Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cleveland Indians T-shirt and jeans with grass stains on the knees. I had on a shirt with a Superman symbol in the center, but my jeans were crisp and clean. We were looking directly at the camera, smiling like we knew a secret but wouldn’t ever tell it. Not to anyone.
    I looked at that picture for a while, studying it for clues, but those boys—I could hardly remember them. And as I turned to pages farther in, I started to feel like I was looking at pieces of someone else’s life altogether.
    A photo from when I’d gone to homecoming with Caitlyn Hornbeck, who was doing a favor for her older sister, who was dating Toby at the time: the four of us all lined up on the front porch in dark suits and pretty dresses. I wasn’t really interested in Caitlyn but felt like I couldn’t refuse when Toby had already arranged things. “You need to get out more, son,” he’d said, slapping my back and smiling like he’d just given me an amazing present. “Caitlyn’s hot. Don’t mess this up.”
    I was already messed up, though. I just didn’t know how, exactly. And while Caitlyn really was hot, I felt this invisible wall between us. It was like I could see her and she could see me, but we couldn’t hear each other, could just see each other’s mouths moving in an effort to connect. We spent the night smiling politely at each other through this glass barrier that felt like it had sprung up right behind my eyes. Like I was trapped inside myself, and the me who danced awkwardly with her on the floor was this stand-in, making dumb jokes while I beat against the glass wall, beat against it with my fists and then my head, until my head really did begin to hurt, to throb hard, and I sat down at our table and rubbed my temples, started to rock and rock away the pain, until Toby pulled me up and helped me out to the car to drive me home, a confirmed mess-up.
    A blue ribbon I’d won in tenth grade for a steer my dad had made me raise: “It’ll do you good to learn how to look after something other than yourself,” he’d said, after signing me up for 4-H without asking. As I stared at that ribbon now, I thought about how wrong he was. I didn’t need to look after something else. I needed to look after myself, I realized.
    A couple of pictures of Toby and me at his graduation party two years earlier: my dad standing between us, his big arms curling around our shoulders, holding us tight. It was my mom behind the camera that day, instructing us to stand closer.
Act like a family,
she’d said jokingly, and we’d followed her directions like good performers.
    Here was all this evidence of my existence spread out before me, but none of it felt like it was mine. None of it felt like it said anything real or true about me. None of it felt like I had made the choices that led to those images. If I searched Google for solid proof of my life, it would probably provide even less than it had for Jarrod. We were just a couple of nobodies.
    The longer I tried to sort through things, the more my head began to pulse. At first it had just been this dull thud in the background, so I didn’t notice it right away. But after I’d spent an hour scouring Google and looking through old photos like they might hold the answer to a question I didn’t even know how to ask, the dull thud transformed, and suddenly bright white lights began to burst behind my eyes like fireworks, sending a hot blade of pain down the middle of my skull.
    I could barely stand up whenever I got like this, which hadn’t been very often of late, but I managed to make my way from my desk over to my bed, where I curled up in the fetal position and rocked myself back and forth with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, my eyes closed tight, my hands balled into fists.
    This was an ordinary migraine, according to my doctor, who prescribed meds that didn’t seem to help. The way these seemed to always happen was, I’d be doing something ordinary, like studying or—like I’d