What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible. Ross Welford

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СКАЧАТЬ if you can, standing in front of a mirror and seeing nothing at all. Your face does not look back at you. All you can see is the room behind you. Or garage in this case.

      After gasping, I realise what’s going on. I shake my head, smile, and even give a little chuckle. I tell myself, OK, so you must be dreaming. And – wow! – this is a vivid one! It really feels real. You know how some dreams are obviously dreams, even as you’re dreaming them? Not this one! This one is as real a dream as I have ever had, and I start to think it’s quite good fun. Nonetheless, I run through the Am I Dreaming? Checklist, blinking, pinching myself, telling myself, Wake up, Ethel, it’s just a dream.

      Except, when it’s done, I’m still there, in the garage. This is one stubborn dream! So I do it all again, and again.

      Nope, not a dream.

      Definitely not a dream. I stop smiling right there.

      I close my eyes tight and nothing happens. That is, I feel my eyelids tightening, but I can still see. I can see around the garage, even though I know I have my eyes shut tight – screwed up, in fact.

      I put my hands over my eyes, and I can still see everything.

      There’s a lurch in my stomach of fear, dread and terror, which is a horrible combination when they all come together. Without warning, I throw up into the sink, but I cannot see anything coming out. I hear it splatter. I taste the hot puke in my mouth. Then, in a second or two, it materialises as I watch: my half-digested cornflakes from before.

      I run the tap to wash it away. I put my hand into the stream of water and the water takes its shape. I stare, awestruck, as I lift a palmful to my thirsty mouth and this bubble-like piece of water rises up before me. I suck it up then look in the mirror again: my lips are almost visible for a second where the water has touched them, and I can just make out the liquid as it starts to go down my throat, and then it’s gone.

      I am consumed with a horror that is more intense than anything I have ever felt before.

      Standing in front of the mirror, gripping the sides of the washbasin with my invisible hands, with my brain practically throbbing with the effort of processing this … this … strangeness, I do what anyone would do.

      What you would do.

      I scream for help.

      ‘Gram! GRAM! GRAM!’

       A WARNING

       I’m going to tell you how I got to be invisible, and discovered a whole load of other stuff as well.

      But if I’m going to do that, you need a bit of what my teacher Mr Parker calls ‘backstory’. The stuff that led up to me being invisible.

       Stick around for a couple of chapters. I’ll keep it brief, and then we’ll be back in the garage, with me being invisible.

       However, the first thing I’d better do before I continue is to warn you: I am not a ‘rebel’.

       I only say this in case you’re hoping I’m going to be one of those daredevil kids who is always getting into trouble and being ‘sassy’ to grown-ups.

       That is, unless you count becoming invisible as getting into trouble.

      As for the time I swore at Mrs Abercrombie: that was an accident, as I have said a thousand times. I had meant to call her a ‘witch’ – which, I admit, is rude enough in itself, but not as rude as the word I used by mistake that rhymes with it. It got me into a LOT of trouble with Gram. To this day, Mrs Abercrombie thinks I’m a very rude girl even though it was more than three years ago and I wrote her a letter of apology on Gram’s best notepaper.

       (I know she’s still angry because her dog Geoffrey always snarls at me. Geoffrey snarls at everyone, but Mrs Abercrombie always says, ‘Stop it, Geoffrey’ – except when he snarls at me.)

       Anyway, usually I just sit quietly at the back at school, minding my own business, getting on with my stuff – la-la-la, don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you kind of thing.

       But you know what grown-ups say, in that way they have that’s designed to make them seem clever, ‘Ah, you see – it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?’

       That’s me. A ‘quiet one’. So quiet that I’m almost invisible.

       Which, come to think of it, is quite funny.

      

      How far back do you want to go?

      If you ask me, it all started with the pizza thing. That was what got me so upset that I kind of lost a bit of my mind, and then ended up losing a lot more.

      This is how it happened.

      Jarrow Knight – who else? – shouted, ‘Pizza delivery!’ when I walked in the class, and pretty much everyone laughed. Not a LOL sort of laugh – more a spluttering cackle. Most people in my class are not actually cruel.

      I didn’t get it at first. I had no idea it had anything to do with me. In fact, I thought it was some joke that I had walked in on halfway through, and so I smiled and laughed a bit as well, like you do when you don’t want to feel left out.

      That must have looked odd, in hindsight.

      Then a couple of days later, Jarrow, her brother, and some others were walking past me when I was talking to the girls outside the chemistry labs, and Jarrow said in a loud-ish voice, ‘Did you order the American Hot, Jez?’, and they high-fived, while Kirsten and Katie looked at their feet.

      Do you get it? It still hurts to remember. (There’s going to be quite a lot of hurting and remembering, so we may as well get used to it.)

      ‘Pizza delivery’ is a reference to my face.

      ‘Pizza face’ = acne. That is, spots and zits and boils and the whole pimply shebang. You get it, yeah? The reference, not acne.

      My face supposedly resembles the surface of a pizza. Hilarious. It doesn’t, anyway. It’s not as bad as that.

      Acne on a twelve-year-old? I know, it’s kind of early. Even Dr Kemp said I was ‘at the earlier end of the spectrum’, but it’s not freakish. No, ‘freakish’ we’ll reserve for the acne itself, which is ‘towards the more severe end of the spectrum’. That’s nice family-doctor-speak for ‘Jeez, you’ve got it bad’.

      I’ll spare you the details. You might be eating while you’re reading this and the details are not very nice.

      So СКАЧАТЬ