Out of Sight, Out of Mind

here!'

Emily said, 'Hello, Miss… uh…'

'Serena,' the teacher prompted. 'This is so cool! What are you up to?'

Personally, Amanda thought she was overdoing the 'I'm-your-buddy-not-your-teacher' thing. Jenna also looked doubtful. But Emily seemed intrigued.

'We're just hanging out,' she said.

'I am so excited about this job!' Serena told them.

Jenna's eyebrows went up. 'Really? Why?'

'Well, it's not just student teaching, is it? I mean, you are really different.'

Jenna still looked wary. 'What do you mean, 'different'?'

'It's okay,' Serena assured her. 'I know that you guys are, you know, special. And I really want to know you. As friends, not students.'

'But that's what we are,' Emily said. 'Students.'

Serena tossed her head back and laughed, as if Emily had said something uproariously funny. 'Really, guys, I'm not like your other teachers. Madame, she's very nice and all that, but she's old. It's not like you can confide in her. I want you to think of me as someone you can really talk to. You can tell me your secrets, your feelings.'

'Madame doesn't like us to talk about ourselves to others too much,' Emily said.

Serena nodded. 'Yeah, that's kind of sad, isn't it? It must be sort of lonely for you guys, not being able to talk about what's important to you.'

Emily nodded fervently. 'It is.'

Serena was awfully eager, Amanda thought. Why would anyone want to tell their secrets to someone they'd just met? The woman was so pushy; it was making Amanda feel uncomfortable.

Jenna seemed to be having a similar reaction. 'I'm out of here,' she announced and then took off.

'I have to go, too, Miss-uh, I mean, Serena,' Amanda said. 'Bye, Emily.'

She hurried after Jenna and caught up with her. 'Wait! You still haven't told me.'

'Told you what?' Jenna asked.

'About Tracey. About her gift.'

'You still haven't figured it out?'

'No.'

Jenna grinned. 'Tracey can disappear.'

Walking home, Jenna was in pretty good spirits for a change. It hadn't been a bad day-not bad at all. In her mind, she kept seeing the look on the face of Amanda-Tracey when she'd told her she'd figured out who she was. Of course, it would have been more fun to see that stunned expression on the real face of that conceited Amanda Beeson, but this was the next best thing-knowing she'd freaked out the snottiest girl at Meadowbrook. And that incident at the mall had been pretty cool, too.

She didn't like Slug and Skank and the rest of them, even though she'd called them her 'crew' when she talked to Mr. Gonzalez and she'd told Amanda that they were her friends. Actually, she thought they were a bunch of miserable lowlifes. They didn't do anything real, like go to school or work. They just hung around all day, begging on street corners or picking pockets or shoplifting. They were filthy and not too intelligent, though she had to admit that she liked Bubbles's goth look, which was an extreme version of her own.

They didn't really live anywhere, though sometimes they'd squat in an abandoned house or apartment until someone moved in or the police threw them out. Lots of times they slept on the benches in the train station, and that's how Jenna knew them. There were times when she also hung around the train station, when she couldn't bear to go home.

But she probably would have gone into Target with them if Emily hadn't come along and predicted what was going to happen. Like the rest of the kids in the class, Emily didn't have a whole lot of control over her gift, so Jenna had truly lucked out.

A light rain began to fall, but that wasn't what suddenly dampened her spirits. She'd turned onto the street where she lived.

The three tall brick apartment buildings took up the whole street. Brookside Towers, they were called, which was a joke-there was no brook alongside the structures, and 'Towers' made them sound like castles or something. In reality, Brookside Towers was public housing, packed with all kinds of people who had only one thing in common-not much money.

Jenna suspected that the buildings had been ugly when they were built, and they were even uglier now, covered with graffiti and gang symbols. There were a lot of cracked windows, and cardboard had replaced the glass in some of them. The surrounding grounds weren't exactly gardens: any grass that might be there was covered with junk-trash bags, an old refrigerator, a broken bicycle.

There were some good people at Brookside Towers. Jenna thought of Mrs. Wong down the hall, who had put up window boxes full of geraniums. Then some nasty boys had managed to climb up to her window and destroy them. Mrs. Wong had cried…

No, Brookside Towers wasn't a very nice place to live. Sometimes, when her mother was sober and feeling optimistic, she'd make promises to Jenna.

'No matter how broke I am, I'm going to buy a lottery ticket every week. And one of these days, baby, our ship will come in, and I'll buy us a nice house in a nice neighborhood. If I keep buying tickets, I've got to win sooner or later, right? I mean, it's like that law of averages, or whatever it's called.' Jenna never bothered to tell her mother that she was wrong, that the law of averages meant that it was highly unlikely she'd ever win at all.

Jenna didn't despise her mother. She was just a poor, weak woman whose husband-Jenna's father-had walked out on her when she'd gotten pregnant. And she could feel better about herself only by getting drunk or high. She wasn't hateful- just very, very sad.

Jenna thought you could feel the sadness when you walked into the apartment, even when her mother wasn't home, like now. She took advantage of her mother's absence to pick up the empty bottles, sweep the floors, and wash the dirty dishes in the sink. Hunting in a cabinet, she found ajar of peanut butter and some stale crackers to spread it on.

The cable bill hadn't been paid, so the TV was worthless. With nothing else to do, she got out her homework. She had a lot of reading to do, but that was okay. Jenna liked to read.

Of course, she couldn't tell anyone that. It was too bad for her image…

Chapter Nine

AT FIRST, AMANDA DIDN'T think it sounded so bad, and on the way home she contemplated this piece of news. So, Tracey could turn invisible. That explained why she seemed to be absent a lot and why Madame kept saying it was nice to see her. And maybe that also explained why Tracey looked blurry in her mirror reflection and fuzzy in photographs.

Now, the question was, what could Amanda do with this knowledge? This gift opened up a whole new range of possibilities.

What if she just disappeared and took off until all this was over? Maybe she could sneak onto an airplane, go to an exotic vacation place, and He on the beach doing nothing. Could invisible people get a tan?

She could stay in the fanciest hotels without paying. She wondered what happened when an invisible person ate-did the food just disappear? Or could you see it digesting in an invisible stomach? That would be pretty gross.

Or she could hang around some famous people, like actors or rock stars, and see what they were really like. Or even just go to her very own house and see what her other self was up to…

But ultimately, she had to remember the sad truth of the matter. These gifted kids-they couldn't control their gifts. Dead people seemed to speak to Ken whether he wanted them to or not, and Emily's visions of the