Overtaken by Mark H. Kruger

parked beside me seconds later, “or she’d be one crispy critter.”
    Oliver and I stood side by side and surveyed everyone’s faces as they strode by. I was struck by how disturbingly normal everyone appeared. No anxiety, no fear, just smiles and laughter. It was as if it were all for show.
    â€œBy the way,” I said, looking at Oliver, “what are you doing here?”
    â€œMom’s much better, so I decided to risk being rounded up by the Bar Tech storm troopers,” he said, eyes on alert as he scanned the campus quad for impending danger.
    â€œAll quiet on the western front,” I confirmed, letting him know that our favorite goon squad was nowhere in sight.
    â€œFor now,” Oliver said as he gave me a wary sidelong glance. “Three days ago it seems like the world was coming to an end. Today it’s sunshine and lollipops. A guy could get whiplash. What the hell’s going on?”
    â€œBeats me.” I shook my head and shrugged, truly mystified. “But there’s one person who might have a clue.”

Jackson was already seated in the back, right corner of biology class, fully locked into a beat-up Vonnegut paperback.
    Amazingly, he was still alive and functioning. I contained my relief as I calmly strode down the aisle. Jackson looked up just as I arrived at his desk.
    â€œGood weekend?” I rhetorically asked in an urgent, we-need-to-talk tone.
    â€œLater,” he responded firmly, shutting me down. His watchful eyes darted around the room as everyone else streamed in and grabbed their respective seats.
    I nodded, disappointed but knowing Jackson was right. Talking there was not an option. It was downright stupid. Still, I lingered at his side a moment longer, wanting more than anything to take the empty chair next to him, but our alphabetical seating chart unfortunately relegated me directly opposite him in the front, left corner. As seemed to be the theme of late, I couldn’t be pushed any farther away from him.
    My gaze kept drifting toward Jackson as Mr. Bluni droned on about Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA and a research paper he was writing for one of those geeky science journals. My mind wandered back to Dana’s party. All I could think about was whether Jackson knew what happened. As the lights were turned off in exchange for an overhead projector and a welcome audio-visual distraction, I found myself struggling to focus. I clicked the point of my pen in and out and honed in on the outrageously loud tock of the classroom clock’s second hand. Then I stared into the humming fan on the back of the projector. What was going on? It was like someone had slipped me a triple espresso. Maybe the weekend stuck indoors was finally catching up with me.
    I could hear my toe tapping against the floor with a fervor all its own. I stared down at it as if a threatening look would silence my own extremity and was startled to see the carpeting right through my foot.
    Oh, no.
    I forced a few hard blinks to sharpen my vision, but the top half of my foot was still horribly as clear as day. Shitshitshitsh—
    I held it up a little, along the side of my backpack, which I’d propped in front of my seat. The bag’s logo stared right back at me from where I was pretty sure my toes were. I wiggled them inside my shoe. They were awake and intact, but it had no effect on their transparency.
    Instinctively, I tucked my legs back under my chair, curling one around the other as if the compression would make them less detectable. Scrunching inward in my seat, I tried to wish it away, but my fear and panic were rising. When I lifted my leg back up for a second glance, I could see my invisibility was rising as well. To my shin.
    I knew it wasn’t safe to stay a sitting duck in the classroom. Thanks to the projector, it was still dark enough that no one besides me would notice, but in just the flip of a switch, the classroom lights could be back