Invisible (5 page)

I lit the fire.

At first it was very exciting because the Butterfinger wrappers burned fast and flaming bits of paper floated up and started landing where they shouldn't. We quickly stomped them out, and the fire settled down and started to behave itself. Once it calmed down, Andy took off his wet boot and sock and put his foot near the fire.

“That feels good,” he said.

After a few minutes it started to get pretty smoky. Some of it went out the windows and door, but most of the smoke wanted to hang around. As long as we kept our faces close to the floor we were okay. Andy stretched
out on his back, toasting his foot like a marshmallow. He was on his third Butterfinger.

“Y'know, the Butterfingers are just my first present for you,” I said. “I'm going to get you something else. Something really nice.”

“You don't have to.”

“Yeah, but I'm gonna. Maybe I'll buy you a motorcycle.”

“If you get me a motorcycle, I'll buy you a car.”

“I'll buy you a tank.”

“Then I'll have to get you an F-sixteen.”

“I'd rather have a stealth bomber.”

“How about a space shuttle?”

The room was so full of smoke that we couldn't see the ceiling. It was like being under a low cloud. The tops of the flames disappeared into gray murk.

It was Andy who first noticed how hot the floor was getting.

“It feels good, doesn't it?” I said.

“I don't know. …” Andy crawled to the door and hung his head out. “Hey, Dougie, I think we better get out of here.”

“Why? It's not that smoky.”

“C'mere and look underneath us.”

I crawled over next to him—the floor was getting really hot—and stuck my head out and looked at the underside of the treehouse and saw a sheet of flame. The underside of the floor was completely on fire.

“Come on!” Andy was out the door, his feet on the top step. I started after him, then remembered I'd left my knife stuck in the wall.

“Wait—my knife!” I crawled back inside where the fire was suddenly roaring and groped for my Swiss Army knife. I was blind from the smoke when I finally felt the smooth plastic handle hit my palm. I felt my way back to the door, choking and coughing, my palms blistering, and went out headfirst, forgetting that I was thirty feet up a tree.

Andy caught me. I don't know how he did it, or how that top step held under our combined weight, but somehow his arm was around me and I slammed into the trunk and the burning floor fell out of the treehouse and crashed, hissing, into the snow. We climbed shakily down the steps and stood there watching as the rest of the treehouse went up in flames.

I looked at Andy, who was standing on one leg, holding his bare foot up out of the snow.

“Well,” I said, “you were right.”

“My Butterfingers must be all melted,” he said.

“I'll get you another bag.”

He looked down at his bare foot. “How am I gonna walk out of here?”

I took off my stocking cap and we used the string from his parka hood to tie it around his ankle. It wasn't the best boot, but it helped. By the time we got home, his toes and my ears were frostbit, and I had blisters all over my palms. But it wasn't so bad. The cottonwood itself didn't burn up, I still had my Swiss Army knife, and we didn't get into trouble. I washed my own smoky-smelling clothes and bandaged my own hands. I told my mother that I had fallen down and scraped my palms on the sidewalk. My mother is extremely intelligent, but for
some reason she believed me. I bought Andy another bag of Butterfingers, and I also bought him a pair of battery-powered electric socks.

It's become a tradition with us. Every year I buy him a brand-new pair of electric socks. I don't want him to ever have cold feet again.

Y
ou might get the idea that Andy and I have an unhealthy relationship with fire, but you would be wrong. Fire is simply a tool to be used responsibly, like a hammer or a car or a train. We never start a fire just to watch something burn. We use it to accomplish definite goals, like to stay warm.

For example, we started the fire in the treehouse for a very important purpose. Andy's foot was cold and wet, and we had to do something about it. True, the fire did not work out as planned, but sometimes you just can't control the way things go. What happened at the Tuttle
place was another example of that. And that's all I have to say about
that
.

Although art is my worst subject at school, I do not hate it. In fact, I am quite interested in lettering. I have been working on the sigil. The idea of combining our initials into one symbolic design started back at the Tuttle place. A few weeks after that, I added serifs to the letters and came up with a more refined version:

Since then I have been using my time in art class to improve the design. Mrs. Felko is quite patient with me, although she is constantly telling me to “draw from the heart.”

“I
am
drawing from the heart,” I say.

“You could liven up your lines, Douglas. Hold the pen loosely, let your hand talk to the paper.”

Like many of my teachers, Mrs. Felko is completely insane.

What I enjoy doing is changing my design one parameter at a time. For instance, I recently completed an outline version that I find quite interesting:

I think it looks like an ancient Celtic rune or maybe the logo of a corporation run by elves. I am working now on one in yellow and blue, our school colors. I am planning to give it to Andy to hang on his wall.

The sigil is an expression of my theory about focus. I have found that doing one thing over and over for a long period of time can be extremely satisfying. I try to explain this to Mrs. Felko.

“That's all very well, Douglas, but what we are doing here in this class is learning how to do new things. Everyone else in class is working on their clay sculptures, and here you are, painting your symbol.”

“It's not a symbol. It's a sigil.”

“Well, I want you to put your ‘sigil' away for now and get yourself some clay and try something new.”

“Yes, Mrs. Felko,” I say politely. So I scoop some clay from the plastic bin at the back of the room and use a rolling pin to flatten it into a slab about one inch thick. I then trace the outline of the sigil on its surface and begin to carve. A few minutes later, Mrs. Felko stops by to see how I am doing. The sound of her sigh is like air rushing out of a punctured balloon.

“Well, Douglas, I see you have found your muse.”

“What does that mean?”

She shakes her head. “Are you ever going to share with us the meaning of that device?”

“It's not a device, it's a sigil.”

“I see,” she said. Although it is perfectly clear to me that she does not understand a thing.

M
elissa Haverman lives at 3417 Oak View Terrace in the Woodland Trails development. Her house has lots of big windows and a wraparound second-story deck, and it is located on a large lot surrounded by trees. All the Woodland Trails lots are surrounded by trees. The idea is that every house in the development is separated from its neighbors by a “greenway,” or a belt of trees about fifty feet wide. That way they can pretend they are living in the middle of a great forest. I've seen the sales brochures:
In the Arms of Nature—Safe, Forested Privacy Only 20 Minutes from Downtown.

Of course, the privacy is an illusion. They are still
close enough to hear one another's lawn mowers. The safety is an illusion too. Anybody could be hiding in the greenway—criminals, escapees from the insane asylum, or serial killers.

Or me. I am sitting in the crotch of an oak tree looking into Melissa Haverman's bedroom. I guess that is why they call her street Oak View Terrace. It is eleven o'clock at night, but Melissa has not yet gone to bed. Her room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of a night-light.

I suspect that she is downstairs watching television. I wonder how late her parents will let her stay up.

Time passes, which I measure in seventeen-second intervals: 17, 34, 51, 68, 85, 102, 119, 136, 153, 170, 187. … I once counted as high as 78,251 before being interrupted. I am always getting interrupted, which is the main challenge to staying focused. My goal is to count to 170,000 by 17s. To do that I would probably have to hide in a cave or something.

I am at 9,520 when the light goes on in Melissa's room.

She is wearing a pink sweatshirt and blue jeans and her hair is tied back in a ponytail. She closes the door and kicks off her shoes and throws herself back on her bed. For thirty-four seconds she just lays there perfectly still, then she sits up and takes off her sweatshirt. She is wearing a white tank top underneath. She stands and carefully folds the sweatshirt and walks it to the part of her room I can't see. She is out of sight for almost a minute, then she reappears, still wearing the same jeans and tank top, but with her hair loose. She stops right in front of the window and stares out, directly at me. She can't really be seeing me. She
must be looking at her reflection in the glass. I know I am invisible to her in my dark and leafy nest, but the feeling is quite eerie. I am holding my breath.

Her mouth moves. Who is she talking to? She gestures with one hand, a dismissive, “what
ever
” flick of the wrist, then she laughs and her mouth forms the words “No way.”

Is she talking to her reflection? Then I see the thin black cord trailing from her soft blond hair, and I notice the cell phone clipped to the waistband of her jeans. She is talking on her headset. She laughs again and her mouth twists into a disgusted grimace and I can make out the word she is mouthing as clearly as if she were whispering it into my ear:
“Worm.”

The tree starts to spin and I realize that I am still holding my breath. I let it out and replace the dead air in my lungs with fresh oxygen.

Melissa has her back to the window now and is waving her hands; she is doing a little dance, wiggling her butt and shaking her hair. Then she stops and removes the headset and unclips the phone from her jeans. She starts to unbutton her jeans, then stops, walks a few steps to the window and stares out into the darkness.

I am crawling back into my bedroom through the window when I hear Andy say, “You're gonna get caught.”

I see his white grin in his dark window.

“Not if you keep your voice down,” I whisper.

“I don't mean here and now. I mean over in Woodland. Spying on Melissa.”

“How did you know where I was?”

“Where else would you be at midnight on a Monday night?”

“Maybe I was just taking a walk.”

“Yeah, a walk to Woodland Trails.”

“A guy has to walk someplace.”

“You're gonna get caught.”

“I stayed in the greenway. Nobody could see me.”

“I'm telling you.”

“I was careful.”

“So, how is she?”

“She's … fine.”

“You talk to her?”

“No! I just … I watched her get ready for bed.”

“Really? How ready? You see her blue panties?”

“She took off her sweatshirt. She had on a tank top underneath.”

“Then what?”

“Then she closed the shades.”

“Just like last time.”

“Yeah.”

“Just like every time.”

“I don't know why. I mean, the whole point of living there is the privacy. Who does she think is going to be looking?”

“Well, there's you.”

“She doesn't know that.”

“Why don't you just ask her out? I mean, you know so much about her. How could she say no?”

“Shut up.” I turn my back on him and crawl through the window and close it behind me, but I can still see his grin, floating in the dark.

T
he Madham suspension bridge is based upon the Golden Gate Bridge, which I once crossed at the age of six years and four months in a car with my parents. Of course, my model is much smaller than the original. In fact, it is a 1:800 scale model.