Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF Page A

going on about their work frustrations, my mom said, “Aidan had something interesting happen today, didn’t you?”
    I looked up at her, sitting directly across the table from me, and felt a wave of heat spread across my face. They had all stopped eating and were now staring my way, waiting to hear me elaborate on my mom’s declaration. Eventually I said, “What are you talking about?” before I looked down to press the tines of my fork into my baked potato like it was a very important thing that needed to be done at that exact moment.
    “Jarrod, of course,” my mom said. “Jarrod Doyle is back in town, isn’t he?”
    “Little Jarrod Doyle?” my dad said, turning back to cut another piece of steak. His knife sawed through the meat and squeaked against the bottom of the plate. “Haven’t heard that name in a while, have we? His poor mother,” he added, shaking his head. That was what my dad would always say and always do when Jarrod’s mom came up in conversation.
    “She’s doing better, John,” my mom said, a little exasperated, as if she was tired of constantly having to remind him. “She’s got herself cleaned up. She’s been waiting tables over at Times Square Café for a while now. Jarrod’s come home to stay with her for senior year.”
    “Wasn’t he living with his dad up in Cleveland?” Toby asked.
Of course,
I thought. Of course Toby would remember this, while I—apparently Jarrod’s best friend—had forgotten it.
    My dad nodded. “Yeah, Josh took a job up there after he and Libby split.”
    “Well, Jarrod’s back,” my mom said, nodding once, like that settled something. “So I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more of him, if he and Aidan turn out to be good friends like they used to be.”
    I sat there with my mouth hanging open, stunned that my mom already knew. But something like that wasn’t unusual for her, really. My mom often knew things before other people. I mean,
really
knew things. Knew things in a way no person should be able to. Every once in a while, she’d wake in the morning and tell us she’d had a dream that she knew was going to come true, and sometimes it did. At other times, she’d stop whatever she was doing to look out a window or to stare down at the floor with lines of concentration etched into her face, and after a moment she’d look up to say, “John, play the lottery tomorrow.” Which my dad would do, and he might win a thousand dollars. At times like that we joked that my mom was psychic, but she’d always shake her head and say, “All those words people use to label each other are silly. Besides, psychics are fakes. I’m just a lucky one. That’s all.”
    But to sit there and hear her tell everyone about my day when I hadn’t told her a thing about it?
Psychic,
I thought.
She has to be psychic.
    “How did you know that?” I asked.
    She looked up from her plate, her face blank as a sheet of paper, and said, “Jarrod’s mom called, honey. An hour ago, while you were out doing chores. She said she hoped you and he could spend some time together. He’ll be needing friends here again, naturally.”
    I nearly sighed with relief to hear a rational explanation. And then I immediately started to feel stupid for being so paranoid. But it wasn’t as if my day had been completely ordinary in the first place. “Yeah,” I said now, nodding, trying to resume a normal tone. “I saw him today. Gave him a ride home, actually.”
    And that was when my mom laid her last card on the table.
    “Oh really?” she said. “Well, why didn’t you mention that earlier when I asked how your day went?”
    She pinned me with her gaze, and I felt like I was shrinking. Right then and there, I turned into a little kid with my chin barely making it over the lip of the dinner table and my legs swinging as they dangled from the chair.
    Weirder than the shrinking feeling, though, was how the room seemed to dim around me in that moment, and how, in the center of the