 'em," which was something my parents, too, were sure to point out.

  As the bus began moving once again, Shelley asked, "What are you going to do? Will you be able to see if you ask the teachers to let you sit in the front row?"

  Like anybody would ask to sit in the front row.

  "Shelley," I said, "without my glasses, I won't be able to find the front row." Never mind finding the right classrooms. I sighed. "I'm going to have to call my mom and tell her what happened and get her to take me to one of those one-hour eyeglass places." Where the frames cost twice as much. I told Shelley, "My mom's going to kill me."