The Invisible Girl

Invisible

Cecily Chen arrived at Maya Patterson's birthday party at exactly 4:17 PM, which was seventeen minutes late because her mom had taken a wrong turn twice and then spent four minutes looking for a parking spot.

She walked through the front door carrying a wrapped present — a watercolor set she'd picked out herself — and stepped into the living room where twenty-three kids were already laughing, talking, and throwing popcorn at each other.

Nobody looked up.

Cecily stood there for a moment, present in hand, waiting for someone to say "Hey, Cecily!" or "Over here!" or even just "Oh, hi."

But Maya was across the room showing Priya something on her phone, and the boys from school were wrestling over a bean bag chair, and a group of girls near the snack table were singing along to a song Cecily didn't know. The room was loud and bright and full, and Cecily was standing right in the middle of it, and somehow she was not in it at all.

It wasn't that anyone was being mean. That was the thing. Nobody gave her a dirty look. Nobody whispered about her. Nobody said "Ugh, she's here."

They just didn't see her.

Cecily set her present on the gift table, which already had a mountain of sparkly bags and bows. She got herself a cup of lemonade. She stood near the wall and sipped it, watching the party happen around her like she was watching it through a window.

Maybe if I stand here long enough, someone will come over, she thought.

She stood there for eleven minutes. She counted.

Nobody came over.

So Cecily did what Cecily always did at these things. She drifted. She moved around the edges of the room, not quite joining any group, not quite leaving any group, like a satellite orbiting a planet — close enough to feel its gravity, too far away to land.

She ended up in the kitchen, which was quieter. Maya's mom was in there, frosting cupcakes and looking stressed.

"Oh! Hello, sweetheart. Are you one of Maya's friends?"

"I'm Cecily. From school."

"Of course! Cecily! Do you want to help me put sprinkles on these? I'm running behind."

Cecily didn't especially want to put sprinkles on cupcakes. But it was something to do with her hands, and Maya's mom was looking at her like she actually existed, which at this point felt like a gift.

"Sure," Cecily said.

So she stood at the counter, carefully shaking rainbow sprinkles onto thirty cupcakes while the party thundered on in the next room. Through the doorway, she could see kids playing some game that involved a lot of screaming. She watched them the way you watch fish in an aquarium — with interest, but through glass.

"You're very precise with those sprinkles," Maya's mom said.

"I like things even," Cecily said.

"Me too. Maya thinks I'm ridiculous. She'd dump the whole jar on one cupcake and call it done."

Cecily almost smiled.

When the cupcakes were finished, she carried a tray out to the dining room table. Nobody thanked her because nobody realized she'd done it. They just descended on the cupcakes like seagulls on a french fry.

Cecily took a cupcake for herself and sat down at the far end of the table.

That's when she noticed the boy.

He was sitting on the stairs, just a few steps up, eating his cupcake in small, careful bites. He had dark curly hair and glasses that were slightly too big for his face, and he was reading a book. At a birthday party. On the stairs.

Cecily had never seen anyone read a book at a birthday party before.

She watched him for a minute. He didn't look sad, exactly. He looked like someone who had found a perfectly comfortable place to be and saw no reason to leave it.

She almost didn't go over. Almost. Because what if he wanted to be alone? What if he looked up and his face did that thing — that polite blankness that meant I don't know you and I'm not interested in changing that?

But her feet moved before her brain could talk them out of it, and suddenly she was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

The boy looked up. He blinked behind his big glasses.

"It's about a girl who can talk to octopuses," he said. "Octopi? Octopodes? I looked it up once, and apparently all three are correct, which honestly just makes it worse."

Cecily sat down on the step below him. "Is it good?"

"The book or the octopus communication?"

"Both."

"The book's great. The octopus communication is honestly kind of terrifying because it turns out octopuses have a lot of opinions."

"About what?"

"About everything. They're very judgmental. One octopus told the main character that her shoes were 'architecturally unsound.'"

Cecily laughed. A real laugh. It came out louder than she expected, and she almost covered her mouth, but then she didn't.

"I'm Cecily," she said.

"I'm Jonas. I'm Maya's cousin. I don't go to your school. I don't actually go to any school right now because we just moved here from Portland and my mom hasn't figured out the enrollment stuff yet, so basically I'm just a person who exists in the world without any official location."

"That sounds kind of nice."

"It's extremely boring, actually. I've read fourteen books in two weeks."

"That doesn't sound boring."

Jonas tilted his head and looked at her. Really looked at her. Not through her, not past her, not with that glazed half-attention that people give when they're already thinking about who they'd rather be talking to.

"No," he said. "I guess it doesn't."

They sat on the stairs for a while. Jonas told her about the octopus book and also about Portland, which apparently had a lot of rain and a very famous bookstore that was so big you could get lost in it. Cecily told him about her watercolor paintings, and how she was trying to paint clouds but they kept looking like mashed potatoes.

"Clouds are basically sky mashed potatoes," Jonas said.

"That's not helpful."

"I'm not trying to be helpful. I'm trying to be accurate."

From the living room, someone cranked the music up. A group of kids started doing some kind of dance. Maya shrieked with delight about something. The party was a living, breathing thing — a creature made of noise and energy — and Cecily and Jonas sat on their stairs and watched it like two birds on a telephone wire.

"Do you want to go in there?" Jonas asked.

Cecily thought about it. "Not really."

"Me neither."

"I walked in an hour ago and nobody noticed," Cecily said. She hadn't meant to say it. It just fell out, the way true things sometimes do when you're sitting next to someone who feels safe.

Jonas was quiet for a second. "That happens to me too," he said. "A lot."

"It's not like they're mean about it."

"No. It's just —"

"You're just invisible."

"Yeah."

They sat with that word for a moment. Invisible. It hung in the air between them like a soap bubble — fragile, translucent, and entirely real.

"The thing about the girl in this book," Jonas said slowly, tapping the cover, "is that the octopuses could always see her. Even when nobody else did. She just had to find the octopuses."

Cecily looked at him. "Are you saying you're my octopus?"

Jonas made a face of deep offense. "I am saying nothing of the sort. Octopuses are cold-blooded invertebrates with three hearts. I am a warm-blooded vertebrate with one heart and a very average number of arms."

"So... two."

"Yes. A perfectly standard two."

Cecily grinned. She grinned so wide her face ached, because she couldn't remember the last time she'd had a conversation this ridiculous and wonderful.

Maya appeared in front of them suddenly, flushed and out of breath. "Jonas! We're about to do the piñata! Come on!" She looked at Cecily. "Oh hey — Cecily, right? Come on, you too!"

And Maya was gone again, swept back into the current of her own party.

Cecily waited for the sting of it — the Oh hey, Cecily, right? — the proof that she'd been invisible all along. And it did sting, a little. A small, familiar pinch.

But Jonas stood up and tucked his book under his arm. He looked down at her on the step.

"You coming?" he asked. Like it was obvious. Like wherever he was going, she was already part of the plan.

Cecily stood up.

They walked into the backyard together, where a piñata shaped like a llama hung from a tree branch. Jonas immediately began providing nature-documentary commentary in a low, serious voice: "Here we observe the wild llama in its natural habitat, suspended from an oak tree, unaware of the approaching predators armed with a plastic bat..."

Cecily laughed again. That real, surprised, unguarded laugh.

When it was her turn to swing, she hit the llama so hard that candy exploded across the lawn and every kid screamed and dove for it. For three seconds, everyone was looking at her, and she felt the warmth of it — being seen — like stepping into a patch of sunlight.

But the truth was, the moment that mattered more had already happened. On the stairs. With a boy reading an octopus book. In the small, quiet sentence: You coming?

Cecily grabbed a handful of candy. She tossed a piece to Jonas.

He caught it with one of his perfectly standard two arms, and smiled.