“And, when they found you, he said he didn’t know you.” I say the rest for her, the story everyone at the school knows. “He said he’d been walking by and heard a noise, like someone had fallen, and he’d gone in and found you on the floor.”
“Innocent bystander,” she says, eyes narrowing. “Big hero. Who wouldn’t believe him? Everyone knew the kind of girl I was. No one even questioned it.”
“He must have been scared,” Evan says, “to lie like that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I’m surprised at the vehemence in my voice. “It doesn’t matter if he was scared or in trouble or what. He should have said that he was there with her. He should have said that they were there together. He shouldn’t have said he didn’t know her, that she was just some girl.”
20: THE DROP CLOTH
I MAKE A NEW PLAN THE NEXT DAY TO FOLLOW LUCAS HAYES until he thinks of me. I will walk into Bosworth’s office and make Lucas tell the truth about his part in Brooke’s death. And Lucas won’t be able to take it back later because I’ll tell Bosworth to question Heath; I’ll tell him to call Lucas’s parents right then and there so that I can confess to them, too. It’s the truth. They’ll have to believe it.
But the next morning, Lucas doesn’t come to school. And when Kelsey and Wes saunter in from the parking lot, their shoulders bumping lightly as their steps fall together, I find myself following them instead, straining to hear the hum of their conversation, a tremor in my middle.
Neither Kelsey nor Wes thinks of me that morning. They find each other during passing breaks and take their lunches out to the courtyard. They sit close on the flagstones, sharing body heat. I watch them through the windows from inside the school. It’s too cold out there, even for a dead girl who can no longer feel things like cold. Wes makes a comment that causes Kelsey to throw her head back and laugh. Would she be able to make him laugh? Yesterday, I had.
I step through the brick and glass out into the courtyard.
“. . . sit inside with your friends?” Wes is saying when I get in earshot.
Kelsey makes a face. “No thanks.”
“You’re in a fight?” Wes asks.
“No fight. We’re just not friends.” Kelsey picks up a piece of foil from her lunch, adjusts it so that it makes a reflection on the flagstones. “I did some things. I don’t know why. They were just little things, like wearing the wrong kind of clothes.”
“Or asking the wrong kind of guy to the dance?” Wes raises an eyebrow.
She smiles down at her foil, makes the reflection dance.
My little things, I think. The things I made her do.
“At first it was just an impulse, an experiment. And it was like they thought I was someone else entirely. Some stranger. I was sure I’d ruined everything, my friendships, my entire senior year, myself. But then”—she squints—“I started to be okay with it. I started even to like it. I didn’t have to be so careful to be nice and pretty and just this way. I could just . . .” She flips the foil onto the flagstones, where it joins with its reflection. “Be.”
After lunch, art class takes the two of them past the drop cloth for my old mural. They glance at it, my name spoken in unison by their thoughts. Before I’ve thought about it, I’m pushing my way into Kelsey and blinking up at Wes through her hazel eyes. I reach out to take his hand, but have to pull back because he’s still gazing at the drop cloth, his mind whispering, Paige.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask him.
“Oh,” his eyes flick to me, back to the drop cloth. “Her, I guess. Paige Wheeler.”
“You knew her?”
“Just a little.”
My gaze falls on the sketchbook tucked under his arm. “Why did you draw all those pictures of her, then?”
He turns, nakedly surprised, my name gone from his thoughts mid-syllable, as if it has dropped through a trapdoor. “You saw those?”
“You drew them because she died?”
“Actually I drew these before she died. Or before I knew, anyway. I drew them that afternoon. Seventh period.”
“When she fell,” I whisper.
He offers me the sketchbook. I take it gingerly, flip through the pages, my face appearing before me again and again, but with small differences between each drawing, as if I’m changing my expression, as if I’m moving. That girl who is me. Who isn’t me.
“Why did you draw them?” I ask again.
“I don’t know. Maybe I liked her.”
I’m standing on tile floor, hard and cold and square beneath my feet, but suddenly it feels like I can’t count on the ground at all. It’s like my first days learning to hover, when the floor was an iced-over lake—one wrong step, and I’ll fall through.
“Maybe?” I hear my voice say.
“All right, not maybe. I liked her.”
“You should have told her.”
Wes smiles humorlessly. “Well, what do you know? I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“I mean, are you sure you did? Because I don’t think—”
“I made it pretty clear.”
Had he? I think back to the smirks that might have been smiles, the mockery that might have been flirtation. And then, there was that moment in the burners’ circle. If you were meeting me, he’d said, I’d make a point of being here.
And what had I said to that ridiculous burner, that annoying joker who was Wes Nolan? I’d make a point of losing track of time.
That’s what I’d said.
All my time is gone now. I won’t get to chart the crookedness of another boy’s smile. I won’t get to leap giddily from teasing gibe to gibe. I won’t get to walk down the hallway with him like Kelsey did today, everyone noting, They’re together. Those two. I won’t get to fall in love. I’ve never been in love.
I turn to Wes and ask the question I don’t want to ask, the question I have no right to ask, the question that I’m already asking: “If you liked her, if you liked Paige, what are you doing here with me?”
“Kelsey,” he says, and I’m surprised by how the sound of her name on his tongue suddenly hurts me. “Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“That’s right. She’s dead now.”
Wes reaches out, and I take a step back, his fingers grazing the place where I’d been. This time, the problem isn’t that he’s thinking my name, but that he isn’t.
“I can’t—” I say, and I don’t know how to finish. I can’t what? What is it that I can’t do with Wes?
Besides nothing.
Besides anything.
I turn and walk away from the hurt in his eyes, the light in her eyes, too, that girl under the tree.
As I march Kelsey out of the school and across the parking lot, here are the things I don’t care about: I don’t care that I’m making Kelsey skip class. I don’t care that I made her break things off with Wes. I don’t care that she might like him. I don’t care that he might like her back. I don’t care that he’s not following me. Her. Whoever. I don’t care that he might have liked me. I don’t care about him. I don’t care about myself.
I’m walking faster and faster in Kelsey’s tippy-top boots, until she’s across the road and I’m back where I belong, up on the school roof. The parking lot stretches out in front of me. One time, not so long ago, it must have been a field, not a parking lot. What happens to the grass when they lay all that tar over it?
I’ll tell you what happens.
It dies.
I stare down at the blacktop.
Something catches my eye.
A movement.
Something.
Nothing.
I blink.
Harriet Greene.
There she is, right down there in the parking lot. She stands on the accident site, at the end of the curling tire tracks. She looks around her, bewildered, turns in a slow circle.
“Harriet!” I shout.
Then, she’s gone.
There.
I glance over my shoulder, taking in the distance back across the roof, back to the door, down through the school. She could disappear again any moment. There’s not time to get down there, not time for the stairs.
I take a shaking breath and step up on the ledge.
I don’t look down at the ground below me. I know what I’ll see if I do, that little patch of tar darker than the rest. Instead, I steel myself. Instead, I do what they all said I did.
I jump.
This time, I’m awake for the fall. Each set of windows I pass blazes with reflected light, like a flashbulb. I have enough time to think, Thirty-two feet per second squared, before I land in a heap, the ground jarring up through whatever part of me has been left in this world. I stand, but find I can’t manage to hover, not after the shock of that fall. I limp forward, toes skimming through the asphalt. Harriet is still there in front of me (thank God), only yards away.
She’s seen me now. She’s shouting something. But the volume is turned off. I can see her, but there’s no sound.
I wave my arms, gesture to my ears. “Harriet! I can’t hear you!”
Her silent shouts become more frantic. She points back at the school, then at herself. I’m almost there, close enough to see that she’s saying the same thing over and over, but she’s flickering again, and I can’t make out the word her lips are forming.
Then she’s gone.
I stand at the end of the tire tracks, follow them with my eyes as they curl into nothing.
21. SOMEONE ELSE’S DAUGHTER
EVAN, BROOKE, AND I SIT IN A ROW IN FRONT OF HARRIET’S accident site for the rest of the afternoon.
Evan turns to me. “You’re sure you don’t know what she was trying to say?”
“I was too far away. It was the same thing, though. The same word or two words. And, like I told you, she pointed to the school, then to herself.”
Evan frowns.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Something’s been bothering me,” he says. “You know it’s just been me here for . . . a while.”
“How long?” Brooke asks.
“Years,” Evan admits.
“Decades?” I whisper.
He looks down. “A while,” he repeats. “And that makes sense because it’s a school. No one’s supposed to die in high school.”
I feel a twinge as he says this. It’s true. I look around at the three of us. We weren’t supposed to die so young. “But then there was Brooke,” I say, “and me, and now maybe Harriet.”
“All in the same year,” Brooke finishes.
“It’s like they say,” Evan traces over the tire tracks with his finger, “this place is cursed.”
I still fully intend to make Lucas admit the truth to Principal Bosworth, but he doesn’t show up the next day either. Only half of the upperclassmen show anyway because prom is tonight. It’s tradition to spend the morning sleeping in, the afternoon getting sandblasted and shellacked at the salon.
I hang out in the main office, waiting for a call about Harriet. I expect Evan and Brooke to be there, too, but this morning it’s just me. Bosworth and Mrs. Morello are both shut up in his office, and the secretary is playing solitaire on the computer, no calls ringing. Twenty minutes later, Kelsey Pope slinks into the office, hair in wet ropes, features faint without their usual makeup. I’m surprised she’s here at school and not at home readying herself for the dance.
“Can I get a late pass?” she asks the secretary.
While the secretary bends to get the form, Kelsey picks up a flyer from the front counter, fiddling with it. I think of the origami flower she folded at my grief group meeting. Just then, the office door opens and Bosworth ushers out the people from his meeting.
Those people are my parents.
My mother emerges first, purse wrapped tightly under her arm. My father follows, his hand set on her shoulder, as if this small touch is necessary to their forward momentum, though I can’t tell if he is guiding her or she is leading him out the door.
“. . . for coming in today, Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler,” Bosworth is saying.
At the sound of their name, Kelsey thinks of me, Paige. Without a thought, I step into her, and thankfully, she doesn’t resist.
My mother is buttoning up a dark jacket that I’ve never seen before; she must have bought it new for spring. My father reluctantly takes Bosworth’s offered hand, giving it a tepid shake. I scan them for other differences, new wrinkles, dark circles, white hairs, but it’s like trying to think about your parents by their given names instead of Mom and Dad. I can’t see anything except that they’re overwhelmingly my parents right there in front of me. They’re my parents walking past me out the office door. They’re my parents who might leave this school, never to come back.
“Wait!” I shout.
Everyone looks at me. My mother has a polite expression on her face, as if she doesn’t even know me. Which she doesn’t, I remind myself. And I decide that I’d exchange all of Kelsey’s beauty in a second to look like my mother’s daughter right now.
“Wait,” I repeat. I take a tripping step toward my mom.
She raises her eyebrows, forehead wrinkling.
I have no idea what to say. I look down at Kelsey’s hands, still holding the half-folded flyer. I scan its heading and thrust it forward. “You should come to the spaghetti dinner next week.”
“Oh,” my mother says faintly.
“It’s to raise money for the jazz band.”
“Kelsey,” Bosworth warns. “These are—”
“It’s a really good cause,” I talk over him. “Music and the arts and education, and lots of people come to it, parents come to it,” I finish lamely.
“I think that’s enough for now,” Bosworth says.
But my mother steps past him and takes the flyer from me. “Maybe we will come. I like music.” She smiles briefly. “Thank you for telling us about this, . . . ?” She waits for my name.
“Kelsey,” I say. I hold the paper for as long as I can without keeping it from her, and then I let it slide through my fingers. She takes it, running her hand over it to smooth the creases away.
I follow my parents out of the office, pretending to bend over the drinking fountain so that I can keep watching them. They grow smaller and smaller down the hall.
When I can’t see them anymore, I walk to the social studies hall and stand at the window set into the door of Mr. Pon’s classroom as one and another and another of the kids notice me, all of them smirking at the sight of my face peering in. Finally, one of them takes pity on me and nudges Wes Nolan. When Wes looks up from his textbook, I’m praying that his expression won’t be angry. And it isn’t. He raises his hand and calls the teacher’s name.
When we find an empty classroom, shutting the door behind us, I step forward and, before he can say anything, I say, “You can kiss me.”
“Kelsey.”
“What?”
“I think we should talk about—”
“I don’t care. I don’t care if you think of her.”
“Her?” he says, then blanches. “Oh, no. No. I wouldn’t pretend that you’re, I wouldn’t imagine that you’re . . .” Paige, his mind whispers, even if he won’t say it.
But that was not what I meant. Actually, I meant the opposite. I meant that I don’t care if he thinks of Kelsey when he’s kissing me.
“You can hold me,” I say. “Maybe right now you can just hold me.”
He nods. “Okay. That’d be okay.”
His coat smells like cigarettes, his chin rests on the top of my head in Kelsey’s damp hair. His hands don’t rub my back consolingly, but just hold me, like the earth holds me when I set my feet on it. He doesn’t think my name again. He doesn’t think Paige. But I meant it. I don’t care.
22. PROM NIGHT
WHAT WOULD
I HAVE WORN TO PROM?
I’d been to only two school dances freshman year before Usha and I had decided that they were stupid, so I have only two dresses in my closet at home: red and black. The black one is short; the red one is red. Getting ready for those other dances, I’d stand naked in my bedroom, hair wet on my back, and lay both dresses on the bed, trying to imagine how my night would be different if I wore one or the other. Red dress or black? Hair piled on my head or tousled? Dewy cheek and lip gloss or shadowed bedroom eyes? It didn’t matter. I was never the girl in my head.
Tonight, I wonder where those two dresses are now. Are they still hanging in my closet like promises never meant to be kept? Or have they been folded up and closed in a box with my name on it? Or maybe they’ve been donated to charity and are being worn right now by two other girls at two other proms, with entirely different boys and entirely different songs, their dance moves making entirely different patterns of wrinkles in the fabric.
Kelsey arrives early, just after the chaperones, and leans against the wall opposite from the drop cloth. She wears a knee-length shift with straps so thin they look like they’re made to be snapped. The fabric has been woven through with keen silver threads so that the dress winks dangerously, like a thousand needles, as she turns. She surveys the empty hallway once more, and now certain that Wes isn’t there, she steps back against the wall to wait. Stray strands of her hair, brushed into a frantic shine, begin to climb above her head, tiny static snakes against the brick. I remember a page I’d read in one of the left-open library books, how in actual mythology, Medusa didn’t turn you into stone because she was so ugly, but because she was so beautiful, and because you were fool enough to meet her eye.
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