The Invisible Boy Read online

  “I have some scrap wood,” Paddle Boy says. “We could use that for the pieces we need to replace.”

  “I can get paint,” I offer. “I have a ton left over from an art project.”

  Eli nods slowly. “Okay. Let’s try.”

  I look from him to Paddle Boy. I’ve never worked alongside a supervillain.

  This will be interesting.

  Chapter 12

  STORMS IN THE FORECAST

  We all agreed that we shouldn’t meet on the Fourth of July. Eli said Candace is having a big party, and Paddle Boy is supposed to hang out with his mom, and I know Mom, Dad, and Aunt Lexie will be expecting card games and grilling. So—after a typical day of family activities, capped by fireworks—it’s Friday before I can head over to Eli’s again. I fill my backpack with old paints and brushes. Music blasts down the hall, coming from the ex–guest room/new studio. Mom and Dad have been working in there most of the morning to the tune of extremely loud seventies and eighties songs. Not my favorite, to be honest. It’s about one o’clock now, so too early for visiting Eli, but I don’t think I can take much more of this. I grab Wonder Dog’s leash and go downstairs. She’s flopped over on the hardwood floor, looking about as sick of this music as I feel.

  I hold up the leash. “Want to go on a walk?”

  Wonder Dog scrambles up in a burst of fur, mouth wide in a doggy smile. I snap the leash on her harness and slip outside. The air is thick with a humid, leafy smell that means a storm is coming. We wander around the yard, and Wonder pees in the normal places. Though I try to move slowly and take plenty of time, we wind up by the big old pine tree on the far side within five minutes.

  Our canoe rests on the lowest branches, upside down so it won’t gather rainwater. I grab a stick and clear out some spiderwebs by the seats. Dad and I haven’t gone out on Little Hunting Creek or the Potomac River since the Paddle Boy incident. My parents have promised to replace the paddle, but neither of them has remembered long enough to go online and actually buy a new one. Between Dad’s Pentagon job and my end-of-the-school-year workload, I’m not sure that we really would have been canoeing much anyway. Now that it’s summer, we could probably go on weekends—if we had two paddles. It’s clumsy and hard to navigate with only one.

  Looking at the canoe’s faded pale green paint makes me long to pull it down, flip it over, and take it to the water.

  Instead, I wrap my arms around a low branch and walk my feet up the trunk. Wonder Dog waits down below. Once I’m up in the thick of the branches, I throw her leash over another branch and hoist her up beside me. Wonder Dog swings contentedly in her soft harness until I pull her onto the branch. She wags her tail and licks my cheek.

  While Wonder tests the branches around her to see if she’d like to climb a bit, I look out at Little Hunting Creek. The ospreys are napping in their nest. Between Little Hunting Jr.—where James fell in—and the nesting pole is our small peninsula.

  Something has washed up on the far side of the peninsula. I sit up straighter and push one of the branches out of my way. My heart gives a leap.

  It’s a long wooden pole.

  The perfect size for a birdhouse stand.

  I check my phone—1:25. In the winter, I can cross the frozen water to the peninsula, but right now the connecting part is five inches deep in mud, bramble, and thorns. No time for that now. I slide off the branch and lower Wonder Dog down. Within five minutes we’re outside Eli’s gate. Paddle Boy walks up, too. I give him a civil nod, then cup my hands to my mouth. “Woo WOO ooo ooo ooo.”

  After a few seconds, the gate swings open. “Hello.”

  “Hi!” I hurry inside and bend to unclip Wonder Dog’s leash. “Guess what I just found. On the peninsula behind my house—”

  I stand up and look at Eli. He’s always sort of shaggy and wild, but today he looks flat-out exhausted. The skin around his eyes is so dark, it’s almost like he was in an Old West saloon fight. I blink in surprise. “Are you … okay?”

  “Yes.” He closes the gate quietly, then bends down to pet Wonder Dog. She sniffs his jeans and gives his ankle a little bop. He must have been out patrolling, fighting crime, saving cats from trees; he could clearly use a rest.

  “I brought some wood scraps and glue and stuff,” Paddle Boy says, holding up a plastic bag. “Have you ever built a birdhouse before, Invisible Boy?”

  “Only invisible ones.” Eli’s mouth quirks on one side, but stops short of a smile. He leads us over to the patio, where he’s set out the salvageable pieces of the old birdhouse, along with nails, a hammer, and a handsaw. “I have a pretty good idea how to do it, though.”

  “Well, Wi-Fi Man to the rescue, then—because I have tutorials.” Paddle Boy sits beside the pile and pulls up some videos on his phone screen.

  Eli and I move to watch, while Wonder Dog sniffs around the bushes. Someone’s stomach rumbles loudly—it isn’t mine, and Paddle Boy glances up like he’s surprised, so I’m guessing it is Eli. Again. It’s odd that he doesn’t eat lunch earlier, instead of waiting until after he gardens.

  The video ends. Paddle Boy dumps his bag of stuff out on the patio. “So I think these can work for the walls.” He selects two longer pieces. A bottle labeled Wood Glue and another hammer fall out, too. “If we do it like the tutorial, we should glue the pieces to the base, let it dry, and then use nails for extra support.”

  Eli nods and rummages through the other scraps. “I’ll need to trim those pieces and the roof before we start building.”

  I take out my paints and brushes. “Once they’re sized right, I can get painting.”

  We split off into teams. Eli and Paddle Boy work on sawing the wood—which means Eli saws and Paddle Boy watches in case he hurts himself. I pull out a paper plate and start mixing paints, trying to find the perfect bright red that will match the original color. Once the pieces are all laid out and ready, the boys begin assembling and I start on the roof.

  Now that no one is working with a sharp blade, I tell them about seeing the pole and my plan to get it tomorrow or Sunday and bring it on Monday. “It would be a lot easier with a canoe,” I mention, with a look at Paddle Boy, “but I think I can manage.”

  Paddle Boy’s ears turn red. “Well—Invisible Boy could just fly over and get it, right? That’d be the easiest option.”

  “Sorry, I take weekends off.” Eli shrugs and grins suddenly, like it’s a hilarious joke. To me, Eli adds, “Hold on—why do I have invisibility powers, again?”

  Now it’s my turn to blush. “If you’re going to have flying powers in the Washington, DC, area, you’d need some kind of cover to avoid being shot down as an unidentified flying object.”

  “Does his invisibility also change body heat?” Paddle Boy asks. “’Cause otherwise he might still show up on radars and stuff.”

  “Maybe I could also be really fast?” Eli suggests. He presses one gluey edge to another.

  “Or maybe you and Nadia could, like, team up.” Paddle Boy holds the two sides together and Eli starts putting glue on another one. “If you can stop time, Nadia, can you extend the power to other people? Then you could jump on Eli’s back, stop time, and he could fly you both into the city.”

  “That could work,” I admit. Paddle Boy is better at this than I expected.

  There’s a pause while Eli puts together another side of the birdhouse. Paddle Boy shifts so he can give it support. He asks, “So, is Candace your mom?”

  Quietly, Eli answers, “She’s my aunt.”

  I feel a little thick for never actually asking that before. But it makes sense that with his standard-hero troubled parental past, he would be with an aunt. I need to figure out where his dad is, too—or what happened to him—but perhaps when Eli is more talkative.

  “What school do you go to?” Paddle Boy asks, moving his foot over to support the third side of the birdhouse.

  “He’s homeschooled,” I cut in. There’s no reason for Paddle Boy to grill him. Not that I haven’t grilled him, too.
But it’s annoying coming from Paddle Boy.

  Paddle Boy glances from me to Eli. “Oh. Have you always been homeschooled?”

  Eli hesitates. “No. I went to a public school until I was in seventh grade.”

  “What school?” he asks.

  “It wasn’t around here.” Eli taps two of the edges to get them better aligned. “But I liked it. There was one teacher, Mr. Colvin, who was really nice. He had a hedgehog named Skywalker, and he would have us practice reading with it.”

  “I’ve never had a hedgehog,” I say enviously. “Though my kindergarten class had a hamster.”

  “Mine just had hermit crabs.” Paddle Boy shudders. “They would crawl underground to molt and—well, once it started smelling, you knew they weren’t coming out again.”

  I scrunch up my nose. “That’s awful!”

  Paddle Boy nods. “Yeah, basically.”

  “Okay, that should take a few minutes to dry,” Eli interrupts. The fourth side of the birdhouse is now attached, with Paddle Boy holding them all together. Eli rocks back on his heels. “I need to get smaller nails from the shed. I’ll be right back.”

  I jump to my feet, put my hand on his shoulder, and say, “Time freeze!”

  Eli looks up at me, confused. Paddle Boy holds completely still. Not even breathing.

  I try to hold in a giggle. “Come on, Invisible Boy! We’ll get the nails and be back before he knows what happened!”

  Smiling, Eli stands and runs toward the shed. I glance back at the patio while I follow. Paddle Boy is sitting motionless, and Wonder Dog wanders over to sniff his ear. Paddle Boy shakes with a silent laugh.

  “Hey,” I say to Eli in a low voice. “I am really, really sorry about P—about Wi-Fi Man finding you.”

  “It’s … not actually that bad.” Eli opens the shed door and goes inside. “I guess superheroes can always use more allies, yeah?”

  I’m still not convinced that Paddle Boy is an ally. But he definitely doesn’t seem as evil as I originally suspected. Eli takes a small box of nails and we return together. Wonder Dog is pawing at Paddle Boy’s leg now, making worried woofs. He has his eyes closed tight and his mouth pinched together to keep from smiling.

  “Unfreeze!” I say.

  Paddle Boy exhales a whoosh of air and blinks at us. Eyes widening in surprise, he says, “Wow! You got those so fast!”

  Eli bursts into laughter.

  I plop down in my spot and start applying a second layer of paint to the roof. “Just the way I work.”

  Overhead, the clouds darken and a breeze rustles the treetops. I finish the roof and move on to the walls, once Eli has hammered everything together. Paddle Boy pulls up a photo of Mount Vernon on his phone, and I do my best to replicate the windows and doors. Birds start swooping from branch to branch, and Wonder Dog presses her side against me. I keep working, kind of hoping that if I ignore the signs, the storm will just skip over us. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

  A big drop of rain lands on Paddle Boy’s hand. He tilts his head back and checks the sky. “I think I’d better be getting home.”

  Eli nods. “We’ve done all we can today, without a pole to stand it on. And I need to—do some other chores.” He stands, pulling his hoodie’s hood up over his hair. Rain peppers down on us, throwing little flecks of wet across our clothes.

  “So, are we meeting up again tomorrow?” Paddle Boy asks.

  “No, tomorrow is Saturday. You can’t come on weekends.” Eli smiles. “Remember? I take weekends off.”

  I open my mouth to ask more questions, but Eli is firm.

  “If you want to come over, you can only come during the week, at one thirty, and you can’t tell anyone about me. Those are the rules.”

  Paddle Boy shrugs. I nod reluctantly. I already agreed to these terms, but I wish Eli would explain them.

  I help Eli gather up the remaining scraps of the old birdhouse and stick my paints in my backpack. Paddle Boy makes quick work of scooping his things into the plastic bag. The air flashes with distant lightning, like someone taking a picture, though I don’t hear any thunder this time. Wonder Dog pins back her ears and leans her shoulder against my knee.

  “It’s okay,” I say, snapping on her leash. I take one final look around—everything is cleaned up and put away. Eli’s stored the work-in-progress birdhouse in his shed. No one would be able to tell that we were even here.

  Eli goes to the gate and opens it for Paddle Boy. The rain starts coming down more steadily.

  Paddle Boy glances at Eli. “Think your invisibility can get me out of the secret lair without being spotted?”

  “Can do.” Eli gives him a thumbs-up. “But you’d better hurry.”

  Paddle Boy salutes with two fingers, then dashes out to the street. I watch, half expecting him to disappear into the rain. But no, I can see him jumping over puddles, trying to beat the storm. Just like I can see Eli standing next to me in his red hoodie.

  I’ve been working on the scoop of a lifetime: a superhero living in suburban Virginia. But all signs indicate that I have not uncovered a superhero or a supervillain. Just two boys who I prodded into playing.

  Paddle Boy goes through his front door. The raindrops are bigger and thicker now, a curtain between me and the rest of the street. I shiver in my soaked shirt, even though it isn’t very cold. I think I should feel disappointed. But I don’t feel sad at all. I turn to Eli—he’s looking past me, one hand on the gate.

  He opens and closes his mouth, but doesn’t say anything.

  I knock his shoulder with mine. “Hey,” I say, but he doesn’t look at me. “Stay dry!”

  His hood is drenched and his hair sticks to his forehead in raggedy clumps. He doesn’t smile. So quiet I almost can’t hear over the rain, he asks, “You’ll come back?”

  “Yeah.” I nod, keeping my voice light. “On Monday. I promise.”

  For a second, he glances up—almost at my face, but not quite. His eyes glimmer with a faint sheen, like the flash of leaves when they turn over before a storm. He gives me a single nod. Then he moves to close the gate.

  As I leave, that look plays through my head over and over.

  Chapter 13

  HOW (NOT) TO GO VIRAL

  By Sunday, I’m still thinking about that look. About the way Eli never leaves his yard, unless it’s to rescue Wonder Dog or me. About how he is weirdly invisible, for someone who doesn’t have superpowers.

  If he isn’t an actual superhero, all the strange things about him get even stranger.

  I flip through some of my favorite Superman comics, reading everything I can about Clark Kent. Was he ever scared? So far, I mostly notice him being worried for other people (especially Lois Lane). Sometimes he seems overwhelmed or uncertain. But never outright afraid.

  Was Eli afraid when I left him at the gate on Friday afternoon? I don’t know. I can’t tell. But something has shifted in me. Something doesn’t feel right.

  There’s a knock on my bedroom door, and Mom looks in. She is wearing makeup and has her hair fixed into its extra-curly style. “Hey, Dia, I’m about to do my big announcement. Do you want to be in the video?”

  “Um…” Pretty much the last thing I want is to be a prop in Mom’s live reveal of her new podcast studio. But Mom grins at me and fidgets with her phone and almost bounces. She’s so excited that I shrug and get to my feet. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Perfect!” Mom jumps over to my dresser and pulls out a long purple tunic-y shirt and leggings covered in yellow flowers. “Want to change into this? And maybe we could run a brush through your hair?”

  I sigh but go through the motions of getting ready. It’s almost five, so I think Mom’s planning a pre-dinner livestream. She flits around adjusting things—making sure my hair isn’t tucked behind my ears, picking up one of Wonder’s dog toys from the hallway, checking the lighting on her phone over and over. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Mom this nervous about a livestream.

  Dad comes out of their bedroom, dressed
in a polo shirt and his camera-ready dark wash jeans instead of the washed-out, oil-splattered frayed shorts he usually wears on his days off.

  I smile. “You got recruited, too?”

  He laughs, a little loudly. Almost like he’s nervous, too. “Well, technically I had a part in the surprise.”

  “Okay, everyone get set. Go stand by the door.” Mom points us toward the ex–guest room and herds Wonder Dog downstairs.

  Dad and I exchange a shrug and move to that end of the hallway. He has his right hand closed and his thumb taps against his finger.

  Mom comes back. “You both ready?”

  I tug on my hair. It feels weird without the normal two braids. “Sure.”

  “Yep,” Dad replies, shifting his weight.

  “Remember to face the camera,” she says. “Nadia, I’ll lead you in, with me walking backward, yeah? I want your reaction to be the focus—the moment when you see it for the first time. Then I’ll pan around and show everyone. And Richard, you follow and then stand to the side so I can get your reaction last.”

  A kid’s reaction to a podcast studio seems a bit odd to me, but my mom’s done weirder stuff. Maybe she’s afraid this is going to be a boring reveal, and she thinks that if I’m in the shot, people will be more interested.

  A horrible thought pops into my head. Paddle Boy’s mom is probably watching this.

  Which means Paddle Boy might be watching.

  I want to groan and crawl back to my room.

  But right then, Mom holds up her fingers to count down. “Okay, and we’re live in three … two … one!”

  She fixes a smile on her face and holds it while she clicks record. There is officially no escape.

  “Hello, Quicklings!” Mom says in her slightly fake, on-camera voice. “I am so excited to share my big announcement with you in just a few minutes, but I want to give folks time to show up. Shout-out to Jessica in California—great to have you join us, Jessica!” This goes on for a bit—Mom saying hi to various people who are leaving comments, and counting off whenever we round up to a milestone in viewers. Fifty, two hundred, six hundred by the first five minutes.