Invisible Boy
By Alice Nuttall
Copyright 2014 Alice Nuttall
Jake’s best moment of the day was when he’d just woken up. His head was full of cotton wool and dreams of time machines, and everything was fine.
Jake’s worst moment of the day was the one after that, when real life stabbed through the happy cloud, and he was properly awake, and his sister was still gone.
He rolled onto his front and hugged the pillow tight. On the other side of the room, Benjy was sprawled across his bed, snoring. Jake began to count the rasping noises, one, two, three, four, just to fill his thoughts, so there wasn’t room for anything else.
Maybe a hundred snores from now, they’d have to get up and eat their breakfast, and then Mum would drive them to school, and Jake would sit in the classroom and feel the eyes staring and hear the hushed, kind voices, and he’d wish and wish and wish that he was invisible.
It was a little like when he’d first come to the village – from what he could remember, anyway. He’d been very young, too young to even start school. But he and Benjy and Mum and Dad had all walked Lizzie down the road, up to the primary school gates, every day. And every day, every white face they’d passed had turned towards them like a flower following the sun.
“Why is that man looking at us, Daddy?” Jake had asked one day.
Dad had looked around, and then crouched down, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“It’s because he thinks you might be Batman,” he’d said. “But he’s not completely sure.”
Jake had spent the rest of the day being Batman, and it hadn’t been until a little later, when someone had made monkey noises at the five of them and Lizzie had cried, that he’d first wished to be invisible.
The stares were different now. The village of Middlewick had got used to its one black family. But a family with a missing sister…that was new. So they stared.
The door opened quietly, like it did every morning now. And, like every morning, Jake lay perfectly still, listening to Mum as she tried not to cry.
After a few moments, there was a click, and the door closed. Jake heard Mum’s footsteps going down the stairs, and then a rattling noise from the kitchen. Soon, it would be breakfast, and school, and another long, heavy, awful day. The thirty-second day since his sister Lizzie had disappeared.
It didn’t matter that Jake hadn’t done his homework, because it never did these days. It did matter that Benjy got into another fight in P.E., but not as much as it would have done for anyone else. In fact, Jake was angrier than anyone else about Benjy and the fight, because when Mr Donall the P.E. teacher had come and pulled him out of class, there had been one sick, bright moment where he’d been sure that she was dead. That had been the new worst moment of the day.
But no, it was just Benjy, who’d decided to kick Callum Brown in the ankle and punch him on the nose because he’d looked at him funny, and was now sitting in a tiny crawl space under the stage and refusing to come out. Mr Donall had decided that Benjy needed his twin more than he needed a visit to the head’s office or an angry call home. So, instead of learning about the Vikings, Jake had to wriggle into the dusty hole under the stage and try and get Benjy to stop being…well, the person he’d been since Lizzie had gone.
And then, for my next magic trick, Jake thought as he crawled deeper into the dark, maybe I will turn invisible.
“Go away.”
Jake stopped. He could see a Benjy-shaped shadow up ahead, huddled between two wooden joists.
He shuffled around until he was sitting cross-legged. Something tickled his face, and he brushed away a cobweb.
“You’ll have to come out in the end,” he said, in his most reasonable voice.
“No I won’t.”
“Yes you will. No-one’s going to bring you dinner in here.”
“I don’t want dinner,” Benjy said sulkily.
“Well, you will.”
Benjy hunched over, hugging his knees. “Just go away.”
Rolling his eyes, Jake turned around and crawled back the way he’d come, towards the square of light. Wriggling back out into the school hall, he looked up into Mr Donall’s anxious face.
“How is he?”
Jake gave a loud sigh of exasperation. “He’s just being stupid.”
“Oh dear.” Mr Donall pushed a hand through his thinning hair. He didn’t know what to do, Jake realised.
It wasn’t unusual these days, seeing grown-ups who didn’t know what to do. In the first few days, Mum and Dad had made all the calls, put up all the posters, and talked again and again to the police. But after that, they’d slowed and stopped, like clockwork toys winding down.
He’d seen it plenty of times. He still wasn’t used to it.