Invisible Girl

by Mary Hanlon Stone

  “Re-ally?” Annie says, and all the other girls start laughing under their breath.

  Amal must feel like she’s missing something. She looks up to hear more and to figure out what they’re laughing about. No one says anything. She sort of shrugs and then just relaxes in her seat as if figuring that she’s just too far back in the car to have gotten some joke.

  She turns to me with interest. “So, Stephanie, how long have you been out here from Boston?”

  My head jerks. Did she do that on purpose? Try to remind me of my expulsion from my own family? “A while,” I say rudely. I turn my back to her and stare out the window, feeling the familiar grind in my stomach. I try to push the rage against my parents back down and focus on trying to survive the day ahead.

  I suffer through math class not having the energy to follow all the formulas the teacher, Mr. Specter, is writing on the board. The only thing that keeps me from sheer madness is that Mr. Specter looks like a wizard. He has a severe comb-over of thin, dyed red hair and long yellow teeth. I’d love to leap up, stick my pencil out like a wand and yell something Harry Potterish, like, “Expelliderus!”

  That would certainly give Annie, who I can see is texting madly in the back of the class, a heart attack. And it would serve her right. As soon as Aunt Sarah pulled over to the curb in the drop-off lane, she and her three fellow vipers leapt out of the car, leaving Amal and me to struggle out of the far back.

  I hustled out before Amal. I didn’t want to walk into school with her so I just ran off to my locker without even saying good-bye.

  I saw a slice of her face as I turned to leave, and it looked hurt. I feel a splinter of guilt for leaving her like that since, if I’m honest about it, I’d have to admit that she probably never knew I liked Andrew in the first place. I shove the splinter down since I don’t have time to waste on feeling guilty about a girl who is movie star beautiful and can have anything she wants in the world.

  Math is getting boring again since it’s not that fun to have a teacher who looks like a wizard if there’s no one to tell that to and try not to laugh with. I look around the classroom and see that Annie’s campaign to destroy Amal is running strong. Mean looks at Amal generate not just from Queen Anne and her subjects but from other girls residing on the outlying rings of their clique. News travels fast with instant messaging and texting. Even though it’s explicitly forbidden in the school rules to use cell phones at school, it’s clear none of the kids or faculty take it seriously. Girls have been receiving Annie’s news flashes about Amal being a slut all morning. A subtle buzz surrounds her, a dark current of dislike. She looks confused and nervous when she watches Annie rush out of math class, just like she did in social studies, without even looking at her.

  I’m already seated when Amal enters study hall. Her face flashes with hope when she sees Annie and the group.

  Annie’s group occupies the center table where everyone in the room has a view of them. I’m sitting at the end of their table with some filler girls between Annie, Leslie, and me. Eva and Emily sit across the table from them. I’m pretending to study my math book, trying not to care that the four of them are hunched into each other, chatting nonstop.

  Amal hurries over, every quick step confirming her hope that the morning slights were because of some huge misunderstanding. There are no spots close to Annie, or the group. No effort is made by them to squeeze together to make room for one more friend. Amal stands behind Annie, waiting for her to take notice and motion her in, but Annie doesn’t turn around.

  Amal looks nervous again, but makes the bold move of tapping Annie on the shoulder. Annie turns away from her huddled conversation, clearly irritated, with raised eyebrows that say, EXCUSE YOU without her having to speak one word.

  “Hey,” Amal says hesitantly, yet with a hungry eagerness.

  Annie wears the patronizing expression of a queen interrupted by a peasant. “Obviously,” she releases a short little annoyed puff of air through her nose, “not any room here.”

  Amal reels like she’s been slapped. Her whole face cracks and her eyes blink away tears. I remember how young she really looks without her woman’s body. I feel sick watching it.

  She mutters, “Oh, um, um, sorry.” But Annie has already turned back toward Eva, Leslie and Emily, who also wear perturbed looks in imitation of their queen.

  Amal walks to an empty table in the back of study hall and opens up one of her books. She bows her head low over the book with her back to the whole world, and it’s not hard to see that she’s crying.

  My heart tightens in my chest. It isn’t fair that I feel sorry for her. I have so many things raging through me that I could use all of my time just feeling bad for myself. But I don’t. Even as I try to push her out of my head and just stare at my math book, I feel her worm her way back into my thoughts. She is me sitting over there at that table all alone. Another girl sitting in another bubble of despair, just waiting for someone to pop it and find something, anything, to talk to her about.

  In English class the air is even thicker around Amal as she sits in her chair looking around the room, stricken. No doubt she finally had time to sneak into her Facebook during study hall, probably to find solace from her friends at her old school, and found her Honesty Box filled with anonymous messages calling her a slut.

  When Andrew walks into class he glides by her without even speaking. No big surprise. Obviously by now he’s heard, like the rest of the school, that she was hitting on an older and cuter guy. Not so great for his ninth-grade ego.

  When Annie walks by, Amal presses her back harder into her chair, like she’s afraid to get hit by mean words, but her eyes look up, just a little, just in case study hall was just the last crazy piece of the whole morning mix-up and Annie will go back to being as friendly as she was at the pool and maybe even help her figure out who the cruel anonymous “honest” friends are. Annie doesn’t even blink her way as she flicks her hair right over her head and says a loud, “Hey, dude” to Andrew, then punches him in the arm.

  We’re studying Moby-Dick, and after all the boys get finished making their obvious jokes about the title, the teacher gets down to business talking about the obsession of Ahab. She asks if any of us can think of anything we’ve ever wanted that we couldn’t stop thinking about, couldn’t stop craving. Some girl in the back whispers loudly, “Pinkberry.”

  Kids laugh but I don’t hear them. I’m too busy with images of my own cravings blasting through my brain, striking and burning: my mom leaving—that last feeling of clutching her around the waist, trying to hold on to her—begging her, needing her, please, please don’t go; my dad just leaking all over; the emptiness in my stomach on the plane, knowing I was left and then sent away because I wasn’t lovable enough for anyone to want to be around.

  Have I ever wanted anything I couldn’t stop thinking about? Please.

  I’m choked by the images of cravings and they don’t stop. They just keep coming and searing my brain: Watching other kids in clusters, talking laughing; walking home alone, shoes scuffed, a little too tight. The feeling of first being with Annie and her friends, belonging, belonging like I never have in my life. Then going into that briefcase because I wanted so badly for Uncle Michael to find me special; the Coke, the sticky papers, and then, God, the look in Uncle Michael’s eyes when he came into my room and the look in Annie’s eyes when she heard I was the bad seed of a bar slut.

  I feel like my head is going to explode.

  The teacher is now saying something about the whiteness of the whale and it just seems like hazy chatter, drifting from across the room, wisps of emptiness rolling up against my ears like pulled cotton. Nothing she says is firm enough to sink into me and stop the images. I need something to look at, something to calm me down.

  My eyes skirt frantically around, whizzing like frenzied comets. They whirl past Amal, then back. Past, then back. Something about her is pulling me to her; something in the set of her head, the tilt of her jaw. It’s me aga
in, just like in study hall. She’s looking around and seeing no one. She’s craving too.

  I follow Amal out of the class. Walking behind her I see mean looks from other kids absorb into her skin as if she had no more protection than a milky-white baby on a sundeck. Some of the looks aren’t mean. They’re even worse, they’re blank, like the molecules in her body don’t take up any space in the air and she’s fading, fading into obscurity. Fading like a ghost, like I’ve always been. The more blank looks she gets, the lower her shoulders sag, until she’s almost a letter C, walking through a gray foam of suffocating silence.

  I follow her into the library and browse the shelves, pretending to look at a book while she does her noon bends and bows in the corner. When she finishes and walks toward the door, I breathe in deeply and walk up to her. “Are, um, you doing anything for lunch?”

  Her little girl face looks wary. I was such a witch to her this morning, she probably thinks she can’t trust me. I jump in to scatter her nervousness. “I was just going to sit outside,” I say. “Away from everything.”

  She turns to the window. The sun bends gently, easing from the blistering beats of summer to the smooth brushings of autumn. The lawn whispers in lazy zigzags of windswept grass. Her face lets go of just the slightest bit of tension. “Okay,” she says quietly.

  We walk through the storm of students, getting occasional curious glances that make our eyes flicker toward each other as if, just possibly, we may have the beginnings of a secret. When we get outside, three football players rush by us and I think I hear the word slut in the great wash of scraping shoes, heaving bodies and inarticulate grunts. She falters and darts her eyes at me as if I could be part of an elaborate setup designed for her humiliation.

  “Come on,” I say rapidly. “Let’s go and relax.”

  Amal follows me almost blindly now, hope sparking over her face in tiny lights. I stop and sit down on a wooden bench, big enough for two, where we can dangle our legs as if they were part of a flowering plant flirting with the short crew-cut of the earth below.

  She opens her backpack and pulls out an ordinary protein bar. I’m thrown for a moment, disappointed. After watching her bows in the library, I expected something so fragrantly exotic that smoke would swirl around it and whisper secrets of pyramids and sphinxes into the seven winds. She puts the protein bar on her lap and looks at me. “My mom always sticks one of these in my backpack for emergencies. I figured I was going to buy…”

  She leaves it hanging. We both know she’d rather fall into a nest of snakes than face the cafeteria today.

  I take out the bagel, now kind of hard, that I had stuffed into my backpack after Annie’s ugly look in the car this morning. Then I toss out the two Snickers bars I stole from Megan’s “goody” drawer and keep for emergencies. “Want one?”

  She smiles and nods. “Rule number one, never say no to chocolate.”

  I smile back, so glad that unlike Annie and her friends there’s no mention of fat grams or carbs.

  I toss her the Snickers bar. She catches it midair and grins. “Ya know, y’all talk funny and everything, but I guess y’all are all right.” She speaks in as exaggerated a southern accent as she can muster.

  I grossly exaggerate my Boston accent and say, “That’s exactly what I neva undastood about you Confederates: one person is not ‘y’all.’ ”

  We start to laugh, then she says, “You mean, y’all aren’t y’all?”

  “Go sit ova thaya,” I say, and we laugh again while we unwrap our Snickers bars and bite into the sweet, milky chocolate, feeling the soft sun on our backs and for me, the first easing of the tension I’ve felt in my shoulders in what seems like forever.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “She was, like, having lunch with Amal,” Annie informs Leslie, Eva and Emily as soon as we get into Aunt Sarah’s car.

  I expected this. The outrage of the pack and the pressure to bend to its ways, even though, for all intents and purposes, I’m outside it too. The other girls stare at me and they all wait for me to deny it. I feel the force of their stares pushing into my forehead. They want to watch me twist and turn in my stumbling explanations while they cross-examine with their sharp contempt.

  I think about the women I’ve been reading about. After Harriet Tubman, I devoured a couple more biographies. Real women who have tough jobs and stand up to pressure. Surely, if Harriet Tubman can risk her life to help people out of slavery and Sally Ride can take on outer space, I can deal with these girls.

  I run my eyes slowly over all of them while they wait, like buzzards, eager to tear my face off. I say nothing, since, technically, there is no question pending.

  They can’t stand it that I haven’t started babbling about my innocence or begged for forgiveness. The currency in their group is words. Not good words like Warrior Words, but hurting words or words to show who is on the top and who is on the bottom. They’re getting desperate to put me in my place, so I say nothing.

  Annie looks furious. “Well, weren’t you?”

  They all lean in. Vultures, waiting.

  “Yes,” I answer simply, eyes wide open.

  Their frustration zings through the car. Who the hell do I think I am to break such a critical commandment: Thou shall not dine with the enemy of thou’s superior. Especially, when thou is staying at thou’s superior’s house.

  Annie digs in for more. “So, what did she say?”

  “About what?”

  “About us.”

  “Nothing.”

  Annie flits her eyes to the other girls and then stares at me, incredulous. “So are you going to have lunch with her again?”

  I think about the shimmering leaves outside at lunch, the slow ripple of the grass, and the way the sun warmed my back while we ate. I feel the little seedling of self-acceptance that is starting to grow inside me. “I hope so,” I answer honestly. “She’s really nice.”

  Annie recoils hard as if I were a serpent that suddenly sprang up in her face. She’s so angry that she doesn’t even have a word for me. Eva comes to her rescue and says with all the venom she can summon, “Pathetic.”

  I adjust my head so that I can look out the window as the car glides home. I’ve never felt so clean in my life.

  At dinner, Annie tries several different strategies with me. Suddenly, I’ve become a Person of Interest, like they say in cop shows. After finding out that I lied about my whole history in Boston and that I vomited all over Andrew, she pretty much wrote me off to obscurity. Now, however, I am open and notoriously rebelling against her rule.

  Now it’s time to take out the claws.

  She starts work at dinner. Uncle Michael is out of town on business, so she’s freer to control the flow of conversation since Aunt Sarah always takes a backseat to her, just like she does to her husband when he is there. Annie opens with an eager onslaught of information, informing Aunt Sarah that she thinks she has an excellent chance of making the cheerleading squad but she’s worried that Leslie and Emily will not because Leslie is too fat and does not have the right attitude and Emily is too shy.

  All the while she is crowing to Aunt Sarah, she sneaks glances at my face, hoping, no doubt, to see splinters of loneliness breaking through my new façade of removed serenity I adopt when I’m around her. I see her getting frustrated that she can’t break into me. She liked it better when I was the exposed mollusk and wore my humiliation like a greasy membrane. She feels uncomfortable around me now. Not only am I not bowing and scraping to her dominance, and begging with lonely, haunted eyes to be part of her group, but she senses on some primitive level that incomprehensibly I may not even care.

  The funny thing is that the look I put on my face is starting to actually resemble what I feel inside. For the first time in my life, there is not a great disconnect between the inside and the outside. In the past, since I was old enough to feel the sting of the outside glances, I became an expert at fixing my expressions into masks that protected the roiling turmoil inside. At my
school in Boston, I strode down the halls rapidly, Determination and Purpose set in my face. A façade so strong that no one could see the geysers of despair shooting up inside me, threatening to burst through and knock people over. Where I would drop down and smother them with hungry whispers: Please talk to me; please, please, please, just talk to me.

  When Annie gets absolutely no response from me, her face tightens in the middle of her forehead and she jabs, “I didn’t even think of asking Stephanie to try out. Even if she ever made it, which, let’s face it, would be a miracle, she’d never get to actually go to very many games since she’s obviously not going to be here that long.”

  Aunt Sarah looks up, shocked and embarrassed at her daughter’s meanness. Then she feels the currents of Annie’s power, emanating from her perfect blue eyes and arrogant, strong shoulders, and all she says is a halfhearted, “Annie!” Then she looks at me meekly and asks if I want more rice.

  I decline and quietly just asked to be excused. I hurry upstairs to my room and take out my biography on Eleanor Roosevelt. But before I bury myself in the strength of this great woman, I stare up at the ceiling and smile, thinking of school tomorrow, of having lunch with my friend Amal.

  In a weird way, I have energized Annie’s little group. They have a whole new dimension to discuss and analyze now that Annie officially has an enemy living in her own home, a street urchin who has the nerve to defect from the rosy camp of insiders rather than being content to sniff at its sidelines and live off its crumbs.