Invisible / Pete Hautman.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

You could say that my railroad, the Madham Line, is almost the most important thing in my life. Next to Andy Morrow, my best friend....I guess you could say that I'm not only disturbed, I'm obsessed.

Lots of people think Doug Hanson is a freak -- he gets beat up after school and the girl of his dreams calls him a worm. Doug's only refuge is building elaborate model trains in his basement and hanging out with his best friend, Andy Morrow. Andy is nothing like Doug: He's a popular football star who could date any girl in school. Despite their differences, Doug and Andy talk about everything -- except what happened at the Tuttle place a few years back.
As Doug retreats deeper and deeper into his own world, long-buried secrets come to light -- and the more he tries to keep them invisible, the looser his grip on reality becomes. In this fierce, disturbing novel, Pete Hautman spins a poignant tale about inner demons, and how far one boy will go to control them.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One: My Best Friend There is something about trains. The sound they make. The way they go by, one car after another after another after another. Every car different but somehow the same. And the tracks go on forever, connecting places, connecting people. Wherever you are, you could go to the nearest railroad track right now, and if you followed it long enough, you would find me. There is another thing to know about trains. They are large and dangerous. They would crush you if they could, but they are confined by those two narrow strips of steel. Trains are like fire. You don't want to get in their way. My grandfather left me his HO scale model railroad when he passed on. One locomotive, seven cars, and sixteen feet of track. That's another reason I like trains -- they connect me to him, wherever he is. You could say that my railroad, the Madham Line, is almost the most important thing in my life. Next to Andy Morrow, my best friend. A guy like Andy might have more than one best friend. He is so popular that there are at least five kids at school who would probably claim him. But if you asked Andy who was his best friend, he would say, "Dougie Hanson, of course." And that would be me. I'm a quiet kid, pretty much invisible -- except if you happen to notice me standing next to Andy. We grew up together, Andy and me. Next door, actually. We met at the age of one year and three months. Our birthdays are only seventeen days apart. We are like Velcro, like two poles of a magnet, like peanut butter and jelly, like superglue. We are best friends by every definition. Best friends. Best. Friends. It doesn't matter to Andy Morrow that I have crooked teeth and poor coordination and wear stupid clothes. It wouldn't matter if I had a nose like a pig and smelled of Limburger cheese. Andy would still say, "Dougie is my best friend." True, Andy might spend more time with other kids who claim to be his best friend. He might hang with the other football players, and his friends on the student council, and his golfing friends, and his theater friends, but he always comes home at night and opens his bedroom window and calls out across the low picket fence, "Hey, Dougie!" And if my window is open, and if I'm awake, we talk. It does not matter that we don't spend as much time together as we used to. I tell Andy all about the new tank car I bought for the Madham Line. I might talk about my mother's latest crossword puzzle, or a book I read about black holes, or a math test I took in school, and Andy would listen. That is what best friends do. And if Andy wants to talk about the school play he is starring in, or his latest football game, or a girl he met...I'll listen to him, too. It does not matter to Andy that we live in completely different realities. I'm Andy's best friend. It does not matter to Andy that we hardly ever actually do anything together. Why should it? We are best friends, me and Andy. Best. Friends. Copyright © by 2005 Peter Hautman Chapter Two: Stella Andy. Best. Friends. My full and proper name is Douglas MacArthur Hanson. I am named after Douglas MacArthur, the famous general, who was a second cousin of my father's great-aunt. Everyone on my father's side is named after some famous person we are supposedly related to. My father's name is Henry Clay Hanson. Henry Clay was a politician who died before the Civil War. He was my grandfather's cousin's great-uncle. Or something like that. It goes on and on. Since my grandfather's name was George Washington Hanson, I guess I'm related to the father of our country too. Anyway, I'm glad I got named after a general instead of a politician. I think it makes me sound more respectable. Usually when I meet someone for the first time, I tell them my full and proper name. Then I say, "But you can call me General." Some people find that amusing. Andy always laughs. Sometimes he calls me General, just to tease me. I don't mind. I kind of like it. I am very easy to get along with. My mother would not agree with that. She finds me difficult. In fact, she thinks that I am troubled and disturbed. I find it troubling that she finds me disturbing, so she must be right. Right? "Hey, Dougie!" I look at my alarm clock: 1:17. "Dougie, you up?" I roll out of bed and crawl to the window. "I'm up now," I say, resting my chin on the windowsill. "How's it going?" Andy is sitting in his window, his long legs dangling over the spirea bushes. "I was dreaming." "What were you dreaming?" "I don't remember. Hey, was tonight your play?" "Yeah! It went great. I didn't miss a line. But -- you're gonna like this -- Melissa's skirt came off." "Melissa Haverman?" "Yeah! See, I'm Stanley Kowalski, and Melissa is playing Stella, my wife? And in this one scene she's really mad and she spins around fast and the bottom of her skirt gets caught on a nail sticking out of this table leg and it comes right off." He laughs. "She was wearing blue panties." I have a very vivid imagination. I can see it in my head just like a movie. Andy says, "But she was really cool. She grabbed the skirt and pulled it back on and just kept going with the scene. The audience didn't laugh or anything. You should've been there." "I don't really like plays," I say. "A bunch of people talking about nothing." "Well, you would've liked this one. You should've heard Melissa after the play. She was so mad at the guy in charge of props, I thought she'd rip his face off. So what did you do today?" "Still working on my bridge." I am connecting East Madham to West Madham with an eleven-foot-long suspension bridge. I've been working on it for months. It's really quite amazing. "How's it going?" "I've finally got the towers built." The entire bridge is scratch-built from matchsticks, string, and glue. Andy always teases me about that. "Aren't you afraid it's gonna catch on fire?" We laugh. Andy and I had some bad luck with fires when we were kids. We're more careful now. I always scrape the phosphorous tips off all the matchsticks before using them. I have scraped the heads off 112 boxes of stick matches. There are 200 matches in a box. In case you are slow at math, that's 22,400 matches in all. "I figure the bridge will be ready for its inaugural crossing in about three weeks. Everybody in Madham will be there. You want to come?" Copyright © 2005 by Pete Hautman Excerpted from Invisible by Pete Hautman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The strength of Hautman's (Godless) painfully sad novel is the wisecracking but clearly unreliable voice of its narrator, 17-year-old Douglas MacArthur Hanson who admits, "I'm not only disturbed, I'm obsessed." One of his passions is "Madham," a town he's building for his model railroad, complete with a 1:800 scale replica of the Golden Gate Bridge. He's also fixated on a pretty girl who clearly wants nothing to do with him. And he's overly reliant on his only friend, Andy Morrow, a fellow junior who is the popular and outgoing yang to Dougie's outcast and introverted yin. Hautman expertly teases out the truth about a tragic incident that occurred "at the Tuttle place" three years earlier, a mystery that propels the story to its horrific conclusion. Dougie is as mathematically gifted and socially inept as the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but he also has a sophisticated wit. During a lapse in conversation at one of his $95-an-hour therapy sessions, he observes, "We stare at each other for about $1.40." His self-deprecating comments and wry observations make his spiral into self-destruction all the more heartbreaking. (One measure of how sympathetically the author has portrayed him is that even though he stalks a classmate, you root for him to get away with it.) Hautman once again proves his keen ability for characterization and for building suspense. Ages 12-up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 7 Up-Pete Hautman's novel (S & S, 2005) is brought to life in Norm Lee's performance. Doug and Andy, best friends since childhood, developed a careless-if not downright unhealthy-interest in fire as they entered adolescence. In other ways they seemed to grow in different directions: Andy was outgoing and successful in school and socially, while Doug's proclivities seem to lie with detailed handwork and listening to Andy's exploits. At 17, Doug builds a model train, town, and replica (in matchsticks) of the Golden Gate Bridge in his basement, one of his many obsessions that intensifies when he stops taking his prescribed psychopharmaceuticals. Then Doug and Andy phone in a bomb threat to the high school and Doug's world unravels in a calamity neatly foreshadowed by the tree house fire the boys experienced three years earlier. Hautman's characterizations are realistic, making Doug both credible and barely sympathetic. The adults are presented from Doug's vantage and so, while they seem to say mostly the right things, they inspire distrust on the listeners' part. Because of its brevity and well-shaped plot, this audiobook will have wide appeal among teens who need their stories delivered quickly in order to stick with them.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Gr. 7-10. It's hard to tell if Hautman meant this to be a mystery, but it's clear from the start that there's something not right about the relationship between narrator Doug Hanson and his best friend, Andy Morrow. Doug, a self-proclaimed nerd, is primarily interested in building a matchstick replica of the Golden Gate Bridge for his model railway town. Andy is popular, a football player and actor. But the boys live next door to each other and talk from their bedroom windows at night. In an almost robotic voice that still manages to be intensely insightful, Doug takes readers to his school, where he is mocked and eventually beaten, and to his neighborhood, where he turns into a Peeping Tom, watching school star Melanie Haver undress. Hautman does a superb job of crafting the odd sanctuary that is Doug's mind. But Doug's defenses are crumbling, and the secret he's been keeping about Andy is oozing through the cracks. The truth about Andy won't come as a surprise, but there are some unexpected plot turns here, and the chilling but ambiguous denouement is definitely unsettling. --Ilene Cooper Copyright 2005 Booklist

Horn Book Review

(Middle School, High School) Gifted in math, and recognizably clever when constructing architectural models (he's building an elaborate railroad system in his basement), Doug reveals that it's human interaction he can't figure out. ""I'm a quiet kid, pretty much invisible,"" he says in a precise, unemotional voice, as this unreliable narrator begins his story. Invisibility is Doug's rationale for explaining a range of rejection, from teacher irritation to peer scorn, particularly from pretty and popular Melissa Haverman, who is disgusted by what readers will recognize as Doug's stalker behavior. But Doug reports one near-perfect relationship, the one he has with his best friend, Andy. Gradually, however, that friendship is revealed to be not what it seems. There are secrets from their past that Doug won't discuss, and hints from their present life that skew his tale. Why is there a strange man in Andy's house? What fuels Doug's increasingly complex rendering of their intertwined initials? What medication is Doug refusing to take? Reading this psychological thriller is much like putting together one of Doug's railroad bridges: connections are being made, but the realities being built may be imitations of life rather than the real thing. The tension comes from entering Doug's private hell and learning what put him there. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Dougie Hanson is invisible to nearly everyone in this haunting, lonely tale. He's extremely close to his best friend, Andy, even though Andy's a popular athlete. When they aren't together, Dougie works on the elaborate model train he's been building for nearly three years; the 11-foot-long suspension bridge built of matchsticks is nearly done. The bridge contains 22,400 matches in all (Dougie likes both numbers and matches). As the bridge approaches completion, glimpses from Doug's eyes reveal a life more troubled than he admits. His parents worry, his therapist asks if he's taking his meds and a female schoolmate accuses him of stalking. The mentally ill Dougie, who evokes echoes of Faulkner with his unreliable narration, is confronted with truths he can't bear. The deceptively simple prose doesn't keep secrets from its readers, but Dougie's harrowing mysteries are no less tragic for their visibility. (Fiction. 12-16) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.