Translucent

by Dan Rix

  “I can hear you shivering,” said Megan.

  “It’s . . . it’s freezing,” I stuttered.

  “It’s like seventy degrees out.”

  “Maybe if I had a shirt,” I said. “Or pants.”

  “Shh—” An invisible hand closed around my arm, making me jump. Just Megan.

  Inside the physics building, fluorescent lights flickered to life. A student with a long beard bustled through the lobby and pushed open the door, blasting me with warmth. Long strides carried him off toward the parking lot, oblivious that he’d passed within six inches of an invisible girl’s arm. The door began to swing shut. I darted inside, yanking Megan behind me.

  Then we were in.

  Megan pulled me toward the elevators, but I resisted. I could just picture it, Megan and me huddled at the back of the elevator while a group of physics grad students crammed in like sardines.

  Instead I dragged her toward the stairs, which we climbed in silence.

  Then another dark hallway, lights turned off in some kind of power saving mode. I half expected them to light up from our presence, but the motion detectors didn’t register our movements.

  Which made sense, considering we were invisible.

  The door to the lab was closed, but the bolt hadn’t latched. I glanced up and down the hallway. No one about.

  “Swarming with police?” I muttered.

  “It was an honest concern,” she said.

  Gently as I could, I pulled the lab door open a crack and peeked inside. Empty. A little more, so I could see the other side of the lab. A bright computer screen came into view, and an Asian guy hunched forward, munching on a bag of Oreos. I let the door rest shut again and pressed my finger to my lips.

  Which she couldn’t see.

  “One person,” I whispered. “He’s facing away. Don’t make a sound.” I held my breath, pulled open the door again, and shimmied inside. Megan followed. The door swung shut behind her with a loud clack.

  I froze.

  The grad student glanced behind him. He rubbed his eyes, checked his cell phone, grabbed another Oreo, and went back to work.

  Adrenaline pricked my bare skin. Ever so slowly, I let out my breath. Holding hands again, we tiptoed to Sarah’s desk. The apparatus with the two-by-four and the lenses and lasers leaned against a nearby wall.

  A device that can see it.

  Other than a slightly larger pile of coffee cups, the desk looked exactly like last time.

  Sarah had committed suicide.

  At the thought, a strange pressure throbbed in my chest. Seeing her forlorn desk made it real. The redhead with the flyaways and manic eyes who had figured out how to see dark matter was dead.

  And why?

  What clues had she left behind?

  The police would have come here and poked around, probably. Maybe not much if they hadn’t suspected foul play.

  Had they missed anything?

  Megan’s warm breath sent shivers down the side of my neck. “What are we looking for?”

  Good question.

  “See if you can find her journal,” I said. Too loud.

  The grad student swiveled in his chair and stared right at us, and I shut up fast. Instinctively, I covered my private parts. He pushed up his glasses, shoved a hand through his disheveled anime hair, grabbed an Oreo, and went back to work. The slow crunch, crunch of his chewing filled the lab.

  I felt around for Megan, caught her arm, and followed it up to her ear. “You watch him while I look,” I breathed. “If he starts to turn around again, grab me.”

  She tilted my head so she could whisper into my ear. “Okay.”

  I went to work.

  Sticky notes lined the bottom of her monitor—past-due reminders of assignments, meetings with professors, blind dates, study groups, a dentist appointment, a call dad about Thanksgiving. At that, my eyes teared up. She had family, friends, people who cared about her.

  And she was dead.

  Volumes of physics books crammed a shelf above her monitor, and my eyes went to a gap. One book missing. Removed?

  Clues . . . clues . . . clues . . .

  What had she discovered about dark matter?

  I glanced behind me, checked that Oreo was busy wiping crumbs from his jeans, and carefully lifted the coffee cups. Stuck to a chewed-on lid, another sticky note came into view. Three words, scribbled.

  Superfluid = naked singularity?

  The word naked certainly hit home.

  But I had no idea what naked singularity meant, or if it was even about dark matter. I moved on to the desk drawer. It rolled out with a screech and banged open, shaking the whole desk.

  Megan grabbed my shoulder.

  The grad student swiveled around, an Oreo held in his mouth, and stared at the open drawer. Then, eyebrows pinched together, he rolled his chair across the lab toward Sarah’s desk.

  Megan yanked me to my feet and hustled me out of the way, just as the grad student pulled to a stop in front of the drawer. He peered down into it, then pushed it halfway shut and let it go. It rolled open again. He nodded to himself and pushed it all the way shut, seating it firmly, then let go.

  The drawer remained closed.

  He stared at it, squeezing his jaw. Then he whacked the side of the desk with his palm.

  Nothing happened.

  He banged the desk again.

  Again, nothing.

  He was trying to replicate the drawer opening on its own. Panicking, I stepped forward. If he couldn’t get the drawer to open on its own, he’d get suspicious. I had to interfere.

  Had to time it right.

  Eyebrows knotted in disbelief, the grad student delivered a hard kick to one of the desk legs. Coffee cups tumbled and rolled off. I lunged in and gave the drawer a tug, and it rolled the rest of the way open, coming to rest exactly how he’d found it. The grad student studied the open drawer, nodded to himself, and rolled back to his own computer, apparently satisfied.

  I exhaled slowly, my nerves buzzing.

  Invisible hands groped me, and Megan’s lips pressed to my ear. “Time to go,” she hissed.

  “One second,” I whispered back.

  I wasn’t leaving empty handed. There had to be something here, some kind of clue. My gaze went back to the book shelf, the half-inch gap.

  A book so obviously missing.

  A survey of her messy desk revealed it wasn’t there, either. It bothered me. Had she lent it to someone? Taken it home?

  The book could be important.

  People usually organized bookshelves by subject, so maybe the nearby books would give a clue. I reached for the spine to the left of the gap, but found it wedged in firm. The cover must have adhered to the one next to it. I hooked a finger over the top and tried to tilt it into the gap, but the volume wouldn’t budge. Almost like something was in the way.

  Wait a minute . . .

  I pressed my finger toward the half-inch gap.

  It struck something invisible—the soft spine of a leather-bound journal.

  Sarah’s journal.

  She’d made it invisible!

  I slid it out, stunned at my dumb luck. All we had to do was unwrap it. “Okay, now we can go,” I whispered, handing the invisible journal to Megan’s ghost hands.

  I gave a final look around Sarah’s desk, and my eyes honed in on the apparatus, leaning against the wall.

  The laser thingy.

  “And we’re not leaving without that,” I added.

  If the Asian guy turned around, he would have seen a strange sight. A ten-foot piece of two-by-four fixed with a series of lenses and half-silvered mirrors—floating apparently unassisted toward the door.

  He didn’t turn around,
though.

  He’d already firmly decided, through experiment, that the strange sounds coming from Sarah’s desk—the girl who’d committed suicide—were both unsurprising and fully repeatable, and could be attributed entirely to natural phenomena.

  But the door could be a problem.

  Leading the way, I hesitated, and Megan’s momentum drove the two-by-four into my ribs. Holding the apparatus with one hand, I reached behind me and turned the door handle, eliciting a faint click. I cringed and glanced at the grad student, but he was busy dumping Oreo crumbs into his mouth, oblivious.

  Had he really finished the whole bag?

  I pulled the door open, and backed out of it. Megan caught the door after me, preventing it from closing. The apparatus cleared the doorway, and we straightened it out in the hallway. This time, Megan let the door close slowly. Not a sound.

  “Nice,” I whispered.

  “Now let’s go,” she said.

  We continued at a brisk pace through the maze of dark hallways toward the stairs, nearly breaking into a sprint. Suddenly, lights flickered on ahead of us, triggered by motion sensors. But not by us.

  Footsteps on linoleum echoed closer.

  I froze.

  But who was still wandering the halls at two a.m. on a Friday?

  A shadow flitted toward the intersection. The apparatus levitated in midair between me and Megan. We were invisible, but it wasn’t.

  “Quick, stand it up—” I yanked the two-by-four out of Megan’s grip and leaned it against the wall, just as a girl came into view at the end of the hallway, long blonde hair sailing out behind her.

  I let go of the apparatus and felt Megan pull me against the wall, accidentally nudging the two-by-four just a little.

  Nothing strange here.

  Just some grad student’s light interference experiment, waiting to be discussed with a professor.

  The girl’s head swiveled toward us as she walked, her eyes fixed on me. For a split-second, panic choked off my breath. She can see me. I stopped dead, heart lurching in my chest.

  She was looking right at me.

  No, looking at the apparatus. She was looking at the apparatus, which was right next to me.

  Not me.

  Still her eyes seemed to meet mine, and my gaze flinched away out of reflex. Holding my limbs rigid and hardly breathing, I stared straight ahead.

  The girl passed right in front of us and continued on up the hall. She turned her head and continued to stare in our direction, no expression really. Not suspicion, not curiosity, something else. I noticed then how young she was. Younger than me.

  Not a grad student.

  An undergrad? She didn’t even look that old.

  And there was something disconcertingly familiar about her.

  Before she rounded the corner, the girl gave us one final look—and this time, this time her gaze seemed to burn through my invisibility like X-rays, exposing my nakedness underneath. Like an icy hand had reached inside me.

  Then she was gone.

  But not her face, which remained burned in my retinas.

  “Megan,” I whispered urgently.

  “Shh, she might still hear us.”

  “That girl, didn’t she . . . didn’t she look like . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Like who?” said Megan.

  “I mean, you saw her, right? That girl just now . . . you saw her, right?”

  “Blondie? I’m not blind.”

  I swallowed the tight knot in my throat. “Didn’t she . . . didn’t she look just like Ashley Lacroix?”

  Chapter 13

  Getting it off was the scary part.

  Back in Megan’s bedroom, I stared at the empty space in the mirror where I knew my body was, knowing I had to peel it off eventually.

  I didn’t want to.

  I liked having it on.

  It protected me.

  What if I never took it off?

  The apparatus was still wedged in Megan’s car, splinters ripping up the lowered backseats. Luckily, we’d escaped campus without any more close calls.

  I still hadn’t fully shaken off the encounter with Ashley’s look-alike, even though I knew it had to be someone else. It was a reminder.

  And all reminders hurt.

  “Hey, check this out!” Megan barged into the bathroom. At least, her clothes did. Though still invisible, she now wore sweats and a T-shirt, which clung eerily to a torso that wasn’t there. The empty shirt preened in front of the mirror. “I think I’m going to be this for Halloween.”

  “What . . . Hollow Man?” I sneered.

  The shirt pressed out its boobs. “No, a ghost.”

  A ghost.

  I licked my lips. “How do I get this stuff off?”

  “You just peel it off. Nose is easiest.”

  I touched my nose, but it just felt like my nose. Not sticky. Like the stuff had fused with my skin. “Is there a seam somewhere?”

  “You pinch it a little,” she said.

  I pinched the tip of my nose, getting nothing. “Uh, Megan . . . I’m pinching.”

  “Use your fingernail.”

  My fingernail dug into the skin, scraped at it, tried to get underneath and peel up the top layer. Finally my fingernail pierced some kind of membrane, which then separated from my nose in one huge flap, easily peeling away. To my relief, my nose hovered in the mirror. Visible again.

  “Huh, it’s like once you pierce it,” I said, scraping it off my cheeks, “it comes off a lot easier. Like that plastic packaging. Otherwise it feels like part of your skin.”

  “I agree, it’s freaky stuff,” she said, starting on her own nose.

  It came out of my eyes like dried rubber cement, no longer sticky. I gathered the residue in a ball and worked my way down to my shoulders and collar bones, rolling it off effortlessly now. I continued down my torso. Once past my hips, it unstuck on its own and collapsed in an invisible heap at my feet. I stepped out of it.

  Like a snake shedding its skin.

  A hint of pink lingered on my bare thighs and stomach, but not too bad. I wrapped myself in a towel and felt around the tiled floor for all the scraps, rolling them into a marble-sized ball, which I then scraped off into the contact lens case. On the tip of my finger, it was already behaving more like a fluid again.

  The same amount I’d started with.

  No more, no less.

  “It’s a cycle,” I said. “When it’s wet and sticky, it gets absorbed in your skin, but then it hardens and becomes rubbery so you can peel it off. Then it gets sticky again.”

  “Huh, weird,” she said.

  “You still have Sarah’s journal, right?”

  By now, she’d exposed most of her face. “I thought you had it.”

  “No, I gave it to you.”

  “Yeah, and I gave it back to you,” she said.

  I glared at her in disbelief. “You lost it.”

  “I’m kidding . . . Jeez,” she said. “It’s on my bed. But I can’t get the stuff off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The dark matter, I can’t find the seam.”

  “Did you try pinching it?” I said, with bite.

  “Yes, I pinched it.” She rolled the dark matter down to her elbow, and inch by inch, like a magician’s act, her arm came into view under her palm.

  Along with a row of black smudges.

  “Your arm,” I said.

  “What?” She exposed more of the smudges, lined up in a row.

  “Megan . . . Megan, look at your arm!”

  She looked. Her eyes widened.

  “It’s not just your arm,” I said, pulling the shirt off her shoulder and pus
hing her hair back to expose her neck. The same smudges. I noticed them on her cheeks too now, only fainter. “It’s everywhere.”

  “What are they?” she gasped.

  “They look kind of like . . .” I touched her elbow, “like bruises. Do they hurt?”

  “I don’t know . . . I can’t tell.” Fear crept into her voice.

  I tilted her arm, and for a moment, the smudges seemed to pull together into symbols . . . letters . . . writing.

  A trick of the light.

  “There’s a pattern,” I said. “Did you get a tattoo?”

  “Of course not,” she said, craning her neck to see the back of her shoulder. “I’ve never seen this before tonight, you know, before . . .”

  “Before what?”

  She looked up, alarmed. “Before I put on that fucking invisible stuff.”

  Emory Lacroix’s house.

  I stood outside it on Sunday night, invisible. The house roosted on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, and a wet breeze whipped through the streets and slipped between my bare thighs, prompting uncontrollable shivers, which I tried to suppress.

  I had put it on again.

  Dark matter.

  I had put it on to see this time. To see Emory and his family, to watch them grieve, to see their pain without anybody being able to see me back. I needed to confront the horror of what I’d done.

  Or maybe I just felt lonely without it on.

  My second skin.

  Seeing Ashley in the physics building—thinking I’d seen her—had haunted me all weekend, reminding me I would never in all my life escape what I’d done to her, what I’d done to her body. The pain I’d wrought on her family, which I would never fully understand.

  But being invisible had also given me an idea. I could be a fly on the wall in Emory’s house.

  I could try to understand.

  Maybe there was a reason for all this, a reason Megan and I had been camping in the San Rafael Wilderness that night, a reason it had landed so close to us, a reason I had gone down into that crater . . .