Invisible as Air

by Zoe Fishman

  A smile crept over Sylvie’s lips, tickling her teeth. Without warning, a single laugh erupted from her throat. And then before she knew it, she was happily hysterical, guffawing so hard that tears began to stream down her cheeks.

  How liberating! She was free. She was finally free. And Lindsey’s pious face, her stupid, boring face as she attempted to explain her self-absorption. Priceless!

  What about Erika, her mouth hanging open like a goddamn mailbox!

  Oh God. Sylvie felt so good. Would she feel so good in the morning, after this high had worn off? Not likely. But! That’s what the pills were for. She would just continue to take them until they were gone, continue to live this pain-free, honest life, and then, when they were all gone, she would figure out how to be this way without their help. These pills were her training wheels; that was all.

  She rounded the corner toward home, hugging herself against the slight chill, smiling still.

  Chapter Five

  Teddy

  Teddy couldn’t get over it. Krystal looked exactly like Daryl Hannah.

  The thought had first occurred to him as he walked home from school the day of the accident. He had been trying to figure it out, just who she looked like; it was someone from that movie about a mermaid his mother had forced him to watch a long time ago—what was the name of that movie? Crap, why couldn’t he remember it?—when, just as he switched tracks to consider whether his mother had remembered to get his Honey Nut Cheerios at the store, bam! It had hit him. Splash.

  He had rushed home, practically running—which for Teddy was unheard of unless he was in PE and being forced to do it—forgone his afternoon snack and scrolled through their vast streaming cue until he had found it.

  Yes, he was right on the money; Krystal was the spitting image of the actress, whose name apparently was Daryl Hannah. Except for her hair. Krystal’s was curly, like ringlet curly. And darker.

  Now, four days later, Teddy had watched the movie six times: once on Friday, twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday and again, tonight. Monday night. He had practically memorized the dialogue, which was pretty funny, he thought, all things considered. And by that, of course, he meant the ridiculous plot. A mermaid on land in New York City, okay. But Tom Hanks was just great. He was really great.

  Teddy wished he was like Tom Hanks and thought that maybe it wasn’t such an unrealistic goal. It wasn’t like Tom Hanks was some jock stud or anything. And he wasn’t the best looking either. What he was, was charming. Teddy could train himself to be charming. Maybe.

  He sat at his laptop in his room, his hair still damp from the shower, scrolling through Google Images of Tom Hanks. Old ones, when he was young. Why was it that when people got old, their bodies started to melt? Like candles or something.

  “Hey, T,” his dad said, catching him off guard. Teddy’s heart jumped into his esophagus as he quickly slammed his computer shut. Could his parents knock, just once in their whole freaking lives? Was that too much to ask?

  “What!” Teddy yelped back.

  “Geez, Ted, relax,” his dad replied, balancing on his crutches in the same blue plaid flannel pajama pants he had worn every day since his accident.

  His mom had cut the left leg off to make room for his cast, but still. It had been a couple of weeks; he could sacrifice the leg of another pair of pants for the sake of variety, Teddy thought.

  “I’m not the enemy.” He gave Teddy a look that said, It’s cool if you like eighties Tom Hanks. Who doesn’t like eighties Tom Hanks?

  “Dad, come on,” he replied, resisting the urge to kick the leg of his desk. “I know that. It’s just like, could you maybe knock or something?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. Sorry. You okay? Want to talk about anything?” He searched Teddy’s face plaintively. His dad was all right, Teddy remembered. He was accidentally annoying, unlike his mother, who seemed to revel in it.

  “No, I’m cool. Just, I really like the way Splash was shot, so I was just reading about it.”

  “Splash?”

  “The movie?”

  “Oh yeah, the movie. You’re really into it, huh? Every time I walk by the TV, it’s on lately. I just thought you were into Daryl Hannah. Or Tom Hanks, whatever. Either one is cool. I remember—” His father was on the verge of one of his rambles.

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Oh, okay. But if you are, that’s okay too, you know?”

  “Dad.”

  “Okay, okay.” He loped the short distance to Teddy on his crutches. “Give me a hug.”

  Teddy stood up and hugged him, comforted by his father’s familiar smell of toothpaste and bananas. He ate a banana every day, his dad.

  “Get to bed soon. Your mom will kill me if you’re still up when she gets home.”

  “’K. Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, T.” He closed the door.

  Teddy raked his fingers through his hair, which was now almost dry. He rolled his chair away from his desk, which was really a drafting table, although his parents had presented it to Teddy as a desk for his eighth birthday.

  He had drawn a lot then, mostly pictures of Stormtroopers and Darth Vader, so it had made sense at the time. But now Teddy was a writer, and he had homework, so he needed a more substantial desk. He eyed with distaste the orange plastic Georgia Aquarium cup that had become his pencil holder. A real desk with drawers.

  His whole room needed an upgrade, Teddy thought. Or maybe he just needed to restock it. He scanned the shelves that climbed up the wall behind his desk, his blue-gray eyes squinting as he considered their contents. Harry Potter was so three years ago. And his mom had loaded his shelves with classics, as she called them: The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Hobbit—blah, blah, blah. Teddy was never going to read them.

  There were trinkets too, placed here and there: Star Wars bobbleheads; a LEGO 747 that he and his dad had built together when he was seven, plus some artwork of his from elementary school his mother had framed.

  Teddy swiveled around to face the other wall, the wall behind his bed. It was filled by an enormous world map, which in theory was cool, but for, like, a doctor’s office or something.

  His bed wasn’t bad, twin size with a gray-and-white-striped comforter. Not babyish.

  Teddy stood up, crossed over to his closet and opened the door, revealing a full-length mirror nailed to its back. He needed new clothes too, he thought, surveying his own red-and-black-plaid pajama bottoms that revealed his ankles and beat-up yellow T-shirt advertising the science camp he had stopped going to the summer he had turned ten.

  His face wasn’t bad. Technically handsome, he guessed. Nice eyes, a small nose for a Jew—which was something he had heard his own mother, the Jewish one, say, so it wasn’t racist, just fact—a square jaw. Not one hair on it, although Teddy searched for one fervently almost every morning in the magnifying mirror in his parents’ bathroom. He had sprouted hairs elsewhere, which both embarrassed and delighted him.

  The hair on his head was nice too. Plenty of it, although he liked to keep it short. A nice color, he guessed. Recently he had discovered gel and liked to spike it a little in the front, just to give it some character.

  He wasn’t all bad, he guessed. He went back to his desk, treading lightly over the muted gray, orange and yellow Turkish rug that stretched across the patch of wood floor between it and his bed. He sat and rolled back to his laptop, his heart pounding like it always did when he decided to google her name.

  Krystal Platt.

  A photo of her popped up on his screen. From her school, a public middle school not too far away that Teddy had heard of but now knew much more about since he had googled that too. It turned out that Krystal Platt played soccer, which had been a surprise to Teddy. She didn’t look like the soccer-playing girls at his school, with their straight, blond hair pulled back in tight ponytails and impressive calf muscles, trotting up and down the field like tiny Clydesdales.

  S
ometimes, when Teddy daydreamed about their first date, he imagined himself saying to her, maybe sitting on a park bench, overlooking a sweeping vista: Krystal Platt, you’re full of surprises. And then he would take her chin in his hand and kiss her.

  He wanted to call her desperately. But there was one problem: he had no phone. Oh, how he cursed his parents! Screen time this and screen time that, and sexual predators blah, blah, blah. His computer had more locks on it than Rikers, which was an analogy he had stolen from Martin, whose parents were even more paranoid than his own.

  Teddy had considered calling Krystal from his mom’s phone, but it was surgically attached to her hand. Plus, what if Krystal didn’t answer and then he didn’t leave a voicemail and then she called back to ask who had called her and his mom answered? A terrifying probability that he could not chance.

  He’d been eyeing his father’s phone—he was on it way less than his mother—but until that afternoon he had been unsure of his passcode.

  “So how many miles of swimming do you log on your app the first week versus running and biking?” Teddy had asked his dad, leaning over his shoulder as he sat on the couch.

  “What?” he had answered absently.

  He was reading a magazine called Runner’s World, ogling a pair of sneakers that Teddy willed him not to buy. Since his father had taken up triathlete training, he had amassed a virtual sporting goods store of supplies, which had overflowed the basement and invaded every inch of the garage, so much so that neither his mother nor his father could park in there any longer. It was a bone of contention with his parents; Teddy heard their arguments late at night, when he was supposed to be sleeping, his covers pulled up over his head to block out the insults she slung at him, his father’s silence on the other end.

  “When you train for a triathlon,” Teddy had answered, as though his asking about triathlons was a normal occurrence.

  The truth was that he had been trying to figure out his dad’s code for days, grabbing his unmanned phone when he wasn’t looking and typing in every birthday, every name he could think of that might grant him access to Krystal Platt. Nothing had worked.

  “Oh!” his dad had replied, flinging the magazine to the far corner of the couch in excitement.

  Bingo, Teddy had thought to himself as his father searched for his phone. He had tried to garner his son’s interest in this app at least a dozen times when he had first started using it: Look how cool this is! Can you believe this interface? he would say, swiping this way and that to no avail. Teddy hadn’t cared one whit about it. Until that afternoon.

  Teddy felt a little guilty, watching his father practically levitate with glee, but really, who was he hurting?

  Teddy studied his father’s long, tapered fingers as he typed in his code. 3-2-7-9. From the pocket of his pants, Teddy covertly pulled out his notepad and scrawled the numbers onto a blank page, his heart pounding as though he were robbing a bank. His code was 3-2-7-9? What was 3-2-7-9? That his father could prize a series of numbers that had no relevance to Teddy seemed hurtful, somehow.

  But that hurt had faded as Teddy had endured his dad’s interminably extensive explanation of interval training. Punishment for the crime, Teddy guessed.

  Tonight, Teddy had eyed his father’s hands as he helped him up the stairs. He hadn’t been holding his phone. And there were no pockets in his pajamas, which Teddy knew only because he had seen them from every angle over the past couple of weeks.

  So this was it. It was now or never. His father’s phone had to be downstairs. All Teddy had to do was get down there, find it and pop back into his room before his mother came home. And stealthily too, since technically he was supposed to be in bed.

  Teddy crept to the closed door of his bedroom and pulled it open slowly. Behind the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, he heard the faint drone of the television. Downstairs was deserted and dark, save for a single lamp left on for his mother. His mother. The only possible foil to his perfect plan. He had to move at the speed of light.

  Quickly, but not too quickly—the last thing they needed was another broken ankle around here, and the stairs were slippery beneath his socks—Teddy descended the stairs. At the bottom, he made a beeline for the couch. Not seeing the phone immediately, he began to frantically dig between the cushions. Shit, it isn’t here. Shit, shit, shit. He plunged his hand into each of the remaining cracks, desperate for his fingertips’ contact with cool, curved metal. Nothing.

  “Goddamnit,” he hissed into the silence, relishing the way it felt to say the word.

  Teddy hit the cushion next to him with his fist, making a soft plopping noise that was not the least bit satisfying. That’s when he saw it. The phone. On the kitchen counter, plugged into its charger.

  He sprang off the couch and ran across the room to retrieve it. Just as he unplugged the phone from its power source, at exactly that moment, he heard his mother’s keys in the back door.

  He slid his sweaty palms down the sides of his legs, searching for pockets he knew were not there. As the door swung open, Teddy slipped the phone between the waistband of his underwear and his flesh and leapt over to the refrigerator, pulling it open to pretend he was eyeing its contents, even though his mother hated it when he did that.

  “Teddy!” his mother trilled, opening the door and turning on the light.

  He had braced himself for her disapproval, but her greeting was surprisingly upbeat. Too upbeat.

  He adjusted the phone beneath his waistband, pulling it up farther before closing the door and turning around to face her.

  Her cheeks were flushed pink from the spring air, her hair escaping a bun—or was it a ponytail? Teddy never was quite sure which was which—in soft tendrils. Her eyes were bright. She looked different, Teddy thought to himself. Pretty, he realized. Young. Was it weird to think these things about your mother? He decided no, since they were just innocuous, fact-based thoughts. Normally she did not look this way; that was an incontestable fact. Normally she looked like she was thinking about something else, even if she was talking to you. And her hair was down, a mass of heavy curls that seemed to, now that Teddy saw her hair up, add five pounds to her neck. She seemed so much lighter, his mother, standing in the kitchen with him now.

  “It’s too bright in here,” she announced, flipping the switch she had just turned on. Purple air filtered in through the window over the enormous white porcelain sink, which was empty save for his father’s water glass.

  “You don’t want to go to that end-of-year party, right?” she asked him. “God, I’m so thirsty.” She took a glass from the shelf and crossed past him to fill it from the refrigerator’s filter.

  “What end-of-year party?” His mother stood before him, chugging her water noisily. Something was up with her, although Teddy had no idea what.

  “At school,” she explained, setting her drained glass on the counter.

  “Definitely not,” Teddy answered, envisioning exactly how that party would go, since it was the way it had gone every year since as far back as he could remember.

  He would sit or stand in some corner of some classmate’s basement, backyard or, horror of horrors, pool deck—the pool parties, those were hands down the worst—with Raj and Martin, although Raj wasn’t a given now, thanks to his improved social status, drinking warm lemonade and talking about nothing.

  “Oh good, that’s what I thought. I mean, that’s what I know,” said his mother. “You’ve told me as much since the dawn of time, but every year I force you to do it anyway. And for what? If you don’t want to go, you shouldn’t have to go. You’re almost thirteen years old; it’s time for me to listen to you once in a while.”

  Teddy nodded his head slowly, slightly afraid. What in the world was going on with her?

  “I never hear you, Teddy. I realized that tonight, sitting at this ridiculous meeting, feeling probably like you feel at all these ridiculous parties. Like, what is the fucking point?”

  “Mom, are you okay?”


  “Teddy, I’m more than okay, honey.”

  She swept him into an embrace. Teddy prayed that his father’s cell phone wouldn’t escape from its precarious position and clatter to the ground between them.

  “I’m great. I just want us to try to really hear each other more, you know? Accept each other as we are. Your father too.” She released him.

  “So I don’t have to go to the party?”

  “No, you don’t have to go. Unless you want to go?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  Teddy and his mother stared at each other for a moment. Did she want him to say something else? He didn’t want to. He wanted to text Krystal, and time was running out. He didn’t know when she went to sleep, and if he sent the text while she was sleeping and then had to send a follow-up text telling her not to text back, it would just be too embarrassing. Code-red embarrassing. But that’s where he was headed. The digital clock on the stove changed from 9:03 to 9:04.

  “Well, thanks, Mom. I’m going to go to bed now.”

  “Sounds good. Me too soon. Probably watch some idiots on TV first, just to wind down.”

  “Idiots?” asked Teddy, sliding the phone out from his waistband and into his hand as he headed toward the stairs, his back to her.

  It was kind of thrilling, stealing the phone even though technically he wasn’t stealing it since he would be returning it to the same spot in which he found it. But the term borrowing wasn’t thrilling at all.

  “Yes, you know, my reality show idiots. Good night,” his mother called after him.

  “Good night, Mom,” he called back.

  If Teddy had to guess, he would say his mom had maybe smoked weed? He didn’t know anything about smoking weed personally, but he had seen it in a movie or two. He peered over the banister, checking if she was assembling herself an enormous sandwich. No. Just settling into the couch, the remote pointed toward the screen. Who knew? Who cared? He didn’t have to go to the end-of-year party, and he had successfully smuggled the phone upstairs and into his room. Two very good turns of events.