The girls don’t want to be seen, except when they want to be seen, at which time they are easy to find. But when they don’t want to be seen, which is usually, to find one is rare. A visitor who knows about the girls, and believes that their ability to conceal themselves has been overstated, will sometimes see one who wants to be seen and announce, not without a certain smugness, that he has seen one of the supposedly elusive girls, and that there isn’t much to their storied invisibility after all, is there. But then the visitor will be told, sometimes by the girl herself, that she was not, in fact, hidden; and the visitor will scoff, and then the girl will vanish.
Of course the girls aren’t really invisible. They are merely skilled at concealment. The tactics they employ are known to include but are likely not limited to:
The girls are excellent judges of character and are thought to tailor their methods to the persons who they believe are seeking them. This, in any event, is what they have told us.
Around the age of fourteen or fifteen the girls lose their abilities. Some young women make fruitless efforts to retain them well into their twenties, but these efforts are regarded as socially unacceptable, and such young women are shunned. Outsiders assume that women should regain their abilities once they reach old age or otherwise lose their desirability, but this glib assumption is wrong, and evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of the girls’ role in our community. Most find such logic offensive. Once the ability is lost, it cannot be regained. Women rumored to have relearned concealment are generally later found to have died or moved away.
Most women don’t miss their juvenile powers. They don’t remember how they did it. They don’t care. Why should they?
It must be admitted that a very few women are thought to remain concealable for their entire lives. There are stories of ostensibly missing girls found dead in their homes decades later, as old women, the implication being that they were present all along, but unseen. Our museum features an exhibit of journals thought to have been written by such women. The entries read, “Watched them eat dinner,” and “Bus didn’t stop for me.”
The journals, however, might be hoaxes. Most women think so. But the men want to believe.