Jenna seemed to be having a similar reaction. "I'm out of here," she announced and then took off.
"I have to go, too, Miss-uh, I mean, Serena," Amanda said. "Bye, Emily."
She hurried after Jenna and caught up with her. "Wait! You still haven't told me."
"Told you what?" Jenna asked.
"About Tracey. About her gift."
"You still haven't figured it out?"
"No."
Jenna grinned. "Tracey can disappear."
Walking home, Jenna was in pretty good spirits for a change. It hadn't been a bad day-not bad at all. In her mind, she kept seeing the look on the face of Amanda-Tracey when she'd told her she'd figured out who she was. Of course, it would have been more fun to see that stunned expression on the real face of that conceited Amanda Beeson, but this was the next best thing-knowing she'd freaked out the snottiest girl at Meadowbrook. And that incident at the mall had been pretty cool, too.
She didn't like Slug and Skank and the rest of them, even though she'd called them her "crew" when she talked to Mr. Gonzalez and she'd told Amanda that they were her friends. Actually, she thought they were a bunch of miserable lowlifes. They didn't do anything real, like go to school or work. They just hung around all day, begging on street corners or picking pockets or shoplifting. They were filthy and not too intelligent, though she had to admit that she liked Bubbles's goth look, which was an extreme version of her own.
They didn't really live anywhere, though sometimes they'd squat in an abandoned house or apartment until someone moved in or the police threw them out. Lots of times they slept on the benches in the train station, and that's how Jenna knew them. There were times when she also hung around the train station, when she couldn't bear to go home.
But she probably would have gone into Target with them if Emily hadn't come along and predicted what was going to happen. Like the rest of the kids in the class, Emily didn't have a whole lot of control over her gift, so Jenna had truly lucked out.
A light rain began to fall, but that wasn't what suddenly dampened her spirits. She'd turned onto the street where she lived.
The three tall brick apartment buildings took up the whole street. Brookside Towers, they were called, which was a joke-there was no brook alongside the structures, and "Towers" made them sound like castles or something. In reality, Brookside Towers was public housing, packed with all kinds of people who had only one thing in common-not much money.
Jenna suspected that the buildings had been ugly when they were built, and they were even uglier now, covered with graffiti and gang symbols. There were a lot of cracked windows, and cardboard had replaced the glass in some of them. The surrounding grounds weren't exactly gardens: any grass that might be there was covered with junk-trash bags, an old refrigerator, a broken bicycle.
There were some good people at Brookside Towers. Jenna thought of Mrs. Wong down the hall, who had put up window boxes full of geraniums. Then some nasty boys had managed to climb up to her window and destroy them. Mrs. Wong had cried…
No, Brookside Towers wasn't a very nice place to live. Sometimes, when her mother was sober and feeling optimistic, she'd make promises to Jenna.
"No matter how broke I am, I'm going to buy a lottery ticket every week. And one of these days, baby, our ship will come in, and I'll buy us a nice house in a nice neighborhood. If I keep buying tickets, I've got to win sooner or later, right? I mean, it's like that law of averages, or whatever it's called." Jenna never bothered to tell her mother that she was wrong, that the law of averages meant that it was highly unlikely she'd ever win at all.
Jenna didn't despise her mother. She was just a poor, weak woman whose husband-Jenna's father-had walked out on her when she'd gotten pregnant. And she could feel better about herself only by getting drunk or high. She wasn't hateful- just very, very sad.
Jenna thought you could feel the sadness when you walked into the apartment, even when her mother wasn't home, like now. She took advantage of her mother's absence to pick up the empty bottles, sweep the floors, and wash the dirty dishes in the sink. Hunting in a cabinet, she found ajar of peanut butter and some stale crackers to spread it on.
The cable bill hadn't been paid, so the TV was worthless. With nothing else to do, she got out her homework. She had a lot of reading to do, but that was okay. Jenna liked to read.
Of course, she couldn't tell anyone that. It was too bad for her image…
AT FIRST, AMANDA DIDN'T think it sounded so bad, and on the way home she contemplated this piece of news. So, Tracey could turn invisible. That explained why she seemed to be absent a lot and why Madame kept saying it was nice to see her. And maybe that also explained why Tracey looked blurry in her mirror reflection and fuzzy in photographs.
Now, the question was, what could Amanda do with this knowledge? This gift opened up a whole new range of possibilities.
What if she just disappeared and took off until all this was over? Maybe she could sneak onto an airplane, go to an exotic vacation place, and He on the beach doing nothing. Could invisible people get a tan?
She could stay in the fanciest hotels without paying. She wondered what happened when an invisible person ate-did the food just disappear? Or could you see it digesting in an invisible stomach? That would be pretty gross.
Or she could hang around some famous people, like actors or rock stars, and see what they were really like. Or even just go to her very own house and see what her other self was up to…
But ultimately, she had to remember the sad truth of the matter. These gifted kids-they couldn't control their gifts. Dead people seemed to speak to Ken whether he wanted them to or not, and Emily's visions of the future weren't always clear. For Tracey, disappearing probably just happened-she couldn't just snap her fingers and disappear.
So Amanda went back to Tracey's house and spent another yucky Tracey-style evening. At dinner, she pushed the food around her plate while each of the Devon Seven were asked about their day and the parents exclaimed how adorable they were. No one noticed that Tracey wasn't even eating.
After dinner, she went to Tracey's room, where she did some homework and read a book that she'd brought home from the school library. And then she remembered Tracey's diary. Maybe Tracey had gone on some interesting adventures while she was invisible.
Amanda retrieved the notebook and opened it at random.
"Dear Diary, Everybody thinks the Devon Seven are so cute. I'm not cute."
That was certainly true, Amanda thought. She turned a few more pages.
"Dear Diary, My little sisters turned three today. They're getting bigger. I feel as if I'm getting smaller."
Now that sounded interesting, Amanda thought. Was this when she started disappearing? She turned a page.
"Dear Diary, Mom and Dad don't look at me anymore. They see only the Seven. I might as well be invisible."
So it definitely was the septuplets that Tracey had written about when she wrote "Sometimes I hate them." Amanda couldn't blame her. They took all the attention away from Tracey. But now Tracey was about to become invisible, which should make up for it all.
Eagerly, Amanda turned to the next page.
"Dear Diary, Sometimes I think I'd like to get a haircut. And some new clothes. But what's the point? Nobody would notice. Nobody sees me now. I'm nothing."
Amanda was infuriated. Without even bothering to shut the notebook, she tossed it across the room. So Tracey felt sorry for herself. In all fairness, Amanda knew she was probably entitled to a little self-pity. But Amanda certainly didn't want to have to read about it.
At least Tracey was starting to make sense. From the photos she'd seen, Amanda knew Tracey must have been the center of her parents' life when she was born, as most babies were. But once the seven girls were born, she grew less and less important in her parents' eyes. She must have felt that. And if you felt like nothing at home, you'd feel like nothing at school, too. It wasn't just shyness that made Tracey disappear- Tracey faded away from lack of attention. And all because of those wretched little septuplets.
Later, lying in Tracey's bed, Amanda thought about her own home, her own parents. Being an only child, she always complained that her mother and father made too much of a fuss over her, watched her too closely, and wanted to know everything about her. She was a star at home, which was nice, but it could also get a little tiresome-there was such a thing as too much attention. Surely there had to be a happy medium between what she had and what Tracey had.
The next day, Friday, started off as a typical Tracey day. The bus doors closed in her face and she had to walk to school. That made her late arriving at homeroom for roll call, but no one even noticed.
In Tracey's English class they were reading Romeo and Juliet, and Amanda had something she wanted to say, about how Romeo should have felt for Juliet's pulse and then he'd know she wasn't really dead and he wouldn't kill himself and she wouldn't kill herself and they could live happily ever after. But no matter how many times she raised her hand, the teacher didn't call on her, not even when she flapped her arm wildly in the air.
It was at lunchtime that she realized what was going on. She was looking for a place to sit, an empty table. As she looked around the crowded, noisy cafeteria, she realized that she had accidentally paused right next to her own special table where Britney and Sophie and her other self were gathered. She was close enough to touch, but nobody insulted her, not even Amanda herself. That was when she knew she had become invisible.
She hurried out of the cafeteria to go to the restroom and confirm this in a mirror. How strange it felt, to be looking at yourself and seeing nothing. And how long would it last?
She left the restroom and ambled down the corridor. It was kind of cool, to stroll right in front of a hall monitor and not be asked to show a pass. She could walk right out of the building and no one would stop her. But where could she go? In a way, it was too bad that she wasn't a gangster like Jenna. She could do a lot of shoplifting in this condition.
She decided to stop at the library and pick out some books. But on the way there, she passed the principal's office. The door was slightly ajar, and she heard Madame talking to Mr. Jackson. She sounded upset, and Amanda paused to listen.
"I don't like this arrangement at all, Mr. Jackson. We have discussions of a highly personal nature in that class. My students will not be comfortable talking in front of a total stranger."