Invincible (Invisible 2)

by Cecily Anne Paterson

  I get back to my room and close the door. It probably wouldn’t matter if I left it open. Mum’s room is through the kitchen and down the hall. Practically at the other end of the house. But I don’t want her to know that I’m up, awake, distracted, in the middle of the night.

  I switch on the light. It jars my eyes but I blink through it until they adjust. I still have to keep them half-closed, my eyelashes protecting my pupils slightly. Everything I can see is slightly fuzzy. But I’ve got what I need.

  My journal is still on the desk. I’m going to do something. I don’t know if it will help, but it might. I’m going to draw every monster, every goblin, every giant that’s ever attacked me in my dreams. Every wart and bump, drip of drool and piece of snot. I’m going to put them on paper, all there for anyone to see.

  Go ahead. Chase me now. Try to kill me. I know what you look like. Someone’s going to find you eventually, and then your fun will be over.

  My pictures aren’t great. I’m not an artist, but somehow, at nearly three in the morning, that doesn’t seem to be important. All I care about is getting the images of evil, grinning, leering, dribbling monsters out of my head. I draw and draw until finally my yawns are too much to resist and I tumble back into bed and sleep. All night. Quietly.

  Morning light makes things better. At 7 am, lying in the early sunshine, it’s like the middle of the night panic was hardly real. A tiny, ridiculous, embarrassing episode that I’d make excuses for if anyone found out. “Oh, I was a little scared. You know how it is sometimes when you’re a bit tired.” A little. A bit. A teensy smidge. Nothing, really, at all.

  My journal is closed on the desk. I must have shut the cover before I hit the pillow and I’m glad. Later, I might rip the pages out and burn them secretly behind the house. I check to see Mum’s not around and swiftly put it in the top drawer. Secret. Quiet. Hidden. Not that I think she reads my journal. But you never know. I don’t want her to freak out and for me to be answering odd questions this afternoon when I get home.

  This afternoon.

  The thought trips me up. I had arranged to go home with Liam after school. My heart takes a tiny extra skip and I bite my lip.

  If I can just get through the next nine days until the holidays, I can go away to Grandma’s and not have to worry about Liam. I just need some time. Then I can decide how I can prove it—that I like him like he likes me.

  Keep it simple, I think. Stay with other people. Don’t be alone. Tell him Mum needs me at home in the afternoon. Fudge it until the holidays.

  If I can get to the end of term, I’ll see Grandma. That will make it all better.

  My post-nightmare breakfast is toast and a fresh orange juice. Someone from Mum’s work has an orchard full of orange trees and we’ve had so many recently that I’ve become the orange juice queen. I like it with the bits in it. They catch in my mouth but it’s like I’ve got the whole orange. It tastes real. I don’t know if juices are supposed to have any superpowers but they manage to clear my head after I’ve been screaming and running all night.

  “Were you going out this afternoon?”

  Mum’s voice is loud in my ear. She sounds a bit frustrated. Like she’s said it more than once.

  “Sorry. What?” I say, looking up, brushing crumbs and monsters off the table.

  “This afternoon. Did you say you were going out?”

  “Oh. Um. Maybe not,” I say. “Not sure.” I sip my juice but it’s more of a slurp as a bit of pith gets sucked up into my mouth.

  “Weren’t you going to Liam’s?” she asks. She sounds surprised.

  “Yeah. But I don’t know,” I say. I shrug. “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

  Mum looks like she’s not sure what to do with that piece of information. Strictly speaking its true. All my teachers seem to have waited until the end of term to inflict us with essays and take-home tests. But I’m pretty well through most of them, except for the Science project which we have to start now and then continue after the holidays. Yeah, mostly done. And one afternoon at Liam’s wouldn’t hurt me. But it’s a good reason to give.

  Mum looks at me. Her eyes are narrowed. It’s one of her signs of worry. “Everything okay with you two?” she asks.

  I fake a smile. “Yeah. Course.”

  “He’s really nice, isn’t he.” She’s still anxious. Checking for agreement on my face.

  “Oh. I know.” I nod enthusiastically but only my head is moving. “He’s great.”

  “Okay.” She steps towards the fridge awkwardly and gets an orange out. “These are good, right?”

  “Mmm.” I nod again. My shoulders join in this time. “Really nice.”

  The bus drives past the park with the plum blossom tree. Even just two days later more petals have fallen off the tree. The canopy above is thinner but the carpet underfoot looks like something you’d put in a little girl’s pink and purple dream bedroom.

  I get out my phone and read Liam’s text again. I never replied to it. Now I think maybe I should have. If he brings it up I really don’t know what I’m going to say. I want to tell him to be patient. To go slower. To be kinder. I want to ask him what was wrong with the way we were at the beginning. I want to know why we can’t just go get ice cream. Sit together. Talk.

  I close my eyes and imagine the conversation in my head. I say my piece and look at his face. Expectant. Waiting for the smile that melts me to my fingertips. Waiting for his eyes to sparkle at me again. There’s a pause, in slow motion and then I see it. It’s a smile that starts in the corners of his mouth and grows to cover his face. He opens his mouth and takes a breath. I think he’s about to speak, to say, ‘oh yeah, of course you’re right Jazmine. I’m so sorry,’ but no words come out. Instead he bends his head back, almost so he’s looking at the sky and he laughs.

  Cackles.

  Guffaws.

  Roars.

  I disappear into the miserable nothingness of total and utter embarrassment. My eyelids slam open. I’m short of breath, shocked and jolted.

  I don’t think I’ll be having that conversation.

  Best to do what I do best: make an excuse, change the subject, avoid the issue.

  When we pull up at school, I look out the window and see Liam, standing by the gate as normal, and suddenly all my fear disappears. He’s so gorgeous with his tousled hair and his blue eyes that I can’t think why I’m even worried about him. Maybe I’m just tired, I think. Maybe I’m a little bit intense. Maybe even a little crazy? Just look at him, I tell myself. There’s nothing to get upset about.

  The morning’s dread drains away and instead a bubbling up of happiness takes its place. I push my way in behind all the other people in blue and white uniforms, jostling to get off the bus, and when I finally step off my smile is wide and relaxed. Liam steps forward to meet me, I step forward to greet him and we’re just about to hug when there’s a rush of air on my face and a noise in my left ear.

  It’s Olivia and Caitlin, and one look at their faces makes me think the school must have burned down. They’ve been running, as fast as they can, towards me and Liam and there’s terror in their eyes.

  “Jazmine!” they shout together. And then they’re both talking at once, their words jostling for space. I can’t understand them. It’s too fast and I’m not keeping up. Liam sees my confusion and steps in.

  “Stop!” he says. “One at a time. What’s the matter?“

  Olivia looks stunned; like she’s been slapped on the cheek. She holds her face while Caitlin speaks up.

  “It’s Angela.” She turns white as she says it. “She says you called her something terrible. She’s says she won’t stand for it. Jaz. She’s going to fight you.”

  Chapter 8

  Caitlin and Olivia are the sort of people who get bouncy when they get upset. Their voices go high. Their words are quick. And their bodies move. Erin’s a bit the same, but where the twins are scared, there’s a streak of happy that shows up on Erin’s face when someone else is in trouble.
It’s not obvious, but it’s there in the slight curl of her lip, the brisk opening of her eyelids. If you have the eyes to see it.

  I’m completely different. My body turns to a slow-moving, rubbery jelly. My stomach slips down to my knees and when I try to breathe and realise I’m slowly choking to death, I reach down inside me to find the air in my lungs has turned to water and is slowly leaking out. Instead of running, my feet send suckers and shoots into the ground. I’m planted in one place. When I try to speak my voice comes back to me, bouncing off glass walls. I’m in a slow-motion, silent snow globe of my very own and all the shaking in the world can’t get me to move or respond.

  “You. She wants to fight you.”

  Caitlin’s looking into my eyes with a puzzled expression. Olivia has a matching face and the two of them exchange glances that say Doesn’t she hear us? Doesn’t she understand what this is?

  I blink. Peer at them. I feel like I’m out of my own body. Like the real me is somewhere, smaller, inside, looking out of my own eye holes like you’d sit at a window and admire the view.

  Liam grabs my shoulder. “Jaz,” he says. “You okay?”

  I put my hands up to my eyes and just hold them there over my face. The pressure of fingers on my skin brings me back a little. I rub my eyes firmly, slide back into my body, open my eyes and ask a question.

  “Me?”

  Caitlin nods furiously. “I know, right?”

  “I said you’d never call anyone, you know, a b…,” says Olivia. She mouths the word, like it’s too dangerous to say out loud. There’s panic in her face. “But she says you did. You didn’t, did you?”

  Both girls are hanging on my answer, their big eyes wide with worry.

  “No,” I say. I shake my head slightly. “I didn’t call her anything.”

  I can see the relief in the twins’ faces. They let out identical gasps of air. “I knew it,” says Olivia, turning to Caitlin. She has an ‘I told you so’ look on her face. “I knew she wouldn’t have.”

  Caitlin shrugs her shoulders. “Well,” she says, as a half aside to her sister. “I mean… maybe…”

  Liam steps between us. “But Angela doesn’t usually make stuff up,” he says. “I mean, I know she’s not the nicest person in the world, but I’ve known her since preschool. And I really don’t think…” His voice trails off. “I don’t get it. What’s she trying to do?”

  I know exactly what she’s trying to do. She’s still angry at me for the standing ovations I got in the play. But it wasn’t as if I muscled in and pushed her out of it. She just can’t stand to have anyone take over what she thinks is hers. And especially not to do a good job at it. She’s taking a small, stupid, irritated conversation between herself and Gabby, twisting it so it looks way worse than it is, and then using the whole thing as an excuse to put me in my place.

  Oh yes. I know exactly how this goes.

  But even though I understand what’s happening, I’m still terrified. My throat has gone to sleep and thinking straight is like finding my way through fog. I shake my head and move my mouth but nothing comes out.

  “You should text Gabby,” says Olivia. “Or I’ll do it.”

  “Yeah,” I say. There’s cloud covering my head. “That would be… Can you?”

  “I’ve got a phone,” says Caitlin, urgently. She flips her pink leather cover open and presses out a message. Olivia’s head comes in close to her twin. They’re arguing about what they should write.

  “I’ll go talk to her for you,” Liam says. He grabs my hand.

  “Who?” I say. “Gabby?”

  “No, silly,” he says. “Angela, obviously. Come on. Let’s go in. I’ll sort this out for you.”

  I want to say no. Just leave it. Don’t make it a thing. But he’s already pulling me along and my legs are following dumbly. He parks me at our usual table and then walks across the quad to where Angela and her girls are sitting. I can feel the poison whiplash of their looks from here. The twins are in panic mode, buzzing around me and asking questions no one can possibly answer. What’s going to happen? Do you think she’ll come over here? I don’t want to listen so I put my head in my hands and shut my eyes. A brown, warty, bristling gargoyle that spent all last Tuesday night chasing me with a live power line pokes its head into my brain and waves, leering, in the empty space in front of my eyeballs. No electric shocks this time. But still I gasp and snap my eyes open again.

  Erin arrives and the twins rush over to update her. There’s a lot of hand-waving, eyebrow raising and nodding and I can see Erin look over at me and then at Angela’s group with a face that can’t quite hide her excitement.

  “For real?” She comes up to me and talks right in my face. “You going to do it?”

  I look, frustrated, at her. “Do what?”

  “Fight,” she says. Like I’m the thickest person on the planet. “Are you going to hit her?”

  I hold my hands palms up and shake my head quickly like I don’t understand what she’s even talking about.

  “Um. No? I didn’t even call her anything.”

  “Yeah, but she’s saying you did. If you don’t do anything now, it’s like she’s won.”

  “It’s not even anything,” I say. “You can’t win if it’s nothing.”

  Erin raises her eyebrows and steps back. “This is junior high school,” she says. “You win. Or you lose.”

  I shrug and turn away. Liam’s still over there with Angela and her group. She looks like she’s angry, sulking on one side. One of her clone friends is up close to Liam, talking in his face. Lots of gestures. Nothing happy. I try to concentrate, to see what’s going on but I’m tired. I can hardly keep my eyes open. All they want to do is shut but I can’t let them. I’m too scared of what I’ll see if I let them close. In front of me are the twins and Erin, alert and focused on the crisis. I turn my head further away looking for some rest for my brain, towards the direction of the gate.

  There’s no rest, but suddenly, and it’s like there are trumpets playing, brassy and loud, in my head, there’s something better than rest.

  Relief.

  Relief in the form of Gabby. No socks and no wombats. Just Gabby herself. And she’s walking like she’s got something to say. I put out my hand in a half wave as she comes closer. The fog around my muscles seems to lift and I tense a little, ready to stand up and tell her what’s happened.

  But she doesn’t see me.

  She walks right past me.

  Right up to the table where Liam’s talking to Britney.

  Right up to Angela.

  And then, the world slows down and it’s like I’m looking through a pinhole lens because everything else is dark except for the light around Gabby and all I can see is her dropping her bag in one motion, stepping back on one leg and then forward on the other, all the while stretching out one arm in front of her and slapping Angela on the face.

  Crack.

  I’m sure I can’t actually physically hear the noise of the slap but there’s an electric shock imprinted on my brain followed by a sudden, total silence. Eight hundred heads—all the heads in the whole school—turn together to see Angela, stunned and breathless, holding her cheek in both hands and blinking, unbelieving, at Gabby who just stands in front of her, chest heaving and her hand slightly twitching beside her.

  And then the noise erupts. Yelling. Whistling. Jeering. Fight, fight, fight! I can’t see anything any more because Gabby and Angela are rushed at, the centre of a screaming, greedy swarm wanting more. The twins gasp and Erin grins and then they run towards the crowd as well, but I’m frozen in my seat, hardly breathing, replaying what I’ve just seen, over and over.

  Weight back, foot forward, arm out, hand connect with face. Slap. And Angela, silent and shocked, but with her anger building.

  The tension is rising. The whole school, except for me, who can’t move, is yelling and shouting, closing in, trying to see two girls do violence to each other, until finally the teachers arrive.

  Mr S
ingh, the Tech teacher and Miss Walker, the Deputy are screaming over the crowd. “Get back. Stop that.” They’re elbowing through, trying to reach Gabby and Angela. Another teacher, one I don’t know so well, is taking mobile phones off the closer students. No one gets to post footage of a fight—the school makes sure of that. Finally, dusty and shaking themselves off, Gabby and Angela emerge out of the mess, a teacher holding each of them. I stand up now and make a move towards Gabby. “Are you okay?” I want to say, but too quickly she’s marched off to the office block with Miss Walker, followed by Angela with Mr Singh.

  I try to step after them but the streams of kids jostling back towards their areas are too strong to navigate through. I stop, my chest cold. It’s pointless trying to chase after her anyway. I know what happens now. I’ve been through it all myself. They separate you, put you in a hard vinyl chair in a corner of the administration office and make you wait for your mum. Then they take you in to see the principal who talks while you listen. Or pretend to listen. If you’re lucky, you go back to class. If you’re not, you leave for the day. Or the week. Depending.

  Weight back, foot forward, arm out, hand connect with face. Slap.

  Yeah. Depending.

  Liam, the twins and Erin are still talking, half to each other, but a little bit to Angela’s friends who are now crying, their perfect hands clasped over their perfect faces. Every so often they wipe their noses and dab at their mascara and give their perfectly straight hair a flick. Liam’s best friend, Dan, has joined them.

  I look down for my bag and catch a glimpse of my hand. It’s only then that I realise I’m shaking. And I can’t stop. I’m like a patient with that shaking disease. The one that old people get. Parkinsons. There’s a tear welling up in my eye as well. I imagine it sliding, zigzagging, down my shaking cheek followed by a million more, making up a crazy, jagged waterfall, and I know I can’t stay here. I can’t talk. Literally. My twitching mouth won’t move to form words. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to talk. Especially not to the twins and Erin, all urgent and scandal-shocked, buzzing around in crisis mode. Not even to Liam. Gabby’s gone nuts and I don’t know when she’ll be back, monsters are invading my dreams and all I have to do is make it to the holidays without getting into a fight. Any kind of fight.