The 6th Power

Read The 6th Power for Free Online

Book: Read The 6th Power for Free Online
Authors: Justin David Walker
invisible. But I also noticed that the bathroom was really steamy and the air seemed to swirl around every time Chet moved. Which meant that it swirled around when I moved. Had Chet seen that? He stepped towards me, which I guess answered my question.
    I dropped down to the floor. Chet waved his hands where I’d been just a moment before. The look on his face had gone from fear to suspicion to anger. He knew that someone was in the bathroom with him and that someone had flushed the toilet on him and, let’s be honest, the list of suspects was pretty short. If Chet got his hands on me, all the transparency in the world wasn’t going to save me.
    But, oddly enough, my mother could save me. She burst into the room, a wailing Kiki in her arms, and started to rip into my brother. I sat in the corner for a few minutes, watching the show and catching my breath, then took advantage of the uproar and slipped out.
     

Chapter 6
    C losed.
    I pressed my face to the glass door of Mr. Magellan’s shop, but the lights were off. I couldn’t see a thing.
    Great.
    After my little bathroom adventure, I’d needed to get out of the house. Sure, it could have been fun to use the invisibility to freak the twins out all afternoon, but the close call with Chet reminded me that I should just stay away from my brothers. So, since I still wanted to ask Mr. Magellan what in the world he’d gotten me in to, I’d headed back downtown.
    But no such luck. Still, I wasn’t too worried. Mr. Magellan frequently closed down the shop over the noon hour. Sometimes he went to the little pizza shop next door, but when I looked in that window, there was no sign of him.
    The smells coming from the restaurant reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. A slice and a soda would really hit the spot. Shame that I’d spent all of my allowance already. Also, it would have been kind of hard to place my order. It occurred to me that I could just waltz in and sneak some food out, but I pushed the temptation aside. I was fairly sure that Susan Richards had never used her power to steal some lunch, so I wasn’t about to, either.
    I had time to kill until Mr. Magellan returned, so I headed over to the park. Coralberry’s downtown is made up of four roads that form a square, with a small park in the middle. It’s a sit-downy kind of park, with trees and grass and benches, and a gazebo in the middle where people can picnic or even hold a wedding. There are some businesses around the square, including the comic book shop and the pizza place on the north side and a sporting goods store on the south side. Two of the four roads that make up the square are highways that continue out of town and in to the next counties. The east-west highway goes either to Westertonville or out past the lake. The north-south highway winds through miles of farmland and other small towns. So despite the smallness of our community, downtown was usually a busy place, even if it’s only busy with people passing through.
    I pushed the cross-walk button on the southeast corner of the square and chuckled as the lights changed and everyone had to stop for a pedestrian that no one could see. Ah, invisible humor. No one gets it but me. Speaking of humor, as I walked across the street, I replayed with perfect clarity the memory of Mom yelling at Chet. He had tried to cover himself with the bathroom rug as he stood there, dripping, protesting that it wasn’t his fault, that there was someone in the bathroom with him. It was so nice, having that vein pop out on Mom’s forehead at someone other than me. This time, I wasn’t the one set up to take the fall. This time, I wasn’t the one whose excuses were rejected. This time, I wasn’t the one who got grounded.
    Just southeast of the little postage stamp of green in the town square was Coralberry Park, a proper run-around-and-have-fun kind of park, and it was crowded with people doing just that. School was out, the sun was up, and

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