“Overly optimistic?” Gracie smiled hesitantly, wondering about that knee pat. Had he ever done that before?
Bonk! At that moment something small and hard smacked into the trunk of the willow tree a foot above their heads.
They both ducked.
“Crap!” someone shouted.
Gracie looked down. On the ground beside her was a golf ball, sparkling white with a Nike logo on it. She heard an angry male voice, coming closer. “Well, well, well…you thought you could sneak away from me and hide under this tree, did you?”
Through the screen of willow fronds Gracie saw a graying man approach, wearing a thick white golf sweater, slashing at the slim fronds with his golf club like a swordsman.
Dylan’s dad.
Dylan, still holding the matchbook, looked at Gracie with terror in his eyes.
“Omigod, he said he was working late! I’m sooo dead.”
The man came closer. “When you behave like that, you’ll be punished. What is a metal three-wood worth, I ask you?”
With trembling hands, knowing she absolutely shouldn’t do it, Gracie opened the journal and scribbled madly.
Dylan and Gracie became invisible so that Dylan’s dad wouldn’t see them sitting under the weeping willow tree.
She looked over what she’d written, and then quickly added temporarily in between became and invisible, hoping to head off any problems that might be caused by the two of them becoming permanently invisible. She shut the journal and put it behind her.
And Dylan disappeared. Gracie’s heart beat once, so hard her chest hurt.
Two seconds later, Dylan’s dad crashed through the hanging branches.
“There you are, you renegade! Trying to escape my clutches, are you? I’ll knock you from here to kingdom come!”
His florid cheek almost touched Gracie’s shoulder, and she shrank back as he bent and grasped the golf ball. He hadn’t seen them at all!
In fact, he saw right through them. His watery eyes narrowed and he reached right behind Gracie and picked up the journal.
“Hmm,” he said.
No! Not the journal. Gracie’s heart thudded. Should she try to grab it?
Dylan’s dad turned the journal this way and that. He opened the journal to the onionskin page with the words from Grace Slick’s song, and his eyes skimmed left to right as he read. He hummed a small riff from the song, then started to flip through some of the things that Gracie had written. Gracie thought she’d cry with embarrassment. Then, to her amazement, Dylan’s dad smiled. Then he laughed.
“Paul!” another golfer yelled. “A group’s waiting on the tee! Let’s move along!”
Gracie watched helplessly as Mr. McWilliams dropped the journal into a pocket in his golf bag and zipped it up. He tossed his ball out onto a clear area of grass. “Hey, look at that, I found my ball!” he said, and pulled out an iron and hit his ball right onto the green. “All right!” he said, lurching toward the green.
There was momentary silence inside the screen of pale willow fronds.
“Omigod, Dylan! Dylan, omigod! We’re invisible!” Gracie jumped up and reached for his hand—and clasped air. “The journal did this!”
“Gracie, Gracie, this is unbelievable! Astonishing!” Dylan started jumping up and down, but all Gracie could see were the indentations in the grass where his feet landed.
“I know! I wrote it in the journal so that your dad wouldn’t see us.”
“You made us invisible! The journal works!”
“I told you it works, you just didn’t believe me.”
“Touch my hand.” Dylan sounded breathless. “Can you feel it?”
Gracie reached out for Dylan and accidentally put her hand on his chest. “Sorry. Yes, I can feel you.”
He took her hand. She and Dylan had never held hands. His fingers were long and delicate, not sweaty at all. Not like a boy’s, really. Somehow, not being able to see Dylan made touching his hand feel more intense.
“So we’re invisible…but we can hear each other and touch each other. This is so amazing! I’ve always wanted to be invisible, and to fly. Can you make us fly?”
“I guess so. Why not? But first I’d have to get the journal back.”
“Hey, how long will this last?”
“I have no idea. I wrote temporarily invisible.”
“That could mean anything.”
“Hey, don’t even think like that. We have to get the journal back from your dad. Come on!” Gracie felt around for Dylan’s arm, touched his chest again, felt embarrassed, and finally grasped his hand. They ran together out from under the weeping willow.
“There!”
Dylan’s dad had finished putting and was getting into a golf cart with another man. Soon they were scooting through the woods to the next hole. Gracie and Dylan started after the cart, but Dylan had always called himself “athletically challenged,” and Gracie’s flip-flops and sore toe slowed her down.
“Wait, it’s useless,” Dylan said. The cart zipped onto a path leading into the woods and was quickly out of sight.
“We’ll go to your house and grab the journal when he gets back from playing.” Gracie spread her fingers and turned her invisible hand back and forth in front of her face. “Hey, can you believe it?”
“It’s really weird, isn’t it?”
“Grab my hand. I have no idea where you are.”
Gracie felt around and touched Dylan’s cheek. He reached up and clasped her hand.
“We’ll have to hold hands,” he said, “and keep talking to each other.”
“Walk this way, back toward the tree. I have to get my backpack.”
“I’m following in your veritable footsteps.”
“Can you hear me now?” Gracie giggled. She couldn’t believe she was giggling, since it was truly horrible to have lost the journal and also to be invisible. But it was kind of exciting too. And Dylan was being so…sensitive. Maybe what she’d written had worked. She felt a pang of guilt. But it felt so nice!
She ducked under the willow fronds. Her backpack, leaning behind a tree trunk, disappeared the moment she shouldered it. “Check that out,” she said.
“Wow!” said Dylan. “Put it down and pick it back up.”
She did. The moment she let go of the backpack, it reappeared. When she picked it up, it disappeared.
“Incredible!” said Dylan.
“Let’s take my backpack to my place. I want to see if Jen’s okay. Then we’ll go to your house and wait for your dad to get home. How long will it take him to finish his golf round?”
“Maybe an hour.” Hand in hand they walked from the woods to the oak tree in Gracie’s backyard, the oak tree where she had first written about the squirrel. That seemed like a hundred years ago.
They headed through the backyard.
“Okay, I was able to pick up my backpack, so that means that when we get the journal back, it should be no problem to pick it up and write in it. Right?”
“Logically speaking, I would say that we are simply invisible. None of the other aspects of life are affected, such as gravity, our ability to write or hold things, eating, sleeping, fooling around.”
“Dylan, you dork, you would think about fooling around.”
“Sorry, that’s just me.”
“Hey, being invisible isn’t so bad from an appearance point of view,” she said, as they stepped onto the apartment’s patio. “You don’t have to worry about your weight, or what you’re wearing, or if your hair is dirty, or about that zit in the crease where your nostril meets your cheek.”
“I concur,” Dylan said. “Being invisible negates a number of time-consuming insecurities. Also, we can sneak into R-rated movies. We could walk right by any sign that reads ‘No Admittance’ or ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’”
“We can get on any plane we want,” Gracie added. “We could go to England or Australia or Tahiti for free.”
“We could have front-row seats for any band we want,” Dylan added.
“We could become spies.”
“We could sleep in each other’s bedrooms.”
“Do you ever stop thinking about that?”
“Not really.” Dylan sighed. They were both silent for a moment.
“If you think about it,” Gracie said, “I’ve been invisible my whole life.”
“I know you’re speaking metaphorically, Gracie, but come on. Maybe you’re not the center of attention in your family, but as families go, yours is no more dysfunctional than any other. In all probability, less so. I mean, your parents are still married, unlike mine.”
“Well, technically.”
“There’s no murder or incest in your family, no psychotic family members are imprisoned in your attic that I know of, and no one has any fatal diseases. And neither you nor your siblings have been thrown in jail or sent to reform school.”
“Jen would be in jail right now if I hadn’t saved her with the journal.”
“That’s a matter of personal faith.” Dylan’s voice was a bit more hollow than usual, but other than that he sounded perfectly normal. “Maybe you thought you were invisible before, but believe me, that was nothing compared to now.”
“Dylan?” Gracie found her house key, which disappeared the moment she picked it up, and carefully slid it into the lock.
“Yeah?”
“Everyone’s going to wonder where we are.”
“I know,” Dylan said. “Unless we tell them we’re invisible, which I would warn against unless we want to be tossed into the psych ward at Dorothea Dix. But I’m quite confident that once Dad gets home from golf, this will be easy to fix, right, Gracie?”
“Right.” Gracie pushed open her back door. Her voice, even to herself, sounded lacking in confidence.
It’s like in Tom Sawyer, she thought. When everyone thought Tom and Huck were dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gracie and Dylan tiptoed through her family room, holding hands. They had started upstairs with her backpack when the door to the garage slammed.
“Kids? I’m home.” Mom dropped her briefcase on the floor, then headed for the stairs. Gracie squeezed Dylan’s hand as Mom walked right past them on the landing. She didn’t see them at all! They followed her down the hall as she knocked on Alex’s door before pushing it open.
“So? How bad was detention?”
Alex, lying on his bed playing his Game Boy, shrugged. “She yelled at us to shut up the whole time. We didn’t and now everyone has another day of detention.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope.”
“That’s horrible!” Mom said. “Why didn’t the school call me?”
“They said they tried.”
Mom took out her BlackBerry, stared at the screen, then went down the hall, knocked, and opened Jen’s door. “Jen! What happened to your face?”
Jen was lying on her bed in her pj’s, and she’d put Band-Aids over the inflamed scratches on her cheek and neck. Her stained clothes lay in a pile on the floor. Jen told Mom everything that had happened in the cafeteria.
“And get this,” Jen finished. “Gracie comes into the lunchroom, and I’m getting beat up by this girl, I mean totally smacked around, and Gracie doesn’t even try to get her off of me or anything.”
“Th—” Gracie started, but Dylan squeezed her hand and she bit her invisible lip.
“She just stands there like a complete idiot and stares at me like I’ve got three heads, and then turns around and runs the other way. I mean, it’s bad enough to have this space-cadet sister who’s like a total social liability, but the fact that she’s not even loyal really ticks me off. Plus, she stole my earrings.”
“Jen, I find this entire episode appalling. You were suspended, and that other girl was expelled? Why wasn’t I called?” Mom punched a few more buttons on her BlackBerry.
“They said they tried. And I didn’t even do anything, Mom; I was just carrying my tray across the lunchroom, minding my own business.”
“Oh, gosh. I have three messages. They must have called during that staff meeting when I turned my phone to vibrate,” Mom said. “Jen, how do I get my messages?”
“Mom, you’re such a dork,” Jen said. She took the BlackBerry, pressed two buttons, and handed it back to Mom. “You’re never going to learn to use that thing.”
Gracie was stung beyond words. After all Gracie had done for Jen, Jen had called her a “social liability.” And Mom hadn’t even yelled at her!
“I’m still going out with Sean tonight,” Jen said. “Candy Bobinski will have to kill me first.”
“Over my dead body!” Mom said.
“Mom! This is Sean we’re talking about. He’s my dream.”
“Oh, God,” Dylan whispered. “Girls think I’m a leper, and the Fridge is your sister’s dream. I hate middle school.”
“I’m not even wasting my time discussing this,” Mom said, looking into Gracie’s empty room. “Alex, Jen, where’s Gracie?”
“No clue,” Alex said. A few rapid beeps came from his Game Boy.
“Don’t know and don’t care, that traitor,” Jen said, and slammed her door.
And Mom, rather than getting worried, glanced at her watch and shrugged. “She’s probably over at Dylan’s. Or maybe they called an extra cross-country practice.” She had just started down the stairs when the door to the garage slammed again.
“C’mon,” Gracie said to Dylan, and they followed.
Dad stood in the kitchen.
“Steven! You’re home!” Mom stopped on the landing and clapped her hands to her head, almost hitting Gracie in the face.
Dad’s face was alive with excitement. “Pamela, you are looking at the new sports announcer for WBRQ Radio. I got it! I got the job!”
“Fantas—” Gracie started to exclaim, before Dylan clapped his hand over her mouth.
“Steven Rawley shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild!”
Mom ran to the bottom of the stairs and threw her arms around Dad’s neck. Gracie and Dylan watched from the landing. It was very weird, knowing that they didn’t even need to try and hide. They could just stand there. Nobody would see them.
“Steven, did you really? You got the job?”
Gracie hadn’t seen Mom and Dad hug in months. She discovered yet another advantage of invisibility: nobody could see her swiping at the tears running down her cheeks.
“Oh, that’s so exciting, I am so thrilled. When do you start?”
“Well, Garrett wanted me to stay and announce an Emory soccer game tomorrow afternoon, but I told him I had to come home and spend the weekend with my family. I’ve got to be in Atlanta first thing Monday morning. Honey, it was uncanny; it was as though velvet words rolled from my tongue. I couldn’t say anything wrong the entire day. Garrett took me to look at some month-to-month studio apartments. Obviously, for a while, I’ll have to commute on weekends.”
“Lots of families do it,” Mom said, patting his chest. “It’ll be a challenge, but we’ll make it.”
“Just until you guys can move down.”
“Move down?” Mom untangled her arms and stepped back. “Steven, I love my job, I love this community. We have friends here. The kids love their school.”
“Now, that’s somewhat of a stretch,” said Dylan, in Gracie’s ear.
“But this is a good job, Pam, with excellent benefits—and the family ought to be together.”
“You haven’t even started it yet. Who knows what might happen.”
“I resent that implication. My whole career, I’ve had no passion for the work. And now I’ve finally landed the job of my dreams.”
“Still, I think we should just wait and see.” Mom turned and headed upstairs. Gracie and Dylan dodged her, wedging themselves into a corner. Gracie stiffened, seeing the guarded look on Mom’s face.
“Uh-oh,” murmured Dylan.
Dad took the stairs two at a time. Dylan and Gracie, who had just crept out of the corner, ducked back into it as Dad raced
by, but Gracie was a split second too late and Dad’s hand brushed against her hair. She swallowed a gasp, but Dad just waved his hand around, the way he did when he walked through cobwebs or a swarm of gnats while mowing the yard, and continued up the stairs. “Pam, wait a minute. I know with all that’s happened in the past year or so you’ve lost faith in me. But are you saying you don’t think I should have taken it? I ask you this, when a man doesn’t have a dream, what does he have left?”
Alex and Jen came out into the upstairs hall with expressions of amazement on their faces.
“Steven, I know about dreams,” Mom went on. “Why do you think our daughter is named Gracie? I wanted to be a singer, remember? But we have three kids and a mortgage. So I work in marketing at a bank, and I read Rolling Stone every month, and once in a blue moon I go to a karaoke bar and sing my heart out!” Mom shut the bedroom door and locked it.
“Pam!” Dad pounded on the door. “Let me in!”
Gracie could not stop herself. “Mom—”
Dylan clapped his hand over her mouth again, but he needn’t have worried. Only Alex looked vaguely in Gracie’s direction for a confused second, then focused again on Dad pounding on the door.
“I wish we could do something,” Dylan whispered.
Dad whirled around and looked at Alex and Jen, who had both faded back into the doorways of their rooms. “What are you whispering about?” He marched past them, then stopped and kissed Jen’s forehead and put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Sorry. I’ll call you guys, okay?” Then he barged past Gracie and Dylan at the top of the landing. At the bottom of the stairs he picked up the suitcase and raincoat he’d dropped by the door.
Alex ran to the landing, his hands gripping the banister. “Dad, where are you going?”
Dad looked up at him, and seemed not to be able to think of what to say. Then he said, “I have a job in Atlanta,” and stalked into the garage, slamming the door. A minute later his car engine roared and the tires squealed as he drove away.
Afterward, there was silence. Alex and Jen, after staring at Mom’s closed door for long seconds, looked at each other.
“If Dad can go to Atlanta, I can go out with Sean tonight,” Jen said to Alex, scrubbing tears from her cheeks. “She can’t stop me.”
Write Before Your Eyes Page 8
