“It means that one second he’s telling me that he can’t see me anymore, and the next he’s outrunning my car and begging me to come back. Then ten minutes later, he’s dumping me again.”
“Last night?” Helen guessed.
“Then, just as I was storming off, he kissed me.” She sighed and clenched her fists in exasperation. “Jason keeps doing this to me. I think it’s making me a little crazy.”
Claire dismissed her confused thoughts with a wave of her hand, grabbed Helen by the shoulder, and started nudging her over to the hand dryer. She pressed the button on the hand dryer and made Helen lean her head over the nozzle, drowning out Helen’s attempt to ask more questions about Jason. Helen took the hint that Claire didn’t want to talk about it and let her angry friend “style” her hair.
The result was a crazy, teased bouffant that Claire insisted on coating with gold-sparkle hairspray. Helen usually would have said no to all that glitter, but she had to admit it kind of worked with the costume. And besides, it was Halloween.
There were tons of people at school that day wearing even more ostentatious getups. Helen had never seen so many people in costume before. The energy in the air bordered on recklessness. Kids were actually bouncing off the walls, and teachers were letting them.
“Is that Parkour?” Helen asked Claire as one sophomore ran up a wall and did a backflip off it.
“Yeah,” Claire replied uneasily. “Um . . . isn’t anyone going to stop him?”
“Guess not,” Helen said, and the two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. What did they care? They had a Hergie hall pass. They were freaking bulletproof.
By the time they were done retouching this and adding another layer of glitter to that, going to and from the prop room, their lockers, and the soda machine as they came up with more and more excuses to wander the halls, it was almost lunchtime. Hours later, they were sauntering past Miss Bee’s social studies class in their kick-ass costumes when the bell rang. All the AP kids poured out of what would have been Claire’s class if she had bothered to show up.
“Whoops. I guess we’re late,” Claire said with a cheeky grin.
Helen was in midlaugh when she felt someone grip her upper arm tightly and pull her back. The air around her blurred and refracted, like she had been shrunk and put inside a diamond. When her pupils adjusted, she saw that she was on the other side of the hallway, and Lucas was using his body to barricade her up against a locker.
“Where have you been?” he asked in a low voice, close to her ear. “Don’t move or they’ll be able to see us. Stay very still and tell me what happened to you this morning.”
“This morning?” Helen repeated, stunned.
“Matt said you looked like you’d been attacked. Then you and Claire just disappeared for the rest of the day. School’s almost over. We’ve been worried sick.”
“I had to shower and change. We lost track of time.” Her excuse sounded lame, even to herself. She had no idea why neither she nor Claire had thought to go back to class.
She glanced over Lucas’s shoulder, trying to figure out what was going on, and saw a scared look on Jason’s face. He took Claire’s hand and led her down the hallway, pulling her close to him. No one seemed to pay any attention to Helen and Lucas at all. They were standing so close—literally on top of each other—but Matt walked right by them like he hadn’t noticed, and so did Ariadne. Something was wrong. There was no way Ariadne could look at Helen and Lucas pressed up against each other and not shoot them a disgusted look.
“What’s going on?” Helen whispered.
“I’m bending the light so no one can see us,” Lucas said softly.
“We’re invisible right now?” Helen breathed.
“Yes.”
A dozen confusing moments finally clicked in her head. Helen’s blurred vision, the uncanny sense of another presence in the room, Lucas’s disappearances, and how he could just suddenly come out of nowhere—it was because he had been there all along.
“You’re my invisible sun, aren’t you?”
She felt his stomach, pressed tightly up against hers, tense in a silent, startled laugh. She saw his lips move soundlessly around the words “invisible sun.” She forced her gaze away from his mouth to meet his eyes.
“Lucas,” Helen chastised gently. “You really scared me. First I thought there was something wrong with my vision, and then I thought I was going insane.”
“I’m sorry. I knew I was freaking you out and I tried to stop, but I couldn’t,” he admitted, embarrassed.
“Why not?”
“Look, just because I pushed you away from me, that doesn’t mean I can stay away from you,” he said, laughing at himself a little. “It started with me learning how to bend light, but it’s turned into something else now. Something I never thought I could do.” He broke away with a pained look on his face. “I learned how to become invisible so I could stay close to you and let you move on with your life at the same time.”
“Have you always been there?” Helen asked in a worried voice, thinking about a thousand private things he could have witnessed.
“Of course not. I miss you, but I’m not a pervert,” he said, looking away and blushing a little. “You’ve always known when I’ve been there, Helen. Unlike everyone else, you can still sense my presence when I’m invisible. No one knows I can do this, except for you.”