The place smelled of burnt popcorn and overcooked frankfurters. The shoppers moved in slow shuffles, pushing carts, some carts with babies in them. Most of the babies were crying, and their din blended with music blared from overhead speakers.
At first I didn’t see Jacey; she wasn’t easy to find in a crowd. Then I spotted her leaning against a jewelry counter, taking notes. With her long hair in braids and her plaid shirt and denim overalls, she looked like a child, if you didn’t notice the notebook and pen in her hands. They made her seem older, somehow.
I headed toward her, but before I reached the counter, I looked back, over my shoulder. The girl with red hair was coming after me.
She seemed to be in no hurry. She smoked as she walked. Some part of me thought, Isn’t smoking illegal in stores?
I changed course, headed down an aisle past greeting cards and craft supplies. The store spread out in all directions, and I didn’t see any place that wasn’t brightly lit and fully exposed. The speakers in the ceiling played an instrumental song that I recognized from a music box my mother owned. The song was called “Stardust.”
The girl with red hair rounded the corner, past racks of yarn and plastic packages of knitting needles. She seemed to be moving faster now.
I wove between shoppers, turned into the appliance section, accidentally shoved a large woman reaching for a toaster oven.
“Hey!” Her voice echoed after me.
The aisles were numbered on signs suspended from the ceiling, but I didn’t have time to look up. Then I found myself back at the jewelry counter, Jacey still leaning against it, writing in her notebook.
“There you are,” she said.
I grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the entrance. “Jacey, go home,” I said. “Get out of here. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t wait for me.”
“What?” She lurched along with me, her pen in one hand, notebook in the other. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t weigh much, and she was easy to drag.
“Remember what happened to my friend Autumn?” I said. “Bernie was right—people around me get killed. Get out of here now. Don’t look at anyone in the parking lot. Just go.”
She kept trying to interrupt me. Then her eyes grew wide. She’d seen something. I whirled around. The girl with the cigarette stood in front of us, her face without expression. She blew smoke into my face.
Jacey pulled free of my grasp and bolted out of the store. I held my ground. “What do you want with me?” I said.
Beneath her cap of red hair, her eyes never blinked. She inhaled deeply and exhaled toward my eyes. I coughed and looked around for help.
The store greeter, an older man with a potbelly, stood by the line of shopping carts. I called to him: “Sir, please—”
Then she lunged at me, holding the cigarette lit-end outward. It singed the hair on my arm. On her second attempt, the cigarette reached my skin.
The pain made me flinch, shrink back. I heard myself say something incoherent. Then I turned and wove back through the crowd again, past jewelry, past appliances, past sewing supplies, and into women’s fashions. That’s where I decided to turn invisible.
I wasn’t wearing my special suit, but when I passed the T-shirts and jeans pinned to a display board, I saw a chance. I kicked my backpack beneath the wooden pedestal where the board was mounted, climbed onto it, and stretched out my arms. Like a scarecrow, I thought. Now, instead of three outfits on display, there were four—the last a little grungier than the rest, accessorized by an amulet in the shape of a cat.
She walked by the display a few seconds later, looking from side to side, scanning like an automaton, holding the cigarette’s red end outward, ready to strike. She passed so close to me that I smelled the lotion she wore: a mixture of pineapple and coconut cream. I tried not to inhale, in case it was toxic. I looked down at her, wishing I was someone else, someone capable of fighting back.
All-Mart stays open late on Saturdays. At ten fifty P.M. the loudspeaker announced that the store was about to close.
For more than two hours I’d held my invisible mannequin pose. My neck and arms ached. One foot had gone to sleep, and the cigarette burn on my forearm throbbed and stung. I’d heard more instrumental versions of popular songs from the 1970s and ’80s than I can bear to recall; for years afterward, I couldn’t stand to listen to that music. Chemically engineered scents worn by shoppers and store clerks mixed with the stench of burnt popcorn, making me light-headed, close to nauseous.
My eyes felt heavy, and I may have briefly dozed. What woke me up was the sight of a dark-haired man pushing a cart filled with junk food. I could have sworn he was Elvis—the Darling of the Chemistry Department, the Once and Future King. He passed me, mumbling to himself, and disappeared down another aisle.
Earlier I’d wondered if I should spend the night in the place. But even if ten cigarette girls and shadow men were waiting, I had to get out. As I turned visible again, I hoped that no one was monitoring the security cameras too closely that night.
Outside, the parking lot gaped, nearly empty. No van. No Jacey’s car, either—which came as a big relief. If Sal had grabbed her, I thought, her car would still be there.
It would be a long walk back to campus. My cell phone didn’t work. Jacey had been right—the moon was full, rising over the flat landscape like a searchlight beam. I thought about taking off my clothes and turning invisible again, but the air was cold enough to persuade me otherwise. I walked along the road’s shoulder, not bothering to look for beige vans. Let them come for me, I thought.
When I saw the sign ahead for the Okefenokee Swamp Park, it seemed as good a place as any to spend the night.
The park was closed, but the fence was easy to scale. Tupelo trees glistened silver in the moonlight, and the shallow water beneath them seemed bottomless. I made my way to the docks where we’d launched our canoes.
I’d had some vague idea about borrowing a boat and paddling out to the island where the cabin was. But I felt too tired to go a step farther. I wrapped my sweater around me and lay on a bench attached to the dock. There was no sign of Old Joe, and I said a silent prayer that somewhere, he was well—that somewhere he was, at least, alive.
I wish I could write that the blue moon talked to me that night. High above, it stared down silently, a blank, impervious eye. I crossed my arms and stared back, too exhausted to sleep. I thought of all the things that might be out there in the night—snakes, duppies, a rollin calf, Sal Valentine—and I sent out a thought to them all: Come and get me. This is your chance. I’m too tired to care.
But no one, nothing, came. I heard only rustles, barks, and splashes, along with the groans of tree frogs and river frogs, communicating in a language I would never understand. The carpet of stars overhead held no discernible patterns; try as I might, I couldn’t find constellations, only stellar clutter.
Left out—the feeling I most feared—is all I felt that night. I remembered an Emerson essay I’d read at the school library: