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  PRAISE FOR INVISIBLE

  “Invisible is a taut, perfectly-pitched snare drum of a novel. The writing style is stretched to the breaking point and the narration never misses a beat. Hautman also proves what we all suspected: an obsessive hobby (in this case model train building) is really a mask for some great pain. His best novel yet.”

  —WILL WEAVER, AUTHOR OF FARM TEAM

  “Pete Hautman’s Invisible is taut, mysterious, and ultimately sad. It’s the kind of story you experience, rather than read. And when it’s over, it lingers. Most impressive.”

  —GRAHAM SALISBURY, AUTHOR OF UNDER THE BLOOD RED SUN

  You could say that my railroad, the Madham Line, is almost the most important thing in my life. Next to Andy Morrow, my best friend. … I guess you could say that I’m not only disturbed,

  I’m obsessed.

  LOTS OF PEOPLE think Doug Hanson is a freak—he gets beat up after school, and the girl of his dreams calls him a worm. Doug’s only refuge is building elaborate model trains in his basement and hanging out with his best friend, Andy Morrow. Andy is nothing like Doug: He’s a popular football star who could date any girl in school. Despite their differences, Doug and Andy talk about everything—except what happened at the Tuttle place a few years back.

  As Doug retreats deeper and deeper into his own world, long-buried secrets come to light—and the more he tries to keep them invisible, the looser his grip on reality becomes. In this fierce, disturbing novel, National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman spins a poignant tale about inner demons, and how far one boy will go to control them.

  A Junior Library Guild Selection

  PETE HAUTMAN has written many novels for adults and teens, including Godless, winner of the National Book Award, and Sweetblood, which Publishers Weekly called “a tantalizing read” in its starred review. His other award-winning young adult novels include Hole in the Sky, No Limit, and Mr. Was. Pete lives in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH COPYRIGHT © 2005

  BY MARC YANKUS

  JACKET DESIGN BY RUSSELL GORDON

  Visit us on the world wide web www.SimonSaysKids.com

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

  SIMON & SCHUSTER, NEW YORK

  Invisible

  Also by Pete Hautman

  Godless

  Sweetblood

  Hole in the Sky

  No Limit

  Mr. Was

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Pete Hautman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ann Zeak.

  The text for this book is set in Bembo.

  Interior illustrations by Pete Hautman

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hautman, Pete, 1952–

  Invisible / Pete Hautman.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends—one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater—who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

  ISBN 0-689-86800-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0704-1 (eBook)

  [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Railroads—Models—Fiction. 4. Models and modelmaking—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Mental illness—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H2887In 2005

  [Fic]—dc22 2004002484

  Contents

  Chapter 1: My Best Friend

  Chapter 2: Stella

  Chapter 3: Focus

  Chapter 4: Logic

  Chapter 5: Secrets

  Chapter 6: Troubled

  Chapter 7: Practice

  Chapter 8: Worm

  Chapter 9: Rat

  Chapter 10: Butterfingers

  Chapter 11: To Build a Fire

  Chapter 12: Sigil

  Chapter 13: I Spy

  Chapter 14: Bridge

  Chapter 15: George Fuller

  Chapter 16: Pooping Cat

  Chapter 17: Pretty Girls

  Chapter 18: Therapy

  Chapter 19: End Run

  Chapter 20: Outrageous Lies

  Chapter 21: Meatballs

  Chapter 22: Kicks

  Chapter 23: Room 317

  Chapter 24: Number Five

  Chapter 25: Rescheduled

  Chapter 26: Flammable

  Chapter 27: Power

  Chapter 28: Trains and Lockers

  Chapter 29: Interrogation

  Chapter 30: Interrogation (Part 2)

  Chapter 31: Godzilla

  Chapter 32: The Yelling

  Chapter 33: Restoration

  Chapter 34: State of the Art

  Chapter 35: Quality of Line

  Chapter 36: Derailed

  Chapter 37: Madham

  Invisible

  1

  MY BEST FRIEND

  There is something about trains. The sound they make. The way they go by, one car after another after another after another. Every car different but somehow the same. And the tracks go on forever, connecting places, connecting people. Wherever you are, you could go to the nearest railroad track right now, and if you followed it long enough, you would find me.

  There is another thing to know about trains. They are large and dangerous. They would crush you if they could, but they are confined by those two narrow strips of steel. Trains are like fire. You don’t want to get in their way.

  My grandfather left me his HO scale model railroad when he passed on. One locomotive, seven cars, and sixteen feet of track. That’s another reason I like trains—they connect me to him, wherever he is. You could say that my railroad, the Madham Line, is almost the most important thing in my life. Next to Andy Morrow, my best friend.

  A guy like Andy might have more than one best friend. He is so popular that there are at least five kids at school who would probably claim him. But if you asked Andy who was his best friend, he would say, “Dougie Hanson, of course.” And that would be me.

  I’m a quiet kid, pretty much invisible—except if you happen to notice me standing next to Andy. We grew up together, Andy and me. Next door, actually. We met at the age of one year and three months. Our birthdays are only seventeen days apart. We are like Velcro, like two poles of a magnet, like peanut butter and jelly, like superglue. We are best friends by every definition. Best friends. Best. Friends.

  It doesn’t matter to Andy Morrow that I have crooked teeth and poor coordination and wear stupid clothes. It wouldn’t matter if I had a nose like a pig and smelled of Limburger cheese. Andy would still say, “Dougie is my best friend.”

  True, Andy might spend more time with other kids who claim to be his best friend. He might hang with the other football players, and his friends on the student council, and his golfing friends, and his theater friends, but he always comes home at night and opens his bedroom window and calls out across the low picket fence, “Hey, Dougie!”

  And if my window is open, and if I’m awake, we talk.

  It does not matter that we don’t spend as much time together as we used t
o. I tell Andy all about the new tank car I bought for the Madham Line. I might talk about my mother’s latest crossword puzzle, or a book I read about black holes, or a math test I took in school, and Andy would listen. That is what best friends do.

  And if Andy wants to talk about the school play he is starring in, or his latest football game, or a girl he met … I’ll listen to him, too.

  It does not matter to Andy that we live in completely different realities. I’m Andy’s best friend. It does not matter to Andy that we hardly ever actually do anything together.

  Why should it? We are best friends, me and Andy. Best. Friends.

  2

  STELLA

  My full and proper name is Douglas MacArthur Hanson. I am named after Douglas MacArthur, the famous general, who was a second cousin of my father’s great-aunt. Everyone on my father’s side is named after some famous person we are supposedly related to. My father’s name is Henry Clay Hanson. Henry Clay was a politician who died before the Civil War. He was my grandfather’s cousin’s great-uncle. Or something like that. It goes on and on. Since my grandfather’s name was George Washington Hanson, I guess I’m related to the father of our country too. Anyway, I’m glad I got named after a general instead of a politician. I think it makes me sound more respectable.

  Usually when I meet someone for the first time, I tell them my full and proper name. Then I say, “But you can call me General.” Some people find that amusing. Andy always laughs. Sometimes he calls me General, just to tease me. I don’t mind. I kind of like it. I am very easy to get along with.

  My mother would not agree with that. She finds me difficult. In fact, she thinks that I am troubled and disturbed. I find it troubling that she finds me disturbing, so she must be right.

  Right?

  “Hey, Dougie!”

  I look at my alarm clock: 1:17.

  “Dougie, you up?”

  I roll out of bed and crawl to the window.

  “I’m up now,” I say, resting my chin on the windowsill.

  “How’s it going?” Andy is sitting in his window, his long legs dangling over the spirea bushes.

  “I was dreaming.”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “I don’t remember. Hey, was tonight your play?”

  “Yeah! It went great. I didn’t miss a line. But—you’re gonna like this—Melissa’s skirt came off.”

  “Melissa Haverman?”

  “Yeah! See, I’m Stanley Kowalski, and Melissa is playing Stella, my wife? And in this one scene she’s really mad and she spins around fast and the bottom of her skirt gets caught on a nail sticking out of this table leg and it comes right off.” He laughs. “She was wearing blue panties.”

  I have a very vivid imagination. I can see it in my head just like a movie.

  Andy says, “But she was really cool. She grabbed the skirt and pulled it back on and just kept going with the scene. The audience didn’t laugh or anything. You should’ve been there.”

  “I don’t really like plays,” I say. “A bunch of people talking about nothing.”

  “Well, you would’ve liked this one. You should’ve heard Melissa after the play. She was so mad at the guy in charge of props, I thought she’d rip his face off. So what did you do today?”

  “Still working on my bridge.” I am connecting East Madham to West Madham with an eleven-foot-long suspension bridge. I’ve been working on it for months. It’s really quite amazing.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I’ve finally got the towers built.” The entire bridge is scratch-built from matchsticks, string, and glue. Andy always teases me about that.

  “Aren’t you afraid it’s gonna catch on fire?”

  We laugh. Andy and I had some bad luck with fires when we were kids. We’re more careful now. I always scrape the phosphorous tips off all the matchsticks before using them. I have scraped the heads off 112 boxes of stick matches. There are 200 matches in a box. In case you are slow at math, that’s 22,400 matches in all.

  “I figure the bridge will be ready for its inaugural crossing in about three weeks. Everybody in Madham will be there. You want to come?”

  “Sure!”

  Of course, the bit about “everybody in Madham” is kind of a joke, because the people who live in Madham are made out of plastic and they are less than one inch tall. Madham is the name of the HO scale railroad town I built in my basement. It covers three Ping-Pong tables and nearly fills the biggest room in the basement.

  Madham has 109 buildings, all scratch-built. There are two lakes, a football stadium, a cement plant, a hospital, two tunnels, a forest, and sixty feet of track. It has a population of 289 plastic people, seventeen dogs, six cows, and eleven horses. Madham is the perfect town. In fact, one of my goals is to live in Madham. Once I figure out how to make a few million dollars, I’ll build a full-scale version of the town with real trains and real trees and real people. I think it would be a nice place to live.

  I’ve been working on Madham for two years and eleven months now. I guess you could say that I’m not only disturbed, I’m obsessed.

  3

  FOCUS

  My ability to focus on one thing at a time is the secret to my success. Other people do not have this talent. Let me tell you: I once peeled an entire bag of tangerines—seventeen of them—using only my fingernails, without losing one drop of juice. I lined up the peeled tangerines on the kitchen counter and they were as beautiful as any work of art. Mrs. Felko, my art teacher, would not agree with that. She and I have very different tastes. But I thought they were quite beautiful.

  The special things I do are not always appreciated by my mother. She was upset about the tangerines. But I still remember them: beautiful, naked, and soft orange, on green Formica.

  I am like that with school assignments, too. That is, if the assignment interests me. I once was assigned to build a model windmill for science class. I made it out of Popsicle sticks, thread, wax paper, and copper wire. It actually worked. Math is also easy for me. It is all about focus and concentration. It is about doing exactly one thing at a time.

  Andy understands the importance of focus. He knows how to focus when he is about to hit a golf ball, or when he is on stage in a play, or on the football field. Andy is a ferocious focuser. But he is not as good at it as I am. I can sit and watch a blade of grass grow. Andy, he can’t do that for more than five minutes before he gets all itchy and has to get up and do something. Andy is a doer. Doing things is what he does.

  One day—this was four years ago—Andy and I decided to build a treehouse in Peanut Woods. We call it Peanut Woods because it’s right behind the Skippy peanut butter factory, and it always smells like peanut butter.

  Peanut Woods is not a very good woods. It’s big enough—about sixteen acres in size—but the ground is squishy and swampy, and except for a few cottonwoods, there aren’t a lot of big trees, and in the summer the mosquitoes can be ferocious. Andy and I used to go there when we were kids and build campfires. Andy was very good at fires. He never needed more than one match. Starting with a few scraps of paper, leaves, and slender twigs, he would slowly feed it larger twigs, then broken branches, then logs. The smoke kept the mosquitoes away. We would sit for hours, talking and watching the flames.

  One big old cottonwood near the center of the woods was a perfect treehouse tree—the trunk went straight up for twenty-five feet, then three huge branches spread out from a single bulbous crotch. We found a pile of old crates and pallets behind the Skippy factory. Andy borrowed a saw, a hammer, a couple of boxes of nails, and some nylon rope from his dad’s workshop, and we went to work.

  We started out by cutting steps from the pallets and nailing them to the trunk, three long nails per step. Once we made it up to the crotch, we set up a pulley system to haul the boards up the tree. Andy stayed up there sawing and nailing while I stayed below and fed him fresh lumber. Most of the time, however, I worked on carving our initials in the trunk:

  A.M.
/>
  D.M.H.

  It took me hours to carve those initials, but I did a remarkable job. I stripped off a rectangular section of bark, carefully outlined each letter with the tip of my pocketknife, then began to carve. I did not have a very good knife back then, just an old two-blade jackknife my father had given me, but I worked on those letters until each one was neat and straight and perfect. And all the while Andy was up there sawing and pounding and every now and then shouting, “Look out below!” when he was about to drop something.

  It took us two days to build the treehouse. It was three-sided, like a wedge of cheese, with a door in one wall, a window in each of the others, and a ceiling just high enough so we could stand up. We covered the floor with carpet samples. We found some wooden chairs and a table someone had thrown out. By the time we were done, it was just like a little triangle-shaped apartment.

  The treehouse was a great place to hang out. Nobody knew about it but us.

  A few months ago Andy and I visited the old cottonwood. The treehouse is just a few charred, broken, rotting boards stuck way up in the branches. But you can still read our initials on the trunk, just as clear and precise as the day I carved them. Andy thinks that’s funny—he worked a whole day building the treehouse while I just carved our initials, but only the initials survived.

  That is all you need to know about focus. If you take your time and do a job right, it can last forever.

  4

  LOGIC

  My father owns seven identical gray suits, fifteen identical white dress shirts, three pairs of brown shoes, and twenty silk ties. Every tie is red and blue striped, but they are all different stripe patterns. Every year for his birthday I try to find a new variety of red-and-blue-striped silk tie. It can be quite challenging. One year I made a mistake and bought him a tie exactly like one he already owned, but he was very happy to get it because the old one had a coffee stain.

  My father loves his suits. He even wears them on weekends. He wears a suit and tie to mow the lawn—although if it is really hot out, he will take off the jacket and roll up his shirtsleeves. Our neighbors find this strange, but many of their behaviors are also quite interesting. Mr. Ness, for example, likes to get drunk and play his electric guitar in his garage and sing old Rolling Stones songs. I find that very strange indeed.