The Invisible Day (8 page)

I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?

“Hubert, you have to wait up here,” I ordered, taking his armload of ingredients, which vanished immediately.

Jody went down the stairs sideways, like a baby, and she only stepped on Pepper’s tail once.

A
s with most great creations of science, from the planet Earth to the human body, this formula is mostly water.”

She turned on the hot-water tap with a flick of her wrist. The water poured into the tub,
splashing on the marble veins, making them look alive. She dumped the contents of both test tubes under the flow. The water turned yellow immediately. She crumbled bits of the fungus and watched as they absorbed water and doubled in size. She shook in some talcum powder and then some more.

“I’ve never made a big batch before.” She gave me a weak smile. “I’m not really sure of the quantities.” She turned off the water. “I guess it should be too strong rather than too weak. We wouldn’t want you to look wispy or fuzzy or anything.”

She put several dog biscuits on the floor.

“Help crush these,” she commanded. Pepper was going crazy, but Jody kept shooing her back. I did a little dance in my sneakers, and Jody rolled her cast back and forth across the floor until the biscuits were chunks and crumbs. We scooped them up and dumped them into the tub. Pepper licked the traces off the tiles.

“Now the gum.” She took fistfuls of gum wads and squeezed them over the mixture. Only the tiniest drops of juice dribbled out. Then she tossed the sticky lumps in with everything else. She rolled up a
Vogue
magazine that was lying on the floor and used it to stir with big, swishing turns.

“Oh, good, it’s starting to thicken. Now take your clothes off.”

I hesitated.

“Your body has to be completely covered,” she said firmly. “You have to be immersed. You should have seen me doing Pepper. She kept slithering away from me, but she was invisible so she was hard to catch.”

“So I really have to get into that and slop around? Like a snail in butter?”

Jody laughed.

“Uh-huh. Like a snail in butter. That’s a good one.” She saluted and limped into the hall. “I’ll be waiting outside,” she called as she closed the door.

I looked down at the tub full of chowder. I looked down at where I should be. I pushed off my sneakers without untying them, thinking how that drives my mother crazy. I peeled off my socks.

I unstrapped my watch and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. I could see its face for the first time since this morning. Yikes! It was after two o’clock. Time was galloping by. Sweatshirt, jeans, and underwear reappeared as they flew from my hands into a rumpled pile beside the toilet.

It was so weird to be naked in a stranger’s house with Hubert creaking around in the attic above me.

As much as I did not want to, I dipped my left foot into the soup. It was warm. I stepped in with my other foot. It was like standing in the squishy kind of mud that lives at the bottoms of lakes.

“Five, four, three, two, one …” I sat down. I smeared the disgusting stuff on my face, my
shoulders, my stomach. I flipped over and wiggled around, just to make sure. I opened my eyes, hoping hard that I would be there.

“It’s not working!” I wailed.

T
he door swung open. Jody’s brown eyes peered around it. Pepper poked her nose in.

“Oh!” remembered Jody. “It has to be dark! You know, ‘in order to come out of the darkness, the light must first be extinguished …’”

I wondered if that was a real quote from somebody.

Jody lurched across the room in her cast and pulled down the window shade. She flipped the switch on the wall as she went back out the door, leaving me in the kind of dark that is inside a theater just before the show begins.
You can see the shapes of people all around you, but nobody has a face.

I sloshed around for about a minute, wondering how long it might take. I closed my eyes. I let my head go all the way under and came up again quickly. I rubbed the muck into my hair like shampoo. The combined smells of dog biscuits and talcum powder and fungus were beginning to get to me. I plugged my nose. I started to wipe the biggest chunks off my knees, when I realized that I could sort of see my knees!

“I can see my knees! I can sort of see my knees! It’s working! Everything’s coming back!” I stood up and did a slippery jig.

The door flew open with a crash.

“Get out of here!” I shouted at Jody. “You don’t have to see
everything!”

“Ooops, sorry,” she said, retreating to the hallway. “It’s just so cool, so cool, so totally cool.”

I heard Hubert’s voice calling from the attic, muffled but excited.

“Yeah,” Jody shouted up to him, “it’s working!”

“Hey, Billie,” she called to me. “You can take a shower and rinse it all off now.”

Hubert’s feet clunked down the stairs. They were standing there in the hall, waiting for me to appear.

I pulled the shower curtain closed and turned on the tap. I could hear Jody yammering away. Well, I guess she deserved to be a little pleased with herself.

The shower was delicious after the bath. I used the Mango Shower Gel that was on the bath sill and rinsed away every gloopy drop of dog biscuit and gum. I washed my fabulous, reawakened hair and let the water pour over me like a waterfall on a Hawaiian hillside.

But, as I scrubbed my wonderful, visible legs and my lovely, reappeared arms, I realized that something wasn’t quite right. Most of
me was back, pale and freckly as usual. But my hands and feet were still a bit vague. I can’t think of another way to describe it except that they weren’t really all there. As if the felt pen ran out of ink before the picture was finished.

I dried off and got dressed, with my heart as heavy as it had ever been. My hair was still drippy and tangled so I swooped it up in a towel turban. I didn’t bother to put on my sneakers.

I opened the door to the hall to face my friends. Pepper put her paws right up and sniffed me all over. Jody actually jumped up and down, with her cast thudding against the wooden floor. Hubert was grinning like he just won first prize at the Computer Fair.

Then I held up my hands. For a second, they didn’t get it. Then they focused on the faintness of my fingers.

“Oops,” said Jody.

M
y feet are the same,” I said, lifting one and then the other for them to inspect.

“Oh, no!” cried Hubert. “What are we going to do now? Everybody’ll notice if she doesn’t have hands!”

Jody’s face was screwed up in concentration. She looked like an old gnome.

“Don’t panic,” she said. “There has to be a solution. There is a solution to every problem.”

“That’s what my mother says,” I said.

“Your mother is right,” said Jody. “Turn on the tap in the sink. The cold tap.”

We all pushed into the bathroom together, eager to try anything. The cold water rushed into the marble basin, and Jody shoved my hands under and held them there. The water got icier the longer it ran and, if anything, my hands faded slightly more.

“So much for that idea,” whined Hubert. “Do you know it’s nearly two-thirty, Billie? We couldn’t get back to school on time if we had a helicopter. We are in so much trouble we might as well kill ourselves.”

“Too bad I haven’t invented a flight potion,” giggled Jody as she dried my hands on an eensy guest towel. “Don’t worry; I have another idea.” She reached into the bathroom cupboard and took out a hair dryer, shaped like a violet machine gun. I could tell that Hubert was getting more upset by the second.

Jody plugged in the hair dryer and fiddled with the settings.

“This is going to be hot, Billie,” she said, pointing the weapon right at me. The hot air blew on my hands, and Jody waved it back and forth for even coverage. Sure enough, only a couple of minutes went by before we could see a change. Bit by bit, my hands were looking more substantial.

“Hubert, stop bobbling about like that.” He was making me nervous. “Go get my backpack. As soon as my hands are done, we’re leaving. I can wear my socks and do my feet at home. Come on! We’re late!” Hubert scuttled off upstairs while Jody kept the hot air blowing at me.

“Let me ask you something while Hubert’s not here to protest,” I said. “I need a teeny-tiny bit of the vanishing powder.”

Jody looked at me with her skimpy eyebrows scrunched low over her eyes.

“I swear, I will not use it on any living thing,” I vowed, “but I need it to perform an urgent act of revenge.”

“Revenge?” That hooked her.

“If it works, I’ll call you and tell you all about it. I still need to figure out the details, but I promise you it is entirely deserved.”

A grown-up would have insisted on hearing a specific plan, but Jody was cool.

“You take over here,” said Jody, handing me the hair dryer. She lurched upstairs just as Hubert was coming down. Pepper went crazy for a minute, scrambling after Jody and then doubling back to make sure Hubert made it safely. By the time Jody was back, so were my hands. I turned off the hair dryer. I pulled my socks on over my half feet. I tied my sneakers.

Jody handed me a film canister, which I slid into the zipper pocket of my pack.

I gave her a hug.

“Thanks,” I said. “You saved me.”

“Thank you,” said Jody, “for being my first human subject.”

No need to linger or get mushy. Hubert and I had a serious deadline.

E
ven though we were way late for school, we’d been uptown for less than two hours. And so much had happened.

It made me think of Ms. McPhee’s introduction to history this year. She said that time has a way of stretching and shrinking, depending on how you’re using it. If you’re eating ice cream, five minutes can fly by. But
if you’re holding your finger over a candle, five minutes is longer than you can bear.

What I hadn’t figured out yet was whether the trip had been blissful or unbearable. Just extraordinary, I guess.

Hubert and I jogged to the subway.

At the top of the stairs, there was a raggedy old woman doing a shuffling dance step and tapping a tambourine. Her hat lay upside down on the ground, holding a dollar bill. I reached into my pocket to pull out my money, and the lady’s face went all happy and crinkly.

“Oh, bless you, honey, bless you.” She had a whistle on her s’s.

“Wait a minute, Big Spender,” said Hubert, “you’re not invisible anymore. You have to pay to get on the train.”

The old dancer lady was watching me carefully. I counted the money in my pocket. I was short by forty-five cents.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. My voice got small. “I don’t even have enough to get home.”

She bent over and took the dollar bill out of her hat.

“You go on home, honey,” she said, handing it to me.

I bought my token and put it in the slot. Hubert waved his pass. We stood close together on the
platform. It felt different this time, now that people could see me. But there were also a lot of other kids and teenagers on the platform. That was good for camouflage, but it also meant that school was already out.