The Invisible Girl. Laura Ruby

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СКАЧАТЬ what Gurl was saying. But cats were rare and special, Gurl told herself. Maybe the cat did understand. Gurl gave the cat one last pat and then she closed the box again, hoping that cats liked small spaces and sleeping for hours.

      She didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it because soon the alarm rang and the kids climbed from their beds. As usual, no one greeted Gurl, no one asked her if she wanted to sit with them at breakfast. She ate as she always did, in the very back corner of the cafeteria, watching as all the others laughed and talked and shoved one another. It was just as well. Gurl had nothing to say to them anyway. A piece of toast fell lard-side down in front of her, but she ignored it.

      “What’s up, Leadfoot?” said a voice. Gurl didn’t have to look to know who it was: Digger.

      “Nothing,” Gurl muttered. It was what she always said.

      “What? I can’t hear you!” Digger bellowed, getting up from her own table to lumber over to Gurl’s. She was huge, bigger than most of the boys even, with a great square head like a block of wood. She wasn’t much of a flyer, but she didn’t need to be. Once a brick had come loose from the second storey of the dormitory building. It had fallen on Digger’s foot while she was playing killer ball in the yard. She’d turned and proceeded to kick the wall so hard that some of the other bricks came loose. “Nobody messes with me,” she said. “Not even the buildings.”

      Digger was tough, the toughest actually. The only thing that wasn’t tough was the way she picked her nose: delicately, with the tip of her pinky extended like she was sipping tea from fine china.

      Gurl pushed her eggs around her plate, wondering if Digger would flip them on the floor or in her lap. Not that it mattered, for the eggs smelled like sweaty socks stuffed with day-old fish and were the last things in the world Gurl wanted to eat.

      Digger snatched the fork from her hand and smacked Gurl’s plate to the floor, the eggs pellets scattering. “I said, I can’t hear you! Speak, Freak!”

      Gurl finally looked up into that big blockhead face. Digger’s expression was the same as the waiter’s had been: smug and triumphant. It was like she knew that Gurl was beaten already, doomed before she began. Gurl thought of what she had done to the waiter, and a tiny smile made her lips curl up at the corners.

      Digger’s nostrils flared. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re pathetic. All you do is sit there like a lump and stare at everyone.” With her knuckles, Digger rapped painfully on Gurl’s skull. “Hello, Lump. Is anyone in there?”

      For a moment, Gurl wished she could disappear. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Then what would Digger do?

      But her hands and legs and the rest of her stayed exactly the way they were and even Digger grew bored. “Freak,” she muttered and went to find someone more interesting to torment.

      A word about Hope House: there are places in the world where so many desperate people have lived and so many bad things have happened that the places themselves have become desperately bad. They’re damp and weird and smell like foot fungus. The windows are never clean and the lino curls up at the edges because it can’t stand the floor. Every corner is sprayed with cobwebs and quivering shadows. When you walk into these bad places, you can feel a headache brewing between your eyebrows, a churning in your gut, a cold prickle at the back of your neck. You feel sad and angry and helpless, all at the same time. These bad places seem to hate you, but they also seem to want to keep you there very, very much.

      Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless was one of these places. But, as Gurl had learned in her history lessons, Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless had not always been called Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless. Back in the early 1800s, when it was first built, it was called The Asylum For The Poor, The Lazy and The Wretched, and its mission was “to teach idle, wild and disobedient children self-discipline of the body and soul”. After that the name was changed again, to The Home of the Friendless—“for unprotected children whose only crime is poverty”. And then for a while it was called The Institute of the Destitute, which offered orphans job training in such occupations as sheep shearing, basket weaving and flower arranging.

      Despite the various name changes, the mission was generally the same: keep homeless kids out of trouble and try to teach them something useful. To that end, in literature class the orphans of Hope House were again composing business letters to rich people urging them to join the Hope House “Adopt-an-Orphan” programme, in which a donation of just $7.50 a day—only the price of a double latte!—would keep an orphan fed for a year. In art they made Hope House oven gloves and place mats, which were sold for $14.95 plus $5.99 shipping and handling on the orphanage website. In computer class they learned how to send emails to thousands of people at a time, with subject lines like “Don’t let hope die at Hope House!” or “The truest heart gives until it hurts!”

      As always, Gurl finished her work quickly and then stared out of the window or watched the other students. Preoccupied by the fact that she might have disappeared like a phantom the night before, and by the cat that she hoped was still sleeping in a box underneath her bed, she didn’t notice the new boy until biology. Gurl was particularly bored in biology because they never learned about any animals except birds (with the occasional bat or flying squirrel thrown in). And while Gurl liked birds well enough, she hated it that everyone else worshipped them just because they could fly. Just once Gurl wanted to learn about a wolf or a salmon or a salamander or an ant. “An ant can lift ten times its own body weight,” Gurl had once timidly told her teacher, Miss Dimwiddie, hoping that maybe she might do a lesson on something else. Miss Dimwiddie had barked, “Birds eat ants for lunch.”

      This morning Miss Dimwiddie began with the same question she always began with: “Who wants to tell me about the bumblebees?”

      “Bumblebees!” echoed Fagin, Miss Dimwiddie’s parrot, who perched on Miss Dimwiddie’s shoulder.

      Persnickety’s hand shot into the air. Since it was the only hand to shoot into the air, Miss Dimwiddie said, “Yes, Persnickety.”

      “Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly,” Persnickety said, knotting her hands on the top of her desk. “Their bodies are too big and their wings are too small.”

      “Yes, Persnickety, that’s absolutely right.”

      “Absolutely right,” croaked Fagin.

      “Now, children, I want you all to remember that. Bumblebees look as if they’d be too heavy to fly and yet scientists have discovered that they beat their wings in circles to create lift. Now, none of you look like you can fly either, but you must all be like the bee. You children can use the bumblebee to inspire you to great heights. All right?”

      She smiled, waiting for the students to agree, but the room was silent. Miss Dimwiddie cleared her throat. “Well then. Today we’re going to talk about the blue-footed booby.”

      “Blue-footed booby,” parroted Fagin.

      The class sniggered and Miss Dimwiddie put her hands on her ample hips. “Does someone want to tell me what’s so funny?” Ruckus, always the first to cause a ruckus, shouted, “You said ‘booby’.”

      “You’re the booby,” said Fagin.

      Ruckus’s tiny black braids, sticking up from his head like caterpillars reaching for a leaf, shook. “Shut up, you dumb bird.”

      Fagin flapped his wings. “Booby head. Worm head.”

      Miss Dimwiddie СКАЧАТЬ