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that little piece of chain.”
“I felt pretty strange at the end,” I told them, still waiting to reappear. “The light grew brighter
and brighter.”
“Did you feel like you were being pulled away?” Erin asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Like I was fading or something.”
“That’s how I started to feel,” Erin cried.
“This is just so dangerous,” April said, shaking her head.
I popped back.
My knees buckled and I almost fell to the floor. But I grabbed the mirror and held myself up.
After a few seconds, my legs felt strong again. I took a few steps and regained my balance.
“What if we couldn’t turn off the light?” April demanded, climbing to her feet, brushing the dust
off the back of her jeans with both hands. “What if the chain completely broke and the light stayed on?
What then?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You broke my record,” Zack said, making a disgusted face. “That means I have to have another
turn.”
“No way!” Lefty shouted. “It’s my turn next!”
“None of you are listening to me!” April cried. “Answer my question. What if one of you is
invisible and the light won’t go out?”
“That won’t happen,” Zack told her. He pulled a string from his pocket. “Here. I’m going to tie
this tightly to the chain.” He climbed up onto the box and began to work. “Pull the string. The light
goes out,” he told April. “No problem.”
“Which one of us is going to be first to get invisible and then go outside?” Erin asked.
“I want to go to school and terrorize Miss Hawkins,” Lefty said, snickering. Miss Hawkins is his
social studies teacher. “She’s been terrorizing me ever since school started. Wouldn’t it be cool just
to sneak up behind her and say, ‘Hi, Miss Hawkins’? And she’d turn around and there’d be no one
there?”
“That’s the best you can do?” Erin scoffed. “Lefty, where’s your imagination? Don’t you want to
make the chalk fly out of her hand, and the chalkboard erasers fly across the room, and the
wastebasket spill everything out on her desk, and her yogurt fly into her face?”
“Yeah! That’s way cool!” Lefty exclaimed.
I laughed. It was a funny idea. The four of us could go around, completely invisible, doing
whatever we wanted. We could wreck the whole school in ten minutes! Everyone would be
screaming and running out the doors. What a goof!
“We can’t do it now,” Lefty said, interrupting my thoughts. “Because it’s my turn to beat the
record.” He turned back to April, who was standing tensely by the door, pulling at a strand of her
black hair, a worried frown on her face. “Ready to time me?”
“I guess,” she replied, sighing.
Lefty pushed me out of the way. He stepped in front of the mirror, stared at his reflection, and
reached for the string.