Spark by Melissa Dereberry Read Free Book Online Page A

brown hair.  Zach!  And would you believe that he turned, right then and there and looked at me?  He stared through that window, his eyes planted right smack on me.  Me!  Well, at least he planted his sunglasses on me and it sure seemed like he was looking at me.  I debated whether to wave at him, and then decided I’d look like an idiot and just stared straight ahead instead. 
    Zach, right next to me in his white car—what are the odds?  His car lurched forward, passing me.  When I realized that the light had changed, I drove, full of strange thoughts.  I always had strange thoughts, but this time was different.  I thought about not being invisible anymore.  I thought about Zach and for some reason, I thought—I can’t believe I am telling you this— what if this Zach had seen the impossible—what if he had seen an invisible girl mid-float, had witnessed her, plummeting back to reality?  And he didn’t even know it?  Wouldn’t he want to know?  Eventually?  Because you never realize what you’ve seen until later when someone explains it to you, right?  He might want to know that he had set the pivotal moment into motion, the moment that had begun in invisibility and had ended with goosebumps on my arms. Punctuation at the end of a very long, rambling sentence.  A useless sentence that has trouble making sense.  This is going to sound really lame, but for the first time in months, I felt alive.  I’d woken up after being all but dead.  But today, something changed.  My heart was thumping with excitement.
                  So, I did the only thing left to do.  I followed him.
                  I drove, my eyes locked on his license plate, mumbling the number to myself a few times.  I started to get all sweaty and nervous and I glanced in my rearview mirror as if, by chance, someone was following me, too.  But there was just a pizza delivery guy behind me, driving a dented little car with a loud stereo.  I could hear the base thumping away. 
                  Zach turned onto a side street, then another.  I was really starting to worry.  If he got too far off the main street, he’d figure out that I was behind him, a lunatic on his trail.  I mean, let’s be honest here.  I was basically stalking the poor guy just like all those pitiful girls at school.  I decided to lag behind as not to appear too obvious.  Strategy is always good.  I even started to relax a little, turned up the stereo, and started drumming my hands on my jeans. 
                  When he pulled over and went into a parking lot, I panicked.  He’d surely seen me.  He had stopped to find out who I was and why I was following him.  I went right on by, of course, thinking he would follow me.  When he didn’t, I sighed with relief, went around the block and returned to the scene, parking just a few feet down on the street, far enough that I was slightly hidden, but still well within view of his car. 
                  He had already gotten out, of course, so I was just sitting there watching an empty car.  Your average person would have shrugged, chalked it up to a momentary lapse of sanity, and high-tailed it back home.  But—have you already guessed?—I’m not your average person.  In fact, I’m the furthest thing from average.  I had gone to the trouble of following this guy, and I was going to sit there until I figured out why.  Something had compelled me to do it.  But what? 
                  As I said before, explanations never come when you need them, and this was no exception.  I sat.  I sat for a whole hour.  I examined the building.  It looked like it had been abandoned years ago, an old brick monstrosity three stories high, decked with a rickety, rusted out fire escape, a large gray door, and a single row of blacked out windows, one of which had a single, baseball-sized hole in it. 
                  After what