Invisible Girl (7 page)

“Ni-ice,” JKIII says, and the guys join in with appreciative laughter. Annie looks at me like I’m some kind of brilliant, gutsy rebel and Andrew stares in complete fascination.

Eva boils.

“Anyway, some loser, who I never should have confirmed on my Facebook, snitched me off to the nuns at my school, who freaked out. And that’s when they confiscated my phone,” I say.

A few mutters rise over the treachery of the loser snitch. Then Leslie sits up, breaks out a bag of Doritos from her backpack and holds them out to the boys. Andrew says, “Cheese?” and when she says, “But of course,” in kind of a French accent, he sits down next to her on her towel. I don’t look at him, but I can feel him about two inches from my rib cage.

A nervous humming spreads through my body, silent yet expedient, as if my blood is rushing to warn all my nerve endings. I shut my eyes in case anyone peeks in and sees my fear. I can hear Andrew munching on the Doritos when something lands on the center of my back. I force my face into a casual “what’s up” look, then open my eyes and glance over at him. He’s chewing with his mouth open. There are orange crumbs in the corner of his lips, but I’m focused only on his eyes.

“Let’s just leave it there,” he says, referring to what I guess is the Dorito he tossed onto my back. “Then, by the end of the day, we’ll take it off and you’ll have the perfect shape of a chip.”

He confuses me utterly. His words are joking, but in the back of his eyes I see a thin curtain covering muscular, shadowy dancers who move in perfect rhythm together, yet clearly hate each other.

I don’t know what to do about the chip on my back. I have a sense Annie would rise up in fake fury and say, “You’re getting it now” and maybe throw something at him and then run screaming from him when he chased her.

I don’t think I could pull this off. I’d have to have a fun tone of voice, and I’ve never had one before. I might end up looking real pissed off and not just fake-angry. Then he might look at Annie, release the dancers from his eyes and go, “Whoa, men-in-white-coat time. Crazy cousin.”

Besides, even if I could manage the right voice, my bathing suit’s unhooked, and what if I stood up too fast before the hook was secured and the top fell down? I glance over at Leslie to see if she’s going to say something funny, but she’s taking some sandwiches out of her backpack and putting them on a little plate.

“Maybe” pops out of my mouth. “Maybe you can also put a sandwich on my back and a can of Coke so that at the end of the day, I’ll have shapes of a whole lunch there.”

His eyes open a little wider as if he didn’t expect me to say that. He doesn’t look angry at all for a moment. Instead, he cracks up and shows perfect teeth. “How about some fries? We could make a happy face right here.” He touches the center of my back with his finger, making two dots for eyes and a swipe for the smile.

Cool waves run from where his finger touches me, turning into a wild heat that flashes between my legs and makes me unbearably ashamed and exhilarated. I want to run down into the ladies’ locker room, catch my breath and just think about this over and over and over. I need to look in the mirror at my back and see if the places he touched are highlighted with dark brown sparkles.

I laugh nervously and my ears hear a giggle come out of my own mouth that’s like one Annie would do. Then there’s the sound of someone pulling the tab open on a can of soda and at the same time Eva says, “How’s that arm, Andrew?”

There’s a shifting of bodies next to me. Leslie moves closer to my head so that Eva can sit next to Andrew. I watch Eva’s profile as she looks at his cast, as if she could see how the bones are healing beneath it.

“You tell me, doc, how am I doing?” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “I wish you guys would stop calling me that. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

Even from my side view of her I can see the glints of pleasure sparking out of her eyes. The others have gathered around as Leslie lays out more food, and I can tell Eva’s glad they’re all hearing about her tentative reluctance to acknowledge the gifts of her superior intellect. Then her eye-glints stop as Andrew slides the Dorito to the right side of my back and says, “I think it looks better here.”

Eva turns from his arm to glare at me. I feel a new wave of hate coming from her, climbing higher and higher, arching to crash over my head and send me whirling into the deep end of the ocean, with all of them watching from shore.

She reaches across Andrew, making sure her hair brushes against his shoulder, and takes a Dorito. She bites a tiny corner off of it and turns to him. “I mean, who could possibly have decided what they want to do with their lives by now? Although, I guess if you had, like, a special gift, you would know.”

Nobody picks up her cue to mention her special gift for science and math. She nibbles another crumb from the Dorito and her eyes flash over the group. Annie, magically no longer on the diet she decreed we were on at breakfast, is eating some fries someone brought up from the snack bar downstairs. JKIII has picked up a half of one of Leslie’s sandwiches. Eva waits until there is a silence, broken only by the sounds of chewing, then says, “Hey, Stephanie, have you thought about teaching fifth grade or something? It’d be perfect, you know, cuz you’re so small. The kids would feel safe with you.” She giggles. “Couldn’t you just see the kids, you guys? They walk into class the first day, see Stephanie and say, ‘Hey, where’s the teacher?’ ”

She laughs really hard and I have no idea who else is joining in because I feel such a deep rumbling in my brain, I know an earthquake is happening there and all my Warrior Words from the countless hours of my lonely reading are bursting free. They slide down from my brain to my mouth. By the time the words get to my tonsils, they are old friends in battle gear. They are finally ready to come forward. They are ready to help me, waving flags and hoisting Uzis.

“Actually,” I say in a dead calm voice, “I’m being conscripted into what could generally be considered the global, Boston-Irish-Catholic family business. The typical ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny situation. Not that I mind. I’m actually thrilled about one day becoming a senator. I like the idea of fighting for egalitarianism. Could you imagine, Eva, the socioeconomic repercussions of a return to say, primogeniture?”

I keep my eyes opened in concerned inquiry. My heart is pounding. Eva freezes with a Diet Coke to her lips. Though I stare at her, I can see Andrew, Leslie, Annie and JKIII out of the corner of my eye, hazy colors with tanned, startled expressions on top. First, they find out I’m a Facebook rebel and now this. No one says a word, and without looking around, I can feel all the eyes weaving into one big question directed at Eva. She’s the batter up, the big-talking slugger who’s now at the plate.

She lowers her hand, setting her drink down, and looks at me. For a moment I almost feel sorry for her as fear skitters in her eyes like lizards suddenly illuminated by headlights at the side of a desert road. She coughs slightly, then says with as much interested concern as she can muster, “No, uh, no, I can’t.”

I close my eyes, nesting my chin in the soft comfort of my towel. My mind explodes with fragments of words flashing like fireworks, tumbling down onto my eyelids. Sounds of crackling chip bags and rustling bodies float up to my ears, gradually easing the tight band between my shoulder blades. Through the blind haze of suntan lotion, fries and far-off cigarette smoke, Andrew’s cologne of anger and despair seeps into my body, and I shudder against my towel in terror and longing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Someone is barbecuing. Meat singes the air. There’s a prick of coolness on the breeze as the sun slants low, splintering its light through the high leaves of the trees, which wave slightly, unhurried and uninvolved, above us.

I can’t believe that this is only my second night in L.A. and the fourth day since my mom left. I feel like I’ve lost all concept of real time. Like I’m a time traveler from another world and everything that happened to me in Boston could have been years ago. I focus only on what is happening here. I keep all the Boston thoughts and memories in a little capsule in the middle of my spine, away from my heart and away from my brain, so I don’t have to feel or think about any of it.

I keep thoughts about my mom buried the deepest. About a hundred times a day, images of her ping up into my head. Sometimes they’re good images and sometimes they’re bad. Sometimes she’s brushing my hair and my heart aches for her so much I can’t breathe. Other times, she’s my evil mother, the one of striking fists and raging eyes.

In the same minute, I can have ten images of each kind blasting in my head and battling with each other to find out which is the real her. When these battles wage, I feel exhausted and empty, as if it sucks out all my guts having two fighting mothers inside me.

Sometimes, I think about sneaking a ride to the airport and stowing away on a plane so I can fly back to Boston and comb the streets for her. I feel like I must have a secret power inside because I’m her daughter. That the power would pull her to me, no matter how drunk she was when I found her. That she could even be blindfolded but would rush over when she heard my voice, like a mother cow hearing her calf in the middle of a great herd.

Then I think, Where was my big, secret power when she was standing right in front of me? Where was it when she pried my hands from around her waist and took off into the rain?

I can’t even call her since, of course, she doesn’t have a cell phone. Maybe she was even thinking of ditching me then, the day I asked her if we could both get them.

I haven’t been able to talk to my dad either. I left a message for him when I first landed. Then, Uncle Michael said he called back while we were at the club.

My dad said he was going to send me a cell phone when I got out here so we could have long chats about my adventures. He said it when he was driving me to the airport and his eyes were still runny and I wasn’t really speaking to him. Now I don’t even want him to send me one. First, it would never be one like the kids have out here, and second, it would ruin my whole Facebook rebel story.

Who cares about him anyway?

I touch my spine, feel a little ridge, and am glad that the capsule of Boston is staying tightly closed.

I look over at Leslie, who is doing an imitation of an old man with a long nose who works at the pro shop at the club and always says, “Ladies, ladies, may I help you,” with a tiny lisp on the
s.
Andrew sits next to me in shorts and a baseball shirt that’s white in the middle and blue on the arms. His hair is slightly damp from the bike ride into the woods. Guy sweat seeps from him in a tangy fragrance, threatening to pull something wild out of me that I never knew was there.

We’ve all ridden from the club to the spot in the woods at Mulholland where we were last night. We’re in a circle around a flashlight bonfire. Everyone is sitting cross-legged except for Annie, who’s leaning against JKIII’s chest with his legs on either side of her. His hands are rubbing the patch of her stomach between her shirt and her shorts.

Everyone’s been asking me questions about my life in Boston. I’m unaccustomed to this much attention, but I’ve already learned from watching Eva talk about her math and science award that I should appear reluctant to discuss myself. So at first I protest that nothing I do is very interesting, and then I spit out a string of lies, one at a time, like a rainbow of glass beads. Once the lies are out, they grow arms and legs and silent, stoic faces that guard my secrets of unwashed hair, stale snacks from greasy boxes, and cold walks home from school in shoes that have long been too tight. The lies surround me with their golden shields and ice-tipped spears, letting no one look in and see my motherless life.

I’ve painted myself as a distant cousin of the Kennedys, not by blood but by friendship. I’ve told everyone how we all rallied around Ted Kennedy when he came out strongly for Obama, making it sound like my family was there at brunches and dinners, having intense, high-powered political discussions.

I’ve got my family playing football on the Cape, laughing as they stumble into each other, with big kids tossing little kids into the air. Even as the stories spill straight from the stored-up pages of my mother’s Kennedy books, I truly smell the fresh salt air of Hyannis Port and feel the grit of the football upon my palms and the trembling freedom as I run toward a touchdown.

Lastly, I cut off any future scrutiny into my lack of new, cute outfits by telling them how it’s so different with the old East Coast families and people would rather hang themselves than be caught wearing anything trendy. I let my shabby clothes somehow speak of my understated, blueblood pedigree.

Even Eva seems spellbound, sitting the farthest from me but staring almost unblinking with her black, glittering eyes.

In addition to everyone who was hanging out on the sundeck at the club there’s also another guy who met us here. A guy named Carl who’s almost as tall as Andrew and has braces and isn’t cute or athletic at all. He’s sort of like the servant of the guys’ group. Like normally he wouldn’t even get to hang out with them, but they need someone to fetch for them so he’s worth having around. Now there are five guys to five girls, but no one’s a couple except for Annie and JKIII.

I think Emily, whom I still think of as a sleepy peach, likes Brian. He’s sitting across from her with his shirt off and she keeps looking at him, opening her usually dreamy eyes more than usual, as if finally, there is something to wake up for.

At first I was thinking that Leslie didn’t like anyone since she kind of acts like the mom, always bringing out food and calling the guys by their last names, as if there’s nothing wild inside of her that she needs to be afraid of. Then, I remember that she hooked up with some guy named Ben and I see her differently, her breasts not a mother’s but a girl’s.

I have no doubt whom Eva likes. She watches everything Andrew does and I see him through her eyes: his hand that for one second touched my knee and his eyes that flicker over my legs while I tell the story about my parents waiting white-faced with the Kennedy family while the Coast Guard searched icy waters for John Jr. when his plane went down.