Gabrysia discovers she can vanish, and with Teodor and Marysia she starts looking for other kids with strange abilities. Their first call to the park brings someone they did not expect.
Gabrysia Zawadzka had always been the kind of girl teachers called quiet and neighbours barely noticed. But one afternoon on Wiśniowa Street, standing under the chestnut tree outside her old yellow block of flats, she learned that being unnoticed could mean something very strange.
She had just come home from school, her bag pulling at her shoulder, when she heard older girls from her block laughing nearby. Gabrysia froze. She did not want a single one of them to turn around and spot her. So she squeezed her eyes shut and made a ridiculous wish: let them look right through me.
The noise around her disappeared.
Gabrysia opened her eyes and stared at her hands. Or tried to. They were gone. So were her arms, her knees, her shoes, everything. She let out a gasp, and even that sounded far away, as if the park had swallowed it.
For a moment she could only stand there, invisible beneath the chestnut tree, while her heart banged against her ribs. Then, just as suddenly, the edges of her fingers flickered. She took one shaky breath after another, and slowly, like a drawing returning on wet paper, her body came back.
After that, Gabrysia spent a whole week testing herself in secret. A thought, a wish, a blink in the right direction, and sometimes she vanished. Sometimes nothing happened at all. She was still trying to decide whether she was imagining it when she told her best friend, Teodor.
Teodor did not laugh. He leaned forward, eyes huge, and said, very seriously, "That is a real superpower."
They tried it together in the park more times than Gabrysia could count. Teodor kept notes, because Teodor kept notes about everything, and after the third success he announced that their team needed a proper name.
"The Invisible Gabrysia Club," he said.
Gabrysia tried not to smile, but failed.
If she had one power, maybe other people did too. That idea sat between them all week until they told Marysia, who always knew answers before anyone else even finished asking the question. On Saturday, she came to the park, folded her arms, and agreed to a test.
Teodor wrote a number on a piece of paper, folded it twice, and stuffed it into his shoe.
Marysia looked at him once. "Seventeen," she said.
Teodor pulled the paper out. Seventeen.
From that moment, the three of them had no chance of pretending this was normal.
On Sunday, they wrote notes and slipped them into school lockers, library books, and the crack in the noticeboard by the canteen: Do you ever do things other people can’t? Meet us in the park under the chestnut tree at five.
At five o’clock, nobody came.
At six, the light began to thin between the trees.
Gabrysia was just about to suggest they leave when something moved in the bushes behind them. A figure stepped out slowly, wrapped in a dark hood. Its face stayed hidden, but the air around one outstretched hand flickered with colour, as if someone had stirred light with a spoon.
Gabrysia felt the world go still.
Even Teodor stopped breathing.
The figure tilted its head and spoke in a low voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"Can you do it too?"