When Sara got off the bus from Ellison Middle School on Friday, there was a package on the hall table for her. She kicked off her snow boots and dumped a book out of the padded mailer. She already knew what it was: a copy of Ninja Invisibility Secrets Made Simple that she’d ordered from the back of the comic book.

She padded damply through the kitchen and upstairs to her room in socks which had gotten wet in the little puddles of snow that had melted off her boots. Sara figured her mom would be in the basement working with the potter’s wheel and wouldn’t be coming up until Jeopardy was on, so she should have plenty of time to read.

She lay down on the bed on her stomach and opened her book. The first part talked about various ways of killing your opponent by using your hands as deadly weapons. Sara decided that she didn’t really need to know how to kill anybody, she just wanted to be invisible. Think how cool it would be to be able to listen to people’s conversations without being seen, or to go to school wearing whatever you wanted, without having to hear what Caitlyn Anderson and Tiffany Baxter thought of it. Sara clenched her fists experimentally, then opened them and examined her short stubby fingers with the chipped pink nail polish. She flipped ahead to the next chapter. Better just to stick with invisibility.

She read for a while, then she had to go to the bathroom. She looked around for something to use as a bookmark. On her nightstand there was a postcard from her father with a picture of a rainforest in Belize. She turned it over and got that elevator-going-too-fast feeling in her stomach again, just like when she’d first read it. “Dear Sara,” she read again, “Belize is beautiful. There are hundreds of tropical birds. Lisa and I got married here yesterday. See you when we get back. Regards, Dad.” Not that she hadn’t known that they’d get married someday. . . eventually, but why did he have to do it without any friends or family around? As she got off the bed, she noticed that she still had her wet socks on. She peeled them off into two sodden lumps, which she hurled, one after the other, against the closet door.

When she got back from the bathroom, it was starting to get dark outside. She stared out at the horizon, where there was still a slight distant glow, hoping to see the first star, but it had been getting more overcast, and the big wads of clouds seemed to muffle any outside sound, as well as light. The clock on her nightstand ticked loudly.

She clicked on the bedside light and picked up the ninja book again. She was still looking for a recipe or instructions or something on how to become invisible, but this next part was all about the legends of famous ninjas. They reminded Sara of the Macbeth movie they’d been shown in her Language Arts class. She thought about what it would feel like to be the only person left alive inside a stone fortress. She imagined the sound of a stone falling down a deep, deep well. Suddenly, she needed to be downstairs.

The only lights on downstairs were in the kitchen. The brightness made Sara blink as she entered the room. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table watching the television.

“Homework, honey?” asked her mother. Sara thought about whether she should mention her half-finished algebra homework, but the commercial was over. Her mother was shooting rapid-fire questions at the TV: “What is Reykjavik? . . . Who was Stendhal?” Sara went over to the stove and scooped some brown rice into her bowl, spooned some black beans on top and sat down to eat. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was, but then she remembered that her mother had put leftover tofurkey in her lunch bag, which Sara dreaded eating almost as much as she dreaded saying.

She watched her mother concentrate on the small blue screen. Maybe someday, her mother would be one of the contestants on the show. Sara would be able to watch while her mother smiled at the camera with her pretty mouth and her eyes that dared anyone to challenge her, and Sara would know that it was really her that her mother was smiling at. A warm breeze would carry the sound of parrots and toucans squawking from the trees outside the kitchen window.

She finished eating before the show was over, put her bowl and fork into the dishwasher. “I’m going upstairs,” she said to her mother’s back.

“What was the Treaty of Versailles? . . . Who is Dan Quayle? . . . Okay, sweetie. What is the polka?” Her mother’s questions at the TV followed Sara up the stairs.

Sara closed her bedroom door. All sounds but the clock seemed absorbed by the carpeting in her room. The house felt too big to her. She heard a dog bark from somewhere far away. Something inside her vibrated to that same note. Ninja Invisibility Secrets Made Simple was lying face down on her bed. She turned off the light and let the book fall to the floor as she pulled her quilt up over her head.