The Invisible Girl
Laura Ruby

For Anne, who has kittens in her pockets And for Gretchen, the original Answer Hand

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

The Professor Remembers

Chapter 1 The Girl Who Wasn’t There

Chapter 2 Blue Foot, Blue Foot

Chapter 3 The Chickens of Hope House

Chapter 4 Bugged

Chapter 5 Attack of the Umbrella Man

Chapter 6 Mrs Terwiliger’s Monkeys

Chapter 7 What Not to Wear

Chapter 8 Sweetcheeks: A History

Chapter 9 Outsides and Insides

Chapter 10 Two Little Mice

Chapter 11 Flyboy

Chapter 12 The Richest Man in the Universe

Chapter 13 Turkey Burger

Chapter 14 The Queen Said “Ouch”

Chapter 15 The Punk Invasion

Chapter 16 The Face in the Mirror

Chapter 17 Never Trust a Monkey

Chapter 18 Run

Chapter 19 What’s It To You? Has His Say

Chapter 20 Ups and Downs

Chapter 21 The Black Box

Chapter 22 The Tower

Chapter 23 Supa Dupa Fly

Chapter 24 The Big Fat Hairy Fib

Chapter 25 Bugbears and Bugaboos

Chapter 26 Sweetcheeks Spills

Chapter 27 Unzipped

Chapter 28 Golden

Ha!

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE CHAPTER BEFORE THE FIRST
The Professor Remembers

IN A VAST AND SPARKLING city, a city at the centre of the universe, one little man remembered something big.

He was very old, this little man, his full name forgotten over the years. He called himself The Professor. His specialities were numerous and included psychology, criminology, mathematics, history, aerodynamics, zoology and gardening. He also collected beer cans.

Other than the delivery boy who left his groceries at the back door, The Professor hadn’t seen anyone in at least ten years. It was just as well, since a hair-growing experiment had left him with a head full of long green grass. Also, he didn’t like clothing, so he wore ladies’ snap-front housedresses and rubber flip-flops with white socks. He spent much of his time fiddling in his workshop, feeding the many kittens that popped out of his pockets and looking things up on eBay.

Today he stood in front of his blackboard—which was covered with mathematical equations—tugging at a dandelion that had poked up through the lawn on his scalp. Suddenly, his eyes widened. He scrawled a few more equations. Yes! He saw it. Right there, in his many calculations.

A child.

He stared at the figures dancing across the board, his forehead creased with annoyance. How on earth he could have forgotten that such a thing, such a person, existed, was beyond him. But The Professor simply didn’t like people. Not their company, not their conversation, nada. Anything having to do with people made the roots of his teeth pulse with irritation. And here on his blackboard was proof that a very particular sort of person had been born into a cruel and stupid world filled with cruel and stupid people.

Frankly, The Professor wanted nothing to do with any of them.

But facts are facts and The Professor liked to keep his straight. Shaking his head at himself, he sat down at his lab table, pulled his notebook from underneath a large tabby cat and made a few notes. “Approx. once every century or so,” he wrote. “Wall. Usually, but not always, female.”

After scribbling these notes, The Professor smoothed out a rumpled map. “One lived here,” he muttered to himself, putting a dot on the map, “another here. This one was born there and moved here.” When he finished plotting points, he connected the dots, then took out a protractor to measure the angles between. Lost in thought, he tapped his teeth with his pencil. Something wasn’t quite adding up. Where could this girl be?

After working for two frustrating hours, he walked over to a filing cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled from it what looked like a human hand mounted upright on a black marble stand. The Answer Hand. He did not like to consult The Answer Hand and very rarely did. The Hand, being a hand, could not speak and was therefore difficult to comprehend. (It knew the sign language alphabet but had to spell everything out. And then it talked in circles.) The Professor could not deny, however, that The Answer Hand often had the answers to perplexing questions, which was exactly why The Professor had purchased it (on eBay of course, from some guy in Okinawa).

He put the mounted Hand on top of the table, pointed at the equations on the blackboard and then to the map. “Where?” he asked.

The Answer Hand’s fingers drummed thoughtfully on its marble base. After a few moments, The Hand began rambling about a number of irrelevant topics: the average rainfall in Borneo, the merits of California wine, the fat content of hot dogs.

“Focus!” barked The Professor, pointing again at the blackboard.

Insulted, The Answer Hand made a waving gesture at the map. When The Professor still didn’t understand, The Hand bent at the wrist and finger and crawled across the table, dragging its heavy base behind it. It grabbed the pencil from The Professor, scrawled a star on the map and gave the pencil back.

There, that’s where, The Hand signed. Happy now?

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” grumbled The Professor sarcastically. He had the distinct feeling that this recent discovery was only going to cause him trouble. Plus there was the fact that one of his cats, Laverna—strong willed, even for a cat—had somehow escaped the safety of his apartment and, despite the flyers he had paid a company to hang around the city, no one had called. In his book, wandering girls and wayward cats added up to a whole lot of unhappiness.

Someone knocked on the door. The Professor scowled, as there hadn’t been a knock on the door since, well, the last time there was a knock, possibly months before, years even. The Professor ignored it.

The knock came again, louder. “I only take deliveries Tuesdays and Sundays. Go away,” grumbled The Professor. “Go, go, go.”

There was a crash as somebody kicked in the door, splintering the jamb. The Professor, always peeved when he was disturbed, was especially rankled. He liked the door the way it was.

Two men strolled down the steps leading to The Professor’s rooms. One was handsome, with thick gold hair and a rosy complexion. The other was impossibly tall and dark, a vicious and terrible scar like a huge zipper running diagonally across his face. Both looked familiar, but The Professor couldn’t remember where he’d seen them before. A book? A newspaper? And there was something odd about the way the scarred man moved. Not walking so much as drifting or floating.

“Professor,” said the handsome one cheerfully. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

They were, now that he’d had a few moments to consider it, rather intimidating. “I have important work to do,” said The Professor, sounding not the least bit frightened, though his knobby knees had gone as weak as egg noodles.

The handsome man stared pointedly at his head. “I see that you have some dandelion issues.” He patted the pockets of his overcoat. “I might have a Weedwhacker around here somewhere.”

“What do you want?” The Professor made more notes in his book: “Two scary men. Need weapon. Sharpen pencil?”

The handsome man hesitated, as if waiting for The Professor to say something else. “I’m being rude,” he said. “I’m Sy Grabowski.”

How do you do, Sweetcheeks? The Answer Hand signed politely.

The Professor dropped his pencil to the floor. “Sweetcheeks Grabowski?”

“In the flesh,” said the man, obviously proud that his reputation had preceded him. “This is my associate, Mr John.”

“Odd John,” said the Professor. Odd John grinned. The Professor could see his teeth were tiny, like a child’s. And he could also see that the scar was not like a zipper, it was a zipper. The silver tab on his forehead glittered when he moved. The Professor decided he would not like Mr John to unzip his face. No. That wouldn’t be pleasant; he was sure of it.

Sweetcheeks reached out and plucked the dandelion from the top of The Professor’s head, making the little man wince. “We’re a little curious.”

“Yes, you are. I mean, what about?” said The Professor. He was trying not to focus on The Answer Hand, which was busily erasing the star it had marked on the map and putting another star somewhere in Brooklyn.

“About your research, of course.” Sweetcheeks eyed the cats warily, his lip curling up with disgust. “I thought these animals were rare.”

“They are,” The Professor said and pulled a rambunctious marmalade kitten out of the pocket of his housedress. “Just not here.” He placed the kitten directly on top of the map, obscuring what had been drawn on it.

“Hmmm…” said Sweetcheeks, before turning the notebook around to read what The Professor had scribbled there. He smiled when he came to the last bit about the scary men.

“I do lots of research,” said The Professor. “What are you interested in? Zoology? Psychology?”

“Oh, a scrap of this, a shred of that,” Sweetcheeks said. “I’m especially interested in this curious little thing that happens once every century or more. This very odd thing. Do you know the thing I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” said The Professor, wondering how the man had found out about it. He sighed. “You want to know when it happened, I suppose.”

“I already know when it happened. I need to know where and I need to know who. And,” he said, turning the notebook back to face The Professor, “I need to know now.”

“Who? I don’t know who it is,” said The Professor. “How would I know that until she shows herself? Er, I mean, until she doesn’t show herself rather. As for where, I can’t be sure…”

“You can’t?” said Sweetcheeks. Using his thumb and forefinger, he lifted the tiny kitten from The Professor’s map. “Look on this map, John. A star!”

“Oh, that?” said The Professor. “You mustn’t pay attention to that. That map marks the sites of vampire nests around the city, that’s all.”

“Vampires? Tsk, tsk, Professor. I would think that you would be able to come up with something more creative than that.” Sweetcheeks took the map, folded it and slipped it into his breast pocket. “That takes care of where. Now I need to know who.”

“I’m telling you, that map is meaningless to you.”

“I think The Professor needs a little encouragement, don’t you, Mr John?”

Uh-oh, signed The Answer Hand.

“But…” stammered The Professor.

“Please,” said Sweetcheeks. “I know that you’re a genius. Everyone knows that. I also know that given the proper motivation, you’ll find a way to get the information I need, won’t he, Mr John?”

The big man smiled with his baby teeth and clasped the silver tab of his zipper, drawing downwards ever so slowly.

The Professor had been correct.

Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.

Chapter 1 The Girl Who Wasn’t There

GURL HAD NO IDEA WHAT made her do it. One minute she was surrounded by a sea of snoring girls, staring at the broken lock on the dirty window. The next minute she was racing through the city like an ostrich on fire.

She ran many blocks before she stopped, shocked at herself. She—Gurl the gutless, Gurl the helpless, Gurl the useless—had escaped from Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless, even if it was only for the night. In front of her, the city snaked out like an amusement park. Gurl drank in as much as she could: the glittering lights of the buildings, the laughter of the people floating by, the bleating horns of the taxis, the scent of car exhaust tinged with tomato sauce.

It was this last that drew her to the section of the city called Little Italy, to Luigi’s Restaurant. She loitered in front of it, catching her breath as she watched the diners inside sip wine and twirl spaghetti on to their forks. People-watching was her favourite thing to do and she was very good at it. It seemed to Gurl that everyone was either a watcher or a doer and the watchers were greatly outnumbered. However, there were benefits to watching. For example, inside Luigi’s a couple drifted from their table, forgetting a package of leftovers, which was then scooped up by the young waiter.

Gurl ran around the restaurant to the alley behind, crouched next to the garbage cans and waited for the waiter to come out with the evening’s trash. Someone kicked a can down a nearby sidewalk and its tinny clang echoed in the alley. “You wanna mess? You wanna mess?” she heard. “Yeah, boyee, let’s mess!” The voices got louder as a bunch of teenagers flew by the alleyway, throwing long shadows on the greasy pavement. Gurl smiled to herself. The noise was a part of the music of the city and she could listen to it all night long if she wanted.

She leaned her head back against the brick and looked up at the sky, plush and grey like a dome of fur, brightened by the lights from the skyscrapers and billboards. An occasional Wing darted high overhead, looping and weaving around the buildings, but it was nothing like daytime. In the daytime people hopped and bounced and flew all over the place, even if they could only get an inch or two off the ground. Just one more reason to enjoy the dark. Only a few showy Wings rather than thousands of them, thrilled with their own stupid tricks.

Airheads, the whole bunch. She was not jealous of them. Not one little bit.

The metal door of the restaurant opened and the young waiter hopped out, swinging two garbage bags. Even with the garbage bags, the waiter was trying to fly. He jumped straight up, but the weight of the bags and his obvious lack of talent ensured that his feet lifted no more than a yard from the ground. Gurl muffled a giggle with the back of her hand as the waiter jumped his way over to the Dumpster, looking very much like a giant, ungainly frog. He opened the Dumpster and tossed the trash bags inside. Then he turned and leaped into the air, this time clearing the top of the Dumpster before landing. Gurl was sure the waiter—only a few years older than Gurl herself—had hopes of being a great Wing, dreams of joining a Wing team or maybe competing in the citywide festival and taking home the Golden Eagle. She wondered when he would realize that his dream was just that, a dream. When he would see that most of his life would be spent scuttling closer to the earth.

The waiter dropped in a crouch, panting. He looked around, to the left and to the right. Gurl stiffened, keeping herself completely still behind the garbage cans that hid her. He squinted, staring at something. A mouse, running alongside the brick. The waiter jumped up again, crashing to the ground in front of the mouse. It gave a tiny squeal and ran the other way. The waiter did it again, jumping and crashing, terrifying the little animal, laughing as he did so. Gurl waited until he sprang up a third time before reaching out from her hiding place, snatching up the mouse and tucking it into her sleeve.

The waiter landed, his grin turning to a frown, wondering where his victim had gone. Then, shrugging, he veered around and went back into the restaurant, slamming the door behind him.

Gurl rested her hand on the pavement. The mouse crawled out from the safety of her sleeve and ran into the darkness. “Bye,” said Gurl, watching as it disappeared through a hole in the brick. She supposed she was lucky that the waiter hadn’t seen her, but then again, she was not the type of girl that people noticed—she was too thin, too pale, too quiet. Sometimes people looked right through her as if she weren’t there at all, their eyes sliding off her as if she were made of something too slippery to see. Nobody, nowhere. When she was little, it made her feel lonely. Now she only felt grateful.

She stretched and walked over to the Dumpster. After throwing open the lid, she dug around until she found what she was looking for: four foil-wrapped packages of leftovers. Ravioli, lasagne, salad and a huge hunk of gooey chocolate cake.

If only the other kids from Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless were here, watching, maybe they wouldn’t think so little of her. But they, like everyone else, believed flying was their ticket to fame and fortune, and thought Gurl was horribly afflicted, maybe even contagious. Mrs Terwiliger, the matron of Hope House, had taken her to a specialist once. First he thumped at her knees with a rubber mallet to check her reflexes. He had her breathe in and out very quickly, hyperventilating, to see if the added oxygen might lift her off the floor like a soap bubble. Then he strapped her into a white quilted jacket with huge feather wings and had her run around the office flapping her arms. Finally, he said: “Not everyone can, you know, and most don’t do it well. In any case, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” As a consolation, he gave Gurl a red and white beanie with a propeller on the top. Mrs Terwiliger told the other kids that people had different talents and they should celebrate them all. “Leadfoot!” the kids yelled as soon as Mrs Terwiliger left the room. “Freak!”

Gurl smiled bitterly to herself. If they were such big deals, why hadn’t they noticed the broken lock? Why hadn’t they thought to sneak out of Hope House at night? Why weren’t they having dinner at Luigi’s? No, this was hers and hers alone. “No man is an island,” Mrs Terwiliger had told her. “One must learn to get along.” But this sparkling city was an island and it got along fine, didn’t it?

Just as she plucked up a pocket of ravioli with her fingers, she heard a sound, one she had heard only on TV.

“Meow.”

She turned, sure that someone was playing a trick on her. But it was no trick. A cat, as plush and grey as the sky above, padded down the alleyway and sat a few feet from her.

Gurl dropped her ravioli, gaping. She’d seen pictures of cats in books and magazines, of course, but Gurl couldn’t imagine where this one came from. Perhaps it was lost? But how could it be? Nobody let a cat outside; they could get hurt or sick or worse. Plus, there was the matter of people’s regular pets: birds. If people saw a cat, especially without a leash, they’d call the police. What if it attacked an old lady’s budgie or a businessman’s parrot?

The cat regarded her with queer green eyes that glowed in the dark of the alley. “Who belongs to you?” Gurl murmured. Cats chose their owners rather than the other way round; everyone knew that. This cat surely had an owner, someone who liked exotic animals, someone who worked in a zoo maybe. Gurl glanced around at the buildings that rose along either side of the alley. There were lights in some of the windows, but Gurl saw no worried faces in them, heard no frantic calls.

“Meow,” the cat said and took a few steps closer.

“Hey,” said Gurl. “Are you hungry?” She looked at the food in the packages and nudged the one with the lasagne. The cat sniffed, then began to eat in big gulps.

“You are hungry, aren’t you?” Gurl said. “Well, you and me both.” Keeping her eyes on the cat, she reached out and grabbed the package containing cake. Gurl ate like the cat did, in huge greedy bites.

The cat finished everything, right down to the noodles. Then it did something totally unexpected. It walked over to Gurl, reached up with a grey paw and patted Gurl’s cheek, once, twice, three times. Gurl’s eyes opened wide. “No, no, no!” she said. “I can’t take care of you! I’m just an orphan.”

“Meow,” said the cat. It yawned, climbed into her lap and began to make an odd rumbling sound. She’s purring, thought Gurl, who had read about it but never experienced it.

Gurl stared down at the cat. What was she supposed to do now? Where would she keep it? What would she feed it? She shifted her weight and her arm brushed against the cat’s leg. So soft. Hesitantly, Gurl ran a gentle finger between the cat’s ears, the way she would pet a friendly bird. The cat closed its eyes and sighed, pressing its head into her palm.

Just then, the back door of the restaurant flew open and the cat sprang from Gurl’s lap. The waiter marched out the open door carrying another bag of garbage.

“Whoa!” he said. Gurl froze, wishing with all her being that she was nothing more than one of the bricks in the wall. A queer shiver went through her.

But the waiter didn’t even glance in her direction. With his foot, he prodded the opened packages of food. Then he saw the cat standing there, back arched and tail spiked. “What the heck? Where did you come from?”

“Meow,” the cat said.

“Meow is right,” said the waiter. “Here, kitty.”

Since she was so close to him, Gurl could see that his brown eyes were hard and shiny, his smile cold. But why wasn’t he looking at her? Why was he acting as if he couldn’t see her? She was sitting right in front of him, right out in the open! But maybe he was just ignoring her like everyone else. The thought made her angry and she reached out for the cat.

What was wrong with her hands?

She could see them, but just barely. It was as if she were wearing gloves exactly the colours and textures of the alley itself: the black of the pavement, the red of the brick, the pink and white of the graffiti. And when she moved them, they changed to match the background. She touched her face, feeling the heat of her skin beneath her fingertips. If her hands looked like this, what did her face look like?

The waiter bent towards the cat. “Come on now,” he said. “I know someone who’d pay a lot of money to get a load of you.” He lunged for the cat, grabbing it by its front paws. The cat howled. “Shut up, you stupid thing,” the waiter said. The animal hissed, clawing with its back legs.

“Ow!” the waiter yelled, but didn’t let go. Carrying the wildly gyrating cat, he took one huge leap over to a garbage can on the other side of the alley and threw the cat inside. He quickly slammed the cover down and held it. The garbage can bucked and bounced, and the waiter kicked it. “Shut up!” he yelled.

Gurl was furious, but she didn’t know what to do. The waiter wasn’t big, but he was probably stronger than she was. And he could fly, even if he couldn’t do it that well. She unfolded her legs and saw they were exactly like her hands, nearly invisible. If he couldn’t see her, then…

The waiter kicked the garbage can again and the terrified mewls of the cat were too much for Gurl to bear. Though she had never done anything like it before, though she thought her heart would burst like a water balloon, she crept behind the waiter. Grabbing the waistband of his trousers, she yanked upward as hard as she could.

The waiter never flew higher than he did that moment and never would again. Gurl popped the lid off the garbage can. The cat vaulted into her arms, instantly becoming the colour of the air, the colour of nothing. The two of them, Gurl and cat, raced from the alley, just as if they had wings of their own.

Chapter 2 Blue Foot, Blue Foot

RUNNING, RUNNING. SHE WAS RUNNING, the cat curled in her arms, running so hard that her lungs hurt, running until she didn’t feel the pavement beneath her feet any more, until the ground below dropped away and she rose up into the air…

Gurl sat up in bed, clutching her chest. A dream. But not all of it. Not Luigi’s chocolate cake, which she could still smell on her fingertips. Not the cat, who slept across her feet under the threadbare blanket. But what about the rest?

She looked at her hands. They were thin and pale, but they were there, plainly visible. Gurl pulled the covers off her legs. Hands, check. Legs, check. She pulled the covers back up and shivered. The clock on the wall read 5.36am and pinkish sunlight marbled the iron sky outside the windows. The alley had been so much darker. Maybe that was why her hands had looked so strange, why the waiter hadn’t seen her. She had been hidden in dark shadows, odd shadows that mottled her skin.

Yes, she thought. That had to be it.

The cat mewled softly from beneath the blankets and crawled up to sit at Gurl’s side. She wasn’t much to look at. Cats in books had impish black faces and blue eyes, or smushed noses and fur the colour of butterscotch. With a wide, plain face and fur the grey of morning fog, this cat seemed unremarkable in comparison. Except for her eyes, the acid-green eyes that blinked so slowly as Gurl scratched one ear, then the other. The cat rolled over and exposed a white, tufted belly. She put her forepaws in the air and flexed them, clutching at something only she could see.

Gurl scratched the cat’s belly and a strange feeling came over her, a sleepiness, a peacefulness. A musical sort of purring filled Gurl’s ears, erasing the frown that had pulled at her lips. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around, she thought, does it make a sound? If a tree falls…if a tree falls…if a tree falls…

If anyone in the dorm had awakened, they would have thought Gurl had gone into a trance. Time passed, syrup slow, as Gurl scratched and scratched and scratched. Finally, the cat turned her little face to the clock and mewled softly. Gurl shook herself awake and checked the time: 5.57! In three minutes the alarm would ring and all the kids would wake up. What was she going to do with the cat? She couldn’t let anyone see it or else they would take it. Gurl was not very brave, not as brave as she wanted to be, but she was responsible. And if the cat had really chosen her, well then, the cat was Gurl’s responsibility.

Gurl climbed from her bed and pulled a box from underneath it, a box with a couple of old sweaters in the bottom. She reached into her bed, lifted the sleepy animal and laid it gently in the box. The cat peered at Gurl. “I’m sorry,” whispered Gurl, “but I can’t let anyone see you. Can you stay in this box until I can come back?”

The cat circled the box, kneading the sweaters. After curling up in a ball, she reached out with a white paw and rested it on top of Gurl’s hand. “You understand, don’t you?” Gurl breathed. Gurl knew that was a silly thing to think, that the cat was just an animal and couldn’t possibly understand what Gurl was saying. But cats were rare and special, Gurl told herself. Maybe the cat did understand. Gurl gave the cat one last pat and then she closed the box again, hoping that cats liked small spaces and sleeping for hours.

She didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it because soon the alarm rang and the kids climbed from their beds. As usual, no one greeted Gurl, no one asked her if she wanted to sit with them at breakfast. She ate as she always did, in the very back corner of the cafeteria, watching as all the others laughed and talked and shoved one another. It was just as well. Gurl had nothing to say to them anyway. A piece of toast fell lard-side down in front of her, but she ignored it.

“What’s up, Leadfoot?” said a voice. Gurl didn’t have to look to know who it was: Digger.

“Nothing,” Gurl muttered. It was what she always said.

“What? I can’t hear you!” Digger bellowed, getting up from her own table to lumber over to Gurl’s. She was huge, bigger than most of the boys even, with a great square head like a block of wood. She wasn’t much of a flyer, but she didn’t need to be. Once a brick had come loose from the second storey of the dormitory building. It had fallen on Digger’s foot while she was playing killer ball in the yard. She’d turned and proceeded to kick the wall so hard that some of the other bricks came loose. “Nobody messes with me,” she said. “Not even the buildings.”

Digger was tough, the toughest actually. The only thing that wasn’t tough was the way she picked her nose: delicately, with the tip of her pinky extended like she was sipping tea from fine china.

Gurl pushed her eggs around her plate, wondering if Digger would flip them on the floor or in her lap. Not that it mattered, for the eggs smelled like sweaty socks stuffed with day-old fish and were the last things in the world Gurl wanted to eat.

Digger snatched the fork from her hand and smacked Gurl’s plate to the floor, the eggs pellets scattering. “I said, I can’t hear you! Speak, Freak!”

Gurl finally looked up into that big blockhead face. Digger’s expression was the same as the waiter’s had been: smug and triumphant. It was like she knew that Gurl was beaten already, doomed before she began. Gurl thought of what she had done to the waiter, and a tiny smile made her lips curl up at the corners.

Digger’s nostrils flared. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re pathetic. All you do is sit there like a lump and stare at everyone.” With her knuckles, Digger rapped painfully on Gurl’s skull. “Hello, Lump. Is anyone in there?”

For a moment, Gurl wished she could disappear. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Then what would Digger do?

But her hands and legs and the rest of her stayed exactly the way they were and even Digger grew bored. “Freak,” she muttered and went to find someone more interesting to torment.

A word about Hope House: there are places in the world where so many desperate people have lived and so many bad things have happened that the places themselves have become desperately bad. They’re damp and weird and smell like foot fungus. The windows are never clean and the lino curls up at the edges because it can’t stand the floor. Every corner is sprayed with cobwebs and quivering shadows. When you walk into these bad places, you can feel a headache brewing between your eyebrows, a churning in your gut, a cold prickle at the back of your neck. You feel sad and angry and helpless, all at the same time. These bad places seem to hate you, but they also seem to want to keep you there very, very much.

Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless was one of these places. But, as Gurl had learned in her history lessons, Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless had not always been called Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless. Back in the early 1800s, when it was first built, it was called The Asylum For The Poor, The Lazy and The Wretched, and its mission was “to teach idle, wild and disobedient children self-discipline of the body and soul”. After that the name was changed again, to The Home of the Friendless—“for unprotected children whose only crime is poverty”. And then for a while it was called The Institute of the Destitute, which offered orphans job training in such occupations as sheep shearing, basket weaving and flower arranging.

Despite the various name changes, the mission was generally the same: keep homeless kids out of trouble and try to teach them something useful. To that end, in literature class the orphans of Hope House were again composing business letters to rich people urging them to join the Hope House “Adopt-an-Orphan” programme, in which a donation of just $7.50 a day—only the price of a double latte!—would keep an orphan fed for a year. In art they made Hope House oven gloves and place mats, which were sold for $14.95 plus $5.99 shipping and handling on the orphanage website. In computer class they learned how to send emails to thousands of people at a time, with subject lines like “Don’t let hope die at Hope House!” or “The truest heart gives until it hurts!”

As always, Gurl finished her work quickly and then stared out of the window or watched the other students. Preoccupied by the fact that she might have disappeared like a phantom the night before, and by the cat that she hoped was still sleeping in a box underneath her bed, she didn’t notice the new boy until biology. Gurl was particularly bored in biology because they never learned about any animals except birds (with the occasional bat or flying squirrel thrown in). And while Gurl liked birds well enough, she hated it that everyone else worshipped them just because they could fly. Just once Gurl wanted to learn about a wolf or a salmon or a salamander or an ant. “An ant can lift ten times its own body weight,” Gurl had once timidly told her teacher, Miss Dimwiddie, hoping that maybe she might do a lesson on something else. Miss Dimwiddie had barked, “Birds eat ants for lunch.”

This morning Miss Dimwiddie began with the same question she always began with: “Who wants to tell me about the bumblebees?”

“Bumblebees!” echoed Fagin, Miss Dimwiddie’s parrot, who perched on Miss Dimwiddie’s shoulder.

Persnickety’s hand shot into the air. Since it was the only hand to shoot into the air, Miss Dimwiddie said, “Yes, Persnickety.”

“Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly,” Persnickety said, knotting her hands on the top of her desk. “Their bodies are too big and their wings are too small.”

“Yes, Persnickety, that’s absolutely right.”

“Absolutely right,” croaked Fagin.

“Now, children, I want you all to remember that. Bumblebees look as if they’d be too heavy to fly and yet scientists have discovered that they beat their wings in circles to create lift. Now, none of you look like you can fly either, but you must all be like the bee. You children can use the bumblebee to inspire you to great heights. All right?”

She smiled, waiting for the students to agree, but the room was silent. Miss Dimwiddie cleared her throat. “Well then. Today we’re going to talk about the blue-footed booby.”

“Blue-footed booby,” parroted Fagin.

The class sniggered and Miss Dimwiddie put her hands on her ample hips. “Does someone want to tell me what’s so funny?” Ruckus, always the first to cause a ruckus, shouted, “You said ‘booby’.”

“You’re the booby,” said Fagin.

Ruckus’s tiny black braids, sticking up from his head like caterpillars reaching for a leaf, shook. “Shut up, you dumb bird.”

Fagin flapped his wings. “Booby head. Worm head.”

Miss Dimwiddie continued as if she hadn’t heard. “I want you all to turn to page eighty-nine in your textbooks. You will see a photograph of the blue-footed booby. Note its distinctive powder-blue feet.”

“Powder-blue feet,” Fagin crowed.

“The blue-footed booby lives on the Galapagos Islands,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “The blue feet play an important part in their mating rituals.” Again she had to ignore a lot of snickering. “The male booby initiates the mating dance by raising one foot and then the other. Like this…” Miss Dimwiddie raised one foot then the other, delicately pointing her toes as they touched the ground. On her shoulder, Fagin did the same.

“See?” said Miss Dimwiddie. “Blue foot, blue foot. Blue foot, blue foot.”

The class bit their knuckles to stifle their laughter. Except for one person, who laughed out loud. Gurl turned to look. In the back of the room was a new boy that Gurl hadn’t noticed before. This was unusual, the not noticing, and because of it Gurl watched him all the more closely. He was broad-cheeked and broad-shouldered, with large, wide-set blue eyes that made him look a bit like a praying mantis. He noticed Gurl noticing him and he raised his eyebrows. She looked away, feeling her face grow hot. (She hated to be noticed noticing.)

Miss Dimwiddie stopped blue-footing about. “That’s enough!” she said sternly. “These are birds we are talking about and they deserve your respect. Birds can fly. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but none of you can fly as well as a bird, can you?” She cast her icy eyes around the room. “Can any of you fly as well as a bird? And isn’t that why we learn about birds, to learn about flying?”

Fagin squawked. “No feathers. No wings. No crackers for you.”

“There there, Fagin,” said Miss Dimwiddie, patting the bird on the head. “I’ll have you know that the blue-footed booby is one of the most spectacular hunters in the bird kingdom. These birds actually stop in mid-flight and drop into a headlong dive into the ocean from heights of eighty feet.”

The praying mantis boy snorted. “Nathan Johnson has flown higher than that and he isn’t a bird.”

Miss Dimwiddie narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Nathan Johnson,” said the boy. “He’s the Wing who won the Flyfest three years running. He can fly ten storeys in the air, go into a free fall and stop two feet before he hits the ground.”

“Really?” said Miss Dimwiddie. “How informative.”

“Ugly boy,” Fagin crowed. “Stupid boy.”

Miss Dimwiddie smiled. “You’re new. Have you gotten your name yet?”

“No,” said the boy. “But I like to call myself—”

Miss Dimwiddie cut him off. “So you admire Nathan Johnson?”

“Yeah,” said the boy. “Doesn’t everyone?”

The students started whispering, much to Miss Dimwiddie’s annoyance. “I admire birds,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “They are the true Wings.”

Mantis Boy scowled. “I still think Nathan Johnson is the best Wing we’ve ever had.”

“Let me guess,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “You’re going to be just like him one day.”

The boy’s scowl got even deeper. “So what if I am?”

“We’ll see about that,” Miss Dimwiddie told him. “At Wing practice you can show everyone at Hope House that you’re better than birds. I’m sure you’ll put on a spectacular show.” She clapped her hands together. “Now let’s turn to the next chapter. Can anyone tell me why crows like shiny objects so much?”

The boy crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Miss Dimwiddie as if he wanted to take a shiny object and thwack her in the head with it. Gurl wished he would, as it could keep them both from talking about birds and about flying. Gurl was so sick of hearing about flying. What was so great about it anyway? What was the point?

She looked down at her hands and tried to convince herself that she was more special because she couldn’t fly. Being a leadfoot made her watchful and patient. It had got her out of Hope House. It had got her a fabulous dinner. And, most importantly, it had got her the cat.

The cat!

After class, Gurl rushed back to the girls’ dorm. She got down on her knees and pulled the box out from under her bed—just enough so that she could see inside, but not far enough that any of the other girls could. The little cat was still there, curled in a tight ball. Gurl breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that the cat hadn’t disappeared.

No, you’re the one who disappears, she thought. But of course that couldn’t be true.

The cat rolled over and stretched, letting Gurl scratch its belly. She didn’t even know this cat and it wasn’t hers, but she already loved it more than she had ever loved anything else. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around, she thought, does it make a sound?

And then she thought: Yes. It purrs.

Chapter 3 The Chickens of Hope House

DAYS PASSED AND GURL WAS more and more convinced that though the cat was real, vanishing had been a trick of the light or of her imagination. Every morning, Gurl got up, put the little cat in the box under her bed and warned her to stay put. Remarkably, she did stay, sleeping all day only to wake up to the bits of food Gurl had saved from that night’s dinner. (For some reason, the cat never seemed to need a litterbox and never left a mess. Gurl was too grateful to think about it.) Every night, the little cat sprawled across Gurl’s feet, purring strongly enough that Gurl felt the vibrations all the way up into her heart. Though she felt guilty that the cat was trapped under the bed all day, Gurl told herself that it was only for a while and that eventually she would let the cat go.

Eventually.

Meanwhile, she daydreamed and people-watched through her classes, trying very hard not to be noticed—especially at Wingwork practice. There Coach Bob led the children in their flying exercises, walking back and forth between the rows of kids, his whistle bouncing up and down on his big round belly. “Crouch!” he shouted with his great trapdoor mouth. “Spring! Up!” He watched the kids attempt to get themselves into the air, then took his hat off and threw it to the ground. “Ruckus!” he said. “Do you call that a spring? I call that a wobble. Hogwash, when I told you to use your arms as levers, I meant use them as levers. Are you an orphan or an air traffic controller? And Blush! This is not a game! This is Wingwork! You kids will never be Wings with all this goofing around! Now, all of you, again!” He pointed at two kids who were jumping up and deliberately crashing into each other. “Lunchmeat and Dillydally, see me after practice!”

Gurl followed Coach Bob with a yardstick and a notepad. After the specialist had declared her hopelessly landlocked, Mrs Terwiliger and Coach Bob had excused her from Wingwork and given her a job: record the heights of everyone’s practice leaps. It wasn’t much of a job because the children of Hope House could fly about as well as chickens could, which is to say not very well at all.

Gurl stopped next to Ruckus and measured his next leap. Though he did everything that Coach told him to do—crouched as low as he could go, used his arms for levers—Gurl got a measurement of two feet. Ruckus always got a measurement of two feet.

Ruckus dropped to the ground. Beads of sweat gave him a frosty moustache that gleamed against his chocolate skin. “What was it?” he asked her, breathing hard.

“Two,” she said.

“It was more than two!”

“No, it was two.”

“It was at least three.” His squinty eyes darted left and right, and he dragged a hand through his crazy caterpillar hair.

Gurl sighed and wrote “2” on her notepad.

Ruckus did what he usually did: grabbed the notebook from her hand, tore off the top page and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing defiantly. After he swallowed, he said, “Who’d believe you? You can’t even get your toes off the ground.”

“Neither can you,” said Gurl, under her breath.

“Leadfoot!” Ruckus yelled.

“Ruckus, stop making such a ruckus!” said Coach Bob. “And Gurl…” he began, then trailed off. Coach Bob didn’t like to shout at her. Coach Bob felt bad for her. At least the other kids might fly one day.

She didn’t hope to fly. In her daydreams, no one could. The whole city was rooted as firmly as she was. She imagined a life for herself in her non-flying world, a nice life—not amazing, but nice. A girl who lives with her parents in a tidy brownstone walks to her after-school job as an ice-cream taster. She says the rum banana is good, but the huckleberry swirl needs more swirl. “You can never have enough swirl,” she tells Mr Eiscrememann, the manager of the ice-cream store. “You’re right,” Mr Eiscrememann says. “What a smart girl! What an observant girl! Here, have a sundae!”

Just then, Mrs Terwiliger, the matron of Hope House, flew out of the main building, her skirt so tight in the knees that she looked like an airborne eggwhisk. For a long terrible moment Gurl worried that the cat had been discovered in the box under her bed.

“Coach Bob? Is there trouble? I heard shouting from my office.” She noticed Gurl and smiled. “Oh, hello, Gurl. I didn’t see you standing there.”

Gurl frowned. Mrs Terwiliger had been saying that ever since Gurl could remember, but she’d never thought about it before.

“Gurl, I said ‘hello’.”

“Hello, Mrs Terwiliger,” Gurl said.

“That’s better,” said Mrs Terwiliger, while Coach Bob inspected the brim of his Wing cap. Mrs Terwiliger had been the matron of Hope House for more years than anyone could count. With her tight skirts, poofy blonde hair, drawn-on eyebrows and facelifts that stretched her toffee apple-red lips so wide that the corners nearly grazed her ears, nobody knew how old she was. Somewhere between forty and eighty went the guesses. It was she who started the tradition of naming the children who came to Hope House after their personal characteristics and temperaments. Thus, the baby boy who threw tantrums became Ruckus, the boy with the slick, ruddy skin became Lunchmeat, the boy who was full of excuses became Hogwash and the girl who couldn’t keep her fingers out of her nose became Digger. “It’s just like how the Indians used to name their children. Those Indians were so colourful! Running Bear, Clucking with Turkeys, Little Pee Pee.”

Gurl thought it was lousy to blame the poor Indians for the dumb stuff Mrs Terwiliger called the kids of Hope House. Gurl got her own name because Mrs Terwiliger kept losing her as a baby. “I would turn around and poof! You were gone! And I would say to myself: Self, where is that GURL? Where has that GURL gotten to? And then I’d open the linen closet, looking for some towels, and there you’d be. I suppose I should be grateful that you have no talent for flight. You would have just floated away and no one would have been the wiser. Like a little cloud. Hmmm…Little Cloud would have been a nice name too, wouldn’t it? No?”

Now Gurl wondered about her name, about getting lost all the time. Was it possible that what happened in the alley had happened before? And would it happen again?

Mrs Terwiliger lowered her voice. “How are the children doing today, Bob?” Each syllable uttered by Mrs Terwiliger was enunciated in the most exaggerated fashion, as if the world were populated entirely with lip-readers. “How are they flying?”

Coach Bob shoved the cap back on his head. “What do you think? It’s like they’ve got bowling balls stuffed in their underwear.”

“Oh, dear. I had hoped…” said Mrs Terwiliger. She always hoped that the kids would do better, maybe one day make their way on to a Wing team and make Hope House the talk of the town, but they never did. Gurl looked through the chainlink fence, out on to the street. The people buzzed by, on foot, on flycycles, on rocket boards, in cars, flitting off to wherever they had to be. Some wore business suits, others wore chains and nose rings, but most didn’t notice the kids of Hope House jumping, straining, failing. If they did happen to look, they frowned in concern and pity or giggled in amusement. Even the crows that gathered in the single tree on the grounds seemed to laugh at them: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Gurl wondered if that was why Mrs Terwiliger made them practise outside. She kept a metal donation box bolted to the gate, which was often stuffed to the brim with dollar bills. What, thought Gurl, did she spend all that money on? She certainly didn’t spend it on the kids at Hope House. The clothes were tattered, the shoes too small, the food inedible and the dorms freezing. The few times that they got to go out on field trips, Mrs Terwiliger took them to Times Square, gave them each a can full of Hope House pencils and told them to sell the pencils to passersby for a dollar each. She said that it was a character-building exercise.

“Hey!” bellowed a voice. “What are you looking at?”

Mrs Terwiliger, Coach Bob and Gurl turned, expecting to see Ruckus causing a ruckus again. But it wasn’t Ruckus; it was the nameless new boy. He was shouting at a woman who had stopped her flycycle long enough to tape some sort of notice to the front gate. “I said, what are you looking at?”

The woman, dressed in a neon-pink sweatshirt that fell off one shoulder, glanced behind her, as if she assumed he was talking to someone else.

“Yeah, I mean you!” shouted the boy. “What are you looking at?”

The woman held up a hand. “Are you talking to me? I don’t think you’re talking to me, ya little snot.”

Bug Boy laughed. “I think I am tawkin’ to ya,” he said, imitating her thick city accent.

Mrs Terwiliger egg-whisked over to the boy. “Stop that! Since when do we accost people who are walking down the street?” She pursed red lips. “Never, that’s when. Now apologise to the young lady.”

The boy crossed his arms. “She was staring. She was watching me fly.”

“Ya call that flying?” shouted the woman. “I seen better lift on a block of cement!” She got on her flycycle and took off.

“I’ll show you!” the boy yelled. He turned away from the woman and from Mrs Terwiliger. He crouched, then jumped. Gurl winced, seeing that he barely made it a foot off the ground. He tried again, his face twisted with the effort, and got about six inches off the ground. Then four. Then two. It seemed that the angrier he got, the heavier he got. Soon he looked as if someone had glued the bottoms of his sneakers to the pavement. The other kids, whom you might expect to make fun of the boy, said nothing. His failure reminded them of their own and who wanted to think about that?

Mrs Terwiliger put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think that’s about enough for today. We’ll try again tomorrow, Chicken.”

“What did you call me?”

Mrs Terwiliger sighed and brushed a bleached strand of hair from her thick, fake eyelashes. “You can’t fly. Neither can chickens. In ancient times the Indians who used to roam these lands liked to name—”

The boy cut her off. “Nobody calls me ‘Chicken’.” Redcheeked, his light brown hair lank with sweat, the boy shook free of her and shuffled from the tarmac, kicking rocks so hard that they rang against the chain-link fence.

“ZOOT!” Dillydally said. “Boy needs to pop a pill and chill.”

“Right on,” said Coach Bob, who knew that Dillydally was obsessed with old TV shows and his speech was littered with peculiar slang.

“Chicken is having a bad day. We all have bad days, don’t we, Ruckus? Lunchmeat? Dillydally? We have to be understanding at times like these.” Mrs Terwiliger looked thoughtfully at the gate, where the notice the woman had hung flapped in the wind. “Gurl, be a dear and fetch that notice for me, would you?”

“I’ll get it,” cried Ruckus, preparing to leap.

“I asked Gurl to do it, Ruckus.”

“Awww,” said Dillydally. “That’s so establishment.”

Gurl walked over and pulled the notice off the fence. She nearly tripped and fell when she saw what it said:

MISSING CAT!

Very rare! Grey, with white belly. Green eyes. Answers to the name “Laverna” (but only when she feels like it). Owner frantic! Reward offered! No questions asked! Call 555-1919!

“Gurl,” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Bring it over here, dear.”

Gurl reluctantly handed the paper to the matron.

“A missing cat!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “My stars! I haven’t seen a cat in years!” Her eyes scanned the notice. “Nasty animals.”

“They’re not nasty!” said Gurl before she could think about it.

Mrs Terwiliger patted Gurl on the head. “I know you children fancy yourselves worldly and sophisticated, but I daresay I know a bit more about wild animals than you do. Cats are bird-killers.” She tapped a long red fingernail on her teeth. “Though I wouldn’t mind finding this one. I wonder how big this reward is.”

“Can I go to my room? I’m not feeling too well,” said Gurl, doing her best to sound ill. She had to get inside the dorm; she had to check on the cat.

“Oh, of course, Gurl,” Mrs Terwiliger enunciated, her plump lips shining like slugs. “I know how hard these Wing practices must be for you, with your condition. Fly along, then. Oh! I mean, run along.”

Gurl turned and walked slowly to the main building, holding her stomach, sick for real with the thought of having stolen someone else’s pet. Gurl could not bring herself to give the cat back, not yet. For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had made a friend (even if it was a fuzzy, nonhuman friend). Just a little while, she thought. I’ll just keep her a little while. That’s not so bad, is it?

Once she got inside, however, she ran down the hallway to the girls’ dormitory and raced to her bed. “Please be here, please be here,” she whispered, pulling out the old sweater box and opening the flaps.

But she knew what she’d find even before she opened the box because it was what she expected each and every day.

Nothing.

Chapter 4 Bugged

THE BOY BOUNCED DOWN THE corridor, punching the wall every few feet or so. Feline Face. Bug Eye. Lizard Man. Any of those names would have been all right with him; he knew his eyes were so big and far apart they were practically on the sides of his head. So, fine. Bug. Bugs were cool. Bugs could fly. Some, like praying mantises, even had those sweet backward scythes for arms. He wondered why grown-ups had operations to have their eyebrows pasted up on their foreheads or fat vacuumed from their butts but never got anything practical. Like antennae. Or fangs. Or scythes for arms. The boy would have enjoyed having scythes for arms because then he could slash through the fence around Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless and fly away for ever. Instead, he was stuck here with Mrs Terwiliger. Mrs Terwiliger looked like a flying Pez sweet dispenser.

He stopped and jumped as high as he could, but his feet were so heavy. It was like he had been chained to the ground. Wham! He punched the wall so hard he bloodied his knuckles and had to stuff his fist in his mouth.

She named him Chicken. Chicken! Chickens couldn’t fly. Why chickens were even considered birds was a mystery. They were more like walking cushions or fat clucking possums or something.

He tried to jump again, his feet sticking to the floor. Wham! Wham! Wham! He didn’t cry out at the pain in his hands; he welcomed it. It kept his mind off everything else. This stupid place. His stupid new name. The stupid food, worse than monkey chow. The fact that he could hardly get his feet off the ground when in his mind and in his dreams, he could soar.

If only he knew who he was. Who he really was. The other kids said that no one ever remembered much about who they were when they came to Hope House, not even their own names, that your memories faded as soon as you crossed the threshold. Bug did remember crossing the threshold, sitting in Mrs Terwiliger’s office and being snarky when she asked for his name: “Mary Poppins! Harry Potter! Stanley Yelnats!” He also remembered hearing music—maracas or cymbals or something—and whispering in someone’s ear. But whispering in whose ear? And whispering what? His real name? His address? His favourite colour? He just didn’t know. But it was better that way, the other kids told him. Otherwise, you’d spend all day crying over the fact that your parents died or your Aunt Lucy gave you away like a pet parrot who talks too much and poops all over the floor. And who’d want to know that? Better to forget. Better to jump up and down like an idiot in the playground at Hope House, wishing that one day you’d make it more than a couple of feet.

“Meeow.”

Bug—if he had to have a name, that was the one he wanted, thank you very much—swung around, bloody fists high. Something small and fuzzy was sitting at the end of the hallway, near the entrance to the girls’ dormitory. What the heck was that, he thought. A rat? City rats could grow big, he knew. The subways were overrun with them. Hairy, dog-sized things with long yellow teeth, all the better to gnaw you with, my dear.

He walked cautiously towards the animal, whatever it was, ready to kick. (He wasn’t about to get gnawed on by an overgrown rodent. Nuh-uh.)

But it wasn’t a rat. It was a cat. He’d never seen one before. Not a real one.

Bug lowered his fists and stared at the cat. The cat stared back. Then it dropped to the floor and rolled around in what Bug thought was a sort of happy way. A friendly way. A hello, how-are-you-I’m-fine kind of way. It looked like fun, or at least distracting. Since no one was around, since flying was futile and since he’d probably break his knuckles if he kept punching the walls, Bug dropped to the floor too and rolled from one side to the other. Encouraged, the cat rolled back the other way, and soon they were both rolling at the same time and in the same direction, back and forth, back and forth. Bug could have sworn the cat was smiling.

A girl ran out of the dormitory and into the hallway, almost tripping over Bug and the happily rolling cat. The cat got to its feet and wound itself around the girl’s ankles. After scooping up the cat, she glared down at Bug as if he were…a bug.

He was embarrassed to have been caught rolling around on the floor, but not too embarrassed to notice how tightly the girl was holding on to the cat. As if she thought it belonged to her. “What’s your problem?” Bug asked her.

The girl bit her lip. She was that weird girl, the one just called Gurl. The one who watched everyone. The other kids said that since she didn’t look like any particular thing and couldn’t seem to do any particular thing, Mrs Terwiliger chose the obvious name. Bug himself might have tried to be a little bit more creative. Pasty Face would work, he thought. Or Ghost. Spooky! Now that was a good name for her. Her skin was white and her long dishevelled hair was almost the same. Her eyes were grey and almost as big as his own, but you could hardly see them through the curtain of hair. They were like headlights glaring through fog. Even her lips were colourless. Bug wondered if she had any blood at all.

Gurl clutched the cat close. “She’s not your cat.” Her voice was low and sort of scratchy, as if she didn’t use it much.

“Sure she is,” said Bug, getting to his feet. “I found her.”

She tried again. “This is the girls’ dorm.”

“No, this is the hallway.”

“This is the entrance to the girls’ dorm. You have to leave.”

Bug laughed. “You gonna make me?”

She gripped the cat tighter in her arms. “You can’t tell anyone,” she said.

“About what?” He looked down at his mangled knuckles, red and scraped from punching the walls. She saw them too and took a step back.

“You can’t tell anyone about the cat.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” the girl blurted. She looked as if she might burst into sloppy tears, which just made Bug think of an even better name for her: Dishwater. Weepy Dishwater Pasty Face.

“She’s mine,” said Bug. “She chose me.”

“She did not!”

“She did too! She was rolling around with me. You saw her.”

“That’s doesn’t mean she chose you,” said Gurl. She seemed to think a minute and then she said, “Listen, Chicken—”

But Bug cut her off. “Don’t call me Chicken!” he shouted, punching the wall. “That’s not my name!” Wham! “I have a real name.” Wham!

The girl took another step away from him. “OK, OK,” she said. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

“What do you think?” he said, opening his eyes as wide as he could. “It’s Bug.”

The cat began to wriggle and struggle in the girl’s arms until she was forced to let it go. “See?” Bug told her. “She wants to come back to me. She plays a mean game of rolling pin.”

But the cat trotted past both children and strode into the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. Bug followed, the pasty girl on his heels, but the cat ran behind the door and pushed it shut.

“What’s she doing?” Bug said, pressing an ear to the door.

“She’s fine,” the girl told him. But she seemed just as confused as Bug was.

After a few minutes, they heard the toilet flush.

“Come on!” said Bug. “Cats use toilets?”

“Of course they do,” the girl said, obviously surprised as well. Soon they heard the sound of water splashing in the sink. “Anyway, you can go now. I’ll catch her when she comes out.”

“No, how about you can go and I’ll catch her when she comes out,” Bug said. Not only was the cat rare, it was some sort of super-genius, toilet-flushing cat. Maybe she could fetch! Maybe she could balance pineapples on her nose! Maybe she could juggle chipmunks! He wasn’t going anywhere.

“She’s not yours!” the girl hissed. Suddenly, she got paler—if that was even possible—and her grey eyes went all silvery, like two nickels. Quickly, she pulled the sleeves of her red sweatshirt over her hands.

The girl was weirder than everyone said she was. “What’s wrong with you?” Bug said.

“What’s wrong with who?” said a voice. Mrs Terwiliger glided down the hallway. “Chicken! I’ve been looking for you. What are you two doing loitering near the girls’ dormitory?”

“Nothing,” Gurl and Bug said at once.

Mrs Terwiliger’s eyes narrowed, staring down at them both. “Gurl, you look pale,” she said, sounding more accusatory than compassionate. (And she enunciated the word “pale” with so much force that she spat.)

“I’m just tired,” croaked the girl. “I think I need a nap.” She tugged at the sleeve of her sweatshirt again. Was it Bug’s imagination or did the sweatshirt seem to be fading somehow? It had been red, but now it looked pink. And there was a faint pattern in it that he hadn’t noticed before, like the lines in a brick wall. Just like the painted brick of the hallway.

Mrs Terwiliger’s overwide lips turned down at the corners and Bug wondered if she had noticed the same strange things. But all she said was, “A nap is a wonderful idea. Go.” She waved her bony hand and Gurl practically ran into the girls’ dorm.

Then Mrs Terwiliger crooked a finger at Bug, the fluorescent lights shining off her tight, waxy skin. “Come, Chicken. Instead of punching the walls, I’d like you to help me move a filing cabinet. There’s a good boy!”

She turned and floated off. Bug started to follow, peeking inside the open door of the girls’ dormitory as he passed. And that’s when he saw her. Uh, didn’t see her. Because the girl wasn’t there. The room was empty.

Bug opened his mouth to shout—because what else do you do when a weird, weepy girl ups and totally disappears?—but then he thought better of it. Something extremely funky was going on with Pasty Gurl, but he’d keep his mouth shut.

That is, he would keep it shut in exchange for a certain toilet-flushing, rolling pin-playing, very rare, genius cat.

“Chicken!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Move it along!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a sly grin on his buggy face. “I’m moving it as fast as I can.”

Chapter 5 Attack of the Umbrella Man

GURL HURRIED ALONG THE CITY streets, the cat peeking out from an old backpack. She’d had to wait nearly an hour for the other orphans to fall asleep. (Digger kept untucking the sheets on Persnickety’s bed, just to make her cry, and stealing Tot’s doll, just to make her cry.) When Gurl finally slipped from the window and out of the front gate of Hope House, it was close to eleven.

The air outside was crisp and fresh, and Gurl welcomed it. Inside the orphanage everything seemed confused and difficult to figure out, so much so that she rarely tried. Outside the orphanage, however, her thoughts were clear. Something was happening to her, something weird and scary and important, and she needed to understand it, control it. For that, she’d go back to the place it first happened: the alley behind Luigi’s. She needed to see if it would happen again.

Plus, she needed a snack.

Luigi’s Dumpster yielded a feast. Tangy Italian meat loaf, delicate squash ravioli, fettucini with peas, prosciutto and cream sauce. Gurl offered the meat loaf to the cat, who ate a few bites before turning her attention to the fettucini. Gurl munched on the meat loaf as she watched the cat drag a long noodle from the packet and proceed to shorten it, bite by bite. “You know, I’ve been doing the same thing Mrs Terwiliger does,” Gurl said. “I’ve been calling you ‘cat’, the most obvious thing, even in my own head!” She smacked her forehead to demonstrate the foolishness of this. The cat stopped nibbling on the noodle to stare. “I could call you Laverna, like that flyer said. Hey, Laverna!” The cat blinked, bored. “Maybe not,” said Gurl. “So, instead of calling you what you are, which is easy, or calling you something that describes you, which is boring, why don’t I call you something that you like?” The cat blinked slowly in the way of cats, the way that said they were listening carefully and you had better say something interesting for a change. “Why don’t I call you Noodle?”

The newly named Noodle uttered a short mew, which Gurl took as an OK, before getting back to her fettucini. “Noodle it is, then,” Gurl said, feeling immensely pleased with herself. She had never named anything before. No wonder Mrs Terwiliger liked it so much, even though she was awful at it.

Gurl finished the meat loaf and polished off the ravioli in a couple of swift bites, eyeing her own hand as she did. She wondered what triggered it, what exactly made her fade. She could feel the tingling in her skin that afternoon, knew it was happening and was terrified that Mrs Terwiliger or that crazy boy—Bug or Chicken or whatever his name was—would notice. They didn’t seem to, or at least neither of them said anything. But she didn’t like the look on Bug Boy’s face as he turned to follow Mrs Terwiliger. It was a smug, self-satisfied look, the one everyone seemed to give her. A look that said Gurl was doomed, beaten before she even started.

“No, I’m not,” she said and her words echoed in the dark alley. Noodle’s whiskers twitched in disapproval. “Sorry,” she said, softer now. If she had to choose between being noticed and being ignored, she would take ignored any day. Bad things happened when she was noticed.

Noodle curled up in Gurl’s lap and Gurl leaned back against the brick, just as she did that first night, and stared up at the sky and the buildings that reached ecstatically towards it. A newspaper wafted on the wind, looking beautiful and fluttering and alive. Gurl felt a thousand things at once. Small and big. Safe and free. Invisible and yet exposed. In her mind, she rifled through her daydreams and found a favourite: a girl stands ankle-deep on a beach with the ocean roaring in front of her. Behind her, a boy shuffles out of a cozy cottage and calls out to the girl: “Mom and Dad say it’s time to come inside now.”

Noodle shifted in Gurl’s lap and mewled softly. “I know,” said Gurl. “We have to do what we came to do.” She held up her hands. “They look the same, Noodle. Just regular old hands.” With her nose, Noodle nudged her fingers. “Yes, concentrate. That’s a good idea.” Gurl focused all her attention on her hands, willing them to fade. She tried harder, squinting with the effort. After a while, her right wrist seemed to look a bit nubby like the pavement beneath her, but it hadn’t changed colour and nothing else seemed different at all. Her hands dropped to nestle in Noodle’s fur. “This is not going to work,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it both times it happened before. It just happened. Maybe it was because I was scared?”

Gurl sat in the alley until her butt and the cat fell asleep. Now what should she do? Would she just keep blinking on and off like a light bulb, never knowing when it was going to happen next? But she couldn’t sit here all night. Though it was only September, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and she was getting a little cold. She tapped the cat to wake her and helped her into the backpack. Gurl would have to try again on another night, maybe in another place.

Gurl slipped the pack on, careful not to jostle Noodle. At least the ravioli was good, she told herself. The trip was not a total waste. She paused at the entrance to the street and looked right and left. It was so late that the city seemed deserted and Gurl felt a flutter of nervousness in her stomach, a flutter that matched the trash dancing in the wind. Even Noodle seemed to sense Gurl’s anxiety and pulled her head inside the bag.

Nothing to worry about, Gurl thought. You’ll be fine. She straightened the straps of the pack before heading out on to the street. Walking briskly, Gurl glanced behind her every so often. Wan light pooled beneath the street lamps, giving the air a sickly, yellowish hue, while the bulbs themselves issued a low, eerie buzz.

Plink!

Gurl whirled around, scanning the street. The trash danced, slick puddles glistened, but no one followed her. This is the city and it never sleeps, she thought. Probably someone kicking a stone down the sidewalk blocks away. She told herself that she was being paranoid. And then she told herself to walk faster. For about the billionth time in her life, she wished she could fly.

Pssst!

Again, Gurl turned to face an empty street. But wait: there, in the darkened doorway of a shuttered shop, was someone lurking in the shadows? She stared, straining to see. On the opposite side of the street, a black dome rose from the subway entrance and Gurl’s stomach clenched. But the black dome turned out to be an umbrella, an overcoat-clad person beneath it. Gurl sighed with relief. Some businessman coming home late from the office. Well, if he thought it was OK to be out this late at night, then she was probably fine. She glanced back at the businessman, who held the umbrella so low that she couldn’t see his face. Like Gurl, he didn’t fly, but walked in a swaying lurch that favoured one leg. She felt a little sorry for him, not only unable to fly but also barely limping along. Imagine if the weather were bad. If it were stormy? It would take him for ever to walk a few blocks!

Gurl frowned. But if it wasn’t stormy, why was he carrying an umbrella?

She turned and started to walk again, a little faster than before. So the guy was a little strange; it didn’t mean he was dangerous. Maybe he just liked to be prepared.

From the backpack, a paw batted her ear. “Yeah,” Gurl whispered. Noodle tapped her again. “What is it?” The cat growled low in her throat, reared up from the backpack and nipped Gurl on the earlobe. “Ouch!” Gurl yelped.

Behind her, a gurgling voice said, “Ouch!”

Gurl whirled around so fast that Noodle almost fell from the pack. The man, who had been at least a block and a half away, now stood just a few feet from her. His overcoat, which had looked fine from a distance, was torn and stained with food and mud and things that Gurl didn’t want to think about. He wore two different shoes, one black, one brown, both slashed at the top to make room for long horny toenails. The umbrella, which he still held low over his face, was lacy with holes, as if someone had sprayed acid on it.

The man giggled, lifting the umbrella just a little, so that she could see the fine grey down that covered his cheeks, the teeth that he had filed to points. “Nice kitty,” he whispered. “Nice, nice kitty.”

And then he said: “Run.”

Gurl took off, running faster than she ever thought she could, Noodle bouncing in the pack on her back. But she could hear the man-thing panting and giggling, the slap-drag of his worn shoes on the sidewalk as he lurched after her. Frantic now, her heart pounding so hard that she thought it would pop out of her mouth, she feinted left but ran right. She could feel something tug at the backpack and heard Noodle’s hiss. “No!” she screamed and stumbled as the pack was wrenched from her shoulders. Reaching back to grab it, she fell to the ground, hitting her funny bone on the pavement and badly bruising her hip. She flipped to her back and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the giggling toothy thing to attack. She could smell his hot breath, stinking of trash and bones and rot.

“Nice?” said the thing. She opened her eyes to see him standing over her, cradling the backpack in one arm. He lifted the umbrella and sniffed the air with a nose that seemed unusually long and mobile, like the nose of a rat. And that’s when she felt the tingling in her hands, in her face, across her whole body, and knew that it had happened again. That the thing couldn’t see her any more.

Slowly and as quietly as she could, Gurl got to her feet. Noodle poked her face from the top of the pack and mewled. Burbling absently, the thing pulled the flap down, sniffing the air. Then he started to shamble back the way he came. Slapdrag, slap-drag. Gurl tiptoed behind him and gave his overcoat a rough tug. The thing grunted and twirled on its short leg, almost stumbling itself. “Bad,” he said. “Bad, bad, bad.”

He clutched the cat tighter and Gurl could hear Noodle’s plaintive mews through the canvas.

“Give me my cat!” said Gurl and she ripped the umbrella out of his hand.

The thing gasped and covered his red eyes with his forearm, as if against a strong light. Gurl dropped the umbrella and grabbed the backpack, which promptly disappeared in her grip. The thing gibbered and wailed, “Kitty! Kitty! Kitteeeee!” She could still hear him wailing two, three, five blocks away. And then she was standing at the gates of Hope House, chest heaving like a bellows, and she couldn’t hear him any more. But she could see herself again, her own arms and legs plainly visible in the dim light. She hugged Noodle close and the animal’s low purr filled her with joy.

“It was you,” she whispered in Noodle’s ear. “Every time I changed it was because I was afraid—not for me, but for you.”

Armed with this realisation, she opened the gate and crossed the yard. She had just slipped around the side of the dormitory when a hot white light blinded her. Someone snatched the backpack and then grabbed the lapel of her jacket.

“Hello, my dear,” Mrs Terwiliger said, reeling Gurl in close.

Chapter 6 Mrs Terwiliger’s Monkeys

MRS TERWILIGER HAD ONE HAND on the strap of the backpack and one hand on Gurl’s arm in a death grip as she half flew, half dragged Gurl across the yard to the main building. “I don’t know what gets into you children. After all I do for you, to just run off like that! And you can stop struggling,” she said. “I might lose sight of you, but I won’t lose you altogether.” She lifted the backpack so that Gurl could see it. “I won’t lose your little friend either.”

More worried for Noodle than herself, Gurl stopped struggling. “Where are you taking us?” Gurl squeaked.

“Where do you think?” snapped Mrs Terwiliger.

Another orphanage? The animal shelter? Jail? Gurl couldn’t imagine. Because of her fear, she tingled all over. It seemed that her body was as confused as her head and flashed an alarming array of colours and textures. One arm was striped like Mrs Terwiliger’s coat, the other arm seemed to be made of red brick. Both her legs somehow mimicked the shadows behind them, so that it appeared she had four instead of two. She kept silent until they reached the front door of the main building.

“Open the door and be quiet about it,” Mrs Terwiliger said. “We don’t want to wake anyone else now, do we? Children need their rest.”

Gurl clutched the brass door handle, noticing that her hand immediately turned the same bright yellow colour. Mrs Terwiliger noticed too. “That’s quite a talent. Better than flying, that talent is,” she said, not talking as much as muttering to herself as she led Gurl down a long dark hallway. At the end of it was a black door, upon which were five separate locks and the words Matron Geraldine Terwiliger in looping golden script.

“Reach into my right pocket,” said Mrs Terwiliger, “and remove the keyring.” Gurl did as she was told, the keys making a faint jingling noise as she pulled them from Mrs Terwiliger’s jacket.

“The silver key opens the top lock,” Mrs Terwiliger told her. “The red key opens the second, the blue key unlocks the third, the gold key opens the fourth and the tiny little key you use on the doorknob.”

Gurl fumbled with the keys, not because it was too dark to see, but because sometimes her hand would turn the colour of the key or the key would turn the colour of her hand.

“I’m waiting,” said Mrs Terwiliger, tapping her high-heeled shoe impatiently. Noodle mewled and Gurl’s hands shook.

Gurl finally managed to unlock the five locks and open the door. “Now,” said Mrs Terwiliger as they stepped inside, “close the door and return the keys to my pocket. Good. Use the chain to turn on the lamp. Ahhh, that’s better, isn’t it?”

The small lamp cast an eerie glow around the office and Gurl gasped when she saw a hundred pairs of eyes gaping at her from all around the room. “What are they?” Gurl asked. Mrs Terwiliger’s overlarge teeth flashed in a wicked smile, but she didn’t answer the question. “Have a seat,” she said, pushing Gurl into a chair next to a huge marble desk. She set the backpack on the desk and produced a set of handcuffs from her left pocket. As soon as she saw them, Gurl tried to rip her arm from Mrs Terwiliger’s grasp, but because of the bruised hip and elbow, she couldn’t move fast enough. One click and Gurl was cuffed to the chair, unable to get away. Mrs Terwiliger sighed, walked around to the other side of the desk, and sat in her own chair, a red velvet one the size and shape of a throne.

“Well,” she said. “Here we are. At least, here I am. If I didn’t know what you were capable of, I might think I was the only one here. I saw that you were starting to…er…fade this afternoon in the hallway. I got curious, so I kept an eye on you. I saw you sneaking in and out of the dorm to bring this animal”—she gestured to the backpack on the desk—“some of your dinner. And then I watched you sneak out this evening, and I waited for you to come back. Did you know that you simply appeared out of nowhere, right in front of the orphanage gate? Astonishing! And you’re nearly invisible right now. You blend right in with that chair. You’re like a chameleon. Or a stick insect. Have you ever heard of a stick insect?”

Gurl didn’t respond to this speech. Her eyes had adjusted to the light, so now she could see that every shelf, every filing cabinet and every surface was covered with monkeys. Hundreds of mechanical monkeys. Some of them were no bigger than a fist; others were as high as a foot. On the end of the marble desk, facing her, sat a monkey wearing a little gold fez and holding tiny gold cymbals. Gurl wondered if its fur was real, and worried all the more for the fate of Noodle.

“A stick insect is a type of insect that appears to be a stick, yet is not a stick but an insect,” Mrs Terwiliger was saying. “Isn’t that fascinating, dear? Gurl? Are you admiring my monkeys? They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

Beautiful was not the word that Gurl had been thinking of. Creepy, bizarre, freakish—those were the words that she had been thinking of. And now that she was thinking of it, those words sort of summed up the whole night. What was that thing that chased her down the street? And here, all these ugly monkeys, some with hats and waistcoats, some with bugles or drums, some grinning very unmonkeylike grins—no, they were not beautiful. Noodle was beautiful, but how would Gurl ever get her back? How could she get them out of here? And then, even if she could get them out of here, where would they go?

Mrs Terwiliger reached across the desk, plucked up the fezwearing monkey and wound a key in its back. She set it down on the desk and it promptly began clapping its cymbals, its mouth opening and closing. Noodle, still in the backpack on the desk, peered out at the clanging thing with her ears flat to her head.

The monkey kept banging away, and the sound went right up Gurl’s spine and into her brain, ringing there like a fire alarm. She wanted to shut it up somehow, to tell it something to make it quiet. A secret. She felt something inside her opening up, yearning to spill her innermost thoughts. Yes, it wanted her secrets: her secrets would make it happy. Monkeys loved to hear secrets.

But she didn’t know any secrets. It was obvious she was as changeable as a chameleon. That was no secret, at least not to Mrs Terwiliger. And Noodle was sitting right there, peeking her head out of the backpack, so she wasn’t a secret either. Wasn’t there anything she could give to this noisy, banging monkey to shut it up? There’s the umbrella man that came out of the subway, a little voice in the back of her head whispered. You could tell that secret. Why don’t you? If you do, it will be quiet and then you can relax, maybe even take a nap…

Noodle howled, snapping Gurl out of her reverie, and the monkey stopped clanging. Feeling slightly dazed, Gurl looked at Mrs Terwiliger. She could have sworn that the matron was disappointed, but about what she had no idea.

The monkey seemed to have another effect on Gurl; she was visible. “Ha, there you are,” said Mrs Terwiliger. She pulled another monkey from the shelf behind her, this one with a purple waistcoat and a pair of maracas. “This monkey is one of my favourites,” said Mrs Terwiliger, her rubbery lips twisting like licorice. “They talk too, you know.”

“They talk?” said Gurl, too startled to keep her mouth shut.

“If you give them a penny they do. Do you have a penny? Oh, silly me! Orphans don’t have extra pennies, do they, dear? I’ll lend you one, how about that?” Mrs Terwiliger opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a penny. She tucked the penny into the purple waistcoat. Then she sat down and set the monkey in front of Gurl.

The monkey’s eyes rolled until they focused in on Gurl. It opened its mouth and yelled: “MONKEY CHOW!”

Gurl was so surprised that she jumped. The chair fell over backwards and she went with it.

“Oops!” said Mrs Terwiliger, rushing out from behind the desk to help Gurl right herself. “I should have warned you that they can be a bit…er…vehement about what they have to say.” And then she added, “Although I do wish that when they talked, they would have something of substance to offer.” She glared at the monkey. The monkey shook its maracas over its head before going completely still.

Gurl rubbed the back of her head where it had connected with the floor. The umbrella man, the talking monkey—she was having some kind of nightmare, but she was too tired to wake herself up.

On the wall next to the desk, the only space not taken up with shelves of monkeys, there was a full-length mirror. Gurl imagined Mrs Terwiliger spent many hours twirling around in her chair, gazing at herself. “What do you want?” Gurl asked wearily.

Mrs Terwiliger leaned her liposuctioned posterior on the desk. “What do you think! What’s best for you, of course. What’s best for Hope House. And I think that there’s a way for you to help me to do what’s best.”

“There is?” said Gurl.

“Absolutely!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “We’re going to have to start small, I think. With some shoes.”

“Shoes?”

Mrs Terwiliger frowned (as much as a woman who’d had weekly Botox shots to paralyse the muscles in her forehead could frown). “Gurl, I’m surprised I have to explain this to you. I am the matron of Hope House, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And as the matron, I represent the children wherever I go, correct?”

“Uh. I guess.”

“So I can’t walk around looking like last season, can I? I have a certain responsibility, a certain image to maintain. For the sake of Hope House. And your sake. So I’d like you to pick me up a few things.”

“Besides the shoes?”

“I did see some gorgeous new scarves at Harvey’s.”

Gurl was more dazed than ever. “You want me to go shopping?”

“Tomorrow afternoon you’ll go to Harvey’s an hour before closing,” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Then you’ll hide in one of the changing rooms until you hear the workers lock up. Then you can turn on the stick insect act and fetch me some of those scarves. You can’t miss them. Silk scarves in the display case at the back of the store. Oh, I wouldn’t mind some new gloves. Shoes, the highest heels you can find. Size six. And a coat. Make it a fur coat. Fox, if they have it.”

Go to Harvey’s? Hide in the dressing room? Make like a stick insect? “Wait a minute. You want me to steal for you?”

“Steal? Who said anything about stealing? It sounds so harsh.”

“But that’s what it is!” Gurl said. “I can’t do that! What if someone sees me?”

Mrs Terwiliger looked at her as if she were as dumb as one of the mechanical monkeys. “You’re invisible. Who’s going to see you, silly?”

“But it just happens!” Gurl said. “I can’t control it!”

“Oh, you’ll learn,” said Mrs Terwiliger.

“I don’t want to learn. I don’t want to become a thief.”

“What does it matter what you want?” Mrs Terwiliger said sharply, then caught herself. “You’re an orphan, Gurl. I’m offering you an opportunity. You act as if I’m asking you to commit a crime!”

“You are asking me to commit a crime,” said Gurl.

“Just a little one. It barely even counts. It’s not like robbing a bank.”

“I won’t do it!” said Gurl.

“You will,” said Mrs Terwiliger. From behind her chair, she hauled out a large birdcage, which she put on top of the desk. Then she opened the clasp on the backpack, deftly scooped Noodle from the interior and tossed her into the cage.

“Don’t hurt her!” said Gurl, skin tingling.

“You’re invisible again. Now, see how easy that was?” said Mrs Terwiliger as she latched the cage. “I’m going to keep your pet in a safe place and you’ll do a couple of things for me. Just to prove that I can trust you again. You do want me to trust you, right? And when you’re done with your errands, a few teeny-tiny errands, then you can have the cat back. What do you say?”

Gurl watched as Noodle pawed at the latch on the cage and meowed forlornly. “What if I don’t?” Gurl said, pulling at the handcuff that held her, even though she could no longer see the wrist that it chained. “What if I can’t?”

“That would be terribly unfortunate,” said Mrs Terwiliger. She opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out the notice that had been tacked to the gates of Hope House. “Because then I would be forced to call the number on this notice. I’d have to return, uh, Laverna here to her rightful owner. How could I leave her in the hands of such an irresponsible, ill-behaved, untrustworthy girl? I just couldn’t. I couldn’t live with myself.” Mrs Terwiliger shrugged and stood. “The choice is really up to you,” she said. She dangled the huge birdcage over Gurl’s head and swung it like a pendulum. “But children often like to learn the hard way.”

Chapter 7 What Not to Wear

SICK WITH APPREHENSION, GURL TOOK the long walk uptown to Harvey’s, wishing that she could melt into the sidewalk. She tried to see some way out of her predicament, but what? Mrs Terwiliger had hidden the cat. And even if Gurl knew where to find her, she didn’t know how to get her away or where to take her. She felt as helpless and useless as when Digger was knocking on her head.

But, despite the sick feeling in her gut, she did as Mrs Terwiliger had told her to; Gurl entered Harvey’s an hour before closing, pretending to browse among the $100 belts and $250 ties. Her normally straight, long hair was curled in stiff but frizzy corkscrews and she was wearing clothes that Mrs Terwiliger had given her: a lacy yellow dress, a limegreen velvet jacket, tights and white vinyl boots. She also carried an overlarge vinyl tote bag. Gurl thought the outfit made her look like a reject from the Radio City Music Hall’s annual Christmas show, but Mrs Terwiliger had insisted that the hair and clothes would allow Gurl to fit in with Harvey’s wealthy clientele until she could slip into the changing room and disappear. If this is what rich people wear, Gurl thought, then I’d rather be an orphan.

Instead of helping her blend in, however, the outfit made Gurl stick out like a frog among peacocks. Other girls her age—and Gurl couldn’t believe there were other girls her age with a need for $250 dollar ties—wore everything but yellow dresses, lime green velvet jackets, tights and vinyl boots. These girls eyed Gurl over the racks, smirking and snickering.

Totally humiliated—and totally itchy under all that lace and nylon—Gurl meandered back to the changing rooms with the intention of hiding until closing time. But the rooms were locked. All of them. For the plan to work, she would have to act as if she really intended to buy something.

She milled around for ten minutes before pulling several sherbet-coloured designer dresses from the racks. Finally, she walked over to a saleswoman who was stacking $1,000 cashmere sweaters on a shelf. She took a deep breath to calm herself; she had lived her whole life in an orphanage and had only rarely talked to strangers. “Um…excuse me?” she asked the woman timidly. “Can I try these on?”

The woman—silver haired, silver eyehadowed, silver suited and thin as a greyhound—turned and gasped, dropping all the sweaters to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Gurl stammered, “I just wanted—”

“Jules,” whispered the woman, staring. And then she shouted, “Jules! Get over here! Now!”

A man with short dark hair, tiny rectangular glasses and purple leather trousers flew out from the back room. “What are you caterwauling about, Bea? Oh. My. God.” He too stared at Gurl, his jaw hanging open.

Gurl had no idea what they were so upset about. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work, but I need to try—”

“Bea,” said the man, Jules, tipping his head at Gurl meaningfully. “I think she represents the Lullaby League.” His voice was deep and yet sort of raspy-squeaky, as if he had borrowed it from an old woman with a bad smoking habit. “Or maybe,” he continued, “she represents the Lollypop Guild.” Gurl thought she detected a British accent, but then again, a lot of people in the city had British accents, though most of them weren’t British.

Bea looked down her sharp nose at Gurl and then at the dresses she held. “She’s obviously in the theatre.”

“Please tell us you’re in the theatre,” said Jules, clasping his hands together as if in prayer.

“No,” said Gurl miserably. “I just wanted to try these on. Uh…I need something for…uh…my cousin’s wedding.”

“Your cousin’s wedding,” said Bea, her lips curling. Her eyes slid down Gurl’s green jacket.

Gurl’s palms began to sweat. These people didn’t believe her. Maybe it was the huge tote bag, she thought. Maybe they suspected she was there to steal something. They would throw Gurl out and Mrs Terwiliger would send Noodle away. Gurl couldn’t bear the thought of it. “Please,” said Gurl. “The wedding’s this weekend and my…my…grandmother will kill me if I don’t get a dress. I just need some help with a changing room.”

“You need more help than that, young lady,” Bea said. She pursed her lips, took the dresses from Gurl’s hand and returned them to the rack. She pointed to Gurl’s jacket. “Where did you get that outfit?”

“Uh…my grandmother bought it for me.”

“Well, she should be brought up on charges,” Jules barked.

Gurl didn’t disagree.

“Do you understand what we’re saying?” asked Bea.

Gurl burned with embarrassment and horror under the disapproving stares of the two salespeople. “I think so.”

“Do your other clothes look like this?” said Bea in a grave tone of voice that one might normally use when discussing funeral arrangements.

“And what,” said Jules, “is going on with your hair?”

Bea tried to fan herself with one of the cashmere sweaters. “Is that green eyeshadow you’re wearing?”

“Your fingernails are all broken!” said Jules. “Were you buried alive somewhere? Were you forced to dig yourself out with your bare hands? Should we call the police?”

Bea collapsed in the pile of sweaters. “I think I need to sit down.”

“This is no time for hysterics, Bea,” said Jules. “Is Paulo still upstairs in the salon?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Tell him that he has one more client today.”

Gurl’s eyes widened. “Oh, please, no. I just came in to buy a dress for—”

Despite his disgust with Gurl’s outfit, Jules’s eyes were warm and kind. He took both Gurl’s hands in his own. “Darling, don’t look so upset,” he said. “We like you; we just hate your clothes. What’s your name?”

“Gurl.”

“Gurl?” said Jules. “How…obvious.” He turned back to Bea. “Take her to Paulo. I’ll round up some respectable clothing and set up changing room five.”

With those orders given, Jules buzzed around, pulling items off the racks, while Bea pushed Gurl towards the staircase at the back of the store. Intent on their tasks, none of the staff responded to Gurl’s feeble protests. Paulo, the head stylist for Harvey’s salon, fainted at the sight of Gurl’s hair and had to be revived with smelling salts while Gurl was being shampooed with beer and honey. An Asian woman who smelled of lilies daubed at Gurl’s face with cucumber lotion, scowling at the eyeshadow that came away on the cloth.

After two bracing cups of green tea, Paulo was ready to work. He hovered like a hummingbird about Gurl’s head, scissors snapping so fast and furiously that they were a silvery blur. When he was through with the cut, Gurl’s hair was gelled, blow-dried, sprayed, fluffed and gelled again. The Asian woman—“Call me Miss Coco,” she said—brushed blusher on Gurl’s cheeks and gloss on her lips. Another woman came and filed her nails with a “natural sea stone”. Then Jules returned to take her back downstairs.

“You. Look. Gorgeous,” said Jules, pushing her into the changing room. “Don’t you think you look gorgeous?”

Gurl felt as if she had just been on a very fast merry-go-round. “I…I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” cried Jules.

Gurl peered into the mirror. She had never spent much time looking at herself and no one ever seemed to notice her anyway. While she wasn’t exactly gorgeous, she did look better than before. Sort of. Her wild, silvery hair now poured softly over her shoulders like a waterfall and she didn’t have to push her fringe from her eyes to see. Her normally pale, dull skin and bloodless lips were fresh and rosy. “I don’t recognise me.” Jules clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth and smiled. “I guess I wouldn’t either. Anyway, start trying on these clothes and let us know if you need any help.”

Gurl nodded and Jules shut the door. Gingerly touching her new hair, and then the rack of expensive jeans, dresses and skirts, Gurl swallowed back tears. She hadn’t had this much attention since, well, never. No one had ever told her she looked gorgeous (even if she didn’t); no one had ever picked out clothes especially for her. For a minute she could imagine what it might be like to live someone else’s life—a rich person’s life, a happy person’s life—and instead of making her feel better, like her daydreams always did, it made her feel terribly alone. But she didn’t have time to feel sorry for herself. It was true: she was an orphan, she was hungry, she had been chased by a babbling rat man with an umbrella. She was not a rich person and she was not a happy person. She also was not alone. She had Noodle, didn’t she?

At least, she would have Noodle if she got Mrs Terwiliger those scarves and shoes. But how would she do that now that the salespeople knew she was here? She couldn’t just hide in another changing room; they would look for her. She would have to make herself fade or blend in or become invisible, or whatever it was that she’d been doing inadvertently for days. But this time she’d have to figure out a way to it on purpose and that’s all there was to it.

Someone rapped on the door and Gurl jumped higher than any of Ruckus’s practice leaps. “How are you doing in there?” said Jules. “Is everything fabulous?”

“Yeah,” said Gurl. “I’ll be out in a second to show you.”

“I can’t wait,” Jules rasped with his odd, deep voice, sounding as if he really couldn’t wait. Gurl felt a stab of guilt at the thought of tricking them, of stealing even more than she already had. But she couldn’t worry about that now.

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