The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy Read Free Book Online

on a lurid scowl. “You don’t know when to quit kidding. Honestly, you’ll hurt a girl’s feelings that way.” She looked at me, the gleaming in her dry eyes limitless. “You can see for yourself. If you meet us. Come to Great Skate this weekend,” she said. “You’ll know where to find us. But don’t tell your boyfriend. We’ll know about it, and so will he.” She noddedat the silhouetted man at the edge of the rink. The lights in the rink came up then, so I could see the line of his mouth, enough to know that he watched us and disapproved.
    Sometimes I thought about what I would have been like if I still had a mother, if I’d look, sound, dress, and think like her. If I would love cruelty like she had.
    We would play this joke on my father, when he got home from work.
    The joke was only good on certain days. I wanted to play it all the time, but my mother knew better. She would stop in my bedroom doorway, interrupting whatever fantasy I had going on. Her toothy smile made me feel like she’d caught me doing something wrong. “Cynthia, should we hide from your father?”
    Nodding yes, I would gather up my dolls, as they were necessary props.
    â€œWhere should we hide, so he can’t see us?”
    The pantry worked best. We could watch through a crack in the door as my father walked around the house, his loafers clacking on the wooden floors, his shoulders trying to shrug off his suit jacket. When he shouted our names my mother would hold me against her, covering my mouth with her hand. If I needed to laugh, tell me, I was to bite her.
    After a while my father would grew so frustrated that his patience failed, and he would make himself a sandwich. This amused us because he’d never learned to snack properly. After watching him mutter miserably over his approximation of the perfect sandwich my mother had prepared and hidden in the pantry with us, we’d wait until he took a beer out onto the patio. Then, very quietly, we would emerge from hiding, she to make him a plate and fill the sink with sudsy dishwater, I to sit on the tiles at her feet with my dolls. Once we were in our respective swingsof wash and play, she would open the window and call to him to come in.
    â€œWhere were you?” my father would ask, moving to dump his poor sandwich in the garbage, now that my mother’s handiwork awaited him. “I was just in here looking for you.”
    My mother would wrinkle her eyebrows, and she’d send me a wink when my father wasn’t looking. “Why, we were right here the whole time. You walked right past. I don’t know why you didn’t see us. Sometimes I think you just don’t appreciate us.”
    Night was falling earlier now, and though the maroon van was not in the old parking lot when I arrived at the skating rink, I wasn’t completely filled with doubt. If my friends were indeed alive, on the run with the driver of the maroon van, they would need to make an inconspicuous entrance. They were simply waiting for the right moment to appear and send me a signal to join them. I wondered what it would be like, to feel the road passing beneath me, what the van smelled like inside, all the things I would see from the heart-shaped window.
    Every Friday in October was Halloween at Great Skate, and that night I waited in a line of fifth- and sixth-grade vampires, witches, he-devils, she-devils, and various other monsters. I had dressed up like the invisible man from the black-and-white movie by wrapping my face in white bandages and wearing sunglasses. I put my hair up in a bun, under a black fedora, and since I was neither a tall nor a large-chested girl, I blended with the younger children.
    The heavyset woman in the little ticket booth charged me for a child’s admission, an unforeseen bonus that under other circumstances would have thrilled me but now only disoriented me a little. I entered the booming atmosphere