Read Online Being Invisible by Penny Baldwin - Free Book Online Page B

so I went with
him. He was working, but I was goofing off. Juggling anything that looked like
a ball, stacking anything that looked like it could be stacked. What can I say?
I get bored easily. Just when Drew told me to knock it off, I dropped
something, knocking over a bunch of chemicals. As soon as they hit me, I knew I
had screwed up. Drew tried to rinse it off, but it was too late.” He paused, and
I could tell whatever he wanted to say was going to be difficult. “I had a cut
on my arm. The chemicals spilled on me and got into my cut. When that happened
I...disappeared.”
    I guess his long pause was so that
we could soak this revelation in, but what Colin didn’t understand was that
wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
         “What the hell?” Liz
voiced my thoughts. “You brought us here to tell us this ? How stupid do you think we are?” She got up to leave, with me
close behind. Before we could actually get out of the door, we stopped in our
tracks.
          Colin, who was
right in front of us... actually did...disappear.
    “What the hell just happened?” I
asked to no one in particular, mostly because no one in particular was in front
of me anymore.
    “He’s obviously telling the
truth.” Drew said, breaking our silence. “And he was just as freaked out when
it happened as you guys are now. That’s why he didn’t want to tell you.”
    I walked back over to the couch,
the need to sit down overriding any other thought.
    Suddenly, Colin was next to me,
making me jump practically off the couch.
    “Sorry, Lucy. I didn’t mean to
startle you. I forgot for a second that you couldn’t see me.”
    “When?” I managed to ask. “When
did this happen? Before you met me, or?” I looked at Colin hoping to make some
kind of sense of what he told us.
    “Before. When I told you about the
old lady? That was true. The only part I left out was that I was trying to use
my invisibility to help her. Before that, all I wanted to do was get rid of it.
Believe me, Drew and I tried. We didn’t know which chemicals mixed together, we
couldn’t duplicate the solution, couldn’t make it go away.” Colin stood up and
started pacing.
    ”That day was the first time that
I thought that I might be able to use it to help people. I became invisible, and
then jumped him. Drew helped me pull him down, but the guy still got away.
That’s when I realized that my superpowers were useless if I couldn’t back it
up. I wanted to become the kind of guy who deserved to be invisible. Someone
who was strong, who could think on his feet, someone who was fast. ”
    “So you started running." I
thought back to the day that I met him.
      Colin nodded. “Shows you what kind of
superhero I am. I did a better job of knocking you down than I did the purse-
snatcher.   And I wasn’t even
invisible then. I just wasn’t watching where I was going.”
    Up until that point Liz had hung
back toward the door, ready to bolt at any second. Colin’s story must have
pulled on her heartstrings, because she grabbed Drew’s hand and pulled him
toward the door. “We’ll be back in one hour.” Liz warned. “Don’t piss her off
while we’re gone.”
    “I’ll try my best.” Colin said, obviously
unsure of where I was at with the whole disappearing act story.
    After they closed the door, my rapid-fire
questions started.
    “Can you disappear whenever you
want to?”
    “I can now. It took a while to get
the hang of it.”
    “Besides the bar, have you ever
been near me while invisible?”
    “No. Never. I wouldn’t do that to
you… I mean other than that one time.”
    "Your clothes obviously
disappeared too. Can you make anything disappear?"
    “I figured out my clothes, a few
small objects. Nothing big yet. I have to concentrate pretty hard. And only
when I’m invisible too.”
    “Why couldn’t you take me on a
date? By then you already knew you had the power so why didn’t you call? Text
me? Anything?”
    “Something was wrong.