Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak Read Free Book Online

breathed in those missing years and exhaled them in awkward silence. Eventually I took out the picture I’d found in my photo album, the one of Jarrod and me sitting on swings as kids, and passed it over to him without comment.
    Jarrod grinned as he looked at it. “You always did love Superman,” he said, shaking his head. “Where’d you find this?”
    “My mom had it in a photo album.” I paused, not sure how to say what was on my mind. “I don’t…I don’t know if I can remember everything from back then very well,” I admitted.
    “No kidding,” said Jarrod. He looked up from the photo with raised eyebrows. “What happened? You fall down and crack your head a few years back or what?”
    “If I did,” I said, “I don’t remember doing it.”
    Jarrod squinted hard, like he was trying to see through to the real me. The me I didn’t know anything about. “Really?” he said. “I mean, you don’t remember anything? Nothing at all?”
    “Well, that’s not it,” I said. “I can remember things, sure. But I can barely remember you. And there are other things I can’t remember, I think, even when I try really hard. Like, most of junior high is gone.”
    “Good riddance,” Jarrod said, and snorted, and I laughed with him, grateful to break the tension, hoping that whatever was wrong with me could continue to be a source of humor.
    A minute later, though, I asked the question that had been on my mind since looking through that photo album the night before. “Hey,” I said. “Can you tell me something?”
    “What?” Jarrod said, lifting his chin a little, looking at me from beneath his furrowed brow.
    “Was I—”
    I hesitated, and a flare of heat rushed across my chest, up my neck, over my face, like a wave of lava. I felt completely freakish as I tried to figure out the words I needed to ask the question that burned inside me like a live coal.
    “Go ahead,” Jarrod said, nodding to encourage me, his eyes lit up with what might have been hope that I was remembering something he wanted or needed me to remember.
    “Was I, you know,
liked
by people when we were kids? I don’t mean popular or anything like that. But, you know,
liked.
Because I found this other photo last night along with that one, and it was a picture of you and me and a bunch of other kids we went to school with—still go to school with, actually—at my birthday party. I don’t really remember that party, though, or having other kids around that often, and I haven’t been close to most of them for years now. You know, I keep to myself. But that picture. When I saw it, it made me think that at some point things had been different, but I can’t remember for the life of me.”
    Jarrod frowned like he felt bad for me, and I thought I saw maybe even a hint of tears in his eyes, like he was attending the funeral of a good friend who had died in an accident, and was looking down at his dead body, thinking,
That’s not him,
the way I’d thought when I saw my grandmother in her casket, all made up with colors she’d have never chosen for herself had she been alive.
    “You were liked, Aidan,” Jarrod said finally, quietly, firmly. “Everyone liked you, actually. I mean, you and I were best friends, but you weren’t what I’d call a loner back then.”
    I sat there for a while, absorbing what he’d said, wondering why I wasn’t a part of things any longer. Then I looked down at my hands, which I’d folded together on my lap like I’d been praying for something, and saw they were shaking a little.
    “You tell your folks about any of this memory loss?” Jarrod asked when he saw how troubled I was.
    I looked up and shook my head. “No. It’s weird, but I didn’t realize any of this until I saw you on Monday. I mean, sometimes over the last few years I’d start thinking about something, but I could never hold a thought for very long. It’s like this wall will spring up inside me sometimes, and after that I can’t see