I draw closer, peering at Kelsey’s face. We both turn at a spike of laughter from people passing the mouth of the hallway, faces stuck in smiles at seeing Kelsey Pope alone at the dance. Kelsey presses a hand to her cheek self-consciously.
“You look beautiful,” I say, not sure whether I’m saying it to apologize or simply because it’s true. As if in answer, Kelsey’s mind whispers, Paige. There’s no more resistance than breaking the skin of a pool as I step into her waiting form, and now I am beautiful, too.
I post myself at the mouth of the hall, watching the dancegoers clump in twos, fours, groups. They all spare looks for me, most of them turning away, expressions laced with laughter.
Then, Lucas Hayes lopes down the hall, the little dark-mouthed burner girl tucked under his arm. I goggle at them. Lucas wouldn’t have taken Brooke to prom—not me either. What does it mean that he’s brought her? A gang of paired ponies and testos come after Lucas, the ponies dropping behind their dates, not sure whether to stare at Lucas Hayes and his low-rent date or at Kelsey Pope and her no-date.
But then there he is, my date, Wes Nolan. He shoulders past them, already muttering apologies. He halts, excuses fading out. “You look . . . shit.” He shakes his head. “You’ll hate it if I say ‘beautiful.’ ”
“You can say it.”
“All right.”
Wes grins. We grin at each other like goons.
“Well, say it if you’re going to say it, then.”
“You look beautiful,” he says, no grin.
A chord rises in me that is both the swell of the music and the pain of the string being plucked.
“Not me.”
“Who else but you?”
When he grabs my hand, I let him take it.
I have never danced like this. But it’s how I would’ve liked to dance. Wes and I leap; we twist and spin. It’s weird. It’s fun. A circle forms around us. With my eye makeup blurring and my hair whipping and Wes laughing in my ear, I can’t tell if they’re admirers or jeerers. Then I think, Does it matter? During the slow songs, I let Wes wrap his arms around me tight, like I’m impossible to break, like I’m invincible. Even the chaperones don’t dare approach us.
Partway through the dance, I see Evan standing in a corner among the wallflowers. I follow his gaze and find Mr. Fisk presiding over the refreshments table. Something must cross my face because Wes touches my arm and says, “Just ignore him.”
He nods past Evan and Mr. Fisk to Lucas Hayes, who cuts through the gym, threshing the crowd. The burner girl follows after him in a dress as dark and brief as her lips. Lucas turns and says something to her; the words are short. She stops at this comment, all the sass draining from her, her hands falling to her sides. Lucas walks on, leaving her behind. The crowd flails around her, buffeting her left and right, until she washes up by the refreshments table. When Lucas reaches the door to the hall, he looks back. Somehow, across the gym full of dancers, his eyes catch mine and hold them. They don’t look like his eyes, charmingly lazy and warm. His eyes look suspicious, mean. He darts out the door.
Through the doorway Lucas has just left, Usha enters, wearing a pouf of canary tulle that we’d found together at a garage sale a year ago. A group of people surround her—biblicals, well-rounders, even a pony or two—though none are nearly so vividly arrayed. One of them reaches to touch the hem of Usha’s skirt with a look of unguarded admiration. Usha laughs and spins, the yellow fanning out. Usha is a twirling type of girl again.
“We have to vote!” I remember.
“Vote?” Wes asks.
“For prom queen.”
“That’s right. You’re nominated.”
“I forgot,” I say, lifting a hand to my forehead.
“Really?” Wes asks. “You forgot.”
“Actually, I did. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to vote for Usha Das.”
“Well, I’m going to vote for you.” He grins.
“If you must,” I say, and lead the way to the table with the ballot box. Mrs. Morello hands us the slips of paper. At the last minute, I change my mind and make a check not next to Usha Das, but Kelsey Pope. Consider it my apology. I fold the paper and drop it in the box with a smile.
Still, I’m just as happy when Usha is called up to the makeshift stage and crowned prom queen. She’s fumbling with the hairpins, and I’m clapping and cheering louder than anyone else. Wes musses my hair and swings his arm around my shoulder, murmuring, “No one has any idea how cool you really are,” and this compliment I claim as my own.
We escape the heat and noise, ending up back in the hallway, the dance still in full swing. The song lyrics from the past few hours echo in my ears like someone is whispering them to me from another room. Wes walks backward in front of me, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, his tie laid carelessly over one shoulder, and his cheeks flushed pink all the way to his ears.
I reach out and let my fingers graze his jaw. He tries to catch them, but I’m too quick, and his hand closes on air.
I step over to the drop cloth. “Why do they still have this up?”
“I think it’s to protect the mural until it’s done.”
“But there’s no mural.”
“What do you mean? It’s right under there.”
I feel Kelsey’s pulse in my neck and wrists, starting up a flutter faster than when I was dancing. I pinch the edge of the drop cloth, the warp and weft of the fabric between my fingers. “No, I saw. Usha painted over it. It’s just a blank wall now.”
Wes shakes his head. “It’s a mural. She’s been working on it for over a month.”
Then I remember something: Stumbling down the hall after I’d seen Lucas with the burner girl, I almost ran into her, Usha up on her ladder. I’d been so upset that it hadn’t registered. I press a hand to my neck. There it is, my pulse, a little under-the-skin creature beating its wings.
“She kept painting it?”
“Of course.”
“But I saw her painting over it. She said, ‘Maybe we should be trying to forget.’ ”
“Here. See?” Wes steps past me and yanks the drop cloth free. My eyes follow it as it floats gently to the floor.
I don’t look at the mural right away. First, I look at Wes looking at it. He scans the wall, floor to ceiling, his eyes lit up like they were when he broke through the trees to the burners’ circle and found me scratching my designs into the ground.
“Will you look at that?” he says, voice awed.
So I look.
The mural reaches from floor to ceiling, a maze of lines and curves.
Birds.
The flocks of birds from Usha’s notebook, not inked centimeters across, but painted meters high, beaks pointed, wingspans unfurled, feathers all colors and speckles, delicate necks stretched toward the sky. And, parachutes, the calmly floating parachutes, their passengers tied safely below. Airplanes with whirring propellers. Bunches of helium balloons, hot-air balloons, too, with wicker riding baskets. Clouds of insects—monarchs, wasps, bluebottles, and dragonflies. Dragons, griffins, other impossible creatures, flying horses, and angels with trumpets as slender as their wrists. And there at the bottom, tiny in its corner, my contribution to the mural, my fuzzy little moth.
Usha has painted things that can’t fall.
She’s painted things that can fly.
I feel it again, that dissolving feeling, the feeling that happens whenever I inhabit someone. But this time it’s different, stronger, warmer . . . wider? And then I hear the voices, dozens of them, a whole crowd, whispering to one another. I can’t make out the words, but the tone is warm, like how you might whisper I love you to someone who’s sleeping. I place my palm against the slick shine of the dried paint, the tiny furrows of brushstroke, the wall beneath. The wall that will last for years.
“Hey,” Wes says softly.
I turn to face him.
“Hey,” he says again, taking one of my hands in both of his and holding it to his chest. “Why are you crying
?”
“Because.” I shake my head. “Because I feel alive.”
Wes leans down and kisses me. I kiss him back. His lips taste like cigarettes, like paper burnt until it’s cinders, but then the cinders glow softly, rekindling with the warmth of his mouth. After seconds and years and eons, we part.
He grins, and I let out a little burst of laughter.
“So that was funny to you?” Wes says, but he’s still grinning.
I shake my head. “What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan?”
“Nothing much,” he says, “Just being here. With you.”
Footfalls behind us. We break apart, and Usha stands there in her dandelion of a dress, lipstick on her front teeth, rhinestone crown pulling away from the pins that hold it to her hair. She looks perfect, by the way.
“Sorry,” she mutters, backing away.
“Usha!” I call.
She turns, an uncertain expression on her face.
“You painted this.” I point at the mural.
“You shouldn’t have taken that off.” She gestures at the crumpled drop cloth. “It’s not ready yet. I still haven’t really—”
“Thank you,” I interrupt.
“For what?”
“They’re flying,” I say.
She nods.
“Now people will remember her as something other than . . . I . . . I’m sorry that I lied, that I said she jumped.”
Usha’s brows draw together. She pulls the crown from her head, holds it in her hands, running her fingers over the fake gemstones. “You don’t have to pretend.”
“I’m not pretending.” I put a hand to my chest. “I really am sorry. I’m sorry I lied.”
“You don’t have to pretend to . . . I know it wasn’t a lie.” Usha looks up from her crown. “Paige stepped off the roof.”
“Usha. No.” My hands fall to my sides, the silky fabric of Kelsey’s dress in them, crumpling and uncrumpling in my fists. “I know what people have been saying, but it’s not true. She fell. She fell.”
Usha doesn’t shake her head, she doesn’t raise her voice, she doesn’t argue. She simply says, “Paige stepped off the roof. I saw her. Everyone else was looking the other way, at those boys throwing things. But I was looking at her. And you were, too. You screamed. When she did it, you screamed, and everyone else looked. You don’t have to pretend. I saw it. I saw you see it.”
“But no,” I argue. “That’s impossible, because I—she—didn’t jump.”
“Kelsey,” Wes says, “maybe right now isn’t—”
My mind latches on to something. Usha and my conversation at the lunch table. “You said, you told Jenny, that I shouldn’t have said it, that I shouldn’t have said that Paige jumped.”
“I was mad that you told everyone, not because it was a lie, but because it was true.” Usha looks down at her crown, pulls free a strand of hair that was caught between the stones. When she looks up again, her expression is peaceful. “I’m not mad anymore. I was carrying it around, that secret, and it was hurting me. But after you said it, after everyone knew, I told my mom and we talked about it. I forgave you. And I painted. And I forgave her, too.”
I open my mouth, “But she couldn’t have jumped, she just, she turned and then—”
“She jumped,” Usha says, plain and soft. “She did.”
I start to say no, no way, you’re wrong, but I can’t say any of it because I’m falling all over again. Kelsey is slowly and firmly pushing me out of her body, and I can’t find my hold on her, can’t even find my feet. I’m sinking through the floor. I see a flash of the three of them—Wes, Kelsey, and Usha standing in a circle—before the floor takes me.
I land in the basement in a heap on my side. This time I don’t have the strength to get up. I draw my knees to my chest, rest my head in their valley, and listen to the ghost frogs singing softly around me.
23: HOW EVAN DIED
“PAIGE,” A VOICE SAYS SOFTLY. “PAIGE,” IT SAYS AGAIN.
I can hear the music of the dance, faintly, from the gym up above. The dance is still going on, then.
“Paige,” the voice repeats.
I raise my head reluctantly.
Evan crouches in front of me. “What are you doing down here?”
“I fell through. I—” I choke on my words.
“What is it?”
I shake my head, dirt pressing against my cheek.
Just like in the grave.
“Here. Sit up,” Evan says.
I follow his instructions like a child. We sit in silence, Evan watching me steadily, until finally I manage to say, “Did I kill myself?”
Evan’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. You’ve always said that—”
“Because Usha said I did.”
“But those were rumors—” Evan begins.
“She said she saw it. That Kelsey saw it, too.” I swallow. “Usha wouldn’t lie. I thought Kelsey was lying about me, but it was the truth.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember it like that. And I don’t know why I would—no—I know that I wouldn’t do that. Not to Usha or to my parents. Or to myself. I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t be so selfish, so unfair to—”
Evan turns away from me, drops his head into his hands.
“Evan? What did I say? What is it?”
He raises his face, his expression pained. The music from the gym winds in, snaking itself around the two of us. Slowly, Evan points to the ceiling. “I died up there, you know.”
“In the gym,” I say. “I know.”
“Seventeen years ago.”
I glance at his clothes, and he catches it. “Fashions change. And then they change back. Someone once said the only constant is change.”
“Who was that?”
“Heraclitus. Ancient philosopher.”
“Sometimes I think nothing changes,” I say.
“There’s a quote for that, too.”
“Right. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ ”
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” he recites.
“Show-off.”
“Sorry.” His smile looks like a stranger that has accidentally wandered onto his sad face. “Seventeen years of French class.”
“How did you die?”
“I killed myself.”
“Oh.”
“I snuck in at night with the gun from my parents’ safe. They kept it locked, but I’d figured out the combination years before.
“There’d been a basketball game, and so the floor was just washed and the doors were open for it to dry. That’s how I got in. I took it as a sign. The janitor was on the other side of the building. I could hear the radio. And I thought, He’ll be the only one to hear the shot. He’ll be the one to find me. I tried to remember what he looked like so that I could picture him, his face, but then I remembered that he was the night janitor, and so I’d never even seen him. I imagined him anyway. I pictured my grandfather with a thick white moustache, holding a wet mop.
“Then I thought, Every day he cleans up after kids, and now he can clean up an actual kid. Do you think that’s funny?”
“No. That’s not funny,” I say.
“I took my shoes off to walk across the floor, so I wouldn’t mess up how he’d washed it, and that seemed funny. I couldn’t laugh, though, because it’s . . . Did you ever notice that it’s harder to laugh when you’re alone?”
I nod.
“I put my shoes back on when I got to the seal. I didn’t want to die in my socks. I’d thought I was going to put the gun in my mouth, but then when I was there, I didn’t want to have to, you know, taste the metal.”
“Evan,” I murmur, but I don’t have anything good to say after that. Or anything at all. So, he keeps talking, his eyes fixed on the dirt floor.
“I put the gun to my temple instead. And I stood there. I stood there for a long time, so long my arm got tired, and I had to rest it. It was heavy. Guns are
heavy. I thought about just going home. But then it would be the same, wouldn’t it? The next week and the next and the rest of my life, really. Because it wasn’t going to go away, even after I graduated and got away from Paul Revere, I’d still be the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And, if my father ever found out—”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I say, wishing that I could’ve said this seventeen years ago to the boy in the gym.
“Thank you.” He looks at me. “I know that now. I mean, I believe it now. Did you do the math? I’d be thirty-four years old. I guess I am thirty-four years old. I’ve had as much death as I did life. That’s a long time to learn a lesson.”
I reach out across the floor and put my hand through Evan’s. “Tell me the rest.”
“There’s not much left to tell. I lifted the gun again, and I pulled the trigger.”
I close my eyes and hear the crack of the shot, a sound louder than a gym full of cheering students. In the gym’s empty center, I see a shadow-thin boy falling to the floor. Then I force my eyes open, because Evan has never looked away from me.
“I woke up a few days later, I guess. At first I didn’t know where I was, some basement, but then I heard them up above me, sneakers squeaking, boys shouting to pass the ball. Gym class.” Evan smiles wryly. “I was trying to escape high school, and I ended up right back in it.”
“What did you do next?”
“A lot of freaking out. The school had covered up the fact that there was a suicide in the gym, the entire fact that it was a suicide, for that matter. No one talked about it, actually. It was like I’d just disappeared.
“For a while, I followed the night janitor, who turned out to be not my grandpa, of course, but this little Dominican woman. She talked to herself, and so I’d fill in the gaps in her conversation. Sometimes her responses would fit what I’d just said. I still think maybe she could—not hear me, but who knows? She retired ten years ago.
“I followed my friends around, too, watched them graduate. This one guy, I was in love with him, but he was so popular and so much a guy’s guy. Sometimes I suspected that he might feel . . . but I was never brave enough to ask.” He pauses. “Then, just a couple years ago, he came back and started teaching here.”
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