Absent (11 page)

“I don’t know.” Lucas scratches the back of his neck, studying the floor tiles. “But he was the teacher. Maybe he should have done something. Maybe he shouldn’t have walked away.”

Then there’s a pause. I take a breath, take a chance. “What if she
didn’t
jump?”

They all look at me with vague surprise. I wonder, belatedly, how often Joe speaks, much less speaks about gossip. He doesn’t seem like much of a presence; in fact, he didn’t offer any push-back when I inhabited him.

“Naw, dude. She jumped.” Brian slaps his hand flat on the locker for emphasis. “It’s all around the entire school.”

“But that’s just gossip,” I say.

“I heard that people
saw
her jump,” Chad says.

“Exactly.” Brian slaps the locker again. “There was a whole roof full of people.”

“You were there on the roof,” I say to Lucas, Joe’s heart suddenly pounding in his chest as I wait for Lucas’s answer. “Did you see it?”

“I was talking to Coach C,” he says, looking away.

“So you didn’t see it, then?” I press, half hopeful that he did, so that he can tell these guys how I didn’t jump, half relieved that he didn’t, because how awful to see someone die, someone you knew, someone you’d kissed. I touch a thumb to my lips. Joe’s lips. They’re chapped, my thumb rubbing against little flakes of peeling skin.

“I didn’t see it,” Lucas confirms, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt up around his neck. “Greg O. threw me his egg thing, that project they were doing, and it splattered. I was looking at that, everyone was. Then some girl screamed. And when I looked up again, the ledge was empty. She’d been right there a second ago, then she . . . wasn’t.”

His voice is thin, guarded. The same voice as when I’d said he’d practically saved a girl’s life.
Don’t say that. I didn’t save her
. And it strikes me that Lucas was there for both Brooke’s death and mine, and both times a second too late.

“That’s rough,” one of the guys says.

“First Brooke Lee, then Paige Wheeler,” someone adds, giving voice to my exact thoughts.

“Yeah, Hayes, why you gotta go around killing all the girls at our
school?” another says, and the guys laugh darkly at this, until they realize that Lucas and I aren’t laughing along with them.

“You knew her, right?” I ask.

Lucas looks up at me, eyes flashing. “What?”

“Paige Wheeler. I heard . . . you knew her.”

Lucas presses his lips together, for a moment, the fear plain on his face. He drops his head, and when he looks up again, the fear is gone and his confidence is back.

“Not really,” he says smoothly.

I suddenly feel more solid than ever, solider than Joe, solider than flesh and bone. I feel like I’m made of stone and will never move again, not even a twitch.

“Not even a little bit?” I ask.

“Naw. She was just some girl,” Lucas says. “Some girl who died.”

I get away from the testos as quickly as I can. I want to stop this inhabitation; I wait for Joe to push me out, but he doesn’t. I’m stuck. Finally, I tell the hall monitor that I left my homework in my car, then I walk out all the way to the property line, stepping across it. From the edge of the roof, I look down to see what Joe will do. He stands there for a moment, like he’s walked into a room but forgotten what he meant to get there, then he shakes his head and turns back to the school.

Me, I feel like the object that’s been forgotten. I feel like the act of forgetting. When I felt this way before, I would go to Usha, who’d drag me out to her car, where she would play the right music (screamy) at the right volume (loud) and drive the right speed (fast). We would fly down those roads. Just fly.

Now I have no music, no car, no roads. No Usha. No flying.

But I do have Evan.

I take a seat next to him on the cupboards in the back of Fisk’s room. Evan must sense that something is wrong, but he doesn’t ask me anything. I know that I’ve only lived a short life and an even shorter afterlife, but I think I can say that this is a rare quality. Usha had it. Lucas, too, actually. The bastard.

Evan and I sit in silence until the class break, when I turn to him and say, “Apparently, I’m just some girl who died.”

“Who made that lovely remark?”

“Lucas Hayes.”

Evan squints. “And you care what Lucas Hayes says since . . . ?”

“Since I was hooking up with him.” I throw my hands up. “Now you know.”

Evan raises his eyebrows. “Oh. When were—?”

“From December until dead. Just a few months.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t know. No one knew. Because it was no big deal. Just a thing. A weird thing. So that’s it. So there.” I brush my hands together, done with it. Done with Lucas. I eye Evan. “So, Brooke didn’t tell you about Lucas and me?”

“She knew?”

“She was the only one who knew. She saw us.”

“No, she didn’t tell me.”

“But you don’t seem that surprised.”

He smiles briefly and unhappily. “It’s a familiar situation.”

“Is it? Not for me. Not that it matters. I mean, technically, he’s right. Technically that’s who I am: some girl who died.”

“That’s not who you are.”

We sit in silence again.

“Did you like him?” Evan asks.

“No. A little. He was nice. When we were alone, he was nice.”

“He’s a coward, though,” Evan says.

“Do you know him?”

“I know cowards.”

“Yeah, I guess he is.” I sigh.

I look to Evan, but he isn’t looking at me anymore. His gaze is at the front of the room, where Mr. Fisk sweeps a long arm, erasing the board.

OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, I LURK BY THE MURAL
, covered in a sheet like old furniture, waiting for someone to pass and think of me, which someone always eventually does. Then, quick as a whisper, I’m in their skin. I am everyone. I’m a burner, a testo, a biblical, a well-rounder, a nobody. Most of all, I am alive.

With every new inhabitation, I hang around the person’s group of friends. I say as little as possible so that I don’t give myself away, and even still sometimes I say the wrong thing, and they all turn and look at me funny. But it’s not like they could ever guess the truth. It’s not like they could know who I really am. And when I can, I guide the conversation to poor Paige Wheeler’s suicide, poor dead Paige.

My lines are simple: “That’s such a lie. Kelsey Pope just wants attention. You know how girls like her are.” Most groups agree with me immediately and shake their heads at the duplicity of spoiled, self-centered Kelsey Pope. A scant few argue that no one would lie about something so terrible, especially not Kelsey, who’s really sweet
if you get to know her. Once I’m out, I listen carefully for the suicide rumor to snuff out. But it is stubborn. Unlike me, it lives on.

Every day at lunch, I inhabit Jenny, Usha’s new best friend. We don’t sit and eat at Usha’s locker, like she and I used to, but in the cafeteria with the other biblicals.

“Do you ever wonder what Paige would think of this?” I say to the table one afternoon. “If she were here?”

“Like her spirit?” Erin asks. “Like, looking down at us?”

“More like just here, invisible in the school.”

“What movies have you been watching?” The biblicals laugh and gently shake their heads.

“But there’s purgatory, right?” I ask them. “That’s in the Bible.”

Usha looks up from her lunch. “You’re saying that high school could be a kind of purgatory?”

“Or hell,” one of the biblicals says.

“Hell for sure,” another agrees.

“No, it’s purgatory,” Usha maintains. “Think about it. We’re all here waiting, right? Waiting to move on, to find out what’s next.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I say, and she looks over at me. There’s something in my tone that I didn’t intend. Something like longing.

I spot Lucas across the cafeteria at a table thick with ponies and testos. He’s laughing at something, the sound of it bright and open, his eyes in crinkles. But today, his laughter doesn’t charm me. It’s like watching the levels of music on a synthesizer instead of listening to music itself. I hear his voice again:
She was just some girl who died
.

I suddenly regret not telling Usha about Lucas and me. She wouldn’t have laughed at me for liking a testo. And she wouldn’t have told anyone if I’d asked her not to. Though she would have asked
me
why it had to be a secret, and she would have known that it
was Lucas’s secret, not mine. Thinking about what Usha would have said allows me to admit the truth to myself: I would’ve walked down the hall with Lucas, sat with him at lunch, put on the dress and gone to prom, all that stupid stuff. He just never asked.

“Hey,” Usha says, giving my sleeve a tug.

“Sorry,” I say. “Distracted.”

“Me, too.” Usha smiles. “Like about ninety-nine percent of the time.”

I smile back.

“That rumor about Paige?” I say. “You were right. I don’t believe it.”

Usha’s smile shrinks up. “I was right?”

“Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, when you told us that it wasn’t true? You were right.”

Usha sighs. “Look. I was just . . . saying things. I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

“But Paige was your friend, right?”

She crosses her arms over her chest, not like she’s hugging herself, but like she’s holding herself together. “She was.”

“So you don’t think she’d—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Usha says firmly.

“Okay, but you know that Kelsey Pope was probably just trying to get attention and be dramatic, right? I mean, it’s just a stupid rumor.”

“It’s . . .” Usha picks at her orange.

“It’s what?” I prompt. “Usha?”

Usha looks up. “Kelsey shouldn’t have said it. Now can we
please
talk about anything else?”

I feel a twinge of anger mixed in among the stew of desperation and loss. Usha had told Mr. Fisk that I was supposed to be her
friend, but Usha was supposed to be my friend, too. So why would she believe the worst about me?

After lunch, I walk Jenny out to the property line and hurry to the art room in time to inhabit Usha for another session of mural painting. This attempt at painting doesn’t go any better than our other sessions, but I’m afraid
not
to inhabit her. She didn’t want to paint the thing in the first place; she could very easily tell Mr. Fisk that she’s going to quit. So, I get up on that ladder and pretend I’m artistic. I add a line that might be the bridge of my nose, a curve that could be my upper lip, a sweep that I mean to be Brooke’s jawline, the cup of her ear. I stand back to assess my work. It doesn’t even look like two girls’ faces, just shapes. I eye the little moth at the bottom of the wall, waiting for its wings to flutter.

I spend the next day as tiny-boned Heath Mineo. His gossip is of a different sort entirely. Kids sidle up to him, twenties soft in their palms, and murmur drug orders—a series of names and numbers I don’t try to decode. I throw in a skeptical comment about Paige Wheeler’s suicide when I can, but the burners are much too eager to believe it was suicide; they don’t even listen.

I decide that I’m not too keen on being the school drug dealer. Not after what happened to Brooke. I wait until the guidance office is empty and squeeze the ill-gotten twenties into Mrs. Morello’s canister for harelipped children. I’ve prepared for some resistance from Heath, a hearty shove for giving all his money away, and I’m surprised when there’s nothing, not a stir. Maybe Heath has some ambivalence about his dealing, after all.

While I’m in the office, I retrieve Heath’s locker combination from the school secretary, who seems unfazed that Heath would have forgotten it. I’ve resolved to find Heath’s stash and flush it,
and who cares how he explains that to himself tomorrow? But when I open his locker to look, a note falls at my feet. I stare at the folded square of paper resting on the toe of Heath’s sneaker, then snatch it up and open it with a shiver of premonition.

It has
with a five written under it.

I know that code. I know that blocky handwriting. In fact, I’ve received the same note myself.

So instead of joining the flow of students returning to class, I walk in the opposite direction, toward the forbidden bathroom, where I expect to find Lucas Hayes waiting for me.