Absent

by Katie Williams

  “Allergic, in fact.” I take a step backward. “If it makes you happy, I’ll go to class, too.”

  “Why anyone would willingly go to class,” Brooke mutters.

  “I think they’re dissecting frogs today in junior bio,” I say.

  “And that cheers you up?” Evan asks.

  “I find it therapeutic.” The school is lousy with ghost frogs, chloroformed for dissection. Beige, green, leopard-spotted, they gather in the corners of the basement, croaking softly, blinking their marbled eyes, and hopping through the cinder-block walls.

  “If you’re sure,” Evan says, clearly relieved to have gotten out of dodgeball.

  “Sure I’m sure. Maybe we can find the new frogs tonight. We can say to them, ‘You must have been so sad, frog.’ ” I imitate Kelsey’s tremulous voice. “ ‘What friends we might have been.’ ”

  I’ve lied to Evan. I have no intention of attending a class where I’ve already been marked permanently, irrevocably, absent. As soon as he turns the corner, I head out to the student parking lot, telling myself I’m just looking for some fresh air (air that I can’t even breathe), telling myself I’m just looking for the sun (sun hidden behind spring storm clouds), telling myself I’m not (definitely not) looking for Lucas Hayes.

  On my way to the burners’ circle, I balance atop the cement stoppers that line the lot. Just after my death—three weeks ago now—I couldn’t have balanced like this, couldn’t even have walked down the school hall without sinking through the tiles, down to the basement where finally the earth would’ve stopped my fall with its sediments, its fossils, its underground rivers, and—deep below—its glowing, churning core.

  I spent the first week after my death stuck on the packed-dirt floor of the school basement, surrounded by an army of croaking ghost frogs. I sat in their midst, sometimes crying, sometimes rocking, sometimes staring vacantly at the skinny freckled boy who would sit across from me speaking, in patient tones, words that I couldn’t stand to hear. Then one day, for no good reason, I felt like I could bear to see the world again. But when I tried to mount the first step of the stairs, my foot sank straight through it, back down to the dirt, where I suppose I now belong.

  It took Evan nearly forever to teach me how to suspend myself just millimeters above the school floor (or a set of stairs or the seat of a chair) so that I could approximate the postures of life. Hovering, he calls it. Even now, if I don’t use a tiny corner of my mind to hold myself just so, I will sink until I hit the earth, however far below that might be. Now, only weeks later, I can hover pretty easily. It was easy once I figured out it wasn’t so different from the ways in which life requires you to hold yourself just so.

  I’ve become so adept at hovering that I can, with concentration, jump from one cement stopper to the next, which I do all the way to the adjacent soccer field. I tread out across the field, as close to the burners’ circle as I can get. The circle is just a cluster of trees earning their leaves back in patches, a spotty effect like a Boy Scout sash only half-filled with badges.

  Lucas Hayes was in Boy Scouts when he was little. He told me when we met among those trees on the day before I died. He could still list off all the badges he’d earned, he said. “Prove it,” I said, and so he had, from American Heritage to Wilderness Survival. As he spoke, he assembled my physics project, twisting the strands of wire into the cardboard box. He gave one of the wires a new twist with the name of each badge.

  “You’re still a Boy Scout.” I nudged him with my shoulder, the tree bark rasping against the back of my jacket. The snow was still on the ground, except in the burners’ circle, where the tree branches held it off of us, as if this place were set aside for us, preserved.

  “Careful.” He lifted the box. “There’s an egg in here, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s my project you hijacked. Besides, you’re doing it all wrong.” He hadn’t been, but I could twist the wires just as well as he could.

  He handed the project back to me with his flashbulb smile.

  “See? Like this,” I said.

  “For the record, I’m not a Scout anymore. I dropped out in sixth grade.”

  “Well, maybe you’re not a Scout, but you’re still Scout-like. Admit it, you still have that sash.”

  “It was a vest, actually, and really, I’m not as good as all that.”

  “Why? Because you have a secret—” I bit down on my sentence.

  I’d almost said girlfriend, which I was not. Not at all. We’d agreed on that from the start. Who needed the looks in the hallway? Not to mention the gossip. Besides, it was no big deal. He was just a stupid testo.

  A stupid testo who happened to be good at kissing.

  Fortunately, Lucas didn’t seem to have heard my slip. “Come on,” I babbled for cover. “You’re captain of the whatever team.”

  “You know it’s basketball,” he said. “And baseball in the spring.”

  “You get good grades,” I continued, “probably mostly by smiling at the teachers. Yeah, that’s the smile I mean. And on top of it all, you’re the school hero. You practically saved a girl’s life.”

  Lucas’s smile shut off. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t save her.”

  And it was true. Lucas had called for help when he found her, but by the time they’d gotten there, Brooke Lee was dead. An overdose. Cocaine.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. And I was.

  “How about you?” Lucas said, his smile back, though at half wattage. “Were you a Girl Scout?”

  “Nope. Not me. I’m not much for dressing identically and earning badges.”

  “That reminds me. I forgot to mention one other thing I earned a badge for.” He leaned close, the cloud of his breath puffing against my face. I should have earned a badge for not wincing at Lucas’s pick-up lines.

  “A kissing badge, huh? How’d you practice your skill? On the troop leader or the other little boys?” I inquired of his puckered-up face.

  “You’re sick, Paige Wheeler.”

  “The sickest,” I said happily.

  “I like that about you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I do.” He paused, looking suddenly serious. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Mind that you messed up my physics project?”

  “Mind being my secret.”

  So he had heard me almost say “secret girlfriend.” I could feel the blood lighting up my cheeks, and I silently cursed my pallor. Kelsey Pope, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, tanned herself to a crisp year round; no one ever knew when she was embarrassed. If she ever had anything to be embarrassed about, that is.

  “I don’t mind,” I told Lucas. “After all, you’re my secret, too.”

  He smiled at this and touched my blood-lit cheek.

  This time, I let him kiss me.

  And I didn’t even think about wincing.

  The opposite, in fact.

  When we pulled away, Lucas got up and walked to the edge of the trees, scanning the soccer field and parking lot for people. He glanced back at me before stepping out.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “You’ll wait a few minutes?” He left the rest unspoken: So no one will see us together.

  I stayed among the trees and watched him walk across the field, his footsteps pressing through the snow. When I walked out after him, I’d leave my footsteps behind me, too. It struck me that someone later, seeing them, would imagine two people walking side by side.

  Today, the trees of the burners’ circle stand tall and silent. I can’t go in, but I can see that no one is sneaking out from between their trunks. Behind me, a door bangs open, and I turn. Three freshman boys clump by the far doors of the school. With a shove, they send one of their number into the parking lot. He ventures to a patch of tar that’s darker than the rest of the blacktop. When he reaches it, he bends down and touches it. His friends hoot in approval, and he runs back with a triumphant smile, his hand held in the a
ir like a lit torch.

  A dare to touch it.

  The school door opens again, startling the boys. When they see who it is, they slide into a tighter group, feigning nonchalance. The boy who touched the patch of tar hides his hand behind his back, even though the tar dried weeks ago and his fingers are unmarked.

  Lucas Hayes lopes out, followed by two of his testo teammates, laughing about something one of them said on the other side of the doors. When Lucas didn’t show up at today’s grief group, I’d secretly hoped that he was sitting out here in our circle of trees. A grief group meeting of one. But the truth is as plain as the laughter on his face. It’ll be all over the school by now, the rumor that I jumped. Has Lucas heard it? Does he believe it?

  Lucas parts from his friends and continues across the lot on his own. I watch carefully as he passes the burners’ circle, and my breath catches when he glances at it. At me. I imagine him saying my name close to my ear. Paige. But then his eyes flick over me and onto the road. Of course he can’t see me. And really, it’s not so different from the times before my death when we would pass in the cafeteria or the hall and his eyes would move past me. No, through me.

  I catch up to him at the edge of the lot and stand next to him on the frosty hunch of grass that separates school from road. A steady stream of minivans flows past the school. As Lucas waits for a break in the traffic, I study his profile, remembering how sometimes he’d reach over and pluck an object from the ground—a bent twig, an abandoned lighter, a skeletal leaf—and gaze at it with guileless eyes. He looked at everything in the world like it was a present he’d just opened. And it was heady, being lifted from your wrappings and looked at anew, just as much as it was infuriating, the invisible tag with his name on it.

  “I didn’t like you,” I say, even though he can’t hear me. “I just liked kissing you. You know that, right?”

  And then something possesses me, and I reach over and grab his hand. As I do, Lucas turns and looks back at the burners’ circle. Underneath the rush of afternoon traffic, I hear it again. Paige.

  And my hand.

  It bumps against his.

  It catches.

  I’m not saying that I’m holding Lucas’s hand. I’m not saying that. But instead of passing through, my hand settles in his like it’s found a pocket of space where it fits. I stare down at it. When I was alive, Lucas and I never held hands.

  I start to feel something in the center of me dissolving like sugar into water, like snow on the pavement, like my body when Lucas kissed me deep. But just as the feeling starts to grow, Lucas turns and spots a break in the traffic. He leaps off the curb, his hand falling free of mine. Before I know it, he’s disappeared between the houses across the street.

  I step off the curb after him, across the invisible property line that separates school grounds from the rest of the world. But unlike Lucas, my feet don’t land on the blacktop of the street in front of me. Instead, with one small step, I find myself hundreds of feet back and three stories above where I just was. I now stand on the lip of the school roof.

  3: A LESSON FROM THE SCHOOL SLUT

  THE FEELING IN BETWEEN THE CURB AND THE ROOF, EVEN though it lasts only a moment, isn’t a pleasant one. It’s a flattening, separating, pressing feeling, like a meager pat of butter scraped thin over burnt toast. Once it’s over, I feel lumped back together again, but all wrong. I open my eyes and look down at the parking lot below. I scuff my shoes against the cement lip that runs foot-high around the edge of the school roof. A safety feature. Ha.

  I don’t have to think about holding myself in place here on the roof’s ledge. I don’t have to worry about hovering. Besides the soil of the earth, this is the only spot in the school where the world can touch me and I can touch it. I didn’t die from hitting the ground; I died from hitting my head right here on this ledge. This little section of concrete is where my skull cracked and the shards of bone pushed themselves up into the squish of my brain, stopping its flashes and flickers. My death spot.

  I let the soles of my boots relax onto the cement, let the breeze pick up the stray bits of hair that have eternally escaped my rubber band. A curl of ivy grows from a crack in the cement at my feet; on its end, a tiny pointed green leaf. I reach down and pluck it, just because I can. Though as soon as I pull it from its vine, the little leaf drifts through the tips of my fingers and down to the parking lot below. I wish I’d let it alone to keep growing.

  Each time I step over the school’s property line, I end up back here. Just like when Brooke steps over the school property line, she appears on the floor of the school bathroom or Evan on the seal of the gym floor. When we try to escape, the school takes us back to where we died. Our death spots.

  I look out at the neighborhood across the road. My house is over there, too far away to see, small and green with dark red trim, colors my father always threatened to paint over. When I was little, I begged him not to. The Christmas House, that’s what the kids at school called it, and it had felt special to live in a house with such a name. As I’d grown older, the specialness had worn off, the colors reverting themselves to simple green and red. At some point, I’d stopped protesting when my father talked about how any day now he’d repaint the house. Just do it, I’d finally said. You keep talking about it. After that, he’d never mentioned it again. It occurs to me now that maybe the real reason my father had kept saying he’d repaint the house was just to hear me ask him not to.

  There are so many things to lose.

  I search the horizon for the house that I can’t even see. I think again of my parents. Will someone tell them what Kelsey said at the grief group meeting? Will they think that I killed myself? Even if they don’t believe it, would a tiny part of them wonder if it was true? I imagine their faces the saddest I’ve ever seen them, my father’s brow folded up into wrinkles, the sound of my mother’s crying, small expulsions of breath like she’s being punched in the stomach again and again.

  The thought takes my feet out from under me. I sit down and drop my head into my hands, wishing my death spot would allow for tears. I come here when it rains anyway, turn my face up and let the drops plink on my cheeks. The moment I step off my death spot and back onto the roof, I’m dry again, like the rain never was. I lift my face from my hands, scanning the clouds for dark spots, for flickers of lightning.

  “Thought you’d be up here,” a voice says behind me.

  I turn. Brooke sits on the cage of one of the whirring industrial fans, inspecting a hole in her jeans.

  “I hate these jeans, you know? But that morning, everything else was unwearably dirty. Leave it to me to OD on laundry day.” She works her finger around the frayed edge of the hole. “I had this other pair I wish I could be wearing. People wrote all over them. Everyone I know wrote on them. Like I was famous.”

  I remember those jeans, the denim faded to a soft parchment. And she isn’t exaggerating. Nearly every inch of them was covered in messages, signatures, and doodles. And when I say every inch, I mean even the butt, even the inner thighs. People said it was the guys she had sex with who got signature space there. It was the school joke: sign the slut. She must not know about that part.

  “I wonder where they are now,” she says. “My mom probably burned them. She was always threatening to.”

  “You don’t think she would keep them?” I picture my own mom standing in front of my closet jammed with musty thrift-store finds. She wouldn’t throw anything away. She’d keep it all on the hangers.

  “When I was alive, I wanted everything to change. Now it never will. Same stupid hole in my jeans. Same stupid school.”

  Brooke hops down from the fan and crosses the roof to where I sit on the ledge. She peers over the side. We both look at the ground below.

  “I’ve done it, you know,” she says. “I’ve jumped.”

  “Off a roof?”

  “Off this roof.”

  I feel cold, like the wind isn’t hitting me anymore, but rushing straight through
me. “When?”

  “After you died. I wondered what it felt like for you.”

  “Did it hurt when you hit the ground?” I ask.

  “Did it hurt for you?” she asks back, her voice cracking on the word hurt.

  “I wasn’t awake for that part. I hit here.” I touch the roof’s ledge. The cement shows no stain of blood, no chip of bone, no sign I was even there. “That hurt. But it also . . . the whole thing felt like I was watching it happen. Like I was watching myself slip. Fall. They say that’s what shock feels like.”

  I look up from the ground and out across the parking lot, the last bits of winter’s snow piled and rock-riddled like scraps left on a plate.

  “Did it hurt when you OD’d?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it feel like you were watching it happen?”

  “It felt like I was watching stupid Lucas Hayes lean over me, trying to get his cell phone out of his bag. Then he stared at it forever, and I was, like, Dial 911. How hard is that? Not that I could manage to tell him that, since I was busy going into cardiac arrest at the time. What’s his excuse?”

  “He was probably scared,” I say.

  “Scared of getting in trouble,” she says.

  “It must have been a shock to walk in on.”

  “A shock to walk in on,” she repeats. “Yeah, that must have been real traumatic for Lucas compared to, you know, dying.” She studies me. “Did he tell you that? That he was in shock?”

  “I didn’t really, you know, know him or anything,” I say.

  “Stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Lying. I know about you and Lucas. I used to watch you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I mumble.

  She ticks off on her fingers. “I mean the notes he put in your locker, the secret looks in the hall, the trips out there.” She points to the burners’ trees, tiny across the black stretch of parking lot. “Of course I couldn’t follow you there.” And she couldn’t have. It’s across the school property line; that’s why the burners meet there to smoke. “But I have an imagination and, if you believe the gossip, plenty of experience with that kind of thing.”