Invisible Girl

by Mary Hanlon Stone

  I eat a quick yogurt and ask her for permission to use Annie’s old bike. She says yes automatically and doesn’t even ask me where I’m going. I don’t know what she’s heard about my scarlet dress last night, but since she’s the one who provided it, it’s hardly anything she can complain about.

  In half an hour I’m riding the bike past the club and up Amal’s driveway. Her house is tall and white with fancy columns, like it was built by one of the guys who built stuff in ancient Greece or Rome. I walk to the front door and ring the bell. The door swings open and Amal stands there looking pretty and excited.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says.

  I step into a dark green marble foyer. A beautiful thick rug of deep blues and reds lies in the middle of the marble. The marble looks cool; the rug looks warm. I want to take my shoes off and put one foot on the marble and one on the rug so I’ll have the experience of cool and warm at the same time. Like drinking hot chocolate at an ice rink, only softer.

  “Want something to eat?” Amal says, and we walk off the rug and into the hallway. My tennis shoes squeak. Amal’s sandals flap. We’re both dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and even though her family obviously has a ton of money, her outfit is not super cute or special, like the things Annie wears.

  We walk a couple more steps and then I stop. On our right is a room with wall-to-wall bookshelves that stretch from the floor to a high gilded ceiling. Sliding ladders of burnished wood grace every wall. Thousands of books glimmer in hard covers of maroon, green and black, marked with gold foreign writing in delicate squiggles that I know without asking is Arabic.

  I don’t even remember Amal is next to me as I float into the room as slowly as Alice in Wonderland. My feet tiptoe on soft carpets as I spin around. The shelves rustle with the hidden whispers of millions of words. I walk forward and touch the bindings of the gold-lettered books. My hands hum with their secrets.

  I turn to my right and see a marble fireplace with a huge tapestry above it showing millions of people walking toward a building of five pillars.

  “That’s Mecca,” Amal’s voice breaks in, and I’m startled to remember I’m a guest in someone’s house and I probably should have asked before just walking into the library without permission.

  “This is mostly my dad’s room. He used to be a professor before he switched to working for a company.”

  “It’s a beautiful room,” I say, still in awe, then suddenly shy and nervous, thinking that she must have a really smart dad and what if he doesn’t like me?

  She looks pleased with my approval of the room. We hear quick, energetic footsteps and she says, “Oh, there’s my dad.”

  Blood rushes to my face. Did I brush my teeth after I ate that yogurt? Should I have worn lip gloss at least? I haven’t met the parents of a friend since my social life ended that time Karen Fratenelli and Maggie Hogan’s parents found my mom drunk after that sleepover.

  I turn slowly. It’s much brighter in the hall than in the library. Amal’s dad stands at the edge of the dim room surrounded by light. He is darker than Amal, with short, curly black and gray hair that grows tight to his head. His hairline is high so his forehead is extra big. His eyebrows are thick and bushy. They run straight across without any arch.

  Intelligence sparks off of him, kindling in the jewel-colored bindings of his books. I want him to like me, but not like I wanted Uncle Michael to like me, as if I were Nancy Drew. For the first time, I am standing before an adult, where I want him to like the “me” deep inside. The me that’s not my mother but a girl who likes books the way he obviously does. I’d love to be able to have a real conversation with him about reading, but I have no idea how to make that happen, so I just stand there.

  I realize that he’s been wiping little oval gold glasses on his shirt and that maybe he hasn’t even seen me yet. He puts on the glasses. “You must be Stephanie,” he says and comes over and kisses me on both cheeks.

  I hope I don’t blow the pronunciation of his name. “Hi, Mr. al Ghamrawi,” I say.

  He speaks in a foreign accent, like a Middle Eastern accent, not a southern one. He doesn’t say, “Call me Kareem,” which Amal told me is his first name, like the other Californian dads would do. He just seems strong and comfortable standing there, like it’s okay that he’s a dad and he doesn’t have to tell her friends to call him by his first name to be a good guy.

  Amal grabs my arm and I follow. We hurry down the hall and into a kitchen that’s bright with soft yellow walls and golden granite on the counters. A woman fusses in the sink. Her back is toward us. “Mama,” Amal says.

  The woman turns. Her face is beautiful and eager like Amal’s, but instead of being easy and open like her daughter’s, it’s complicated and layered. Like each phase in her life left her with a gentle crust of special wisdom and if you just dug deep enough, you could pierce through her entire life’s story.

  She smiles, giving me another moment to search her face. Underneath her surface layer of eagerness is a wariness, and underneath the wariness is, in some inexplicable way, boldness and defiance. She dries her hands on a towel and says warmly, “Welcome, Stephanie.”

  I smile before I realize I’m smiling.

  She walks toward me, holds out her arms and embraces me in a big hug.

  The first thing I feel is the soft cloth of her shirt. Behind the shirt are large breasts that mush in against me. Her arms are thick and solid. Her body is a meadow, and I breathe her in so hard, I’m lightheaded.

  She steps back from me, keeping her hands on my shoulders and smiling down on me. I smile back, trying not to remember that last hug I had with my own mother, when I felt the sharp cut of her chain belt against my cheek, when I clutched at her, begging her not to leave and heard the wasps buzzing inside her.

  I let the memory rise out of the top of my head like steam, just like I did with the thoughts of my father this morning. I am already lighter from not working so hard to stuff things down again.

  “Come and eat,” Amal’s mother says. Amal and I swing our butts down onto a built-in bench that is part of a bay window with a little table in it. Mrs. G. puts down bowls of what Amal says is belila, a wheat-berry cereal that’s sort of like oatmeal with milk and raisins and cinnamon.

  My nose swallows the scent. I know it’s not polite to openly sniff food so I do it secretly, acting like I have an itch on my nose. I scratch my forehead with my left hand while I put the spoon under my nostrils with my right. The smell is now a hug inside me.

  Amal’s mother sits down right across from me. “So, Stephanie, are you going to be staying in Los Angeles long? Or going back to Boston?”

  I feel a weird excitement that I obviously have been the topic of discussion between Amal and her mother. I don’t even think how I should answer her before I just spit out honestly, “It’s hard to say. I don’t think my dad really knows what to do with me right now.”

  A quick look passes between Amal and her mother. I’m in shock that I said what I said. The old Stephanie would have kept up her fierce protection without even thinking. I’m torn between my old self and my new.

  Too soon, too soon, too soon.

  Anxiety leaps up my throat. I’m furious that I was blinded by the cinnamon and the hug. I can’t possibly expose the dirt of my neediness to someone like her. She can’t know I’m an unloved kid. She just can’t.

  I need to tell her how much my mother worries about me and concerns herself with my future. I quickly calculate that even though Annie told me “everyone knows the truth” about me, Amal is out of the way of anyone’s texting traffic. I just can’t let her mother know how pathetic I am.

  “My mother’s away on business right now,” I blurt. “She really wanted me to spend some time in L.A. so I could start thinking about colleges and checking them out—like maybe Stanford or something.”

  Slight confusion dots Amal’s mother’s face. Fear sucks in my stomach. I’m frozen in a moment of elusive information and afraid I might
just have erred. I go over snapshots of dialogue. Aunt Sarah did say that Michael Jr. went to Stanford, right? And it was in California, wasn’t it?

  I try desperately to remember conversations from Annie’s dinner table. My cheeks burn hotly when I recall that Michael took a plane back to school, which means Stanford couldn’t be in L.A.

  I can cover this. “My mom thought that even though Stanford isn’t in L.A., if I went there, I might come here for weekends, just for fun.”

  I’m talking faster than usual, and my voice is higher. “My mom was going to come out here with me so we could visit colleges together, just the two of us. She knows a lot of presidents of universities and stuff, because of her work on charities. But, right before I left, someone who works for her, on a big charity party, got sick, and well, you know, she had to stay and take care of business.” I’m absolutely rambling now, my liar’s words sputtering out fast and poisonous.

  Amal’s mom leans forward. “What kind of charity work does she do?”

  I look at her hard to see if she has a sarcastic half smile like my mom would wear whenever she called my dad “Senator.” She just looks normal and interested. I take another bite of my belila to buy time to answer and notice that her skin is lighter than my and Amal’s skin and that she has three freckles in a triangle on her forearm.

  I keep staring at her arm, chewing slowly and thinking frantically. “She counsels people with prosthetic limbs,” I blurt. “And, ah, skin grafts after fires.”

  I look up quickly to see if I’m exposed. Why did I say something so stupid? I suddenly can think of a million charities, like heart attack stuff, diabetes, cancer. Why didn’t I say one of those?

  She just nods, even more interested, and places a soft hand on mine. “I think I would like your mother very much,” she says quietly.

  I blink fast, holding back tears, because I just lied to this wonderful person, which means I’m still just the old Stephanie, covering up my dirty rotten core with fables of greatness.

  I try to forget about my lies when Amal takes out a fancy bead kit that she got from a friend in Georgia that has real semiprecious stones. I’m in awe as she spills out glittering purples, reds, greens, blues and yellows.

  Because she has only enough beads to make one necklace, we decide to share it, with each of us getting to wear it for a week, then switching turns. For an hour, we’re deep in creative mode, trying out different orders of the beads before we finally agree on two of each gem with a big amethyst hanging from the middle in front.

  We talk about maybe going into business together making jewelry and selling it to kids in Beverly Hills and getting our own label. We try a bunch of ways to combine our names and end up cracking up when we pretend-fight over choosing between “Stepham” and “Amsteph.”

  When the necklace is finished, it’s stunning. Amal lifts it up to the light and we’re silent for a moment, watching the facets sparkle. “Here,” Amal says, leaning over and fastening the necklace around my neck. “You take the first week.”

  I’m too stunned to even speak. Talking about sharing a necklace when it was just a pile of beads was one thing. Wearing this piece of utter beauty that we forged together is another. I blink away quick tears and remember my manners. “No, you wear it first.”

  “Not for discussion,” she says in a perfect impression of the wizard, Mr. Specter. I fall away laughing, delirious that I have a friend, a private joke and my first piece of jewelry.

  I want to tell her about Andrew, but something holds me back. If it were some guy she didn’t know and I had a cute picture of him on a cool phone to show her, it’d be easy. But it’s Andrew who went after her big time when she first got here. Way too weird.

  I shove Andrew out of my thoughts and just try to enjoy the lightness of the moment, but the lies I told Amal’s mother swim back into my head. I miss the clean feeling I felt when I was honest with Annie about having lunch with Amal. I now feel the gray arms of my old self wrapping around me and making it harder to breathe.

  Amal and I go outside to her patio. The sun is weak but warm, the air cool, with a vague prick of hope in it, like smelling the approach of Christmas vacation in the middle of a test.

  We randomly toss leaves into her pool.

  Amal is nothing like Annie and in some ways seems even younger than me. We’re now doing leaf races where we’re allowed to poke our leaves with sticks to get them started, but then we can only encourage them with our voices and by waving our arms. It’s really stupid and silly, but we call the leaves names like it’s a big-time horse race and we crack each other up with our announcer impressions.

  A clock in the house chimes five times. Amal’s mother comes out to the pool and asks if I can stay for dinner.

  “Um,” I say with my stick mid-poke on a leaf.

  “I can call your aunt,” Amal’s mother says, and she and Amal give me an identical smile.

  “Um, I’ll call her,” I mutter, never having thought about whether she’d really care if I came home or not, but then figuring she’d probably get mad if I didn’t because she’s responsible for me.

  We get up so that I can use a phone in the house. Amal jogs ahead and whispers something to her mother, then comes back to me triumphantly. “And, ask her if you can spend the night!”

  I call Aunt Sarah’s. Annie answers.

  I don’t feel like letting her acid trickle into my day, so I try to get this over with as quickly as possible. One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to give up this house of shimmering warmth to make a Viper Queen happy. I walk a little away from Amal and her mother for some privacy.

  “It’s me,” I say quietly into the phone.

  “Who’s calling, please,” she says in her witchiest voice, even though, of course, she knows it’s me. I figure she’s decided for the moment to stay enemies with me even though I’m now with Andrew.

  I’m not playing. My new self is not shaky when it comes to dealing with Annie. “Just tell Aunt Sarah that I won’t be home tonight. I’m sleeping over at Amal’s,” I say in a firm voice.

  I wait for her to confirm that she’ll do this, but all she says is, “But she’s not really your aunt, now, is she?”

  I quietly click off the phone, then turn to Amal and her mom and say brightly, “My aunt says it’s fine.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Voices rumble. Amal and I are in their piano room at the top of the stairs lying on the floor so that we can see into the foyer but no one can see us. She puts a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. We’re spying on her parents and their friends.

  I look at Amal’s happy face and take in the moment, like I’m feeling the pulse on my life. I appreciate that it’s the same scene as with Annie, when we were hiding under the gazebo, but this time, I’m unburdened by any fear of my exposure. I can enjoy this to the fullest. I can just be a girl, hanging with her girlfriend, seeing if the grown-ups say something that we’re not supposed to hear because it’s supposedly too sophisticated for our delicate young ears.

  Two loud men and their wives stand near the door opposite Amal’s parents. Everyone is speaking Arabic. It sounds like a fight, but Amal whispers that what’s going on is that her parents keep demanding that the guests stay for dinner while the guests keep insisting that they couldn’t possibly impose. This goes on for fifteen minutes.

  Amal says this is not unusual and it would be shockingly rude for either her parents not to fight to have the guests stay or the guests not to fight to not impose. Finally, her mother laughs and takes one of the women by the arm and everyone goes into the dining room.

  They’re going to eat a long grown-up meal. We already had some kind of really delicious lamb-and-rice dish in the kitchen earlier with Amal’s mother.

  Amal decides that we’re done watching her parents. She stands up. “You want to see something hilarious?”

  I nod. She turns back into their piano room, which has a huge grand piano, a gold couch with fancy wood and lots of pictures
in gold frames. I follow her to the table with the pictures. She picks up an old black-and-white photo of a man with a beard and black glasses. She giggles. “This is my dad. Right after they got married.”

  I take the photo out of Amal’s hands and really stare at his features. His eyes catch me. They are shy behind the glasses. Happy. His smile, with slightly protruding teeth, eats up the picture.

  “Can you believe those glasses?” Amal asks and leans forward as if to share a big secret. “My dad was a major nerd. He came here from Egypt when he was ten. All he did was study, study, study. They met in chemistry class at Princeton. He was planning to be a professor and she was planning to be a doctor. He’s older than my mom. He didn’t go straight through to college.

  “Anyway, my mom was supposed to marry his cousin, who was, like, really good-looking but totally arrogant. My dad serenaded my mom at her uncle’s house. That’s where she was living while she was in the United States.”

  Amal walks over to a large armoire and opens it. She pulls out a CD and puts it in the player. “Wait ’til you hear the song he sang her.” She deftly pushes the correct buttons and leans back, unselfconscious and emboldened with the strength of being the custodian of cherished family lore.

  I’m struck once again by the difference between her and Annie. Annie always acts as if her parents are insufferable idiots, necessary servants to fuel her numerous material and social needs. Amal has a warmth and respect toward her parents. Like even though they may be amusing to her, because they are old-fashioned and from another era, they still had a valued life history before she was born.

  Old-fashioned music slips out. A voice I recognize as Ray Charles from my dad’s CDs yearns across the years. You give your hand to me, and then you say hello and I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so, and anyone can tell, you think you know me well, but you don’t know me.

  Amal and I lie on the floor, on our backs, with our heads almost touching and our feet opposite of each other in a long, unbroken line. The music swirls around us. It’s a powerful song about a guy who dreams about a girl who doesn’t dream about him.