Invisible Girl (12 page)

We get on our bikes and start to pedal up the long path to our spot on Mulholland. I’m thinking I could ride into Annie when a car gets close so the family could scream at her funeral how they knew I was a bad seed and how they wished to dear God they had acted to evict me sooner.

I’m sweating slightly when we get to our spot even though it’s cool enough for Annie to be wearing her new blue jacket, which makes her eyes look bright enough to light candles. Andrew’s there and says, “Hi, Senator” the second I get off my bike.

I glance quickly at Annie to see if she’s going to expose me. Her eyes lock onto mine and I brace myself for her announcement that I know the Kennedys like she knows the pope. She sweeps her eyes right past me and it hits me that it wouldn’t exactly help her image if everyone knew her cousin’s mother was a bar slut and a total alkie. Guess she’s not too happy she told people we were cousins now.

I give a harsh laugh like I’m a biker chick challenged to a fight and swipe the back of my hand across my nose. I almost wish she would make her little announcement so that the crowd could rise against me and I could lash out with fists and nails, fighting until they stomped the last breath out of me, a martyr for all offspring of total alkie moms.

We walk up to the center of the circle. There are two brown bags. Andrew seems to be responsible for them and his dark eyes flash with rebellious excitement.

JKIII is nowhere to be seen and Annie is royally pissed. She takes out a cigarette and hands one to Leslie, Emily and Eva, letting me fend for myself. I see in the slight turn of her mouth that bringing me along is almost more than she can bear. That she now will begin to slowly and subtly wash her hands of me.

Ben walks up and Leslie flashes him a thousand-watt smile, sending off her own force field of hormones.

Matt says something to Andrew I can’t hear. Andrew opens up one of the paper bags and pulls out a twelve-pack of beer. Everyone stops what they’re doing and stares. Andrew looks proud of himself and says, “My mother’s out of town. The new boyfriend. Nothing she’ll notice. And besides, I’m celebrating. Feels so good to have the cast off.” He holds up his newly emancipated arm, which is the pale brother of his sun-tanned one.

Like the junk food, it’s different when rich people have alcohol and beer in their homes.

Andrew passes out beer to Matt, Brian, Ben and Carl. Annie and her girlfriends are studying their cigarettes like they’ve never watched the way they burn before. Andrew says, “Well, ladies?”

Everyone looks at Annie. I feel her on the fence, and in a flash I see her as the little Goody Two-shoes she was when she was Megan’s age. I’m the bad seed, so I say, “I’m a little thirsty” in a cool voice, and everyone looks at me in surprise until Andrew says admiringly, “What do you expect from a senator from a big city?”

I take a beer, and then Eva and Annie hold out their hands for a beer at the same time. Leslie just giggles when Ben presses one into her hand. Emily’s the last one without a beer and everyone just laughs when Andrew tosses one into her lap.

Bottle openers flip through the group. Emily’s beer fizzes over her hand. I’ve never seen beer that wasn’t in cans and the smell of it almost makes me gag. It’s her Saturday drink. What she has when she says she’s not drinking because beer doesn’t count.

Annie, back in the lead, takes the first sip. “Not bad,” she says with a wise nod, then clinks her bottle with Eva’s.

I take a sip. It’s horrible. In my mouth, the smell that was her Saturday breath becomes the taste. Her angry fists are all around me. Silver bangles flash against the dark that is creeping down from the sky and making shadows of the other kids of raised bottles and open mouths.

I swallow my sip, then hold my breath while I take another and then another. My sips are getting bigger and bigger, turning into gulps that hit my throat like acid. In a moment I’m ready for another bottle and I flash my eyes at Annie, daring her to draw some genetic conclusion.

Andrew gets me another bottle and asks me if I want to go for a walk. Things are getting fuzzy, but I don’t feel so angry anymore. Eva gives me a dirty look, but I only smile at her before saying, “Okay.”

Andrew takes my hand. His fingers are strong and a lot bigger than mine. His sweatshirt is soft as it rubs on my bare shoulder, and I realize dimly that I’m cold and that I wish I had a cute little jacket to wear.

We walk for a while. The white rubber on the end of my old blue tennis shoes bats moonlight onto the path. Behind us, laughter rises in smug clouds of privilege and I know, twenty years from now, they’ll all be lifting glasses at the club, dressed in clothes that cost what my dad makes in a year.

We get farther down the path, which has become narrower with the trees closing over us so that a couple of times I have to duck so I don’t hit my head. I can barely see and I stumble. Andrew puts his arm around my shoulders to steady me, then keeps it there and says, “You’re cold.”

Out of the fuzziness I feel a whoosh of gratitude for his concern. We drink as we walk. He finishes his second bottle and motions to me to drink mine down. I hold the hard glass against my lips and let the beer slide down my throat. I almost can’t even taste her now or remember the Saturday afternoons of slurred shouts and the time she knocked my head into the TV and tiny bits of glass burrowed into my hair while blood ran in rivers.

I hold my empty bottle up to his. He clinks it like a toast and I start laughing because it’s so funny to clink something when it’s empty. He laughs too and clinks my empty bottle again. That makes me laugh so hard that tears fall onto my cheeks.

He stops laughing and says, “Want to sit down?” I fall against him, wondering why my face is so wet.

He catches me and lowers us to the ground. We’re lying on leaves that must be from last summer since they’re dry and crackling. I want to ask what’s up with his mom, the boyfriend and his dad, but he suddenly puts his lips against mine. I feel a full charge erupt through my body and I wonder if I have a mini force field of hormones that I’m giving off.

He keeps pressing his lips on mine and it’s a way different feeling than I had kissing Carl last night in Bump Around. His lips feel like something crucial for my survival, like a secret antidote to a poison someone slipped into my meal. I like them pressing on mine. I like his smell of pure guy.

His hands stroke my shoulders and he kisses me on the lips in steady little tiny kisses that remind me of a wood-pecker, so I start laughing so hard, I hiccup.

He laughs a little too, and then he pulls on my shirt, taking it out of my shorts, and puts his hand on my bare stomach. My skin vibrates like a chick out of its shell, with the air ruffling its tiny yellow feathers.

He pulls my face close to his. His eyes are closed so I close mine. I like this with just our foreheads touching. My brain had started to feel dizzy, but now he’s steadying me. He isn’t even kissing me anymore and I wonder if we’re just going to stay with our heads touching for a while. It feels good, like we’re letting our thoughts float into each other’s heads. It feels safe and I wish we could do this forever.

Suddenly, he presses his lips up against mine and shoves his tongue into my mouth. I’m so shocked I almost gag but jerk my head back to force his tongue out. He must think I’m playing a game or something, because he puts his hands on the back of my head and sticks his drool-covered tongue back in even harder. I can’t breathe. I’m gagging. The alcohol swims inside me.

My stomach heaves, like the little warning before a big earthquake, then an eruption of vomit rushes out, striking him in the face and practically hurling itself down his throat. He flings himself back like a wounded animal, howling in utter horror.

I throw up again, this time on the ground, and I see my shadow, pitching forward, emptying itself, just like I’ve seen her do, too many times to count.

I stumble to my feet. Is Andrew still around?

I look, squinting against the darkness between the trees, struggling to see. He’s nowhere. I vaguely remember him running off and calling me a bunch of names I could barely hear as I heaved. I have no idea how to get back to the group. Even though I got the alcohol out of my stomach, it still must be in my head, because I feel thick and stupid. There’s moonlight, but many of the trees look the same and I’m not sure which way to go. I listen, hearing all the sounds of the woods, wishing I could transform myself into an animal and run for cover in the rustling leaves.

I turn in a full circle, smelling the vomit that must now be crusting on my clothes, seeing nothing familiar. I’ve never felt so alone in my life.

I walk a few random steps, then turn uncertainly and walk back the way I came. I do this several times, now with panic beating in my heart. What if I’m stuck here forever? What if I’m lying over a fallen log a month from now, starving and half dead, and a serial killer comes along?

“Hey!” I shout as loud as I can. My face is red in the night from shame, but my fear of being stuck here alone is even greater. Tears start running down my cheeks. “Hey, Annie. You guys!”

I hear shouts of male voices sparking on my right and I plunge ahead that way wildly, wishing I’d thought to grab a branch since I might run into coyotes along the way, waiting to devour me.

When I stumble into the clearing with a tear-stained face and smelling like vomit, all the voices melt away. The group, all relaxing around the flashlight bonfire, looks up at me and stares. No one stands up quickly to see if I’m okay. No one moves except for Matt, who sits up straight and says in a pretend principal’s voice, “Um, if you’re looking for Andrew, he went home. Apparently, there was some kind of an accident.” Everyone totally cracks up. Annie laughs the hardest.

I walk over to my bike in silence, then slip my leg over the bar that’s too high for me, wondering how or when I’m ever going to get off of their sterling silver planet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Annie says a frigid “Good night” to me when we walk into her house as if I’m some great weight she has to bear, and only because of her extraordinary breeding is she even doing me the favor of acknowledging my existence. I go straight into the bathroom in my room and crumple to the floor. While on my back, I peel off my clothes. Then I stand up and stumble into the shower. The water is warm and soothing on my body. I only wish that it could wash away everything that happened from the moment I thought about sneaking into that briefcase.

I scrub harder and harder, pouring gobs of shampoo onto my hair and all over my body. Maybe if I wash hard enough, I can get down to the layers inside me that are my mom.

I flip the handle to cold and stand for a full minute as if it’s a punishment I deserve. I towel off, then slide into a big white fluffy robe that, yes, is another thing the Sullivans have provided me. I walk into my bedroom and collapse on the bed. My fingers punch out my dad’s cell phone.

He answers with a tired and defeated “Hello.”

“Dad.”

“Stephanie.”

I try to hold back the tears. This is the only number I have to call and he is supposed to want me, but I can tell in that one word that he doesn’t.

Too bad. He has to take me back. I’ve been here for four days, and now the thought of still being stuck here for school starts ticking like a terrifying explosive in the back of my brain. He’s had enough time to, as Michael Sullivan said, clean up his mess.

“Dad, I need to come home.”

“Yeah, yeah, kiddo, I miss you too. It’s just that I’m still working on things here. Just for a little while longer.”

His passivity only fuels my rage as if there’s an ultimate balance in the universe and the more still he is, the more whirling I become. “Dad,” I say firmly, my voice another notch louder and higher.

“I know, I know. It’s probably going to be just a few more days. I’ll call you, okay?”

I can almost see his furtive hand pulling the phone away from his ear for a quick hangup. A quick getaway.

“No, it’s not okay,” I yell, pulling the phone back to his ear. “I need to come home now. NOW. Nothing is okay here. NOTHING. I have to get back and get ready for school. For once in your life, you HAVE TO DO SOMETHING.”

I know my words slap him. I don’t care. Fury is blasting off of me in unstoppable waves.

He doesn’t say anything. Despair floats down, smothering my anger. I know he must now simply be standing stock still, like he always does when he just can’t deal. I drop my voice. I can always beg. “Come on, Dad. Just call the airline and book my flight. Come on, please. I’ll be fine at home. I’ll stay out of your way—”

My tone moves him into action, but not the kind I wanted. “It just can’t happen yet,” he snaps and his tone is assertive for the first time, but only in preserving his defeat. “I’ll call you in a couple of days,” he says. He clicks off, not even risking a good-bye, just in case I have the audacity to continue to demand something more of him.

I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling. This is the part about my family nobody understands. My dad’s not the long-suffering hero all his brothers think he is. He’s not the real parent just because he’s not the obvious, crazy drunk one. He is only a vague brush of air in my life, never anything I can actually hang on to.

When he’s home, he’s either reading his law books or grimly cleaning up one of my mom’s messes. His interactions with me are nothing but a series of martyred sighs, strung together in one long exhale of defeat.

I caught him once staring at me when he thought I was asleep. I saw him, through the slits in my lashes, looking at me like I was the hangman’s noose itself. Because, after all, if it wasn’t for me happening, he and the bar slut would have simply parted ways.

At least, strange as it sounds, I know my mom really loved me. Yeah, she was drunk a lot and she hurt me. But when she was there, she was THERE. She pulsed with life. She gave me fantasies of us in the White House. She hugged me fiercely.

I clutch the robe around me and my mind floats to last summer. My mom took me on a picnic. She wasn’t drinking. She had a little CD player with music from
The King and I,
our favorite musical. She taught me how to dance. Over and over she held my hands and sang, “Shall we dance, da, da, da, da, shall we dance,” until we collapsed, laughing, onto the grass. Then we ate junk food until our stomachs were stuffed. At the end of the day she stroked my hair and whispered, “You’re the most important thing in my life. No matter what ever happens, never forget that.”