Invisible Girl

by Mary Hanlon Stone

  Annie continues, her own voice escalating with excitement. “My mom will set it all up and stay in a connecting room, but the five of us can all stay in one.”

  Now my eyes are fully open. I am totally suffused with the old thrill of being part of the epicenter of cool. Part of Annie’s chosen. Then it smashes into me.

  The five of us.

  My heart drops to my feet. So that’s it. I haven’t become more fascinating to the group because of something about me or even the fact that I’m going out with Andrew. Annie hasn’t undergone introspection and decided to lead a more meaningful, kinder existence. There is no fun night in a hotel being set up to start over and really bond. I am just a pawn to leave Amal, the Big Enemy, completely out in the cold. Amal, a girl who hasn’t done anything to Annie except be the recipient of her drunken boyfriend’s lustful gazes.

  I’m embarrassed that for one greedy second I actually considered getting back into the inner ring of hell with these girls, just for the chance to soak up some of their power.

  “I don’t think I can go,” I say, then take a deep breath and add, “I’ll probably have plans with Amal. Unless you were thinking about inviting her too.”

  I stare with open, innocent eyes.

  Since Annie is to my side, the first person I see is Eva. She’s staring at me, not with her old contempt, but with something that looks a little like envy. Like the way I felt when Amal had the guts to say no to the group about smoking.

  I see Eva for the first time with something resembling compassion. How hard it must be for her to keep up with this group of glistening goddesses. Annie, who is perfect. Emily, though not the prettiest girl in the group, still with a fabulous body and a kind of sleepy appeal that makes both boys and girls like her and not be threatened by her. And even Leslie, who, while overweight, is still pretty and sexy and assertive in her sense of absolute entitlement to everything money can offer.

  Poor Eva, with her horsy face and true secret love for math and science. How much of herself does she give up simply to be safe in the knowledge that she’s a key part of this A-list crowd?

  Eva shoots me another glance and the trail of wistfulness is still in the air when she closes up her face. I turn to Annie. Her face is open with venom. No one turns down her olive branch.

  “Amal?” she asks incredulously. “Amal? The traitor who was totally hitting on my boyfriend? Like, right. Sure I’m going to have her come with us.”

  I feel it’s not enough that I refused the offer. Here is a chance to say something that is the truth, to stick up for someone who was kind to me and can’t be here to stick up for herself.

  “I saw the whole thing,” I say. “She was barely even talking to John. He was talking to her. She’s not the least bit interested in him.”

  Sparks fly off of Annie in her outrage. “And I suppose you know all of this because she’s your new BFF?” She suddenly notices my necklace. Her eyes narrow in new fury. “And I suppose she gave that to you?” She says it like I cheated on her. Like we were really close until I started accepting gifts from a rival suitor and defected to a better setup. I realize that anything other than absolute blind allegiance to her is an insult of the highest order.

  There’s really nothing you can say to a person like that.

  I stand up. “Thanks for the offer anyway,” I say. I walk toward the house, aware that all of their eyes are on me. Especially Eva’s, who is so afraid to look at who she is, she can’t even face that she really wishes she were striding beside me, walking away from Annie, who will eventually suck out all of her blood and leave another dried-up, bled-out corpse.

  The phone rings just as I’m passing through the kitchen. My dad’s hollow “Steph? Are you there?” spills out of the machine and I grab the phone, out of reflex, the second I hear his voice.

  “It’s me,” I say quietly. I walk quickly up the stairs into my bedroom and shut the door. I need to take this privately. I don’t want anyone to wander in and see the mash of emotions on my face.

  “I’ve got good news, kiddo. Your uncles and I have worked out a schedule so you can come home. You’ll be switching around at their homes during the week, since I’ll be working or at school most of the day. On weekends, you’ll stay with me.”

  His voice is joyless but grimly satisfied, as if he finally figured out the damned problem with the plumbing and has, after a lot of false starts, ordered the right parts.

  I have to sit down on my bed. This ramshackle plan for my return feels like a roller-coaster car, flung off its tracks and set loose in my stomach. “What, what, about Mom?” I stutter. “The rehab stuff?”

  He clears his throat as if somehow, he had actually thought he could just sort of float out the whole plan without addressing this issue. “Kind of isn’t going to work out,” he says. “She’s, ah, moved. Out of state, I think. Not sure when she’s coming back.”

  “What?”

  “Um, yeah, she thinks these rehab things are kind of Mickey Mouse. She said it wasn’t really her style.”

  This must be where I first learned to lie. From my father. I have no idea if he actually had a conversation with her or if she was just totally drunk every time he tried to contact her and he, obviously, inferred that she had no interest in rehab.

  I don’t want to ask, I fight myself not to ask, but I do anyway. “Did she say anything about me?”

  He hesitates just a fraction of a second too long so that I know that whatever is going to come out is going to be a lie. “Yes, of course, she did. She asked all about you and sent her love.”

  The phone feels hollow in my hand. A hollow vessel for his hollow words.

  “So, anyway. I was thinking we’d get you home really soon. Two weeks from today.”

  The deepest, unutterable sadness envelops me. I have to go back to what I was when I’m not finished finding out who I can be. I’m going to be shuffled back and forth, never belonging anywhere, especially not belonging by the side of my father who never wanted me in the first place.

  “Yeah,” I say weakly into the phone. “Okay.”

  I click off the phone and drop it onto the bed. Two weeks? I need to call Amal. I need to tell Andrew.

  I can still hear cries out at the pool. I wish my room overlooked it so I could at least try to wave down to Andrew. How can this be happening now? Just when we really got together?

  His face blows into my head. Out on Annie’s front lawn. Leaning over me. His eyes boring into me. Dark dancers in the backs. The absolute power of him. Will you go out with me? Then the kiss. Scorching.

  I don’t want to lose him.

  Maybe we’ll think of a plan to stay together. He has a powerful father, doesn’t he? Didn’t he just get some kind of award? Surely he’ll care about his son’s happiness. Phone calls could be exchanged. Important men in suits calling my father. Making it worth his while.

  I could deal with staying at Annie’s. I’d spend most of my time at Amal’s anyway when I wasn’t at school or with Andrew.

  Downstairs, the blender roars into action and I hear a squeal of “Margarita time” from Annie.

  Where is Andrew? He must have noticed that I went in a while ago. I consider calling Amal to give her the bad news, but that would mean having to face it myself.

  Action pounds in the kitchen. Big male voices join the girls’. The blender roars again and again. The din rises. Laughter slams more frequently. JKIII shouts, “Shots for my men and horses,” earning him a new round of coarse laughter.

  I’d love to go downstairs, find Andrew and maybe take a walk. Maybe he’ll say we should make a mad run for it if the dads can’t work it out so I can stay. In books, the boys are always reckless. The girls are more practical. I’d have to look at him sadly and tell him it’d never work. That he’d be leaving too much behind and I wouldn’t let his dad disinherit him. Then he’d press my hand against his lips and say that he doesn’t deserve me. That no matter how much distance separates us, we’ll always belong together.r />
  I’m so close to running downstairs, but then Annie whoops in hysterical laughter and I lose my nerve. It sounds like she’s smack in the middle of the kitchen and I’d have to run right into her before I got outside to find Andrew.

  I’ll just wait.

  At least I have Eleanor Roosevelt. I pick up the book and go to sit on the little apricot love seat set daintily beneath a huge window with apricot floral drapes in my rich girl’s bedroom. I curl up on the plush cushions. The sun streams through the window softened by the sheers that float down in the middle of the parted drapes.

  The book is solid in my hands. It’s about five hundred pages and in hardcover. Even though softcover books are easier to hold, for Eleanor, I like the feel of a hardcover book. It feels right, as if she needs a big heavy book to tell her story because she did so many big important things.

  I fall into the chapters dimly aware over the next hour or two that the blender keeps buzzing and JKIII repeats his idiotic, “Shots for my men and horses” a few more times.

  Suddenly, there’s a knock on my door. I jerk my head up out of the book and set it down next to me. A visitor at my tower? It can only be Andrew. Finally.

  I run to open the door, fantasies buzzing through me along the way. Maybe he was swimming laps or something since he’d said he was going to try out for the swim team. Maybe he had to go run home for something with his mother, then came back and asked Annie where I went and got into an argument with her when he found out she was rude to me.

  I swing open the door. Andrew leans against the left side of the door frame. The stench of alcohol slaps me.

  Bad registers in my body before my mind has a clear thought.

  Adrenaline jolts my cells. I feel a primitive need to run but I stay planted, forcing myself to be calm despite the panic rising from a deep well in my body.

  I force myself to be logical. I smell alcohol, but there is a boy who likes me standing here, not my mother.

  I process everything about him, making my brain register that there is a friend here, not a foe. And he looks good. His hair is still damp and messy, curly around his head. His chest and stomach are tanned above his bathing suit. His eyes pull me in.

  I try to ignore the alcohol that burns my nostrils. I’m mad at myself for not being prepared for this. Why was I so stupid to blindly assume he wasn’t one of the people drinking downstairs? Especially after he’d been the one to bring beer into the woods in the first place?

  I guess I’d just thought that since drinking in the woods turned out to be such a disaster, both of us had learned our lesson.

  I’m frozen in place. This isn’t like I pictured it at all.

  “So, can I come in?” He smiles his dark, edgy smile.

  I’m thrown off. My body doesn’t like this. Not one bit. But my mind knows I have to tell him about what my dad said and that we have to have our discussion and clarify our future.

  “Um, okay.” I lead the way to the apricot love seat.

  He follows me and swings down sloppily onto the dainty cushions bathed in the soft sunlight. I slide my Eleanor bio to the edge of my side of the couch and sit down gingerly next to him. I clear my throat. I might as well be direct. Maybe he didn’t drink so much that his thoughts will be clouded.

  I start with the most urgent stuff. “Andrew, I talked to my dad.”

  He closes his eyes for a moment, and I don’t know if he can tell by my voice that this is really important and he wants to concentrate or he’s so drunk the room is spinning.

  I plow on. “He said I have to go back to Boston in two weeks.” My voice breaks on the “weeks” and I swallow hard. I could use a hug right now really badly.

  He opens his eyes and stares at me. “That sucks,” he says. “I know,” I say in a small voice, waiting for him to get outraged at my dad and maybe make an urgent call to his dad right on the spot.

  He leans toward me and puts his hand behind my head. I’m ready for the feel of my cheek against his chest in a gentle embrace when he says, “You look hot.” He yanks my face toward his and kisses me clumsily on the mouth.

  The smell of alcohol is overwhelming. A thousand times worse than when he first kissed me in the woods after I’d slammed down beers and was drunk myself. Now, stone cold sober, with no alcohol in my system to swim with that in his, I have nothing to buffer this horrible stench of violence that the alcohol means to me.

  I want Andrew, but not like this. Not when he smells like this. This is all wrong. We have to talk about things. Resolve my deportation.

  He lifts his head for air and I’m able to mumble, “Not now. Not when you’ve been drinking.”

  He breaks into a hard laugh and says, “Right.”

  He grabs me more firmly behind the head and grinds in another kiss. The smell and the pressure behind my head sends men on horseback pounding through my body screaming: Run, run, run. Into the closet. Shut the door.

  I turn my head to the side and manage to gasp, “Andrew, not now.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” he whispers. “I trust you.”

  It takes me a minute to know what he’s talking about, and then I realize that he thinks I’m worried that he’s worried that I’m going to barf on him.

  I shake my head as best I can. “No, it’s not that—”

  But he’s pulling me toward him again, big, clumsy, damp bathing suit against my leg, sweaty, smelly, smashing me against him, shoving his lips against mine.

  Tears prick my eyes, but he doesn’t notice.

  He shifts his weight and stops kissing me for a second.

  I need to get him to focus. “Andrew, I don’t want to do this now. We have to think of a plan,” I say urgently. “My dad says—”

  He shakes his head irritably like I’ve started to talk about algebra. He tightens his arm around the back of my neck and his raging eyes snap into mine. “Chill out,” he orders. “Just go with it while you’re still here. Everyone’s hooking up downstairs.”

  I almost choke. The beautiful balloon has sawdust inside. This is no boyfriend who’s going to scheme with me so we can be together. I’m just the next event on his playbook for the night. An event that requires a partner. Any partner.

  Sadness seeps through me, resonating with the cracked rubble of endless dismissals from my mother. I feel a leaden paralysis.

  He locks his mouth back onto mine and reaches out a clumsy hand to pull me around on top of him. He grabs the necklace by mistake and the string snaps. I jerk my head up in horror. The beads fly high into the air, spinning in the sunlight, shooting rays of colored brilliance around the room.

  Vignettes pound into my head with every flash of the beads. My mother’s face: drunk, contorted, yelling. Me: trembling, running, wetting, hiding. My mother: bangles, biceps, raging, striking. My dad: blind, passive, worthless.

  I gasp for air, but the images keep coming with every flash of the beads. Amal: laughing, warm, friend. Her mother: solid, safe, cradling. Me: open, pouring, growing, light, lighter, floating.

  I feel a roar inside of me starting from the bottom of my feet and blasting into my head. My body wakes as if from a deep dream.

  I plant my feet on the floor and with all my might start to stand at the same time I spin to my left. I rip out of Andrew’s grasp and reach out and grab Eleanor Roosevelt. The book is firm in my hands. Weighty. A Warrior Woman book filled with Warrior Words. I pull myself to my full height and point the book at him like a saber. “Get out.”

  Andrew rubs his hand over his eyes, a bleary-eyed sleeper waking to a shocking sight, like seeing snow in the middle of the summer. He can’t process that someone like me could stand up to someone like him.

  He shoots me a look of the purest contempt. “Whatever, freak,” he spits. He staggers to his feet and stumbles out the door.

  I remain standing. Triumphant and strong, stunned by my own power. I’m so tall I almost scrape the ceiling. Then I notice the beads winking on the floor. I fall to my knees and start picking them up
, one at a time, cradling them in my shirt, even as the tears start to fall and I know with a bottomless relief that I will never be the old me again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  On Friday, I leave school at noon with Amal. She was given a study hall on Fridays at this time because it’s the Muslim time for the services at the mosque, just like Sunday is for Catholics. I feel so special that she’s invited me into this private part of her world. I had Aunt Sarah sign a permission slip for me so I could leave school early today. She signed it immediately, almost forgetting I was still around since she’s been so relieved to have me leaving.

  Amal and I sit in the backseat of her dad’s car with our heads bent toward each other while her father drives. I’m dressed just like Amal and her mom, wearing a long black skirt and a long-sleeve shirt. I have a scarf tied around my head so that no hair peeks out. The necklace, painstakingly strung back together by Amal and me, shimmers around my neck.

  Her father glides the car to the curb and we all get out. The mosque is not a fancy building. It’s a long rectangle with a smaller rectangle on top. It’s made out of red brick with arches of bluish green tile that remind me of fish scales. There are four square white pillars in front.

  Inside, the women go to the right and men go to the left. Amal and her mother motion to a shoe rack. We take off our shoes.

  Amal’s mom is speaking to a young woman with long black eyes and arched eyebrows in a dark, gray suit. She’s really pretty and reminds me of what Cleopatra would look like if she had her bangs pulled back under a scarf and was an attorney. While they’re talking, Amal grabs my arm and says, “You want to see everything?”

  She takes me to a big map that I think is some kind of a joke because it has Africa smack in the middle of it and I’ve never seen a map like this. That seems strange. I look back harder at the map to see if I missed something. I must be blind; it’s a map of the Muslim world. The green shows countries that are more than fifty percent Muslim. I start listing them mentally—Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq—when Amal nudges me. “Look,” she says.