I may not be able to feel things anymore. But I get to see things now—things that people hid from me—from everyone—before. The thoughts they don’t say out loud but admit to themselves when they think they’re alone.
My English teacher? The one who reported me. I watch her sometimes. Not too often. Because it makes me sad and angry. I don’t say her name. Can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t, period. Maybe because it would hurt too much. Like a wound that never heals. She doesn’t work at my old school anymore. Her face scrunches sometimes when she looks at kids. Some kids, anyway. Like they are a walking bad word. Like they’re a broken rule.
How did she mistake my costume jet pack for a bomb? Easy. She never really looked at it. She was only looking at me. Well, part of me, anyway. The Iraqi part. The Muslim part. The hard-to-pronounce-name part. She never ever got my name right. I don’t even know if she tried. Which is weird because sometimes she’d talk about this dead Russian writer she loved. He wrote a book about a guy who went crazy and killed an old lady. My teacher didn’t seem to have any trouble pronouncing his name.
Sometimes I want to do mean things to her, to scare her. But I don’t. When I was upset, Mama used to say, Don’t let them change who you are. Don’t let them steal your goodness. I haven’t exactly figured out how to do all those scary-movie ghost things anyway. I whisper, though. Walk through leaves and crunchy, ice-hardened snow and across wooden floors that sometimes creak. Mostly people can ignore it, pretend it’s nothing. But Safiya notices, I think. Maybe she’s even starting to believe it’s more than the wind, more than her mind playing tricks on her.
One thing I learned by being invisible: People see what they want to see and decide it’s the truth. But it’s not. Let me show you. Here are some things people thought were bombs:
A backpack.
A sack lunch.
A loaf of bread in a brown bag.
A camera.
An e-cigarette.
A science project about circuits.
A clock.
Police got called. Bomb squads. Bridges and stores were cleared out. None of those things were bombs. Guess what they all had in common.