by Morgan Rice
“Do I have to say everything twice?” he complained.
There was no way out of it. Oliver left the room, Chris right on his tail. He hurried up the stairs, making a beeline for the bathroom in an attempt to get the hand-washing over and done with as quickly as possible. But Chris was right there in pursuit, and as soon as they were out of their parents’ earshot, he grabbed Oliver and shoved him into the wall.
“Guess what, squirt,” he said.
“What?” Oliver said, bracing himself.
“I’m really, really hungry tonight,” Chris said.
“So?” Oliver replied.
“So, you’re going to let me have your dinner, aren’t you? You’re going to tell Mom and Dad you’re not hungry.”
Oliver shook his head. “I already gave you the bedroom!” he refuted. “Let me have my potatoes, at the very least.”
Chris laughed. “No way. We’re starting a new school tomorrow. I’ve got to be strong in case there are other pipsqueaks like you I need to pick on.”
The mention of school sent a new wave of trepidation washing through Oliver. He’d started so many new schools in his life and each time it seemed to get a little worse. There was always a Chris Blue equivalent who was able to sniff him out, who wanted to pick on him no matter what he did. And there were never any allies. Oliver had long ago given up on making friends. What was the point when he’d just be moving again in a matter of months?
Chris’s face softened. “Tell you what, Oliver, I’ll be kind. Just this once.” Then he grinned and burst into maniacal laughter. “I’ll give you a knuckle sandwich for dinner!”
He raised his fist. Oliver ducked away, missing the flailing fist by mere millimeters. He bolted downstairs for the living room.
“Come back, toe rag!” Chris yelled.
He was right on Oliver’s heels, but Oliver was fast, and he hurried to the dining table. Dad looked up at him as he stood there panting, recovering from the sprint.
“Are you two fighting again?” He sighed. “What about this time?”
Chris skidded to a halt beside Oliver.
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
Suddenly, Oliver felt a sharp pinching sensation at his waist. Chris was digging his nails in. Oliver looked over at him, at the look of triumphant glee on his face.
Dad looked suspicious. “I don’t believe you. What’s going on?”
The pinch got stronger, the pain radiating through Oliver’s side. He knew what he had to do. There was no choice.
“I was just saying,” he said, wincing, “that I’m not feeling very hungry tonight.”
Dad looked at him wearily. “Mom’s been slaving over that stove for you and now you’re saying you don’t want it?”
Mom looked over her shoulder from the stove with a wounded expression. “What’s the problem? Don’t you like meat anymore? Or is it the potatoes that are the issue?”
Oliver felt Chris’s pinch deepen even more, sending an even sharper pain through him.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said, his eyes watering. “I am grateful. I’m just not hungry.”
“What am I supposed to do with him?” Mom exclaimed. “First the bedroom, now this! My nerves can’t take it.”
“I’ll have his extras,” Chris said quickly. Then in a sugary voice, he added, “I don’t want all your efforts to go to waste, Mom.”
Mom and Dad both looked at Chris. He was bulky and getting ever bulkier but they didn’t seem concerned. Either that, or they didn’t want to stand up to the bully son they’d raised.
“Fine,” Mom said, sighing. “But you have got to sort out that brain of yours, Oliver. I can’t be having this sort of fuss every evening.”
Oliver felt Chris’s pinch release. He rubbed his sore side.
“Okay, Mom,” he said, sadly. “Sorry, Mom.”
As the sound of cutlery and crockery clinked behind him, Oliver turned from the dining table, his stomach growling, and walked back to his alcove. To block out the smells that made his hunger even more pronounced, he distracted himself by opening his suitcase and taking out his one and only possession, a book about inventors. A kind librarian had given it to him several years ago after noticing that he kept coming in to read it. Now it was dog-eared, well-worn from the million times he’d leafed through it. But no matter how often he read it, he never got bored. Inventors and inventions fascinated him. In fact, one of the reasons Oliver wasn’t that sad about moving to this neighborhood in New Jersey was because he’d read about a factory nearby where an inventor named Armando Illstrom built some of his finest creations. It didn’t matter to Oliver that Armando Illstrom was included in the Zany Inventors section of the book, or that most of his contraptions failed. Oliver still found him very inspirational, especially his booby trap device which was designed to scare away raccoons. Oliver was trying to create his own version to ward off Chris.
Just then, he heard the sound of clinking cutlery coming from the kitchen. He looked up to see his family sitting at the table, preoccupied with their dinner, Chris slurping up Oliver’s helping.
Frowning at the unfairness of it all, Oliver discreetly took his invention pieces out of his suitcase and laid them on the floor before him. The booby trap was in a state of half completion. It was a kind of slingshot mechanism that would activate when a lever was pressed underfoot, catapulting acorns into the face of the intruder. Of course, Armando’s version was for a raccoon so Oliver had had to scale it up in order to fit the much larger dimensions of his brother, and he’d replaced the acorns with the only thing he had on hand, which was a small plastic statue of a soldier. He’d managed to get most of the mechanism constructed, as well as the lever. But every time he pressed it down to test it, it didn’t work. The soldier would not be flung. It just sat there, gun poised.
With his family distracted, Oliver got to work on it. He set all the pieces out, laying the trap. But he couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work. Perhaps, he thought, this was the reason Armando Illstrom was considered zany. None of his inventions worked very well. If at all.
Just then, Oliver heard his family begin to bicker. He squeezed his eyes shut to block it out, allowing his mind to take him to his special dream place. Once again, he was in a factory. This time the booby trap device was right in front of him. It was in perfect working order, catapulting acorns left, right, and center. But Oliver couldn’t see how it was any different from his version.
“Magic,” a voice said behind him.
Oliver jumped. Never in his dream land had there been any people!
But when he looked behind him, there was no one there. He swirled on the spot, searching for the owner of the voice, but could see no one at all.
He opened his eyes, bringing himself back to the real world, to the dark corner of the dingy room that was his new home. Why on earth had his imagination conjured up magic as a solution? Magic wasn’t his cup of tea. If it had been, he would have bought a book of tricks, not a book of inventors. He liked inventions, solid things, practical items with a purpose. He liked science and physics, not intangible, mystical things.
Just then, the smell of dinner wafted toward him. From his place on the floor, Oliver couldn’t help but look toward the table. There, eyes locked on Oliver, sat Chris. He shoved a large potato into his mouth and grinned widely as grease dribbled down his chin.
Oliver glared, feeling a sense of fury come over him. That was his potato! A strong urge overcame him, to walk over and swipe his arm across the table, sending everything on it clattering to the ground. He could just picture it now. What a sweet victory it would feel like!
Suddenly, Oliver’s sense of fury was replaced by something different, something new that he’d never felt before. With a whoosh, a strange calmness overcame him, a peculiar sense of certainty. And just like that, a loud crack sounded out, coming from the table. One of its legs had snapped right in the middle. The table lurched suddenly to the side. All the plates started to slide along it, and then they fell
right off the end, smashing to the ground one by one. The noise was horrendous.
Mom and Dad cried out, both alarmed by the sudden turn of events. As peas and potatoes went flying everywhere, they leapt up from their chairs.
Shocked, Oliver leapt to his feet too. Had he made that happen? Just with his mind? Surely not!
While Mom hurried to the kitchen, looking for towels to clean up the mess, Dad knelt down to inspect the table.
“Cheap, shoddy thing,” he said gruffly. “The leg’s snapped clean in half!”
From the table, Chris’s gaze fixed on Oliver. Whether Oliver had somehow broken the table leg with his mind or not, Chris clearly blamed him for it.
With his gaze locked on Oliver, Chris rose slowly from his chair. Potatoes and peas rolled from his lap to the floor. His face grew redder and redder. He clenched his hands into fists. Then, like an exploding rocket, he came galumphing toward Oliver.
Oliver gasped and turned quickly to the booby trap. His fingers moved quickly to set it up.
Please work! Please work! he thought over and over again.
The whole thing happened as if in slow motion. Chris loomed up before Oliver. Oliver’s foot stomped onto the lever. Oliver held on to the desire for the machine to work, picturing the soldier flying through the air just as he’d pictured the plates crashing to the ground. And then, sure enough, the mechanism began to whir. The soldier launched into the air, sailed in an arc, and smacked Chris with his plastic, pointy rifle, right between the eyes!
Time sped up back to normal. Oliver gasped, awestruck, not quite believing it had worked.
Chris stood there, perplexed. The soldier fell to the floor. There was a small red mark in the middle of Chris’s forehead, a dent from the hard plastic gun.
“You little jerk!” Chris yelled, rubbing his head in disbelief. “I’ll get you back for that!”
But for the first time ever, he hesitated. He seemed too wary to approach Oliver, to sock him in the ear, or rub his knuckles against his head. Instead, he backed away as if he were scared. Then he stormed out of the room and upstairs. The sound of his slamming door resonated through the house.
Oliver’s mouth dropped open. He couldn’t believe that it had really worked! Not only had he made his invention work at the last second, but he’d literally made Chris’s meal fall to the floor with his mind!
He looked down at his hands. Did he have some kind of power? Was there really such a thing as magic? He couldn’t just suddenly start believing in it because of one little experience. But deep down he knew that he was different in some way, that he had some kind of power.
Mind swimming, he went back to his book and read, for the millionth time, the passage about Armando Illstrom. Thanks to his invention, Oliver had scared Chris away for the first time ever. He wanted to meet Armando Illstrom more than ever. And the factory really wasn’t that far from his new school. Maybe he should visit him after school tomorrow.
But surely he would be a very old man now. Possibly so old that he’d passed on. The thought made Oliver’s heart sink. He’d hate it if his hero had passed before he’d had a chance to meet him, and to thank him for inventing the booby trap!
He read again the passage about Armando’s string of failed inventions. The passage stated—in a rather wry tone, Oliver noted—that Armando Illstrom had been on the cusp of inventing a time machine when World War Two broke out. His factory had ground to a halt. But when the war ended, Armando had never tried to finish his invention. And everyone had ridiculed him for trying in the first place, calling him the “lesser Edison.” Oliver wondered why Armando had stopped. Surely not because of some bully inventors laughing at him?
His interest was piqued. Tomorrow, he decided, he would find the factory. And if Armando Illstrom was still alive, he’d ask him, to his face, what had happened to his time machine.
His parents emerged from around the corner of the kitchen, both covered in food.
“We’re going to bed,” Mom said.
“What about my blankets and things?” Oliver asked, looking at the bare alcove.
Dad sighed. “I suppose you want me to fetch them from the car, do you?”
“It would be nice,” Oliver replied. “I’d like to get a good night’s sleep before school tomorrow.”
The sense of dread he felt about tomorrow was beginning to grow, mirroring the building storm. He could already tell he was going to have the worst day ever. At the very least he’d like to be rested in preparation. He’d had so many horrible first days at new schools he was certain the one tomorrow was going to be another to add to the list.
Dad trudged reluctantly out of the house, a plume of wind roaring through as he opened the front door. He returned a few moments later with a pillow and blanket for Oliver.
“We’ll get a bed in a couple of days,” he said, as he handed the bedding over to Oliver. It was cold from having been in the car all day.
“Thanks,” Oliver replied, grateful for even this level of comfort.
His parents left, turning off the light as they went, plunging Oliver into darkness. Now the only light in the room was from the street lamp outside.
The wind began to roar again and the window panes rattled. Oliver could tell the weather was building, that something odd was in the air. He’d heard on the radio that the storm of a lifetime was coming. He couldn’t help but be excited about it. Most kids would dread a storm but Oliver was only dreading his first day at his new school.
He went over to the window, leaning his elbows against the ledge as he had before. The sky was almost completely dark. A spindly tree blew in the wind, angled sharply to one side. Oliver wondered if it might snap off. He could just picture it now, the thin bark snapping, the tree launching into the air, carried away by the fierce winds.
And that’s when he saw them. Just as he was transitioning into his daydreaming state, he noticed two people standing by the tree. A woman and a man who looked remarkably like him, like they could easily be mistaken for his parents. They had kind faces and they smiled at him as they held one another’s hands.
Oliver jumped back from the window, startled. For the first time, he realized that neither of his parents looked anything like him. They both had dark hair and blue eyes, as did Chris. Oliver, on the other hand, was the rarer combination of blond hair and brown eyes.
Oliver wondered, suddenly, if perhaps his parents weren’t his parents at all. Perhaps that was why they seemed to hate him so much? He looked out the window but the two people were now gone. Just figments of his imagination. But they’d looked so real. And so familiar.
Wishful thinking, Oliver concluded.
Oliver sat back against the cold wall, tucking himself into the alcove that was his new bedroom, pulling the covers up over him. He brought his knees up to his chest and clasped them tightly, and was struck by a sudden strange sensation, a moment of realization, of clarity—that everything was about to change.
CHAPTER TWO
Oliver woke with a sense of trepidation. His whole body ached from sleeping on the hard floor. The blankets hadn’t been thick enough to keep the cold from getting right into his bones. He was surprised he’d slept at all, considering how anxious he was feeling about his first day at school.
The house was very quiet. No one else was awake. Oliver realized he’d actually woken earlier than he needed to thanks to the dull sunrise seeping through the window.
He heaved himself up and peered out the window. The wind had wreaked havoc through the night, blowing down fences and mailboxes, and throwing trash all over the sidewalks. Oliver looked over at the spindly, crooked tree where he’d seen a vision of the friendly couple last night, the ones who had looked like him and made him wonder if perhaps he wasn’t related to the Blues at all. He shook his head. It was just wishful thinking on his part, he reasoned. Anyone with Chris Blue as their older brother would dream they weren’t actually related!
Knowing he had a little bit of time before his family wo
ke up, Oliver turned from the window and went to his suitcase. He opened it up and looked inside at all the cogs and wires and levers and buttons he’d collected for his inventions. He smiled to himself as he looked at the slingshot booby trap that he’d used on Chris yesterday. But it was just one of Oliver’s many inventions and it wasn’t the most important one, not by a long shot. Oliver’s ultimate invention was something a little more complex, and a whole lot more important—because Oliver was attempting to invent a way to make himself invisible.
Theoretically, it was possible. He’d read all about it. There were actually only two necessary components to make an object invisible. The first was bending light around the object so it couldn’t cast a shadow, similar to the way swimming pool water bent light and made the swimmers inside look strangely squat. The second necessary component to invisibility involved eliminating the object’s reflection.
It sounded simple enough on paper, but Oliver knew there was a reason no one had achieved it yet. Still, that wasn’t going to stop him from trying. He needed this in order to escape his miserable life, and it didn’t matter how long it took him to get there.
He reached into his case now and took out all the bits of fabric he’d collected in search of something with negative refractive properties. Unfortunately, he hadn’t found the right fabric yet. Then he took out all the coils of thin wire he’d need to make electromagnetic microwaves to bend the light unnaturally. Unfortunately, none of them were thin enough. In order to work, the coils would need to be less than forty nanometers in size, which was an unfeasibly small size for the human mind to comprehend. But Oliver knew that someone, somewhere, someday, would have a machine to make the coils thin enough, and the fabric refractive enough.
Just then, from upstairs, Oliver heard his parents’ alarm clock jingle. He quickly packed away his items, knowing all too well that they’d go and wake Chris up next, and if Chris ever got wind of what he was trying to make, he would destroy all his hard work.