Absent

by Katie Williams

  “We didn’t . . . we only . . . we only kissed,” I splutter. I shake my head. “You knew?” I’m not sure how I feel. Relieved? I think I feel relieved. “No one knew. I didn’t even tell Usha.”

  “Why not? Wasn’t she your best friend or something?”

  “It was no big deal.” I leave the other reasons unspoken: that I didn’t know how to explain it, me hooking up with some testo. The testo. The celebrated Lucas Hayes, Mr. Slam Dunk, Mr. Gleam Tooth. And then, the reason I only sometimes admitted, that if the truth had gotten out, it would have been over. Lucas wouldn’t have wanted to meet me anymore.

  Brooke eyes me like she knows all my reasons anyhow. “So Lucas never told you about how he stood there and watched me die?”

  “Sometimes he said things that . . . I know he wished he could have done something.”

  “Something,” Brooke echoes. “Or nothing.”

  “He was scared. He tried.”

  “Just like he tried to be your boyfriend?”

  “I never asked him for that. It wasn’t a big deal with labels and corsages and things. I’m not that type of girl.”

  “Did he make you memorize that little speech?” she asks bitterly.

  “I’d think if anyone would understand, it’d be you.”

  “Why? Because I was the school slut? At least I wouldn’t pretend not to know someone because it would hurt my reputation.”

  “He wasn’t doing that,” I say, but it sounds weak even to me.

  For a long moment, we stare out across the street at the houses lit up for the night. Tiny yellow windows. You have no idea how warm those lights are until you’re outside the circle of their glow.

  “Brooke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you were watching us?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did it look like . . . ? Did it seem like Lucas . . . ?” I give up.

  “Did it look like he liked you?” Brooke asks for me.

  “Not that it matters,” I mumble.

  Brooke’s laugh is dark enough to douse a few of those lights across the street. “Here’s a lesson from the school slut: They always look that way when they’re kissing you.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. We stand in silence.

  “It’s not so bad, you know,” Brooke finally says, “having them think things about you that aren’t true. They all think I was a druggie.”

  “Brooke. You died of a cocaine overdose.”

  “I wasn’t a druggie, though. I only tried it a couple of times.”

  “Really? That’s it?”

  “That’s it. It’s like a ridiculous after-school special: The chick gets pregnant the first time she has sex, the kid crashes the first time he drives drunk, the girl dies . . .”

  She doesn’t finish the last one. Her mouth twitches, like only a fraction of the smile can make it through. “I’m just saying, we’re dead now. What does it matter what they say? How is it any different from what they said about us when we were alive?”

  You’re right, I should say. It doesn’t matter about them. But I can’t quite get the words out, so I don’t say anything, just pick out patches of dark across the road, trying to guess which house will be the next to turn on its lights.

  4: FAIRNESS

  WHEN I EMERGE FROM THE STAIRWELL THAT LEADS DOWN from the roof, the extracurriculars are ending, just in time for everyone to get home for dinner. I linger at the ragged edges of groups of student council officers, basketball players, half the chorus for the spring musical, and the track-and-field runners. In one short walk down the school hall, I hear my name mentioned again and again. Everyone is talking about what Kelsey Pope said in the grief group meeting, about how I killed myself.

  By the time I reach the end of the hall, I’m sick of my own name. But when I hear it one more time, coming out of the art room’s half-open door, I stop, because this time it’s Mrs. Morello’s voice saying it. I peer in to find her teetering on one of the stools that line the high tables. Mr. Fisk, the art teacher, sits on the stool next to her. Across from them sits Usha.

  I can’t see Usha’s face, only the back of her messy black bob and the tips of her elbows peeking out from either side of her rounded back. Her arms must be crossed over her chest, which is not how Usha sits at all. Usha sits legs akimbo, head tilted, hands constantly in motion, tapping on the table or her own knees, unless she has pencil and paper, in which case, they’re busy drawing. I step closer to this tough-jawed, pulled-up version of Usha.

  “. . . authorized a mural to memorialize the students we’ve lost this year,” Mrs. Morello is saying. “We’ve designated a section of wall in the hallway. Right by the doors to the student parking lot.”

  A memorial mural.

  I imagine my face floor-to-ceiling high, my painted pupils staring down at students who rush below it. I imagine two girls, decades from now, pausing beneath it. One of them will say, “Who’s that?” And her friend will shrug and answer, “Some girl who died.” And I’ll be standing behind them, silent as my mouth painted on the wall.

  Some girl.

  Who died.

  Mrs. Morello is beaming down at Usha, the kind of lipless smile adults use when they have a present hidden behind their backs. Usually something you don’t want. Usually socks.

  “The school board decided that, rather than hire a professional artist, it would mean more to have a student paint it. It would be a way to—”

  “No,” Usha says.

  Mrs. Morello blinks rapidly. “Pardon?”

  I’m startled, too. Usha isn’t a suck-up well-rounder, but she’s never rude to teachers. In fact, she was always telling me that it’s rude to raise my hand only to point out when a teacher has made a mistake.

  “You were going to ask me to do it, right?” Usha asks Mrs. Morello in the same detached voice. “Paint it?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “So, no. I don’t want to paint your mural.”

  “But . . .” Mrs. Morello’s smile falters, then regains its ground. “It’s not my mural. It’s for Paige. Principal Bosworth has decided that you’ll have complete creative freedom. Whatever you think best expresses Paige and Brooke and the school’s loss, you can paint it. And Mr. Fisk recommended you especially.” She looks over at Mr. Fisk for help.

  He runs a hand over his beard and clears his throat. “Think of it this way, Usha. This is a chance for you to remember Paige, to help other people remember who she was.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be trying so hard to remember her,” Usha says. “Maybe we should be trying to forget her.”

  “Usha,” I whisper, even though I know she can’t hear me. The world starts to tilt; I look down. I’ve forgotten my hover and started to sink through the floor. By the time I get my feet right, Mr. Fisk is saying something that ends with “. . . can be upsetting,” and Usha has already slid off her stool. She stands with the table between her and the teachers.

  “Everyone keeps saying that,” she tells him.

  “Saying what?” Mr. Fisk asks.

  “That word: upset. You must be upset. Isn’t this upsetting?”

  “Because people are worried about you,” Mrs. Morello puts in.

  “Well, it’s a stupid word. Upset. Like something’s been knocked off a table. Like I’ve been knocked off a table.” She looks down at her crossed arms, takes a breath, uncrosses them, plants them on her hips. “What if I’m not? Upset?”

  “Then you’re not upset,” Mr. Fisk says smoothly. “You can feel whatever you feel.”

  “I feel angry.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Morello nods emphatically. “It’s not fair, is it?” She pats the table as if Usha’s hand were under hers, even though it’s not. “It’s not fair that she died.”

  “It’s fair.” Both adults open their mouths, but Usha keeps talking right over them. “You jump off a roof, you die. That’s completely fair.”

  “Depression can be difficult to—” Morello begins.

  “Th
at’s the thing,” Usha interrupts. “She didn’t say she was depressed. She didn’t say anything, that she was sad or . . . she just did it. I’m not angry at death. I’m angry at her. I was supposed to be her friend, and she just did it.”

  “Usha. Please. I didn’t.” My voice is loud in the quiet room, but it doesn’t matter. I could scream, and it wouldn’t even be a whisper.

  Usha doesn’t even flinch as she says to Morello and Fisk, “Sorry, but I’d rather not paint some mural. Not for you, not for the school, and not for her.”

  5: NO HEAVENLY LIGHT

  IN LIFE, USHA WAS MY FRIEND. IN DEATH, EVAN IS. WE SPEND most nights in the library. Though the room is set windowless in the center of the ground floor, it glows with a series of dim lamps that the librarian leaves on; she also leaves books open on the tables and cart. Each night, Evan and I move from one book to the next, reading two pages about photosynthesis, then the French-Indian War, then how to build a go-cart, then a teen romance novel. We shout to each other from across the room: Found one on economics! Here’s, oh, Little Women, the haircut scene! Sometimes I suspect that the librarian leaves the books open on purpose because she knows we’re here, but Evan says that’s silly. No one knows we’re here except for us.

  When I arrive in the library that night, I don’t tell Evan what Usha said about me. If I say it out loud, I’ll . . . I don’t know what. Can’t cry. Not an option. No working tear ducts. So I pretend it didn’t happen. Not just Usha refusing to paint the mural—all of it. I pretend I didn’t fall, didn’t die. I pretend that my friend Evan and I are staying late to work on a project for school, that we were accidentally locked in the library. We’ll pass the time reading random passages out loud until, in the morning, the janitor will open the door to find us blinking in the early light. He’ll say, “What are you two doing in here?”

  Once Evan and I have finished our snippets of reading, we meet up at the empty spot on the far side of the stacks where the card catalog used to be. The carpet is still tamped down in a square from the old catalog’s weight, and we settle into this depression. How much did they weigh, all those slips of paper? Even the ink printed on them must have weighed something.

  “Look!” Evan points at the light fixture. A moth flutters around it. “I used to stick the neck of my desk lamp out my window at night just to see the moths do that.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Why?” Evan asks.

  “Because. They think they see something beautiful, but they can’t get to it. They hit the glass. They keep hitting it until either they knock themselves out or they get fried.”

  He considers this. “I don’t know. I like their optimism.”

  We both watch the moth for a minute, batting its head and wings against the light fixture.

  “Evan? How long have you been here?”

  “A long time,” he says, which is always his answer. He won’t tell me how long he’s been here, and he won’t tell me how he died. His clothes are the normal sort—jeans, sneakers, a wool sweater—but there’s something vaguely outdated about them, like items Usha and I might pass over in the Goodwill bin. Otherwise, he’s skinny and freckly, his hair parted in a tidy line. He looks like a teenager, but who knows how old he really is.

  “Do you think there’s something after this?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “No heavenly light has ever shone for me.”

  “You believe in that, then? In heaven?”

  He looks at me sidelong. “Do you?”

  “I never went to church.” I snort. “Maybe that’s why I’m stuck here.”

  “Well, I went to church. Or rather, I was required to go.”

  “So you believe in God and all that?”

  He taps a finger against his bottom lip. “I found church to be an unreliable source. I liked some of what they had to say. Other things, I didn’t.”

  “You mean about gay people?”

  His eyes widen, and I immediately wish I could unsay it. I’ve known since I first met him, something in his movement, his words, his sense of humor, his quality of kindness. Some people you don’t know for sure, or you think you do, but then you’re wrong. With Evan, it’s unmistakable. It’s part of who he is.

  “I’m not . . .” He shakes his head.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s no big deal. Lots of people . . . Usha made out with a girl at summer camp once, and lots of other people are gay . . . or whatever. There’s an after-school club, an official one, with an adviser. It’s your favorite, actually, Mr. Fisk, and—”

  “I’m just not that interested in—” He winces. “I’m more interested in the world of the mind. I don’t even have a body, so why should I think about that other stuff? Right?”

  “Sure.” I think about how much I still think about Lucas and that other stuff. How when I think about it now, it’s almost like I have a body again.

  We’re quiet then, quiet enough that I can hear the books around me creaking in their shelves, rustling their pages, stretching their spines, as if they have something to add to the conversation. Which some of them probably do.

  Maybe we should be trying to forget her, Usha said. I wonder if everyone Evan knew has forgotten him. They’ve surely moved on anyway, graduated. Just like Usha will, and Lucas, and the rest of them, too. All my classmates will go on to college and jobs and families and lives. There won’t be grief groups with remembrances. If they think of me, it’ll only be once in a while, that poor girl who killed herself. And I’ll still be here. In high school.

  “I don’t want them to think it,” I admit, and my voice comes out so weak that I hate the sound of it, all desperate and wobbly. “I don’t.”

  “Paige? What?”

  “I don’t want everyone to think I killed myself.”

  “I know,” Evan says soothingly. “I know.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “You don’t know.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “Usha said . . .” I have to make myself say it. “She said she wouldn’t paint the memorial mural. She said she wasn’t sad, she was angry. At me.” My voice gets louder and shakier with each word, but I can’t stop it. The tears are trapped in my dead body, just like I’m trapped here in this school. “She said that she wanted to forget me. And if my parents ever thought that I did this to myself, that I wanted this—”

  “Paige,” Evan repeats helplessly.

  I wave him away, close my eyes, and take a few breaths. When I speak again, my voice is calm and certain. “They’re not going to remember me like that. I’m going to find a way to change it.”

  “How?” Evan asks gently. “We can’t talk to anyone, can’t touch anything, can’t do anything. What can you do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I tell him, “but something. I’ll find a way to do something. I’m not going to end like this.”

  6: HOW I DIED

  ON THE LAST DAY OF MY LIFE, I STOOD UNDER A LATE FEBruary sky, the gray clouds pulled thin and high over our heads like a veil. The sun was somewhere behind there, but I didn’t know where. Maybe if I scanned the sky slowly, I’d find a spot to the west where the clouds burned white instead of gray, and that’d be the sun. Otherwise, it was all sky, from top of head to soles of shoes, and we were up there in it, because our physics teacher, Mr. Cochran, had gotten permission to take us onto the roof for our egg-drop project.

  We, the physics class, clumped at the center of the roof’s flat, cement slab, as far as possible from the foot-high lip around its edge where Mr. Cochran stood. We shivered and stumbled against each other, but we didn’t break ranks. Mr. Cochran had been very clear: he had a quiz ready. If there was any running, any pushing, any “tomfoolery,” we would march right down and take it.

  “Let’s not have you ending up like your eggs,” he kept saying.

  That afternoon, I was a good kid. We all were good kids, good eggs. We stood at the center of the roof as we were told to. We didn’t run; we didn’t push; we didn�
��t tomfool. It’s possible we whispered. It’s possible we poked, and perhaps we turned to the roof’s edge like how the bean plants in Mrs. Zimmer’s biology room turned toward the dirty windows, even though they only opened inward, and then only a crack. I was alive then, though that wasn’t something I thought about, because it wasn’t remarkable; it just was.

  “You were late again,” Usha informed me, as if I didn’t already know that. We stood as far from the rest of the group as we could without getting yelled at. Usha had fashioned her hair into a stiff egg-yolk mohawk in honor of our egg drop. It was the end of the day, though, and she’d started to smell like leftover breakfast.

  “Headbang for me,” I said to distract her, and she obliged, making a rocker scowl as she dipped her head. As soon as she’d finished, she went right back to “You were late yesterday. And twice last week.” She poked a finger at my chest.

  “Okay, okay, it’s not a big deal. I forgot this.” I held up my egg contraption. “I had to go back to my locker and get it.”

  “That took fifteen minutes?”

  “I stopped to fix my hair. Not everyone has such a resilient hairstyle.” I tweaked one of the peaks of her mohawk.

  “True, true,” Usha allowed, “but since when do you care about your hairstyle?”

  The truth was, I hadn’t been late because of homework or hair. I’d been late because I’d been waiting for Lucas Hayes in the burners’ circle. After lunch, I’d found a note he’d left in my locker with a hastily drawn tree and a six, which meant to meet him in the burners’ circle during sixth period, and I’d skipped American lit to do it. But he hadn’t been there. No one had. I’d sat at the base of a tree for half an hour, scratching patterns in the dirt and staring up at the protective branches above me, before someone had finally arrived. And that someone hadn’t been Lucas.

  What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan? I thought when the sound of footsteps produced the cargo-jacketed, shaggy-haired burner. Wes was accompanied by Heath Mineo, the school drug dealer, so short and corrupt that he resembled a tiny mafia boss from the cartoons. Wes extracted a pack of cigarettes and tapped it against the trunk of one of the trees.