Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF

table, a candle suddenly appeared, its flame dancing while my mom leaned toward it, staring into its light as if she were hypnotized by its flickering. And then, where my dad and Toby had just been sitting, there was nothing but their empty high-backed chairs.
    I blinked several times, and finally the room came back into focus: the candle disappeared completely, and then my family was back again, Dad and Toby still waiting for me to answer my mom’s question. Why hadn’t I told her about Jarrod Doyle? their befuddled faces asked.
    “I guess,” I said, “I guess I forgot to mention it.”
    “How do you forget something like an old friend coming back out of the blue, Aidan?” my dad said. He squinted as he shook his head, his lips twisting in this way that made me feel like he thought I was probably the stupidest person in the world. That look was the same one his own dad wore in the photo hanging on the wall over in the living room.
    “I guess I don’t have a good memory,” I said, like Jarrod had told me earlier.
    “Well,” my mom said, “that can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you view things.”
    And after that, thankfully, she let the subject go.

    I spent the rest of the night up in my room, searching the Internet on my laptop for anything I could find on Jarrod Doyle. In the end, it was no good. Jarrod was almost completely absent from the online world. No Facebook or Twitter profiles. No blog. Not even an old trail of messages on some forgotten discussion board. I found just one lousy news article from the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
reporting the score of a game Jarrod had won for his high school the year before. He’d pitched a no-hitter, and the writer speculated that Jarrod would be college baseball draft material when he was a senior. Were things really so bad at his dad’s, I wondered, that he’d give up all that promise just to move back to Temperance and live with his mom? It didn’t make sense to me.
    When I hit a dead end online, I went to my bookshelf and looked through an album my mom had started for me years earlier. It held photos and documents from my life inside it. Toby had one too. And there was also the very, very thin memory album that lived on the bookshelf in my mom and dad’s room, the one that belonged to our older brother, Seth, who had died from a seizure when he was just five, long before Toby and I were ever thought of, back in the 1980s. Seth had a photo in the living room too, hanging across from the picture of my suicidal grandfather. In his photo, Seth has this real little-kid face, soft and round, with green eyes like my mom and I have. My parents barely ever spoke his name aloud, and whenever they did, tears would spill from my mom’s eyes like it was just yesterday she’d lost him.
    I opened the album with my name on it for the first time in what had to have been years. Inside was my birth certificate, an envelope that held one curly lock of dark hair from my first trip to a barber, and photos of me at different ages. In the margins of the pages, my mom had scribbled little notes with a fine black marker.
    Aidan at five
was a photo of me at my birthday party at a kid’s pizza place in the mall out in Niles, surrounded by classmates I still knew because we all walked the same high school hallways. Which made me pause and wonder when, exactly, we’d stopped hanging out, because in the picture it looked like we were all having a good time together.
    Aidan at eight
showed me playing catch with my dad, probably for the first and last time, since it was evident early on that sports and I weren’t really going to happen.
    Aidan at ten
showed me swinging on a swing set in the park with Jarrod Doyle.
    I stopped on that page and slipped the photo out of the binder, brought it closer, smiling as I inspected the image. There we were, after all: two ten-year-olds with our hands gripped around the rusty orange chain links of the swings we sat on. Jarrod was wearing a