In the following few days, Matt became acquainted with the unspoken terms and conditions of his ordeal. He would become visible to the living between 4:00 and 10:00 P.M. each day; during the remainder of his time, he was mostly transparent to his own eyes and completely invisible to everyone else in the city. When in this state, he couldn’t move anything or communicate with anyone, and he could only touch that on which he was standing or sitting. He was little more than a powerless bystander to the world, and his lack of control was exasperating.
He quickly discovered that even during his “visible hours,” he could not be seen, heard, or touched by his family or anyone else he knew in life. He spent most of his first week back among his family, but silently watching them grieve for his death became too painful to stand. They stayed home from work and school and reminisced and cried for hours on end. Matt’s heart ached for them, but he soon left his home behind for good. He could not bear to see them in such agony.
After leaving home, Matt spent most of his time in a long abandoned house in town, which had become his refuge during the time he was invisible. When he was visible, he spent every moment trolling the streets asking random girls to kiss him, and he had been ridiculed and slapped more times than he could remember.
Matt lay stretched out on his back in the old house after his eighteenth fruitless night of searching. He wasn’t sure what he was doing wrong; the guys on TV make it look much easier to get a kiss from a pretty stranger. As he stared up through the thick dust and the holes in the ceiling, he wondered if he would ever be able to leave this world. Could this really be his fate? Was he doomed to spend an eternity trapped in an ironically hellish purgatory?
He rolled over to his stomach and closed his eyes. His entire life, he had always been extremely picky when it came to girls. He had imagined in his mind how she would be: someone intelligent, kind, and fun; someone with similar morals and values to his own. He refused to settle for anything less—he had even turned down several offers. Of course, he had had small crushes before, but there had never been one person that really met his high standards. Besides, none of the girls he had liked during his life even seemed to mourn his death.
When 4:00 P.M. rolled around the next day, Matt took his search to the mall. He soon spotted a group of four girls shopping at a trendy clothes store. They were all blonds. After a painful sigh, he approached them.
“Hi, girls!” he greeted them with a forced smile, “I’m doing an experiment to see how many pretty girls I can get to kiss me at the mall today, and I’d love for you to participate!” His stomach churned at the toxicity of his words, but he kept smiling. They giggled among themselves.
“How many girls have kissed you so far?” one girl asked him. Her stupidity was written all over her face; Matt yearned to turn and run.
“Six so far,” he lied, “Would you like to be the seventh?” At this, she covered her face with her hands and laughed like an imbecile. Her friends laughed with her, but then gently yet quickly led her away from Matt. Some of them wished him ‘good luck’ with his experiment. Frustrated and furious with his lot, Matt scowled and stormed off.
He plopped down on a bench outside the music store. He leaned forward and rested his crossed arms on his knees. If this was how he was going to spend his eternity, he would rather give up now and accept it; anything was better than this. He admitted defeat.
What if he focused on just one girl? Matt leaned back and furrowed his brow thoughtfully. Perhaps this situation wasn’t as bad as he had made it out to be. No one ever said the girl had to be a stranger, and any Average Joe could make a girl kiss him if she was in love with him. It would take longer, but it would certainly be a more reliable and less humiliating method to find one girl and make her love him than to search for a stranger that would kiss him just because he asked her to. Matt smiled to himself. His epiphany left him feeling hopeful again; his destiny was once again within his power. But how could he choose the right girl?
He stood quickly, still lost in his own thoughts. He spun around with newfound purpose and managed to plow right into a girl that had just come out of the music store. He stepped back in surprise as she fell all the way to the ground—her purchase and the contents of her purse scattered around them with a clatter. She let out a cry of discomfort when she suddenly found herself on the floor and looked up at her unwitting assailant. Matt looked down at his accidental victim.
