Invisible Boy Read Online Free Page B

soda-can tabs and matte-black ovals of chewing
     gum—a stretch of nowhere to be raced across when exchanging your sleek city train for the big-shouldered cars of the Oyster
     Bay Line.
    I had nothing against Queens, per se, it was just that if you were raised in the milieu I had been, you were reminded of the
     borough beneath this platform maybe once a year, if that often.
    It might happen on your way to the airport, or when a member of your party dismissively remarked upon the “bridge-and-tunnel
     crowd” still pressed up hopeful against the velvet ropes while a nightclub’s bouncer ushered all of
you
inside that particular season’s haute meat-market Nirvana (and please understand that such inclusion had always made me feel
     slightly ashamed and unworthy—whether I’d been granted entrée to Studio or Regine’s aged fifteen, Area or Pyramid at twenty—since
     I can’t dance for shit and besides which never had the price of so much as a draft domestic beer in my pocket, even if I was
     on somebody’s guest list and didn’t have to pay the cover).
    With all of the above in mind on this particular September afternoon, I ventured down Jamaica Station’s cast-iron staircases
     to street level for the very first time.
    I consulted my rough sketch of map every few blocks, walking on through a crowded terra incognita of bodegas and boombox stores,
     newsstands and fruit vendors, feeling very much like the only white chick for miles.
    The day had grown hot: air rank with diesel fumes and curry, melting asphalt and the chicken-soup funk of humanity, not to
     mention the occasional sweet-sour belt of Dumpster leakage wafting out from restaurant alleyways.
    I trudged onward, the sidewalk crowds thinning, the stores fewer and farther between, until I finally turned into a cratered
     dead-end block in the shadow of some elevated subway tracks. A wall of vines ran down one side of this lane, the occasional
     snatch of ornate rusted fence peeking out from beneath the leaves.
    I spotted a gate sagging open next to a small Romanesque building of golden stone. Its low roof-pitch was more suggestive
     of synagogue than chapel, and its rose windows were shattered.
    I looked across maybe a quarter-acre of cleared lawn inside the gate. There were crooked gravestones poking forth from the
     hacked weed stubble and a dozen brush-filled black garbage bags lined up at the head of a trail leading into the lot’s still-riotous
     green interior.
    I followed the narrow path into a jungle of nettles and vines, towering three times my height in some places.
    “Cate?” I called. “It’s Madeline….”
    I heard soft laughter ahead.
    “Cate?”
    I found her around the first bend of trail through the brush, with a gaggle of chattering teenaged kids bearing hedge clippers
     and
    machetes.
    My newfound cousin swiped an arm across her forehead, then spotted me and waved.
    “This is Madeline,” she said, rattling off the names of her crew.
    It was cooler in the shade, but my face had started pouring sweat now that I’d stopped moving. I took a bandanna out of my
     pocket and folded it narrow to tie around my forehead, Deadhead style.
    “There’s a big jug of ice water in the chapel,” Cate said. “Let’s grab some before I put you to work.”
    I blinked when we came back out into the glare, following her past an enclosed rectangle of headstones, its shin-high rails
     held aloft by a squat granite obelisk at each corner.
    “Was everything
that
overgrown when you started?” I asked, looking back at the cool wall of green behind us.
    “Solid vegetable matter,” she said. “It’s taken us the whole summer to get this much cleared. The final burial was in nineteen
     fifty-four—I suspect that’s the last time anyone tried weeding.”
    At the chapel door Cate fished a big wad of keys from her pocket and started sorting through them.
    I looked above the iron fence as an elevated train screeched by along its Great-Wall course of