real. You walk into a room where you are not, and you hear what people say, unguardedly; you watch how they move when they aren’t with you. You see them without their masks—or in their various masks, because suddenly you can see them anywhere. It may be painful to learn what happens when you’re behind the arras; but then, please God, you know.
All these years, I was wrong, you see. Most people around me, too. And especially now that I’ve learned that I really am invisible, I need to stop wanting to fly. I want to stop needing to fly. I want it all to do over again; but also I don’t. I want to make my nothingness count. Don’t think it’s impossible.
2
It all started with the boy. With Reza. Even when I saw him last—for the last time ever—this summer, when he was and had been for years no longer the same, almost a young man, with the illogical proportions, the long nose, the pimples and cracking voice of incipient adulthood, I still saw in him the perfection that was. He glows in my mind’s eye, eight years old and a canonical boy, a child from a fairy tale.
He walked into my classroom late, on the first day of school, grave and uncertain, his gray eyes wide, their millipedic lashes aflutter in spite of his visible effort to control them, not to blink, and above all not to cry. All the other children—most of whom I knew from the schoolyard the year before, knew by name even—had come early and prepared, with book bags and packed lunches and a parent waving from the doorway, some with their mother’s lipstick still pink upon their cheeks; and they’d found their desks and we’d introduced ourselves and announced a single salient fact about our summers (the twins Chastity and Ebullience had spent two months with their grandma in Jamaica; she kept chickens—this was one fact per child; Mark T. had built a go-kart and raced it at the park; Shi-shi’s family had adopted an eight-year-old beagle named Superior from the pound [“he’s the same age as me,” she said proudly]; and so on), and we were beginning to establish our classroom rules (“No farting,” shouted Noah from the cluster of tables by the window, provoking universal hoots and giggles) when the door opened and Reza walked in.
I knew who he must be: everybody else on my roster was already there. He hesitated. He put his feet, in their prim closed-toed sandals, very carefully one in front of the other, as if he were walking on a balance beam. He didn’t look like the other children—not because of his olive skin, his fierce little eyebrows, the set of his lip, but because his clothes were so tidy, so formal and foreign. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with blue and white checks, and a pair of long navy linen Bermudas, pressed by an invisible hand. He wore socks with his sandals. He carried no bag.
“Reza Shahid, yes?”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody”—I spun him by the shoulders to face the class—“this is our last new student. Reza Shahid. Welcome.”
Everyone called “Welcome, Reza,” loudly, and even from behind I could see him trying not to flinch: his scalp retracted up his head and the tops of his ears wiggled. Already in that moment, I loved his nape, the carefully marshaled black curls lapping their uneven shoreline along the smooth, frail promontory of his neck.
Because I knew him, you see. I hadn’t known he was Reza, had never suspected he would be mine, a pupil in 3E; but the week before I’d seen him, had stared and been stared at, had even exchanged a laugh with him, in the supermarket. I’d been struggling with my bags at the checkout—the handle of one had broken, and I was trying to pick it up from beneath, while grasping the rest of my groceries in the other hand; and succeeded only in spilling my apples out across the floor. Bright red, they dispersed underfoot as far as the café area by the window. I scuttled after them, hunched to the ground, leaving my two bags and my purse sprawled in the middle of the aisle to the door. I was on my knees to retrieve the last stray from beneath a table, my left arm pressing four bruised apples clumsily to my breast, when a single, illuminating burst of laughter made me look up. Over the back of the neighboring