Wonders of the Invisible World (3 page)

The room filled with laughter then, and after Mr. Johnson raised his hands like a traffic cop to quiet everyone, I looked at him and said, “I'm sorry. I guess…I guess I was daydreaming.”

“That's probably why your grade isn't as good as it could be.” His voice was dry enough to catch fire with the drop of a single match. “Now, please, Aidan,” he said, “try to pay attention.”

I nodded once, wanting to seem eager, even though my mind still leaned toward my memories.

Hamlet, I reminded myself upon seeing a quote Mr. Johnson had written on the board in his loopy, almost unreadable cursive. That was what we were reading.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

“Now that you're back, Aidan,” said Mr. Johnson, “can you interpret what Hamlet has said to Horatio in this line?”

I squinted at the sentence for a moment, then said, “Things aren't always how they appear, because people don't have the ability to see everything that exists in the universe?”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Johnson, pushing his glasses a bit farther up the bridge of his nose. “Indeed,” he said again, then looked away to begin lecturing about the crisis of faith and reason that led to Hamlet's seeing the ghost of his dead father.

When the last bell of the day rang, I shot up from my seat in study hall to make a fast exit, and as I pushed through the doors with everyone else swarming to escape another day in those fluorescent-light-filled hallways, I spotted Jarrod already leaning against my car, as if he'd left the building ten minutes before the bell rang.

“How did you know?” I asked, jingling my keys in the direction of the rusted-out blue Chevette that had served as my horse-and-carriage since I'd turned sixteen the year before and my brother Toby had handed it down to me, like he'd done with clothes and toys and just about anything else hand-downable since we were little.

“It's the Blue Bomb,” said Jarrod. “Your dad's old work car, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And then my brother's first car. Man, you have a good memory.”

“Not really,” said Jarrod, pushing hair away from his eyes. “But it looks like you've got a bad one.”

I nodded toward the other side of the car and said, “Get in. The doors don't lock anymore.” Jarrod laughed at that, then got in. And five minutes later, after the last bus left, we were on the road like we did this all the time, like we'd been doing this forever.

This was usually the time of the day I'd spend driving around Temperance on my own, not thinking about school or the work I had to do when I got home. I didn't know why I'd gotten into the habit of doing this after school, but an hour or two on the back roads would usually clear my head, which seemed full of fog most days. On these drives, I liked to pretend that some other life was waiting for me out there, that something mysterious and different from everything I knew was just around the bend. But I wasn't used to having anyone with me on these expeditions, so with Jarrod beside me, it felt different, like for the first time there was some kind of meaning to my aimless driving.

“Do you actually know where we're going?” Jarrod asked after we'd been on the road for ten or fifteen minutes.

“Wherever,” I said, shrugging. “Why? Someplace in particular you want to go?” Before Jarrod could answer, though, I said, “Now that I think about it, how long
have
you been back?” It was late October already. School had been in session for over two months, and the wide, toothy grins of jack-o'-lanterns had begun to appear on the porch rails of Temperance's houses.

“Just moved into my mom's place last week,” Jarrod said. “It was kind of sudden.”

I glanced over, but he kept staring out the windshield, blank-eyed, tight-lipped, not giving anything away.

“Something happen?” I asked. And as soon as the question left my mouth, I felt like a jerk. Five years had passed without a word between us. Somehow I'd almost completely forgotten him, despite once having been his best friend. Yet there I was, prying into his private life, like I had a right to know everything about him.

He answered me anyway.

“Had a fight with my dad,” he said, shrugging one shoulder like it might be painful to shrug both. “I think I said this morning that he's got a girlfriend.”

“Yeah?” I said, hoping to keep him going.

“Yeah, well, she and I don't really get along,” he said, right as I slowed down to edge the car into the center circle of Temperance, which was surrounded by a small grocery store, a gas station, the Dairy Oasis, and Times Square Café, like points on a compass. Inside the circle was a dusty old bandshell, where the wind blew autumn leaves to life, making them shuffle across the steps of the shell like the severed hands of zombies.

“So you don't like your dad's girlfriend or something?” I asked, trying to get more out of him.

“Or something,” Jarrod said. “It's more like she doesn't like me. I think she wants my dad and his place for just them, no sullen teenager haunting the extra bedroom. She made me feel weird in my own house, like I didn't belong there.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm glad you can come live with your mom, at least.”

“Yeah,” said Jarrod, nodding slowly, a brief pout of doubt twisting his lips.

As I turned out of the circle and onto the causeway, Jarrod peered out the window at the gray-blue waves of Mosquito Lake chopping up and down on either side of us.

“You don't sound as excited about being home as you did this morning,” I said.

“Can you pull over here?” he asked suddenly. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were wide open in this way that made it seem like he was asking for a big favor. “You asked if there was someplace in particular. Here,” he said. “I want to see the lake, if that's okay.”

I slowed down and pulled into a strip of parking spaces on the side of the causeway, where fishermen would park during the summer months before they climbed down the embankment to perch on one of the flat gray rocks and cast their lines out, sipping beer with their buddies and talking about the win-loss records of various sports teams or telling worn-out hunting stories. When I killed the engine, Jarrod didn't wait. He got out and took a pack of cigarettes from his jean jacket pocket. After shuffling a stick out, he lit it with one hand cupped around the flame of his lighter.

“I thought you were going to play baseball,” I said, getting out and coming around to meet him. He offered me the pack, but I shook my head.

“Yeah, I am,” he said. He sucked in hard, then expelled a thick cloud, and I began to feel even more like I was hanging out with a stranger. “You
can
play baseball and smoke,” he said, rolling his eyes at me. “What? Don't tell me that after I left you went on the straight and narrow?”

“Was I ever off it?” I asked, laughing, trying to make it seem like I knew what he was talking about.

Jarrod snorted and brushed the hair out of his eyes, smiling after he sucked in another drag. “I guess you were never
bad,
per se,” he said, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth in a slow stream. “Just weird. Not like other people. Not normal.”

I laughed again, slow and completely faked, because I still didn't understand what he was talking about, and I didn't want him to know that. I wasn't weird. I was just a benign loner. You know the type. There are a lot of us wandering the hallways of schools around the world, invisible, our shadows always turning the corner in front of you. I kept to myself, turned in homework like a good machine, watched other people doing things together from across the room. Looked down if someone caught my eye, tried not to invite trouble. Maybe being like that is weird for most people, but for me it was how I'd always been. Or at least, it was how I'd always remembered myself being.

We stood in silence for a while, me leaning against the passenger side of the Blue Bomb with my hands in my jeans pockets, Jarrod a few steps in front of me, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket, the other flicking away ash as he looked out at the waves and the gulls that screed overhead. Beneath those waves were a school and some houses, the remains of an old village where people used to mine for coal, my mom once told me, back when they needed it for the furnaces in the steel mills that used to line the rivers in nearby Warren and Youngstown. When I was little, I used to think of those buildings at the bottom of Mosquito Lake and imagine the inhabitants still going about their business, as if the lake had never been made, their village never flooded to make a reservoir after the coal had all been gotten. My mom used to tell me that there are places like that all over the world. Places we can't see. People we can't hear. She used to say that we'd never know any better by looking at the surface of things. The chop of waves, the flight of the gulls, the lines the fishermen cast over the water—you'd never see an old coal-mining village out there if you didn't already know about it.

When it seemed like Jarrod and I had nothing left to say and that maybe we weren't cut out to be friends like we used to be, I asked the question I'd wanted to know the answer to all day.

“What did you mean earlier?” I asked.

And Jarrod looked over the curve of his shoulder, his hair fluttering in the wind. “About what?”

“About me seeing weird shit,” I said. “About me being weird when we were little.”

Jarrod flicked his cigarette into the water, where it sizzled before settling in to rock on the foamy waves. “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe you weren't that weird. Maybe little kids are weird in general and I'm just remembering
you
being weird, is all.”

“How?” I said. “What did I see that you're remembering? Because seriously, I don't know what you're talking about.”

He suddenly came toward the Blue Bomb like he wanted to get in and get out of there in a hurry, so I moved out of the way to let him grab the door handle. Before he ducked down to fold himself back into the car, though, he turned to me and took a deep breath.

“You used to have all kinds of stories you'd tell me,” he said. “About a white deer you sometimes saw. And about a woman's ghost who talked to you.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, not even a laugh. “You're kidding,” I said eventually. “Right?”

Jarrod shook his head. “No,” he said. “And there were other things you used to tell me about. Like the time Mr. Marsdale died. You remember that?”

Mr. Marsdale had been one of our seventh-grade teachers. He died of a heart attack one night a month or so after school started, and for the rest of that year we had a pretty, just-out-of-college substitute named Miss Largent. “Yeah, I remember Mr. Marsdale,” I said, nodding. “What about him?”

“Well,” said Jarrod, “the day before he died, you said you saw a man in a black suit come into our classroom and look him up and down like a piece of meat. But no one else could see him.”

“A man in a black suit?” I said. “Like a piece of meat?” I repeated. I could feel my brows knitting together, and tried to laugh a little, hoping he'd admit that all this was a long, drawn-out joke.

But before Jarrod put himself back into the car and closed the door on me, he said, “Your exact words, if I remember correctly, were: ‘Like a piece of meat he was going to purchase.' ”