After a few months of hard work, Ned's plans were near complete. He had filled twenty-seven one-gallon milk jugs with vanishing solution, and thirty-one one-gallon milk jugs with the restoring solution, and hid them in his closet. He also made two make-shift “showers” with which to “shower” himself with the solutions. All he had to do was fill which ever solution he desired into the tank of the proper shower, and pull a chain to release the fluid. To keep himself from getting soaked with the chemicals, Ned wore a rubber suit, some rubber gloves, goggles, a rubber hood, and rubber socks over his shoes.
Ned set the showers up in the garage. He convinced his dad to let him tear up the floor with a sledge hammer by saying that he was going to fix up those cracks in the floor.
In the corner, Ned dug a hole in the dirt, in which he made a cement pit, and reconstructed the surrounding floor. When the cement was dry, he built a false floor door out of a regular door, that was cut down to size, reinforced it with two-by-fours, and put a lock on it.
When this was all done, Ned carefully transported the hidden milk jugs to the pit at night, so as not to be seen. He found an old, gray tarp clothe in the attic to cover the false floor with.
Ned was proud of what he'd accomplished. I'd like to see Tony Kay try to do this in twice the time it took me, Ned thought to himself. With help! Ha!
In the days that followed, Ned tormented Tony Kay with an assortment of pranks.
Once, he went to the football practice, invisible, of course, and took a sponge soaked with vanishing solution. Ned stood a good distance from Tony, who that day was practicing without a helmet because it was missing, as if it had vanished into thin air. When the football was thrown to Tony, Ned squeezed the sponge over the football as it passed him, making the ball invisible. Unable to see the approaching ball, Tony was surprised to suddenly have his head knocked back with a sting by absolutely nothing at all that he could see.
The next day, a quarter of the track team was injured in a pile-up. The runner that started the pile-up claimed that he had stepped on a ball that he had not seen, nor had anyone else seen it for that matter, which caused him to fall on the trackers in front of him, starting a domino effect. The trackers behind were unable to stop running and ran into the pile-up.
Another time, Ned took Coach Reynolds' car keys, vanished them, and stuck them in the bottom of Tony's open locker while Tony was in the showers. Ned carefully placed a leaf containing restoring solution on top of the keys.
After Tony got dressed he slammed the locker door. The slam shook the leaf and it tipped its contents on to the keys, restoring their visibility.
When Coach Reynolds couldn't find his keys he kept everyone after. “Alright, who's got my keys!” Nobody confessed. “Fine,” he said furiously, “I'll do a locker-by-locker search.”
And sure enough, the keys were in Tony's locker.
“I'm putting you on probation, Kay!” screamed Coach Reynolds. “One more screw up and I kick you off the team!”
Invisibly observing everything from the doorway, Ned had to run outside as fast as he could so that no one would hear him laughing.
Ned later decided to just follow Tony Kay in his free time.
Ned was shocked when he followed Tony to bars and chug-a-lug parties only to discover that he was a heavy drinker. Ned then realized that he had to help Tony somehow.
One day there was a big game and Tony's team won. Afterwards, Tony and his friends celebrated by getting wasted in the locker room. Tony passed out and Ned decided it was time to step in.
He was invisible, of course, so Tony's friends thought they were hallucinating when Tony dragged himself over to a towel hamper and threw himself in. Then the hamper rolled out of the locker room and out to the parking lot next to Tony's car.
Ned got the keys out of Tony's pocket and put Tony in the back seat. He drove to the hospital and left Tony in a chair in the reception room with a note that said, “I have a drinking problem.”
THREE MONTHS LATER . . .
Tony Kay was kicked off the football team when his addiction was exposed, but he had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous and hadn't had a drink for two and a half months.
Ned stopped using the invisibility solutions when he discovered that extensive exposure caused molecules to become unstable (when his rubber clothes disintegrated).
Ned never did tell anyone about the solutions, for he knew that they could be enhanced and used as weapons if the knowledge fell into the wrong hands.
THE END