The cloak was shaking in his hands; he wanted to put it on; he wanted to put it on and play with them. When Lena looked at him with that inquisitive, but fierce gaze, he lifted it up to eye level and peered through it, like one inspecting through a magnifying glass, at the young half-British half-Polish brunette, so familiar and so polarising, reminding him of the woman he still loved with all his heart and all his soul. Had he become to her hidden behind this sheet of plastic, utterly invisible to her Egyptian eyes?
“Why did you not just leave yourselves...if you had this?” asked Rod after a moment.
“Who else is gonna carry our shopping?” smirked Cee with her arms crossed.
“Put it on already, boomer,” groaned Just.
Lena smiled and opened her mouth to say something when Cee jumped in between them, pushing her away from him. She stood just above waist level to him and stood there looking up at him with her big blue eyes.
“Mister,” she said, “since it is an awfully long walk to Trafford, can we play tig?”
“Tig? Walk?” echoed Rod with a puzzled look towards Lena.
Lena chuckled, her own big blue eyes glistening like crystalised ice as she turned toward her little sister. “Sure,” she said warmly with a smile.
“We’re going to walk?” he asked.
“You too fat to walk?” said Just with a repulsed expression.
The curvature of the young brunette’s eyes, or more precisely put, her epicanthic fold, was an absolute torture to him, like the stabbing of his heart, for it reminded him of that woman, but in regards to the question whether he was going to go along with their whimsical quest, he had not in that moment felt any qualms about spending time alone with them further than necessary, even if that meant participating in a shopping spree. The very nature of his self was called into question at that very moment, the very nature of his self indeed, which he himself was self-conscious of: “This is inappropriate!” “This is not something a grown man should be doing!” he muttered to himself, his hands beginning to flap in excitement, a jittery sort of energy permeating through and out him, and a crazed smile forming on his cracked lips. “How embarrassing,” he thought further, intensifying the emotional tornado occurring inside of him, a blush slightly appearing on his dimpled cheeks.
“Lena,” began the young man to the teenage brunette after they had quickly separated for a reason entirely lost on his mind, with a look of concern plastered on his face, but which was hidden underneath their invisible cloaks - “Why is it that you are the way that you are?”
“What do you mean,” asked Lena, raising her eyebrow.
“Well...err, I mean, I would have assumed that the children of the most richest person on Earth were, um, were more...”
“Posh?” interrupted Lena with a smile.
“Well, yeah.”
Lena shrugged. “Don’t believe all that your eyes tell you,” she said.
“I must know why.”
“It is a long story,” she replied, looking at the marble floor.
Rod looked to the other end of the long hallway that they were walking down; it was bleached with light and bright white paint. “Why are we going down this way? Couldn’t we have just gone through the front door?”
Lena looked at him squarely with a dumb look, and said, “Because we’d be seen by the cameras? It's too dark outside.”
“But we’re wearing invisibility cloaks! We are invisible. Even my face is invisible – it's so hot and humid in here and I can barely breathe with the hood all over me.”
“Oh, right, you don’t get it do you? Visibility relies on the activity process of the visible objects on light. There are a few select ways an object of matter can interact with the particles of light: The first instance is that the object absorbs light; the second is that it reflects it; the third is that it refracts it; and the fourth is that it does all of these things. However, I must add, if it does neither of these things, it cannot be visible.”
Rod blinked in astonishment at her explanation.
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“What?” Lena said, shrugging, “I like to read.” She smiled, and continued, “Therefore, it is not easy to make something completely invisible to the naked eye.”
“Why not?”
“Because light interacts with an object by it being absorbed or reflected; but an utter transparent effect would require the particles of light to seamlessly transpire through the object as though it was not there. Do you know what I mean?”
The young student simply gulped and nodded his head.
“So,” said Lena, “the material, referred to as a ‘metamaterial’, of this cloak is what contributes to the illusion of it being invisible.”
“How so?”
“Have you never heard of transformation optics?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Didn’t they teach you this in school?” asked Lena as they walked down the corridor.
“They teach what they want you to teach,” muttered Rod bitterly, his mood suddenly turning sour.
“Anyway, this cloak simply bends light around it from every ang-”
“I am so fucking sick of being different,” complained Rod suddenly, feeling a heat in his chest. He looked at Lena but quickly turned away out of shame. “I know this is not socially appropriate to say, and it has come out of nowhere, but I must get it off my chest for when else will I ever get an opportunity to get what is off my chest to another person without paying for it again? It almost feels more authentic this way. But I understand that I must respect the other party now – that it is a two way street. If I want to benefit from an interpersonal interaction, an interpersonal relationship, I must give as much as I take. A relationship of any kind is built on trust and reciprocity – I know that,” he stuttered. “But I am just exhausted... I want to be normal,” he continued, almost as though he was directing his monologue to the divine, whereby his wishes could be manifested more readily than another human being, though sometimes in his heart he thought of particular women as more than they actually are –a remnant of the misogyny he had grown up consuming - “I want to be...normal...” he repeated once again, unaware that he had just said this desire a mere second before. “I cannot, no, I will not tolerate it any longer. I do not want to hide all my life. As soon as I realised who I actually am, who I actually was all this time, I realised that I would rather be myself than pretend to be someone else. However, this offers with itself a predicament,” he mused further, placing an invisible finger to his chin, “I do require the benefits of social interaction and yet I do not want to entangle myself into the dense network of sociocultural norms, which to me are as invisible as the cloak that I am wearing right now, for it taxes my brain completely where a quadratic equation does not. I hate sitting in class with a bunch of neurotypicals because they judge me for asking questions and asking critical questions and challenging normal assumptions about things, and seeking clarifications on definitions and such. Why must I be subjected to an institutional system designed for the 99%? It is absolutely ludicrous that I must be subjected to such a ridicuolous measure as this! I am stamped down because I stick out. Well...these insitutions ought to be stamped out of existence themselves! If the world will not accommodate to me, and I will not accommodate to the world, then one must have to force the other to change.”
“You against the world, huh?” marveled Lena beneath her invisible plastic screen.
“Yes, me against the world. Although I am not too grandoise to think that I will remodel the world into my own image; too be quite fair, though, that is where my fantasieis will lead me if I do not put a stop on them. I daydream too much.”
“Same,” remarked Lena.
Rod narrowed his eyes at her with suspicion, and said, slowly, “I doubt that very much.”
“Why?” replied Lena defensively.
“Well...because, why would you think the same as me? You have friends and stuff. I? I have none.”
“Aren’t you my fa-” Lena stopped herself from completing the word, and sighed. “Aren’t you my daddy’s friend?”
Rod raised his eyebrow in puzzlement, and asked, “Why do you call him ‘daddy’?”
Lena turned bright red, but of course the young man could not see it for the cloak obscured his face. “Nothing,” she stammered, flustered.
“Nothing?” uttered the young man in bewilderment. A smile creeped on his face, a sign of his curiosity peaking within him. He lodged the proceeding question that he was about to ask, which was sitting on the tip of his tongue, into the back of his mind and started again in that which had been tormenting him his whole life. “I hate people,” he said bitterly, “I fucking hate them because...” he lowered his head and thought for a moment; “no,” he growled, “I must not say that I hate women.”
“What?” asked Lena. “Do not fall down that rabbit hole,” she muttered dismissively.
He whipped his head around sharply and stared at the space that was next to him with glaring hate in his eyes. “Is it my fault that I do not understand all these rules that people operate by? I do not understand and I hate it because to understand something one must experience it, observe it, hold it – but I can never get close! And when I do, it is never what I want; and if it is what I want, it does not last very long – in fact, it lasts a very short time indeed. I am passionately broke; I am gutted. I am a jealous man. I want to be accepted by I must mask to be accepted. Can you understand that? When you talk about boys and hanging out with friends...What does that even mean?” he gasped, his knees buckling out of sheer grief as he continued, “Why cannot people operate under fixed rules that I can see? Good God! I am fucking pissed. I think a woman likes me and wants to be my friend and then the fucking rug gets pulled underneath me...I do not even care about relationships or even touch...What I want is a friend and to be myself and to have a friend,” and he started to bawl.
The two came to a halt in the corridor as his head fell into his hands. “Fuck, I hate crying,” he spluttered, “the damn sunscreen is getting in my eyes. I keep checking Whatsapp and they don’t open my message. But I know also that sometimes people don’t want to communicate – I know that from experience. But dear God I want to rage. If it wasn’t for all the therapy I poured my student loans into I...I wouldn’t know what I’d be doing right now.”