Absent (10 page)

When I step back, Greenvale takes my place and breathes on the streak of grease my fingers have left, lifting her sweatshirted hand to rub the glass clean.

“Why bother?” I ask.

“Oh.” She gestures at the gold and silver cups. “I think they’re pretty. I mean, imagine doing something like that.”

For a moment, I try to imagine it—the globe of the ball between my hands, the ribbon breaking across my chest, the faraway roar from the stands—and maybe she’s right. Maybe it is something to imagine. But then I notice the reflection in the glass.

The bathroom door. I haven’t been watching it.

“Excuse me,” I say, leaving Greenvale by the trophy case.

But when I push open the bathroom door, it’s too late. The bathroom is empty. Lucas Hayes and whoever he was meeting are long gone.

Mr. Fisk has asked me to tape a sheet over the mural at the end of each day so that no one can see my (ahem) progress until I’m completely done. Honestly, I’m happy to cover up my blobby ovals. Besides, everyone will know why the sheet is up there anyway. As they pass, they won’t be able to help thinking of me. I’ll have my pick of them. I sit through physics, planning what I’ll do tomorrow, how I can undo the rumor of my suicide.

After the final bell rings, I make it halfway to the parking lot before I stop abruptly in the center of the hallway, a stone in the middle of a rushing river. Everyone is leaving for the day. It hits me that, today, maybe I can leave, too. I ignore Usha’s station wagon parked in the last row of the lot. I’m not sure what will happen when I cross the property line, so I’d rather not be driving a car. Usha’s coat has pockets, and I ignore them, too, enjoying the sting of the early spring air on my skin. The road just ahead of me looks like a dark river with banks of frost-stiff grass.
The Lethe
, I think, wondering what coin I will have to pay to cross its waters.

As I’m walking, I’m remembering how when I’d come home, the steam from the kitchen would puff out to greet me only a second before my mother’s voice, calling,
Paige? That you, honey?
Then at dinner, my parents and I would go around the table in turn, each of us sharing one event from our day. It had to be something tiny, like eating a different type of bread for lunch or seeing a strangely
marked cat on a windowsill.
Today
, I could say,
I came home after school. Today I came home
. I’m walking faster across the lot, and then I’m running toward the road, running
onto
it, running, running home, running—

Off the ledge of the roof.

The momentum is still in my body, but before it can carry me forward, I crouch down and grab the lip of the roof, holding myself teetering on the brink of the building. It was too much to hope that I could leave. And yet I’d let myself hope it. I should have known that it’d be just like before, that the school wouldn’t let me go, that it’d pick me up and set me back down on my death spot.

My hands, when I look down at them, are my own—nails clipped straight across, star-shaped scar on one knuckle, opal ring inherited from my grandmother. I am me again. I cling to that little square of cement, feeling the rough of it under my palms, the only thing I can feel. The second I step off this square of cement, I’ll be insubstantial again—no dark green front door, no steam on my cheeks, no voice calling from the kitchen, no cat, no bread. My hands won’t even be cold anymore, because they aren’t really hands. I press my palms against my eyes.

When I lower my hands, I’m looking out across the parking lot, its car roofs laid out like tarot cards on a table. Past the cars, a chubby Indian girl in red rubber boots walks determinedly across the road where I can’t go. She sinks down in her wool coat, letting it shield her from the wind. She wears no gloves, and her hands are pink from the cold. After a moment, she raises her hands to her mouth, blowing hot breath before shoving them into her pockets to keep them warm.

THE MEMORIAL MURAL WORKS JUST AS I
’
D HOPED IT WOULD
. The next morning, I stand under it as the crowds come in from the parking lot. Almost everyone glances at the white sheet fastened to the wall as they pass it, and my name is whispered in the voices of a dozen different minds. Brooke and Evan stand with me.

“I hear it,” Brooke says, her eyes closed and her chin tipped up as if she has found a sunbeam to bask in. She opens her eyes. “You’re right. I’ve heard it before. I just didn’t know to listen for it. It’s them thinking of me. It’s . . .” She shakes her head.

“That’s great!” Evan says, overly cheery.

“You don’t hear anything?” I ask him.

“None of them knew me. How could they remember me?”

I think about that, being forgotten, being lost to time. That’ll be me someday, just like Evan. It’ll be them, too, all of them bustling by. Someday they’ll die and be forgotten. They just get a little longer to ignore the fact.

“It’s nice, though, right?” Evan continues, his voice scrubbed bright and shiny. “So many people thinking about you?”

“That all depends on what they’re thinking,” Brooke says.

He turns to me. “And Usha is painting the mural after all?”

“Yup,” I say. “She is.”

I wonder, nervously, if Usha would agree with that statement. I’ve been waiting for her since last night, the questions burning inside me: Does she remember asking Fisk to paint the mural? Does she remember any of it? The fight with the biblicals? The mysterious Lucas meeting? The conversation with Greenvale? I lived an entire afternoon of Usha’s life.
Stole it from her
, a rude little corner of my mind chides. Usha will have plenty of afternoons, I tell the corner. She can spare one of them.

When Usha finally arrives, I follow her to her locker and am surprised to find one of the biblicals, Jenny, waiting there wearing a stiff smile. Usha eyes her warily.

Shit
, I think.
I’m caught
.

But then I realize that this is perfect. Surely, Jenny will talk about what happened in the cafeteria yesterday. And by Usha’s reaction, I can figure out what she remembers from when I was inhabiting her.

Jenny clicks her heels together smartly like a secretary on a TV show. “I want to apologize. For yesterday.”

Usha turns to her locker, dialing the lock in three quick moves, opening it with a fourth. “Why are you apologizing?” she says quietly, and my stomach lurches. Does she not remember any of it? Was the entire afternoon a blank? Did she close her eyes in the cafeteria and open them again, hours later, at the edge of school grounds? She must think she’s going crazy, losing time like that. Will she tell her parents or Mrs. Morello? Will they send her to the Greenvale facility like Greenvale Greene?

But then I realize over the whirr of my panicked thoughts that Usha is still talking. “If anyone apologizes, it should be me,” she tells Jenny. “I’m the one who yelled at you.” She bites her lip. “I don’t know why I yelled like that. I guess I lost my temper. I didn’t used to get angry, but it seems like I’m yelling at everyone these days. I’m sorry anyway.”

“No. You don’t need to . . . Don’t apologize. I had no right to start preaching about that stuff.” Jenny touches her fingers to the slats of the locker next to Usha’s. “I shouldn’t . . . not everyone believes . . .”

“But it’s a nice thing to believe.” Usha moves her bag from one shoulder to the other, gives the locker dial another spin without even looking at the numbers. “Sometimes I wish I could believe in something like that.”

“But you don’t have to . . . not to be friends with us.”

“Friends with you?” Usha’s mouth twists, and Jenny blushes.

She stammers, “I didn’t mean to assume. . . . That was a stupid thing to—”

“No. Hey. You can say that . . . you can . . . We could be friends.” She pauses. “But . . .”

“What?” Jenny says. “You can tell me.”

“You only wanted to be friends with me because of Paige.”
Paige
, her mind echoes. “I mean, didn’t you?”

“Oh.” Jenny moves her hand from the locker to her chest, a parody of surprise. It’s so broad, it’s almost like an impression of the biblicals that Usha or I would have done. Except, I realize, there’s no sarcasm there. Jenny means it. She means everything she says.

And this time Usha’s not laughing.

“Is that what you thought?” Jenny asks.

“It seemed like—”

“No, I know.” Jenny clasps her hands in front of her like a pleading silent-movie heroine, and again it’s obvious that she means this gesture sincerely. “After . . . what happened . . . we thought you could use someone to sit with at lunch. So, that was because of Paige, I guess. But that’s not why you’re our friend.”

“Why, then?”

“We like you. That’s all.”

“Okay.” Usha smiles her smile. “That’s okay, then.”

After Usha and Jenny head off to class, I sit at the base of Usha’s locker. This is how it will be now, I tell myself. Usha will have a new best friend. Lucas will have a new not-girlfriend. Everyone else will have their shocking suicide story. I’ll have some dried paint on a wall. Unless . . .

I go over the girls’ conversation in my head, weighing each sentence. Usha apologized for yelling at the biblicals. Could this be how it works? Not only does she remember everything I did yesterday, but from what she said, she accepts the actions as her own. She didn’t black out. She wasn’t watching me from behind her eyes. She wasn’t consciously trying to push me out of her body. I was her, and she was me. And if this is true, it means that I can be anyone, do anything.

When I return to the mural, the hallway is empty. The late bell has rung, and Brooke and Evan have moved on to their various time fillers—Evan to class, Brooke to wander. I still haven’t told them about my ability to inhabit people.
Soon
, I promise guiltily.

I startle as the school door slams open, barely regaining my hover when I hit the ground again. A good fifteen minutes after the tardy bell, and Lucas Hayes has arrived. Even though he’s late, he
doesn’t hurry. Why bother? He has a pack of blank hall passes in his bag, the perk of being basketball captain. Lucas Hayes. My secret . . . something. Kelsey Pope’s very public ex-boyfriend.

And yes, I want to fix the rumor about my death. And yes, last night, I thought up a dozen different ways to do that. But first, there’s something I have to do, something I’ve always wanted to know. I want to know how Lucas Hayes really felt about me.

Inhabiting Usha’s body was one thing; inhabiting one of the testos’ bodies is a million things. I choose the least sweaty, least beefy of Lucas’s friends: lanky, shy Joe Schultz, who happens to pause by the mural on his way to the gym. Joe is so quiet, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard him talk before, so it’s strange to hear my name whispered in the deep, rumbling voice of his thoughts. Though it’s not nearly as strange as his body.

Usha and I had been best friends since middle school. We’d shared clothing, locker rooms, beds at slumber parties. Usha’s body was as familiar as another person’s body could be. Even so, it was little preparation for suddenly being her—different heights, different weights, different muscles pulling different bones. Essentially, different physics equations.

But, being Joe . . .

How can I describe it? If Usha’s body was a favorite pair of jeans, Joe’s is a Halloween costume.

For one thing, he’s a guy with, um, all the guy features. I try to avoid thinking about the soft, swinging weight between my legs, which forces me to adjust the width and roll of my steps. Also now, suddenly, I’m a good six inches taller, with long limbs and ropy muscles. Joe is an athlete, tall, fast, and strong. I can feel that just walking down the hall, the potential for power and speed. I have the impulse to double back to the gym and dunk a basketball like some stupid testo.

Instead, I head to the locker banks where I find Lucas and the testos in a cluster. I stand uncertainly at their backs, afraid to actually speak. I don’t know how to be a guy, much less a testo sort of guy. They’ll know. They’ll know right away. But then, one of them says, “Hey, Schultz.” And when I realize that he means me, I say, “Hey” back, and they shuffle aside to make room for me.

I expected the testos to be talking about free throws or girls’ tits or something, but in fact, they’re talking about Mr. Cochran and how he hasn’t yet returned from his leave.

“We should get a group of guys from the team and go over to his house,” Brian Mulligan is saying.

“I’ll go,” Chad Harp offers. “It’d suck to be sitting there thinking that you caused some girl’s death.” Their minds whisper my name.

“That’s what I mean,” Brian says. “He should know what people are saying. He should know that it wasn’t his fault.”

“Maybe it was his fault,” Lucas says softly.

The boys shift and look at each other nervously. I watch Lucas. The usual confidence is gone from his eyes. Today, he doesn’t look like the world is his birthday present; he doesn’t look like he even has a birthday.

“But, Luke, if that girl wanted to jump, what could he have done?”