Supervision

by Alison Stine

  Martha helped, in her way. It made me uncomfortable, all the work she did for no reason, but I could never catch her, never see her tucking in the sheets, or cleaning the bathroom, or dusting the dozens of rooms. The sheets always un-tucked themselves by bedtime, and the rust stubbornly returned to the tub, but I could see why my grandmother thought I wasn’t there.

  Sometimes I wasn’t sure myself.

  Martha covered my tracks in the house, and my sister? She just couldn’t hear what I was saying, couldn’t understand.

  “I understand,” she said automatically. “You feel invisible.”

  “No,” I insisted. “I am invisible. I am.”

  “Grandma is very busy and you have opposite schedules, but you need to have a conversation with her. Have you really even talked with her yet?”

  “I can’t!” I said. “Can I please come home?”

  “We’ll talk about that later, okay? But for right now, this is your home, Esmé. This is where you live.”

  But I felt barely alive.

  One thing was certain: I was not going back to that school. Not if no one noticed. Not if I wasn’t even getting credit.

  “Oh come now,” Martha said, scanning the closet in my room. She had unpacked my suitcases one night while I slept (though I had to re-unpack them). She had put away my clothes, and now she took them out, one by one, appraising the T-shirts and jeans she had ironed and folded and hung on hangers. Multiple times. She shook her head, and put the clothes back on the rack. “School is important,” Martha said. “School will get you a better life.”

  “One where I’m not invisible?” I said.

  “You can learn a lot, being invisible,” Martha said, disappearing into the closet again.

  “Like what?”

  “How to speak, how to act. Certain people’s secrets.”

  I sat up on the bed, watching her. “Secrets?” I said. “Like, what secrets?”

  “Servants are supposed to be invisible. We have separate stairs, separate entrances, separate living quarters.”

  “What secrets, Martha?”

  She came out of the closet, holding a yellow dress. “Now, why don’t you ever wear something nice like this?”

  I groaned. “I hate dresses. My sister must have packed that.”

  “No one can see you, anyway. Why not wear a dress like a regular lady?”

  “Because I’m not a regular lady. Martha, come on.” I pulled a tasseled pillow to my chest. “What secrets do you know? Tell me. What do you know about my grandmother?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, the yellow dress in her lap. “Not very much,” she admitted, “even after all these years. Your grandmother keeps to herself. She leaves at night. She works.”

  “At a nursing home. She’s a nurse.”

  “And she has nurse things,” Martha agreed. “Hot water bottles and medicine and needles and such. But she also has …” She leaned forward so I did too, “other objects.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cards,” Martha said solemnly.

  “Cards?”

  Martha sat back with a satisfied nod.

  “Playing cards? Prescription cards?”

  “Cards with horrible pictures on them—weeping women, skulls on fire, men with swords. Cards that tell the future, Clara says.”

  I thought. “Tarot cards?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps that’s what they’re called.” Martha brushed an invisible speck of dust off her apron. “Nothing good about them, that’s all I know. Not good medicine.”

  “Martha, kids at school—I overheard them talking. One of them said my grandmother was a witch. Do you know anything about that?”

  Martha stood up from the bed, shaking out the folds of the yellow dress. “There’s no truth to it. Your grandmother is a good woman. People in town tell stories, it’s true. But there have been stories about this house forever. Those stories don’t concern your grandmother, don’t have nothing to do with her. She’s an innocent old woman.” She frowned slightly. “Except for the cards.”

  I thought of how my grandmother had seemed the first night I had arrived in Wellstone, when she didn’t see me, couldn’t see me, when she had returned home alone. I had walked in on her in the big empty house, by herself in the sitting room, watching the TV on mute. Lonely, is what I had thought. I thought I had understood.

  “Martha,” I said. “Is there another ghost here?”

  Martha was hanging up the dress. “Hmm?”

  “Other than the four of you, and the Builder, I mean. Is there a man maybe? An old man? Another ghost who hangs around the train station? Mr. Black said Tom was … Mr. Black said this old man at the train station hurt Tom. Did he push him in front of the train? I thought I remembered ghost stories about an old man in Wellstone. Did the train hit the man too, or—”

  Martha came out of the shadows. “Don’t worry about Tom’s death, Miss. It’s over now. It’s over and done.”

  But it wasn’t.

  I rode the bus to school. I shuffled along with the rest of the students, but I didn’t go to class. Any class. After the late bell, I could make my way through the halls without fighting, squeezing against the wall to avoid being stepped on, run into, or tripped over. I found the library.

  It was windowless, cool, and empty. Rows of computers stretched out before the door and the circulation desk where the librarian sat, clicking on another keyboard. I chose a computer away from the door, with a screen not facing the librarian, thinking that if a student came in, he wouldn’t walk this far just to check email.

  But someone did come in and stand behind me. Clara.

  I felt uneasiness whenever she showed up now, like something might explode or go missing. I tried to concentrate on the screen. “Where’s Tom?” I said without looking at her.

  “Don’t know,” Clara said. “Avoiding you.”

  I stopped typing. “Why?”

  “You embarrassed him. You saw his death.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “You came close.”

  I twisted in the chair. “Clara, he just took off in the middle of talking to me. He heard the train and was gone. I had no idea what was happening. If he was hit by a train, if that’s how …” I couldn’t make myself say it. “How it happened, other people would have seen his death too. Anyone on the platform or train would have seen.”

  “He wasn’t hit by a train,” Clara said. “Shows how much you know. That’s not how he died. That’s not at all how it happened.”

  “Tell me how then.”

  But she bent down to the computer, her fingers outstretched. “Oh, the magic box! Tom doesn’t like them, but I do. You can make it sing. You can look at dancing hamsters. Students do it all the time.”

  “Clara.” I put my hands over the keyboard, blocking her. “I’m doing something important, okay?”

  I waited until she had left, then I opened a browser, and tried not to think about Tom.

  There were over a million search results for invisible. Invisible ink, invisible fencing, a rumor about invisible paint. A faerie tale: twelve princesses who made themselves invisible every night so that they could sneak away from their room and dance. And then a boy followed them, found them out, snapped a twig from each magical tree they passed on their way to the underworld of dancing: a gold tree, a silver one.

  “Great,” I said. “All I need is some boy to follow me and break off a magical branch.”

  I hadn’t realized I had spoken out loud. But the library student aide, a small girl with frizzy hair, spilled a cup of pencils across the circulation desk.

  Had she heard me?

  I stood up from the computer. I thought she looked at my chair as it pushed away from the table. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t invisible anymore. Maybe it had ended, whatever it was that had happened to me. “Hello?” I said.

  She looked around. “Miss Simms?” The girl had braces.

  Invisible braces.

  I waved. “Hello?
I’m right in front of you. Can you see me? Can you really see me?”

  “Miss Simms?” the girl said again. She looked through me, wouldn’t—or couldn’t—make eye contact with me. “There’s something wrong with one of the computers.” She vaulted up the stairs to the second story, where the librarian had disappeared ages ago.

  I slumped back down in the chair.

  “A sensitive one,” Tom said. “Sometimes they can sense something—even hear you if it’s quiet enough.” He stood beside me.

  I was too disappointed to be relieved he was back. I thought the girl had seen me. I thought maybe… but no. “Stop doing that,” I said to Tom. “Stop sneaking up on me. I know you don’t have footsteps—I guess you don’t—but it drives me crazy.”

  I wanted to touch him, to reach out and make sure it was really him, to convince myself. I didn’t know if he was okay, if a ghost could be okay or not. I didn’t know what to say to him. He had held my hand. But he had also screamed at me without seeing me, blinded by tears. He had tried to derail a train.

  I took a breath. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” He shrugged. “Dead.”

  “What happened back there at the train station?”

  His eyes didn’t leave mine, but his face turned hard. “I would prefer not to talk about that.”

  “I get that,” I said.

  “What did you find out?”

  I glanced back at the computer. Was I just going to let it go, let him change the subject? This time I was. “Not very much about invisibility,” I said. “Nothing about the subway. No one reports turning invisible after being underground. I thought it might be a chemical, maybe. Maybe something was wrong with the paint that was spilled there, or there was some kind of secret experiment going on? But I don’t think so. A lot of people seem to want to be invisible, according to the internet.”

  Tom glanced around. “Let’s get out of here. It’s almost the class change, and there’s a class in here next period.”

  We exited the library just as the bell rang, students flooding the halls. I winced, but Tom kept walking calmly, unchanged, making a path for me down the middle of the hall. He held onto my arm. And no one ran into us.

  “How do you do that?” I asked.

  “Practice.”

  I felt something brush against my hand. “I guess I still need to work on my technique,” I said. But then the brush became a tug, a pinch. “Ouch,” I said. I looked down.

  A girl stood beside me. She had washed-out blond hair falling from a center part, deep gray circles under her eyes. She clutched a stack of books. And she was looking straight at me. “Excuse me?” she said. “Can you help me? I can’t find my locker.”

  I turned around, searching for the person she must have been addressing.

  But she touched me again, yanking on the hem of my yellow dress, the one Martha had made me wear.

  The girl touched me. She saw me. Invisible me.

  “Me?” I said. “You see me? You’re talking to me?”

  “Help me,” she said. “I need to find my locker.”

  “Seriously?” I said. I was almost excited. “You do?”

  But I felt myself being pulled in another direction.

  Tom had grabbed my arm. He was sprinting with me, as Mr. Black had done. By the time I opened my mouth to protest, we had gone down the hall, far away from the girl. There were students in between us, jostling and hurrying to class, hiding us from her.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “She saw me. She actually talked to me. We have to go after her. Either I’m no longer invisible—or she’s a sensitive one, or whatever.”

  “She isn’t sensitive.”

  “Maybe she can help us.”

  “No,” Tom said flatly. “She can’t.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because she’s a ghost.”

  I remembered the girl’s face, pale as if she had been drained of blood, the circles under her eyes. “Well, we have to help her then.”

  “No.”

  I stared at him. “Tom, you helped me. When you and Clara thought I was a ghost, you were going to help me. You were going to go out of your way to make me understand. We have to make her understand.”

  “She understands,” Tom said.

  “I don’t think she does.”

  Then I heard a roar. The students scattered, clearing a circle in the center of the hall. In the middle of the circle, a boy lay on his side, books tossed around him. His face looked stunned, slack and hurt. There was a minute of silence when no one moved. Then the moment passed, tension broke. The students began to laugh and talk and move again, to help the boy up, to walk around him.

  “Way to trip,” one of them said.

  But the boy hadn’t tripped on his own.

  He had been made to fall by the blond girl, by the ghost—and I had seen it. I had seen her move, a flash through the crowd as she terrified him. I had seen her mouth drop open, heard the keening sound that escaped. The roar, the inhuman roar of pain and anguish. It had happened in a blink, but I had seen it, seen her target him.

  “Why did she do that?” I whispered. “Why did she scare him?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “But she doesn’t need us. She knows she’s dead—and she’s angry about it. She wants to hurt other people like she was hurt.”

  The boy limped off, supported by friends. Blood leaked from his nose onto his shirt.

  Tom and I went to the cafeteria, and sat down at a center table. People gave us space without even knowing they were doing it. It was like being in bubble, like how the Firecracker said strangers treated famous people in the city, pretending the celebrities weren’t there, pretending they didn’t see them while also accommodating them.

  No one had to pretend not to see or hear us. It made carrying on a secret conversation easy.

  “Tell me about the ghost girl,” I said. “Do you know her? Do all ghosts know each other?”

  “No,” Tom said. “But I know her type. She’s a malicious spirit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That kind of ghost that would try to get you to harm yourself.”

  I scanned the cafeteria. All around us, students laughed and ate and stood in line. They looked so happy, innocent. Had I ever looked like one of them, been one of them? Everything they did—all their lives—had to be easy. They were visible; they were alive.

  “She’s not here anymore,” Tom said. “I don’t sense her. Do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  He peered down the empty table. “Are you hungry? Would you like to eat something? I can filch you an apple. I used to be good at that.”

  “Tom,” I said, “what was your life like before?”

  He made a face that was half grimace, half smile. “Not good.”

  “Why did you go back to the train tracks? Martha said it’s not right to go back to the place of your death. She said you’re not supposed to. And Mr. Black tried to stop you. Why did you do it?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I feel like I have something to do. I can’t explain it. Clara doesn’t feel it so strongly, but I do. And the only thing I can think of is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Dying?”

  “No,” he said. “My father.” He spit the word.

  I remembered the man at the train station: the old man with the lantern, his hat, his greasy grin. “That man on the tracks was your father?”

  “Adopted. He adopted us. He wanted us to call him Papa, but we wouldn’t. He didn’t act like one.”

  No one was looking at us. No one ran into us, or brushed past us, or bumped us, though we sat in the center of everything. And now it seemed like I couldn’t see the other students either, like I couldn’t even hear them. All the noise and talking and laughter fell away. Everything was silence. Everything except us.

  “He killed you,” I said. “How?”

  “He liked to hit. Funny thing about ghosts, Ez. We can’t feel pain
, can’t feel temperatures, can’t bleed or bruise—except when it comes to our own death. We can feel that, experience that, again and again, with just as much pain as the first time if we’re not careful. And I’m not careful.”

  I remembered the bruise on his face, how quickly it had disappeared. Why hadn’t I asked more questions? The words left my mouth before I could stop them. “I need you to be careful,” I said.

  It was then that I knew, knew for sure without a doubt, that something had happened to me and I was different, different beyond belief, that I was invisible, for good, for real, maybe forever. Because Tom Griffin kissed me in the middle of the high school cafeteria, in the midst of the lunch rush—and no one said a word.

  CHAPTER 7:

  Riding Too Long

  I asked Martha about Tom. There was so much I didn’t know: hobbies, fears, dreams (did ghosts have dreams?). “Girls?” I asked. “Have there been girls?”

  “No,” Martha said. “Not that I know of, Miss, and I know just about everything that happens in this house. There have been other ghosts we’ve met along the years, but they don’t last. They’re just passing through, the other dead. They come and go. But Tom and his sister, Mr. Black, the Builder and me—for some reason, we’re the ones who have stayed.”

  She was turning down my bed as she spoke, even though I had asked her not to. It was a comfort, Martha said, to do the familiar job, to do the job still, to make the house nice for someone, especially someone who noticed, someone who could thank her, which I did repeatedly, though it never seemed like enough.

  “Does Tom ever talk about his father?” I asked.

  “No. And don’t go calling him that. He was no father.”

  “What should I call him then?”

  “Nothing. Don’t talk about him. Don’t say his name. It upsets Tom.”