by Dan Rix
There were things I needed to see.
The asphalt shuddered beneath my bare feet, followed by the deep rumble of surf crashing at the bottom of the cliffs. A salty mist filled my lungs.
I had to do this.
My eyes jumped from the front door to the black convertible parked in the street, then the SUV in the driveway.
Emory was home.
So were his parents.
Before I could chicken out, I ventured across the lawn, my toes sinking in damp grass. Each nerve-wracking step I had to remind myself I was invisible. Like I wasn’t even here. No one will ever know.
The bruises on Megan’s body had mostly healed. Probably nothing, we’d figured—an allergic reaction to dark matter, nothing serious. I had a bottle of Benadryl waiting at home in case I had a similar breakout.
A few bruises weren’t going to stop me from doing what I had to do.
I stepped onto the porch, and the throbbing soles of my feet flared with new pain, making me wince. I’d walked barefoot all the way from my house, not wanting to risk my car being seen, and now the skin felt raw and tender. I limped to the front door, leaving wet footprints.
Hmm.
I wiped my feet off on the prickly doormat, chafing them further. More stinging jolts of pain. At least no more footsteps.
Through a bay window, I made out a dining room, brightly lit. A living room, a huge TV blaring news, but no one watching. No one in sight. I tried the handle. Locked. Obviously.
I had a plan, but it was risky. Knowing what it would require, my breath hiked and my heart pounded. I rang the doorbell.
Ding-dong.
I pressed it twice more, to really get their attention.
Silence inside the house, then footsteps stomping down the stairs. Emory Lacroix came into view in gym pants and a sweaty wifebeater, exposing hard, tanned shoulders. He leaned to peer through the side widows, saw no one and frowned, but fumbled with the latch anyway. The door opened.
I swallowed the dryness in my throat, steeling myself to enter the Lacroix residence.
For a disconcerting moment, Emory stared right through me. His body blocked the door.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called from upstairs. His mom.
Emory swiveled. “They’re gone.”
A gap!
Under his arm, while his back was turned.
Adrenaline drove me forward, and I ducked under him and scooted inside, hugging the doorframe, briefly self-conscious of my nakedness and his proximity. Above me, he shrugged and pushed the door shut, with my legs still outside. I yanked them in and rolled out of the way like a ninja, grateful the blaring news masked the thumps of my shoulder on hardwood floor.
I rolled right into a dog.
A Golden Retriever.
The animal reared up, startled, ears perked. He’d been asleep. He sniffed the air with a perplexed look, and then his snout jerked toward me and he gave a low growl, lips pulled back from razor-sharp canines.
He could smell me.
I shrank away from the animal, scuttling like a crab. Though his coffee eyes darted this way and that, his nose tracked me perfectly.
Caught.
“Carter!” Emory shouted. “No growling! NO!”
If only he knew. I used the distraction to slink from the foyer into the dining room. The hardwood floor creaked under my heel, but Emory was too busy trying to calm down his dog to notice. I slipped into the kitchen and backed into a corner, gasping for breath.
This was crazy. Stupid crazy.
What the hell was I doing here?
My gaze gravitated toward the refrigerator, and I remembered why. The photos held in place by magnets. Ashley’s piercing blue eyes and golden hair lit up half of them—smiling, laughing, arms around her friends, hugging her brother. She was gorgeous.
I noticed other details around the kitchen. The artwork displayed on the walls. Watercolor sunsets and brooding chalk pastel faces, gloomy scenes of London with ink streetlamps reflecting off slick cobblestone, stuff I couldn’t have drawn in my wildest dreams.
Stuff she had drawn, signed Ashley down at the bottom.
My face twisted into a grimace, and my vision blurred through tears. I couldn’t look anymore, couldn’t look at the remnants of her life. I slid to the floor, invisible tears dripping from my cheeks and pooling in my belly button. I wanted this pain.
I wanted to feel everything, suffer for everything, suffer like they suffered. They didn’t know what had become of her, because the police never turned up a body. Emory and his family would be stuck like this forever, stuck in limbo, grieving for her but never able to move on, tortured for the rest of their lives by the tiniest flicker of hope.
It was all my fault.
Why hadn’t I just come forward? Why hadn’t I confessed? Any punishment would have been easier than this soul-crushing anguish. License revoked. A year in prison. Easy. I would have given them my whole life to have my conscience back.
Instead, I had done the most abominable thing.
I went upstairs next.
A hallway greeted me at the top of the stairs, and I tiptoed along the walls where the floor didn’t creak as much. An office came into view, Emory’s dad hunched forward over a computer screen, rubbing tired, grief-stricken eyes. Steam seeped under the door of a bathroom, where someone was taking a shower.
A closed door pulled my gaze to the end of the hall.
A vibe was coming from that door.
At the sight, my heart stilled, and my breath seemed to get lost on its way into my lungs.
Her bedroom.
I could feel it tugging at me. The way a murderer must feel the tug of their victim’s grave, the urge to go look like little barbed hooks in my heart, sinking deeper and pulling harder with each beat . . .
I tore my gaze off her bedroom, and only then realized how fast I was breathing.
I shouldn’t be here. I should go.
But my curiosity wouldn’t let me. It was an itch that needed to be scratched.
Emory’s room came up on my left, door eight inches ajar—obviously a teenager’s room given the shelves of trophies, the sports and band and car posters lining the walls. The softly hissing Mozart, I did not expect.
I slipped inside, and my pulse ratcheted up.
The room was empty.
I noticed three things immediately. A fat book lay open next to his bed, pages well-worn and dog-eared. I peered closer to read its title: Understanding Sleepwalking: Recognizing the Causes, Triggers, and Patterns of Recurrent Somnambulism Episodes. Pinned to a corkboard behind his desk was a printout of every article that had ever been written about Ashley’s disappearance. Unfurled next to it was huge map of Santa Barbara, riddled with pins.
One glance told me he was looking in the wrong place.
I crept closer. Every pin had a handwritten label—Episode 3/20 . . . Episode 4/5 (found in backyard) . . . Jennifer’s house (best friend) . . . and hundreds of others.
He’d never quit searching.
As I scanned the months of work he’d put in, my hand went to my mouth.
The door creaked suddenly behind me, and I spun around.
Emory sauntered in, a towel barely hanging onto his hips, blond hair falling in damp tendrils down his forehead. I jumped away from the desk and flattened myself against the wall. Time to go, Leona.
He shut the door behind him.
Only then did I realize my mistake. I couldn’t open the door without making a sound. I was trapped in here with him until he let me out.
Emory reached for the towel.
Uh-oh—
I clamped my eyes shut. The towel landed near my feet with a whoosh, and I felt a brush of air. I swallowed hard, squeez
ing my eyelids even tighter. Don’t peek, don’t peek, don’t peek . . .
I peeked.
Yep, he was naked. I averted my eyes as fast as I could, but oh I still saw plenty. Powerful thighs, extremely tight butt cheeks. In my periphery, he dragged on a pair of boxer briefs and faced me. I looked again, unable to resist now. An athlete’s torso, abs and pecs flexing as he swiped on deodorant. His brooding gaze stayed fixed on a spot in a corner.
He had no idea an invisible girl stood less than ten feet away.
Also naked.
My face flushed at the thought.
I had to get out of here. Soon. I was violating his privacy and acting like a pervert. Just because I was invisible did not mean it was okay to sneak into boys’ rooms and leer at them naked.
What else are you going to do with it? said a little voice in my head.
Shut up.
He rummaged around for a pair of jeans.
Time to go, Leona.
I scooted along the wall toward the door, trying and failing to look somewhere else besides him. I had to get around his bed. While his back was turned, I cut toward the center of the room, ducking on the balls of my feet.
A loose floorboard squeaked under my weight. Cringing, I let off, only to yield another agonized creak. I froze in the middle of his room.
Emory’s back flexed. He turned slowly.
And stared right at me.
For a moment, I forgot I was invisible, and wondered how I could possibly explain my way out of this. My body certainly seemed to think it was standing right in front of him wearing nothing at all.
But then his gaze flicked side to side, up and down, searching the wall behind me. He couldn’t see me.
But then he did the worst thing possible. He leaned over his desk and turned off Mozart, bathing us in silence. Acoustic, soundproof walls. Not a whisper, not a creak.
Just my own deafening pulse.
By then I realized I wasn’t breathing.
I took a minuscule breath, only a sip, but even that caught a little. A tiny gasp.
His gaze darted back to me, and my limbs went rigid.
He took slow steps toward me, and my heart began to pound like a huge drum. He would hear my heartbeat . . . floating in midair. He would sense me. He was so close now he could reach out and touch me. My weight shifted away from him, and my ankle cracked.
A crack like a whip.
I could have sworn it echoed.
He halted midstride, eyes alert. They seemed to focus on my face like he knew there was something there, like maybe if he looked hard enough, he would see it. His throat moved up and down in an effortful swallow.
Then he whispered, “Ashley?”
His eyes were bright . . . hopeful.
A soreness spread through my heart and pooled in my belly. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
He thought I was her ghost.
Ashley’s ghost.
His eyes brimmed with tears, and his voice cracked. “Ashley, is that you?”
I desperately wanted to answer back, wanted to say yes. I wanted it to be true . . . for him.
He reached a hand toward me, hesitated.
I saw the anguish in his eyes, the desperate longing, and I couldn’t resist.
I reached out too.
I shouldn’t have, but I did.
An ominous calm washed over me as I extended my ghost hand toward his. Our fingers touched before I was ready.
He flinched back, and his eyes widened. He staggered backward, tripped on his heel, and crashed into his computer chair. “No!” he shouted. “No, no, no!”
The horror in his voice snapped me out of my daze, and I ran for it, adrenaline doing my thinking for me. My footsteps pounded the floor, boards creaking and groaning. Screw it all. I flung open the door, and the force banged it into the dresser, sending a shudder through the walls.
I didn’t care.
I flew down the stairs and leapt over a barking, snarling dog, yanked open the front door, and sprinted off into the night.
Chapter 14
“What the hell?” I said, gritting my teeth as I dug my fingernails into Sarah’s leather-bound journal, still infuriatingly invisible. “Why can’t we get it off?”
“It must have fused with the pages,” said Megan.
“This is so stupid,” I said, whacking my hair away from my face. “How are we supposed to read it if it’s invisible?”
“Maybe that’s the point,” she said.
“If I could just break the surface,” I muttered, sliding my finger along the spine. But there was nothing to break.
“Maybe you have to be invisible to read it,” Megan offered. “Maybe if we put the stuff back on—”
“That’s not how it works,” I snapped. “Invisible things can’t be seen, period.”
While I struggled with the journal, Megan lay the apparatus diagonally across her floor. Then stared at it blankly.
It was Monday afternoon, I was back at her house, and we’d decided to take a serious look at our spoils from the UCSB break-in.
I hadn’t told Megan about my stint into Emory’s house. She wouldn’t approve. Plus, I didn’t want to give her any ideas about peeping on naked guys. She’d be all over that.
If she wasn’t already.
“How does this thing work?” she said.
“Did you try turning in on?”
“There’s a switch. I’m flipping it. Nothing’s happening.”
I sighed and threw down the invisible journal—then thought better of it and instead leaned it carefully against her nightstand where I could find it again—and scooted over to the apparatus. “Okay, let’s see . . . the laser . . . follow the wires.” My fingers traced the wires to a tiny toggle switch screwed into the two-by-four—which Megan was flipping in vain—and then back to a battery container, which was empty.
Four AA batteries.
“You thought it ran on fairy dust?” I said.
“Shut up. I thought it was solar powered or something.”
We pillaged two batteries from her clock radio, two from her TV remote, and slotted them in place. At last, the laser turned on, throwing a red smudge on the wall.
“Turn off the lights. I’ll get the windows.” I yanked the cord to lower the blinds, plunging her bedroom into darkness.
The smudge grew larger, easier to see. A smooth blob, which meant no interference. Nothing invisible.
I reached for the journal and dipped the corner into the beam, where I’d seen Sarah do it. Magnified on the wall, a frayed corner came into view, its outline rippling in the laser light.
Interference.
“Still works,” said Megan.
“I know, I was worried everything got bent out of alignment in your car.”
Megan lay down on her stomach to get a closer look, propped up on her elbows. “So all those squiggly, blurry lines . . . is that actually the stuff? Are we actually seeing it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It looks like a kaleidoscope.”
“Hang on—” I propped the journal up on the two-by-four, so the edge remained in the beam. Without the jitters of my hand, the projected squiggles froze in whatever position they were in. No more movement. I scooted up next to Megan to get a better look.
Even unmoving, the arrangement of squiggles and shadow mesmerized me. I found myself leaning closer, my eyes straining to peer through the image, as if searching for a 3D shape in one of those geometric patterns. It stirred something in me.
And this was just a shadow.
Just interference.
A way of looking at it that wasn’t really looking at it.
Just a cheap laser
pointer projected on a plaster wall. What would you see if you could look directly at it?
“Could we use this to read Sarah’s journal?” said Megan.
“Huh, I wonder . . .”
“That way we wouldn’t have to take the stuff off.”
“Yeah, but it only lets you see outlines,” I said. “And the beam’s way too narrow, there’d be no way to make out letters.”
But now that she’d mentioned it, my brain continued to toy with the idea.
Look closer, Leona.
I leaned closer, and my hair cast a shadow near the edge of the blob.
Megan shoved my arm. “Move, you’re blocking it.”
Closer . . .
“I just want to see,” I said.
“Stop blocking it!”
But the sight pulled me closer still, until my nose was inches from the plaster. Can you see it, Leona? The blurry lines filled my vision, quivering like living things.
“It’s still moving,” I whispered.
“What? Let me see.” Her head appeared next to mine. “Where?”
“It shouldn’t be moving, should it?”
“What do you mean? It’s not moving.”
“The pattern’s still moving,” I breathed, entranced. On the wall, the furry red caterpillars began to wriggle and writhe, join together and split apart. “Please tell me you’re seeing this.”
Can you see it now, Leona?
“Whoa,” said Megan. “It is moving. It looks alive.”
“But nothing’s moving,” I stammered. “The laser, the journal, the lenses, none of that’s moving.”
“Is that . . .” she glanced sideways at me. “Is that bad?”
“I . . . I think it’s trying to communicate with me.” I touched the wall, hypnotized by the projection. “What are you?” I whispered.
For a moment, the pattern coalesced into shapes, symbols—like the symbols I had seen on Megan’s arm—before melting back into wobbly lines.
Can you see me, Leona?