The School Trip

As soon as I woke up, I knew the day was going to go haywire. I always hated going on school field trips because no one else wanted to see the same things I wanted to see. Today I would be heading to the science museum with the rest of my fourth-grade class and I could only hope I would not be put into the same group as Briget. She and I had once been friends, but when she found out all my secrets, she had “accidentally” let them slip. Let them slip so she could talk down to me at school and have everyone laugh over the fact I lived in a small apartment with my parents and grandma instead of in a house like ‘normal’ people 

Brigit had been my first friend to sleepover and I had not had another one since her. Why would I when all she would do was make fun of me in front of others? I thought it was perfectly normal and I loved the fact my grandma lived with us. I had an ordinary family just like everyone else and didn’t care if my normal was a little different. Today was my chance to win my friends back. The entire fourth grade was going to the zoo and my grandma was going to be the chaperone of my group. What most of them didn’t know was that my grandma had been a touring magician when she was younger. She started working with the circus when she was in high school and found the life of performing was good for her and she was good at it. After her parents went their separate ways and slowly disappeared from her life, my grandmother became a traveling carnie to support herself.  

Her magic education came during the long hours of travelling with the animals and the rest of the circus and she quickly became good enough to have her own part in the show. When she was twenty-four, she started to blossom and left the circus to start her own travelling magic show. While my grandma had loved the circus, the owners were taking most of her profit while not supporting her with helping with any of her expenses. With her name fairly well known on the circus route, it didn’t take long for her to find a place of her own. 

My hope for this zoo field trip was to amaze my school mates with how cool my grandma was. We could see the animals and see magic tricks in between. Then as an additional bonus, they would forget how we didn’t live in a huge house with a backyard and swimming pool like many of them did. The biggest thrill of the day was when my grandmother made Brigit disappear. One second Brigit was there and the next second she wasn’t. I had known my grandmother had a few invisibility tricks up her sleeve, but I had never seen her make an entire person go invisible. We could hear Brigit talking and sobbing, but we couldn’t see her. As the day wore on, Brigit slowly came back into view and I could tell she was tripped out by being ignored for most of the day because we couldn’t ‘see’ her. What I will never tell her was the fact we could see her for the entire day, we just didn’t acknowledge her. Now she knows what it’s like to really be in the shadows through no fault of