Free Invisible Girl by Mary Hanlon Stone

as if he’s hungry, just as if eating were something interesting to do while he has a conversation. I wish I could blink and he would be my father, Carson Drew, and we could be with Chief McGinnis from the River Heights Police force, who would shake his head and say, kind of marveling at me, “Stephanie, just how did you determine the painting was a forgery?”
    An elbow jabs me in the ribs. “Can you believe how he’s eating?” Annie hisses. “He’s such a pig.”
    I look over in the direction where she’s staring. Her brother Patrick is shoving a huge bite of chicken into a mouth already brimming with mashed potatoes. Annie takes a tiny bite from the tip of her fork. “They are so gross,” she says furiously. “Don’t you dare tell anyone how they eat.”
    I feel a blast of rage. This is all she has to be horrified about? This is her dark secret? Jealousy claws at my chest. I want her life so badly I could tear her face off with my bare hands and plaster my own over her network of blood and veins if I thought it would be a successful way for us to trade places.
    At the other end of the table by Aunt Sarah, Megan spills her milk. Subconsciously, I brace myself for hollering and blows. Megan starts to cry as the milk trickles down her leg and Aunt Sarah only says, “Shush, honey, it’s okay. It just scared you.”
    Carmen comes and cleans up the mess. Immediately, a new milk is set in front of Megan, who still sniffles like a victim. I hate Megan all over again, and so I look over at Michael Jr. and try to hear what he’s saying to Daniel. I pick up the words unbe-LIEV-ably hot.
    Aunt Sarah doesn’t hear this because she’s too busy telling Megan how proud of her she is for holding her new milk like a good girl. The expression hasn’t escaped Annie though, who sets her eyes upon her brothers like lasers and demands, “Who? Who is?”
    Daniel says, “None of your beeswax.”
    Patrick, with more mashed potatoes in his mouth, says to his brother in complete wonder, “You met her?”
    Now everyone’s focusing on their conversation. Annie says scornfully, “Who, some stupid actress?”
    Michael Jr. now addresses the whole table but mostly his father. “New family, bought the Taylors’ house. Just moved here from Georgia. Some kind of crazy Arab last name—”
    “Michael.” Aunt Sarah flashes him an angry teacher look. Michael Jr. ignores her. “I met their daughter at the club today. James Mattson got them a guest pass. He wants to sponsor them as members—”
    “Really,” Aunt Sarah says, no longer the angry teacher, but a club member excited to be the bearer of fresh gossip for her girlfriends.
    “Oh, I heard about them,” Uncle Michael cuts in. “The father’s supposed to be some sort of genius in chemistry—all the pharmaceuticals were fighting over him.”
    Michael Jr. doesn’t seem the least bit interested in the genius father. He leans over to Patrick and whistles softly. “What’s truly a crime is, the daughter is only fourteen.”
    “Get out,” Patrick says. “May the Lord strike me dead. Or at least blind.”
    Daniel punches him in the arm and they do a mini-wrestle at the table. I’m distracted for a moment until I realize that Annie is tensing beside me. “Who is she?” she says with a huff of sheer boredom, but I recognize the tone. It’s the same one she uses when anyone at the pool admires a model in a magazine. She asks to see the picture as if she couldn’t care less, then she scrutinizes it with her breath coming out her nose in harsh, tiny puffs. When she finds what she’s looking for, something wrong with the model, like too-thin lips or too wide of a forehead, she shouts out her discovery and makes everyone agree. On the one occasion where she couldn’t find anything wrong, she tossed the magazine back at Emily and said, “Jesus, do you realize how much makeup they put on these girls? She’d probably look like hell if you just ran into her shopping or