Extremely Invisible

Chapter I. (Or How I Hate Helping Strangers)

Life without Belle wasn’t as hard as it should’ve been.

You’d expect the dead girls’ family to be torn apart by pain, completely devastated by the feelings, and in a constant state of mourning. You’d expect a quiet form of distance slowly appear between it’s members, with a father who’d stop working and a mother who could simply not look at her remaining children, unable to bear the extreme resemblance with her late daughter. A Lovely Bones kind of situation, if any of you have actually read that book.

Our family wasn’t like that. I still went into Belle’s room, to borrow some of our clothes and, although it did feel like some sort of sacrilege at first, it made me think that she wasn’t as dead as the doctors had claimed she was.

We still spoke about her at dinner. Not mourning, not crying (At least, not often), just casually. ‘Oh, Belle would’ve liked these peas.’ ‘I saw Belle’s old friend, Caroline, today. She looked so vulgar.’ ‘Belle, I mean, Emma, pass me the salt.’

I think we all agreed that it made us feel closer to her and that, somehow, my sister was still between us. Five months had passed since her death.

Of course, it hadn’t always been like that. When she had just died, Dad did stop working, but because he was allowed to, for a while. Kind of like a maternity leave, but with complete opposite reasons. Mom cried a lot, and there were days where she’d lock herself in her studio and cry, cry, cry. I stopped going to school for the last months before summer, because everyone decided that I wasn’t able to watch the hallways that my sister had so many times walked across. Academically, everybody was fine with me leaving, because of my super bow chicka wow wow A star grades. (My social life was so non-existent that i spent my saturdays studying.)

Then summer came, and my parents decided it was time to suck it up, and took me and my remaining siblings to our Grandmother’s house in the South of France. A shitty place, if you ask me, but it did do us well. Depp inside, I guess we all needed an escape.

Then September came, and we had to say goodbye to the clear french skies, and hello to England’s rainy ones.

Apparently I was now able to bear with seeing those famous school always that Belle used to roam, because it was now my third week of school, and Year Eleven work was already killing me. Sigh.

✺✺✺

At school, I had like two friends. One of them, Bianca, had lost her virginity over the summer, and kept telling her the details of the oh-so-romantic moment, details that I personally would’ve chosen to spare. The lucky guy was a boy from her summer club in Italy, where her family lived, someone called Lorenzo whom we all suspected, wasn’t as attractive as she said he was. My other friend, Mia, had spent her summer in an ‘independent summer course’, and she never explained what an ‘independent summer course’ was. I guess it was a summer camp where they took meditation classes and stuff like that. In any case, their summer seemed much more exciting than mine had been, with zero hints of a romance and/or anything spiritually calming.

I must confess, I expected some recognition, back at school. After all, I was the dead girl’s sister, and people didn’t usually die at our school (Although it would’ve been nice for some of these people to disappear.)  

But I soon realised that nobody would point at me in the hallways, or whisper in my presence, or bow their heads and pat my back. Mainly because Annabelle’s death was something like, last year’s thing, and there was new juicy summer gossip to gasp about. Like beach shagging and whose ‘open relationship’ had miserably failed.

Only one person spoke to me about Belle, and it was quite unexpected. 

It was during Advanced Literature, one of the classes I enjoyed the most. Since it was ‘advanced’, a) none of the dumb jocks attended it, b) people were actually serious about it and c) the stuff we studied wasn’t a bunch of lame popular teenage books. (Bianca told me they were studying ‘Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants’ in her class. It’s a wonderful book, but for a thirteen year old teenage girl.) 

I usually sat next to this kid called Stanley, who had long curly hair that reached to his shoulders, braces, and barely ever spoke. When he did, the bits and pieces of his last meal would reveal themselves to the world, trapped in the wires of his teeth. 

He smiled at me when I got there, and I nodded, noticing how he had had bacon for breakfast. And maybe, what was that…? Oh, a banana. Yum.

The good thing about having almost no friends, is the lack of distraction. I was deeply immersed in the description of the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (They were both bitchy and grumpy, perfectly made for each other) when a hand touched my shoulder and I jumped on my seat.

‘Hey, calm down.’ a voice whispered. Stanley turned to face me, lips nicely closed.

I turned to face the person behind me. It was a boy  I had seen many times, and I think his name was Michael. No, wait, it was Daniel.

‘What?’ I asked quietly, in a very Cathy-ish way, which is an angry one.

‘Aren’t you Annabelle WIlber’s sister?’

I shook my head after a very small moment of hesitation. ‘No.’

The boy raised an eyebrow and nodded. ‘Sorry.’

I looked back down at my piece of paper and stared blankly at it. Perhaps being the dead girl’s sister wasn’t actually what I wanted. I finished the description of Cathy’s very lovely persona, notice the irony, and headed outside as soon as the bell rang, after lightly smiling at Stan (I turned my face away when he smiled back.)

Alas, Michael/ Daniel wouldn’t leave me alone. He practically ran after me down the corridor, and quickly caught up with me.

‘Hey, sorry for that. Before, I mean.’

I shook my head and looked up at him. He was almost too tall. ‘It’s fine.’

‘It says Emma Wilbers on your notebook.’ Michael/ Daniel said, staring at me in a way that seemed slightly creepy.

‘Oh, does it?’ Rolling my eyes, I fastened my pace, wishing Michael/ Daniel would leave me alone.

He walked in front of me and turned to face me, stopping me in a way that I found rude, and disconsiderate, and very un-gentlemanly. ‘I need your help, sorry, Emma Wilbers.’ 

Seeing this was going absolutely nowhere, I sighed and pulled a face of obvious annoyance. ‘What for?’ I said sharply, looking quickly down at my watch. I was going to be late for French, merde.