“Don’t you even care about Dad leaving?” Alex said, his voice cracking.
“Shut up!” Jen shouted, and slammed her door.
“You shut up!” Alex shouted back, and slammed his.
Gracie stood, invisible, beside Dylan, and looked down the empty hallway, with closed doors in every direction.
“Gracie, are you still here?” Dylan asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered, feeling too scared and sad even to talk. The headache above her left eye throbbed like a lightning bolt trapped in her brain.
“C’mon,” Dylan whispered. “Let’s go sit in your room for a minute and think about what to do next.”
“Fine, I’ll leave my backpack in there.” The fact that Dylan was being so helpful and attentive dulled the pain in her head just a bit.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, taking her hand and patting the back of it lightly.
“We’ll go to your house and get the journal back from your dad,” Gracie said, shifting her backpack and beginning to feel hopeful. “I’ll make us visible again. I can write something in it about my parents making up. And then I’m going to add something about Jen being attacked by giant leeches. I can’t believe she called me a social liability!”
“What I’m wondering is, what is ‘temporary’ in the lexicon of the journal?” Dylan whispered as they headed down the hall. “How old do you think the journal is? We could extrapolate that a temporary case of invisibility could last fifty years or more. Which is rather disconcerting.”
“You’re not kidding.” Gracie went into her room and let her backpack slide to the floor beside her bed.
And muffled a scream.
Sitting on the windowsill outside, peering into her room, was the Cheshire cat. He pressed his orange nose against the screen and showed his very shiny, square human teeth the moment he saw her.
And a good afternoon to both of you.
Apparently he could see Gracie and Dylan just fine. He clawed the screen and gave a very insistent meow.
“Omigod, it’s him!” Gracie hissed. She bumped into Dylan as she backed out of her room. “Run!” She had already pulled Dylan halfway down the hall.
I’m getting a complex. Is it my breath?
“Why? Where are you going?” Dylan skimmed down the stairs behind her, gripping her shoulder.
Mom’s bedroom door opened behind them. “Steven, is that you?”
Gracie hesitated for a second, then felt around until she found Dylan’s elbow and pulled him through the kitchen. They stumbled out the back door onto the patio.
“What about Jen and Alex and your mom?”
“It’s me he wants, not them.”
“Who?”
“The Cheshire cat. Couldn’t you see him?”
“No!”
“You’re kidding!” Gracie pulled Dylan by the hand, through the backyard, past the weeping willow, and along the creek. Gracie could hear Dylan wheezing behind her. They ended up in Dylan’s backyard, beside a small pond with a fountain Dylan’s dad had built.
“Wait, I have to stop,” Dylan said. Gracie sat down on a boulder. She knew Dylan sat on the one next to her, because she heard him panting, and then he coughed a few times, trying to catch his breath. Clear water in the fountain burbled over artfully arranged rocks, and a few lily pads floated on the surface. One white lily bloomed. On the edge, a statue of Saint Francis with his hands spread and animals at his feet stood next to a sitting Buddha. Gracie’s heart began to slow, and she felt calmer listening to the water’s soothing sounds.
“Okay, my family can’t see us. But the Cheshire cat definitely could. He said hello to us.”
“But I couldn’t see him,” Dylan said.
“It’s the cat from Miss Alice’s mailbox.” Gracie’s heart thudded and a sour dryness licked the back of her throat. “Was the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland evil?”
“Not evil, just…mischievous. Always appearing and disappearing. Offering advice that didn’t seem to make any sense. Oh, and no one could see him but Alice.”
“Very interesting,” Gracie said. “You okay now?”
Dylan took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Do you think the journal is evil?” She looked over her shoulder at a shadowed grove of trees lining the golf fairway and shivered. “Is there someone somewhere laughing at the bad things that are happening, like Jen being attacked in the lunchroom, or Mom and Dad getting in that fight?”
“I’m a secular humanist, Gracie. I don’t believe in evil.”
Gracie wanted to glare at Dylan but couldn’t because they were both invisible. “Dylan, what are you talking about?”
“People are people. Sometimes they’re capable of extreme goodness and sometimes of extreme evil. But in my lexicon there are no spirits and no forces of good and evil. It’s all religious hooey concocted to control the proletariat.”
“Is lexicon one of your vocabulary words this week or something?” Gracie said irritably. “And how do you explain a see-through Cheshire cat that can read minds?” She wasn’t sure what she believed.
“I’m going to say a hologram projected from something in your brother’s room? And there’s a possibility that you’re excessively stressed. Maybe you just thought you saw it.”
“So you ran like a chicken escaping the nugget factory to get away from a hologram or a figment of my imagination?” Gracie couldn’t believe Dylan was so smart but could be so dumb when bizarre things were staring him right in the face.
“Well, you were running. I never saw the thing. I was just…providing moral support.”
“And you and I are invisible because…?”
“That definitely is a tiny fly in the ointment of my theory.” There was a moment of silence. “Not that I blame you a bit for this invisibility issue, Gracie, but I wish you’d written that we became invisible for fifteen minutes or something a bit more specific,” Dylan said.
Gracie groaned. “As soon as your dad gets home, we’ll get the journal back and I can fix everything.”
The sun dropped lower and a faint breeze stirred the surface of the water in the fountain. Dylan’s hand lay on top of hers.
Suddenly Dylan said, in a quiet voice, “All this holding your hand, Gracie, I don’t know, I think I’m…”
The top of Gracie’s hand, where Dylan’s touched hers, seared with heat. Her heart did a twitching thing and she caught her breath. At that moment a car door slammed in front of Dylan’s house. Gracie’s responses to touching Dylan’s hand had so confused her that she actually felt grateful for the interruption. “That’s probably him right now.”
“C’mon.” Dylan lifted Gracie’s hand and his fingers accidentally brushed the side of her breast. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Right,” said Gracie. Sensations flared all over her body.
“I didn’t!” Dylan squeezed her hand, just to emphasize the truth of his statement, and they both ran down the driveway. Gracie caught her breath as she watched Dylan’s dad heave his golf clubs out of the trunk of a black Lexus. He slammed the trunk shut, then waved to the driver of the car.
“Thanks, Bruce. Good round!” The car pulled away, but while Mr. McWilliams was still in the driveway, a battered gray Ford Taurus pulled up.
“Larry, hello.” Mr. McWilliams leaned down and spoke through the window. “We’re still planning to meet tonight at your house, correct?”
“Right. I’ve been trying to call your office all afternoon.”
“Sorry, I’m just back from golf.”
“Paul, I’m just terribly in need of some reassurance, that’s all.”
Gracie kneeled beside the golf bag and tried very quietly to unzip the pocket into which she’d seen Mr. McWilliams drop the journal. She’d half-unzipped the pocket when he hefted the bag over his shoulder.
The bag hit Gracie in the side of the head and knocked her sideways.
Muffling a groan, she scrambled to her feet, and at that same instant the m
an in the car—Larry—leaned across the passenger seat. “Hey, I’m safe, right? I can’t go to prison. My wife and kids…” Larry’s eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses were nearly invisible in the late-afternoon glare, but Gracie still recognized him. It was Dr. Larry Gaston, her own ex-principal!
“Stop worrying. That’s what you’re paying me for. I’ll stop by tonight and we’ll go over the arraignment. It’s very straightforward.”
Again Gracie poked her hand through the pocket’s opening. Holding her breath, she curled her fingers around the journal’s edge. She had it! Slowly she pulled it out of the bag.
“Thanks, Paul.”
At that moment Dylan’s dad turned abruptly, hitting Gracie’s elbow with the golf bag. The journal popped out of her hand, and flew through the open back window of the Taurus into the backseat.
And then, before Gracie could do anything else, the Taurus pulled away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“If I’d tried a hundred times, I bet you I couldn’t have thrown the journal through Dr. Gaston’s car window,” Gracie groaned as she and Dylan raced up the broad hardwood stairs of his house. She gripped the back of his T-shirt so she wouldn’t lose him.
“I know! Quick, I’m supposed to be grounded. He has to know I’m here, but we can’t let him see that we’re invisible.”
Gracie giggled. “He’s not going to see that we’re invisible.”
“Okay, okay, let him know that we’re invisible. I’ll go in the bathroom and turn on the shower so he has to talk to me through the door. Meanwhile, you get on my laptop and find Dr. Gaston’s address.”
Dylan slammed the door to the bathroom. A moment later Gracie heard the shower turn on, and Mr. McWilliams’s heavy feet on the stairs. She ducked into Dylan’s bedroom as Mr. McWilliams stopped in front of the bathroom door. “Son?”
“In the shower, Dad,” Dylan answered.
His dad yelled through the door. “I’m home. I’ll be down in my study. Remember, no phone calls.”
“Yessir.”
Mr. McWilliams looked into Dylan’s room, his face only inches from Gracie’s as she stood inside the doorway, her heart beating wildly. Then Mr. McWilliams headed back downstairs. Gracie heaved a sigh of relief and tiptoed over to Dylan’s desk. Dylan’s room was dominated by the fifteen-hundred-piece balsa-wood model of the Globe Theatre that Gracie had helped him assemble in sixth grade.
It didn’t take long to find Dr. Gaston’s address. Just as she finished printing out the map, the shower stopped. The map presented something of a challenge, because every time Gracie tried to pick it up and read it, it disappeared. Finally she laid the map on the desk and memorized it.
“Gracie?” Dylan whispered from the doorway. “Where are you?”
“Over here by the desk, memorizing the map to Dr. Gaston’s house. We need to get over there.”
“Okay, what happens if my dad wonders where I am?”
“We could do the old pillows-under-the-covers trick.”
“That is so clichéd.”
“Or turn on the TV and shut your bedroom door so he thinks you’re watching.”
“I’m grounded from watching TV.”
“I think we have to go with pillows under the covers.”
“Okay.” Dylan sighed. It took longer than they expected to stuff pillows under the covers and make them look convincing, since the pillows disappeared every time they touched them. That inconvenient power also made writing the note saying Dad, I’m really tired, I’m taking a nap and taping it to Dylan’s bedroom door into a complex chore.
Finally, Gracie and Dylan tiptoed past his dad’s study, peering in. Mr. McWilliams sat hunched in a red leather chair, shuffling through legal files and sipping from a tumbler of amber liquid. Dusk had fallen, and an antique lamp cast a cone of golden light over the burnished mahogany bookcases and thick Turkish rug.
“He doesn’t seem to be wondering why you haven’t come downstairs,” Gracie whispered.
“He’s always been exceptionally focused,” Dylan said after a minute.
“Do you think Dr. Gaston is guilty?” Gracie watched as Dylan’s dad shuffled through the sheaf of documents.
“Dad’s clients are always guilty,” Dylan said gloomily. “But he’s brilliant and he always gets them off. Hence the demand for his services.”
“That’s so depressing. I always liked Dr. Gaston. You know, he looks kind of like an owl trying to wake up. And he sounded so worried about his wife and kids.”
Suddenly Dylan’s dad scanned the room. He went to the window, looked out, and closed the heavy drapes. As he was sitting down again, adjusting his cashmere sweater over his large stomach, his cell phone buzzed.
“Paul McWilliams.” His voice assumed a patient, long-suffering tone. “Hello, Louise.”
“It’s Mom,” Dylan whispered.
Mr. McWilliams listened. “Yeah, I wanted to ask you about Dylan’s friend. What’s-her-name…the nondescript one?” He listened. “That’s right. Gracie Rawley.”
Gracie felt her cheeks grow hot.
Dylan squeezed her hand. “Ignore him. He’s the world’s most insensitive person. You’re not nondescript in any way.” He pulled her toward the door. “C’mon, don’t even listen.”
Gracie squeezed Dylan’s hand back gratefully. “Okay.”
A minute or so later they were racing down the path between Dylan’s house and hers. Gracie gripped the folded map to Dr. Gaston’s house in one hand and Dylan’s hand in the other.
“Can you drive?” Gracie said.
“I have yet to pass driver’s ed or obtain a permit, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Well, it’s either you or me. I vote for you.”
Gracie and Dylan jogged past the oak tree at the back corner of her yard just in time to see Jen, dressed in low-rise jeans and a T-shirt that said GO COMMANDO, walk briskly across the back patio, swinging her car keys. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, and Gracie could see the icy blue of her eye shadow halfway across the yard.
“Hey, there’s our ride!” she whispered to Dylan. “C’mon!”
Gracie pulled Dylan through the yard, running as fast as she possibly could, weaving through trees and scratching her arms as they crashed through shrubbery. When Jen stopped to look at her reflection in the kitchen window and reapply makeup over the scratch on her cheek, Gracie quietly opened the back door of the Mustang, and she and Dylan jumped in next to one of Jen’s jackets, which was wadded in the corner of the backseat. Gracie pulled the door closed, making as little noise as possible.
“Aren’t you going to say something to her?” Dylan whispered as Jen trotted down the driveway.
“If we say something before she leaves, she’ll kick us out of the car. Wait until she gets going.”
“But if two invisible people start talking to her while she’s driving, she might freak and drive off the road.”
“Believe me, with Jen driving, that could happen anyway,” said Gracie. “Let’s just give it some time. Maybe she’ll meet the Fridge somewhere and get in his car, and we can borrow this one.”
Jen got in the car, slammed the door, and tossed her hair over her shoulders. Gracie fought a sneeze as perfume billowed into the backseat. Gracie and Dylan held their breath as Jen shuffled through the CDs, stuck Jet into the player, and cranked up “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”
“The music’s so loud we can probably talk in a normal tone of voice and she wouldn’t even hear us,” Gracie whispered.
Suddenly Mom shouted out her bedroom window, “Jen Rawley! If you take that car tonight, you’ll be grounded for the rest of your natural life!”
“Wow, I wouldn’t want to meet your mom in a dark alley,” Dylan whispered.
Jen ignored Mom and squealed in reverse out of the driveway. Goose bumps shot up the back of Gracie’s neck.
“Whiplash!” Dylan hissed as Jen put the car into first gear. “I’d like to lodge a complaint.”
Dylan gripped Gracie’
s hand when Jen took the turn out of the development on two wheels and tailgated another car at fifty miles an hour. When it slowed down, she slammed on the brakes and Dylan gasped.
“It’s all I can do not to scream at the top of my lungs,” he said.
“She’s listening to Jet, it’ll fit right in. Anyway, once we get the journal back, I’m going to give it to the wisest person in the world.”
“Who’s that?” Dylan briefly wrapped his arms around Gracie’s neck when Jen ran a red light. “I can’t look!”
Gracie sighed. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Who do you think it is?”
“Wow, what a question. Let’s see, the oracle at Delphi called Socrates the wisest man in the world. Then there was Solomon.” Jen swerved to avoid hitting a parked UPS truck. “Jesus.”
“That’s true. Jesus was incredibly wise.”
“And Buddha. Galileo. Muhammad. Mother Teresa. Mahatma Gandhi. Shakespeare. Jane Austen. Charles Darwin. Marie Curie. Some might disagree about John Lennon, but—there’s a small inconvenience—none of those people are still alive.”
“Obviously it would be preferable to have the person be alive.”
“Okay, okay, I’m thinking. What about my namesake, Bob Dylan? He’s been called the literary voice of an entire generation. Or…Jane Goodall. All that fabulous research on apes. Or…Shirley Ann Jackson, the physicist. Or…Bill Gates? I know—Nelson Mandela!”
“I like him,” Gracie agreed.
“Or those guys who started Google? Hey, maybe Google is your answer. It’s the gateway to all the information in the world. Give the journal to Google. It will never die, only grow more wise.”
“To a search engine?” Gracie made a face. “What about the Dalai Lama? He’s still alive, isn’t he? I looked through one of his books last year when Mom was reading it for her book club. I opened it up to this one page and I got goose bumps. I read something like, All human beings are the same. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. That seemed so wise to me.”
Jen was singing at the top of her lungs to Jet, belting out “Roll Over DJ.”
“You know where the Dalai Lama is from, don’t you, Gracie?” Dylan sounded patronizing.
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