They caught up to Wesley as he made his way onto the playground at lunch. Luke flanked left and shouldered him sideways for Justin to catch in a headlock, squeezing tight enough that Wesley thought his head might pop off. When they let him go he laughed and straightened his tie. He couldn’t let them think he wasn’t a good sport.
‘No sign of Kat Waldgrave,’ said Justin.
It was like they could read his mind. Wesley had spent the morning trying to find her, looking into classrooms and waiting in the corridor between lessons (Miss Jalloh had caught him twice, ushering him away as she would a beggar).
Luke stretched to lean against the wall in a way that blocked Wesley from escaping. A dark sweat stain had blossomed in his armpit. ‘Tru likes how that went.’
‘Even if she was an easy target,’ added Justin.
Wesley tried to push any thoughts of the unsent letter on her MacBook desktop out of his mind. ‘You spoke to him?’
‘Online, yeah,’ said Luke, before jabbing him in the chest. ‘Don’t worry, we told him everything you did to make it happen.’
‘Yeah?’ Wesley couldn’t keep the smile from his face.
Luke glanced around slyly before he spoke again. ‘He’s got something else going on, something we’ve been part of for a few weeks. Something bigger.’
Wesley’s smile faltered. A few weeks? Easily long enough that they had kept it a secret while they worked together on Kat. He swallowed, refusing to let them see how much it bothered him. ‘Bigger?’
Justin grinned. ‘Bigger than Selena.’
The name made his heart beat faster. Selena Jensen had been in the year above them, and dated a guy called Gabriel Clark. She had done some modelling work, and almost every boy (and a lot of the girls) in school were obsessed with her. When she broke up with Gabriel, he didn’t take it well.
First he wrote a blog post detailing how Selena had cheated on him, taken his money to support her career, and strung him along. Whether any of it was true or not, he sent the post to the whole school and enough people chose to believe him. It struck a spark. Every guy who wanted Selena so badly they had come to resent her was mobilised. The blog post confirmed all their worst fears: that girls like Selena only slept with guys they could use; that boys like them could unfairly be painted as the bad guy.
It became a crusade, and Luke and Justin led it online, coining #SelloutSelena. It immediately caught on across social media, hundreds of (mostly anonymous) accounts bombarding her – and anybody who spoke up in her defence – with abuse, as well as spreading rumours and ideas for action, using it to promote videos about the evils of modern women and feminism. Even TrumourPixel joined the hunt, talking about it on his streams and making videos in support of the cause.
It all ended with the attack. One day after school this guy, egged on by everything he had seen on the hashtag, waited in the car park and hit Selena with his car. Apparently he’d been at school two years before and she had rejected him.
She survived, though she never came back to school. The hashtag died, but despite how it ended Luke and Justin became legends in certain circles. Wesley couldn’t help but envy them that.
‘We think you proved yourself,’ said Luke, watching him closely. ‘Tru’s looking for more help, and he thinks you’d be perfect for the job. I’ll tell him you’re up for it?’
The thought of being part of anything bigger than #SelloutSelena terrified him, but he couldn’t let them see. They were inviting him to be part of the next campaign. TrumourPixel was inviting him. It was exactly what he had wanted.
So why could he not stop thinking about Kat Waldgrave?
‘What’s it about?’ he said, trying to sound casual.
Justin lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. ‘We can’t tell you yet.’
‘We just need to know if you’re up for it,’ said Luke, leaning closer. ‘And I can ask to bring you along to meet him.’
Wesley’s stomach seemed to backflip. He was almost overwhelmed by the urge to retreat, to surrender to his fear because doing so would confirm the simplest truth he knew about himself: that he wasn’t up to this, and never had been.
Now Kat’s letter gave him strength – he had done that. For better or worse, it propelled him forward.
‘Yeah,’ Wesley said. ‘I’m up for it.’
If this strange fade was caused by withdrawal from the real world, maybe all Kat needed to do was re-engage. Maybe she just needed to go outside. Suzy had always told her to get out more.
There were a few hours before she was due to meet the Lonely People, and sitting at home was driving her crazy. Going to school would at least give her the chance to test the limits of the fade – it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go, and she might feel better knowing what she was up against. Right?
Alongside her usual school clothes, Kat added tights and a blazer in an attempt to make herself as solid as possible. She was almost dressed when Dad knocked on her door. ‘Are you okay in there?’
Dinner had still been waiting forlornly in the oven when Kat snuck downstairs in the middle of the night. She’d thrown it away and helped herself to a selection of luminous orange snacks instead, although once she’d brought them up to her room her appetite had abandoned her.
‘I’m going to work now,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s catch up later, okay?’
Kat had always joked – to herself – that she learned most of what she knew about video game mechanics from studiously avoiding her dad. Over time, she’d realised it might be true. In the evenings Dad would pour a glass of wine and spread his marking across the living room carpet while Kat stayed upstairs, making toilet runs when she was certain he wasn’t nearby.
Excluding the weirdness of the fade, there was no actual reason for it be so difficult to talk to Dad. Generally speaking, they got along fine. The word that always came to mind was estrangement. It had only become apparent after Suzy went to university.
Before Mum left, Dad and Suzy had always got on. They watched films and went shopping together. They even looked more alike, Suzy’s skin a similar dark brown where Kat’s was lighter, closer to Mum’s.
There was a vacuum to be filled after Mum was gone. Suzy’s already BIG personality expanded further to fill the space. It was always unclear why, but she began to clash with Dad, and after a while it seemed like they never stopped fighting. Kat was left no territory but the sidelines. Even though Suzy was gone, and had barely been in touch since, Kat hadn’t found a way back. She thought if they kept to themselves, their relationship couldn’t sour like it had with her mum and sister. So they became like former best friends who had moved on, obliging them to be cordial and nothing more whenever they ran into each other. Awkward, when you live together.
Now, as she listened to Dad’s feet shift uncertainly on the carpet outside her bedroom door, she wondered if trying so hard to find herself online had made her neglect the scraps of life she still had here.
She wanted to show Dad what had happened. She wanted him to see and tell her that she would be okay. There had to be a not-crazy way to do it. Maybe she could wrap herself in a hooded cape, hurl a smoke bomb into the room, and then unveil herself – ta da! She had the cape (for cosplay reasons) but she was fresh out of smoke bombs.
‘Have a good day,’ said Dad, before he headed downstairs.
Kat knew the real reason she couldn’t show him. It was one thing to be invisible to the world. Her dad not seeing her would be to lose a fundamental part of her existence.
Once he had left, she went downstairs and stood behind the front door, trying to psyche herself up.
In the Doctor Backwash episode ‘The QWOP Factory’, Vladimir is stung by an escaped genetically modified hornet and his hands swell to three times their normal size. The only way to fix it is to get back to his lab, except he can’t drive and his wallet is stuck in the hornet hive (long story). So he faces up to the ridicule he knows he’s going to face, and sets off across campus.
‘For science,’ Kat said, and opened the door.
There was no sign of her in the canteen or the playground, in any of the classrooms where they sometimes played lunchtime games. The last place Wesley checked was the library, poking his head into all the nooks and crannies created by the shelves arranged around the computer tables. The MacBook was burning a hole in his bag, making him feel more like a thief with every passing second.
He found Mutya, a girl from their year, in the corner reading a book with sperm on the cover.
‘Do you have any idea where Kat Waldgrave hangs out?’ Wesley asked, probably the first time he had ever spoken to her.
Her face went blank. ‘No idea who you’re talking about.’
Wesley found a quiet corner and opened the MacBook to watch a TrumourPixel video, a tirade about the evils of loot boxes in video games. It almost felt like Kat had disappeared from the face of the planet.
A calendar notification popped in the corner of the screen. He fumbled the touchpad and opened it. The Lonely People. Drama rehearsal room. 3.45pm. There was no way of seeing when the entry was made, but it was the closest he had to a lead. Maybe Kat was planning to show up at the bell. If he went to the meeting himself she would know he had used her MacBook, but he couldn’t see any other choice.
Wesley squinted at the calendar appointment. Whenever he turned his head he was sure he saw additional text there, filling up the Notes field, but whenever he looked square on it was gone.
He needed to get to the bottom of this once and for all.
Kat arrived at school just as the bell signalled the end of lunch. By the time she made it inside the corridors were quiet, most people already in registration. As Kat reached the second floor a couple of younger girls scurried past, and she found herself shrinking away, ashamed. The photos everybody had seen of her weren’t real, but she still felt – ironically – as if she had been exposed.
Anxiety tightened inside her chest. If she was going to face this down she needed to be brave. She forced herself to keep moving, because she knew stopping meant she would turn back.
Her registration room had two rows of desks, and everybody was already seated by the time Kat pushed open the door. A few glanced up at the movement, and then returned to staring into space. Mr Delaney insisted on five minutes of torturous silence before he took the register. Kat inhaled, determined to draw any loose pieces of herself back to the whole, and began the walk to her seat towards the rear of the room.
Usually Mr Delaney made a show of chastising anybody for being late. Today he stayed focused on whatever he was reading, and nobody looked up at her as she passed. She had expected to find them all still talking about the photograph that had been sent around on her website the day before – the fallout of anything like that usually lasted for days – but it was as if it had never happened.
It was fairly normal for people to ignore her at school, so she needed to push a little to test the boundaries of the fade. Before she reached her seat, Kat stopped at the desk of a boy engaged in drawing a painstakingly detailed penis in the margins of his homework, and knocked the exercise book to the floor.
‘Hey!’ he said, glaring up at her. Before they could settle his eyes grew unfocused and his gaze slipped away. He bent to retrieve his artwork without giving her a second glance.
Some of the desks were old, their surfaces scratched and scrawled with graffiti, and when Kat reached her place she didn’t sit, instead laying her hands flat on the tabletop to read the tags and love notes through her skin. Mutya, her desk-mate, was engrossed in her phone hidden behind a stack of books.
‘Hey,’ said Kat, emboldened by desperation.
Mutya didn’t look up. ‘Hmm?’
‘I said hey.’
It was like being teased by so-called friends – Do you hear something? I could swear I heard something but it must have been the wind.
Kat had become the wind. She had always longed for the security of invisibility at school, but now she had it she felt only empty.
Mr Delaney stood wearily to call the register. ‘Let’s do this so we can get the afternoon over with, shall we?’ he said, scanning the room. If he saw Kat still standing at the back of the room he didn’t show it.
Her surname placed her near the foot of the register. Mr Delaney reeled off the names in a near-continuous drawl, punctuated by tired acknowledgements and the beeps of the electronic register.
Finally, he called, ‘Kat Waldgrave.’
‘Here, sir,’ she said.
Mr Delaney waited a beat, and then flicked his eyes up to the class. ‘Kat Waldgrave?’
He spoke the name like it offended him. Kat took a steadying breath and walked towards him, but he aimed his frown right past her.
‘I’m sure I saw her earlier,’ he muttered to himself, and marked her as present.
She might never need another mandatory attendance meeting if she was automatically considered here. It should be a blessing, a superpower she could twist to her advantage. Yet when the bell rang and everybody carefully avoided her while simultaneously not seeing her on their way out, she begged for somebody to concede to her presence.
The usual crowd was heading to English, and she tagged along behind. While the rest of the class took their seats, Kat remained standing at the front of the room. The lesson began regardless, Miss Ellis enthusiastically reciting Shakespeare as if she was on stage. Every time Kat blocked her path the teacher threw her an irritated glance, and then stepped aside to find herself more space.
It wasn’t that she was invisible, Kat was learning. Not quite. Everybody could see her, they just forgot her as soon as they looked. She had become an absence, a void that nobody could tolerate to stare into for even the most fleeting moment.
‘Come on!’ she shouted. ‘I’m right here!’
The Shakespeare didn’t stop. It felt like Kat’s lungs had faded too, the air escaping before she could breathe it, and she ran out into the empty corridor, rushing back to the toilets where this had all started. She slammed into a cubicle and locked the door.
She had thought that being outside and forcing people to see her would snap the fade like an over-stretched elastic band, leave it no choice but to loosen its grip and return her to the world. Seeing its power, its stubborn totality, felt like receiving a death sentence, or worse, being doomed to walk in limbo for the rest of her days.
Home. She wanted to go home, and she knew nobody would stop her. Anxiety begged her to run for it. It was only the thought of meeting the Lonely People that kept her there. One of them had seen her. They might have answers. They might be able to stop this fade.
The door to the toilets creaked open, and Kat listened to a single set of footsteps pace deliberately to her stall.
‘Occupied,’ she said timidly, knowing they wouldn’t hear.
‘My dude, I know you’re in there.’ A girl’s voice Kat didn’t recognise. ‘Open up.’
It was such a wonder to have somebody speaking directly to her that she didn’t think twice, and pulled the door open.
The doorway framed a smaller girl with wavy brown hair and unruly eyebrows, grinning like they shared a secret. Unlike Kat, she wore a skirt with no leggings and shirt sleeves rolled proudly to the elbow. Every inch of her bare, pale skin looked cut from paper, pasted onto reality with too much glue so that the room shone through her.
This girl was fading too.