Absent (13 page)

“Thanks for telling us about Andy Warhol,” I say.

“Certainly.” Mr. Fisk looks up. “Thanks for asking.”

“I just thought it could be helpful for some people who might be thinking about their, you know, orientation.”

“I agree.” Mr. Fisk leaves the papers altogether. His eyebrows draw together. Serious teacher face. I know where this is headed. “Is that something you’re worried about, Chris?”

“No, not me. At least, I don’t think so,” I add because I don’t know the inner halls of Chris Rackham’s heart or even the topiary lining its front walk.

“It’s all right not to be sure,” Mr. Fisk says.

“Yeah, I know. But, really, it’s a friend who’s wondering.”

“Ah,” Mr. Fisk says. “A friend.”

“Not a ‘friend’ that’s me. A real friend. He exists.”

Mr. Fisk smiles. “I wasn’t trying to imply it was you. It’s just I had a friend like that, too.” The angles of his smile have shifted
somehow into something sad.
Your mouth really should be bent the opposite way
, I want to tell him. “Are you worried about your friend?” he asks.

“I just want him to . . . be okay with himself.”

Mr. Fisk closes his eyes, right there in the classroom. “I want that for every student.” He opens them. “Maybe you could invite him to a GSA meeting. Gay-Straight Alliance. Every other Wednesday after school.”

“I don’t know if he’d go to that.”

“Maybe if you came with him.”

“Yeah, maybe. Thanks.”

I turn, eager to see Evan’s reaction to this. But the back cupboard holds only art supplies, not, as I’d hoped, an attentive ghost. All that awkward teacher conversation, and Evan hasn’t even bothered to listen to it.

And now for lunch, and the real reason I’ve chosen to inhabit Chris Rackham. Not only was Chris elected class president by the sheer tens of students who had bothered to fill out a ballot, but his mom is superintendent of our school district. There is no one more trustworthy at Paul Revere High. People will have to believe him when he says I fell.

I time it for midway through lunch, the well-rounders reaching the pudding cups at the bottoms of their brown bags. There’s a lull in the conversation as butterscotch is wordlessly traded for vanilla and foils are peeled back with a snick of plastic. I wait for the silence to peak. At just the right moment, Kelsey Pope obliges me by standing up on her chair and waving one of the ponies over to her with a giddy yell.

“Someone sure needs a lot of attention,” I make Chris say, looking meaningfully at Kelsey.

“She’s a pleasure-seeking monster,” Whitney Puryear agrees grimly. “We used to be best friends for, like, all of middle school. Did you know that?”

“No,” I say honestly.

“Well, we were. She used to say,” Whitney sits up extra straight, widens her eyes, and heaves an imaginary sheath of hair over her shoulder, “ ‘Whitney, do you ever feel like you’ll love everyone, and no one will ever love you back?’ ”

“Awww!” the well-rounders chorus faux pity in a minor key.

“That must have been before she got breasts,” I quip, and the rounders all look at me, stunned.

“Chris, ouch!” Whitney says.

“Yes, people, you heard it here. Chris just said
that
,” another one says.

“Just kidding,” I mumble, reminding myself to act more like Chris, less like me.

“Well, everyone frigging loves her now anyway.” Whitney rolls her eyes.

“Do they?” I ask. “I heard she made up this nasty rumor about—”

“Paige Wheeler?” one of the rounders cuts in. “Yeah, a kid in calc was saying that maybe Kelsey made that up.”

“Right. Exactly. Did anyone else hear that?” I ask, thinking of my hours of careful rumor spreading. I am awarded with noncommittal noises.

“If you ask me, that girl totally jumped,” Whitney says.

“Totally,” one of the others agrees. “Nancy Kim was there on the roof. She said you couldn’t fall off. There’s a ledge thing—you can see it from the ground. You’d have to step up onto it.”

“But what if Paige stepped up onto the ledge and then slipped?” I counter.

“Why would she step up onto the ledge?” someone asks.

“Because . . . I don’t know. To see a little farther, to be a little higher. To be daring.”

They look at me blankly.

“Yeah,” Whitney says. “She totally jumped.”

“But she didn’t,” I say. “Kelsey made it up.”

“How would you know that?” Whitney asks.

I can hardly say,
Because I’m Paige and I
didn’t
jump
. “Because of my mom,” I say instead.

All the well-rounders look up from their puddings now. “Your mom told you something about the suicide?” one of them asks.

“She did.” I lean in. “But she made me promise not to tell anyone.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” half the table replies, while the other half urges, “Tell
us
.” Thus follows a debate about the ethics and loopholes of parental secrets. The matter is finally decided by Whitney Puryear’s unimpeachable argument: “Well, you have to tell us now.”

“All right.” I lower my voice. “But you have to promise not to say anything.”

They all promise.

In my hushed tone, I say, “Kelsey Pope is being investigated for slander.”

“By the police?” a girl asks skeptically.

“Of course not,” I say. “By the school board.”

“Really?” Whitney says. “Kelsey’s under investigation?” She looks pleased.

“Yeah.” I gird myself against the deep unconscious part of Chris that will push against this bald lie. The push comes, and I hold on until it passes. “The forensic examiners looked at the trajectory of the fall and the angle of the body.” (I silently thank my own mother’s addiction to trashy crime shows.) “It was definitely a fall. An accident.”

“They can tell that?”

“Of course. It’s science.”

“It
is
science,” someone else adds. “It’s not like how they show it on those TV shows—twenty minutes with a microscope, and you find the magic hair. In reality, it’s legitimate.”

“Exactly.” I nod. “Science.”

“Then the suicide was just a rumor? That’s the slander?”

“Yep.”

“So Kelsey lied.”

“Yep,” I say again.

“What’s going to happen to her?” Whitney asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. They’re just looking into it. Besides, it’s just a rumor.”

“Yeah, but that’s a pretty sick rumor,” Whitney says. “I mean, think about how Paige Wheeler’s friends must feel. Or her parents.”

“Right,” I say. “Exactly.”

“If it were up to me, I’d suspend her,” Whitney continues. “Or expel her. Something permanent-record for sure.”

The others voice their agreement in unison.

I hide a smile. “You guys won’t tell anyone, right?”

The next morning, I stand under the drop cloth and wait anxiously to see how Chris’s new rumor is faring. I hear nothing from the early arrivals, and my mood starts to sink under the weight of another failed plan. The thick of students marches in minutes before the bell, and still nothing. It’s nowhere.

I was so sure it was going to work. Everyone knows Chris Rackham wouldn’t lie; he is always completely and totally honest. And besides, yesterday at lunch, the well-rounders had all seemed to believe him.

“What’s wrong with you?” I grumble at the milling crowd.

They walk on, oblivious.
People want to believe bad things
, I tell myself, glaring around at my classmates.
They want to believe the most shocking story. They see you as the worst version of yourself
.

Then, at the end of the hall, I hear my name. It’s Whitney Puryear, her voice loud enough for everyone to hear. Chris Rackham stands in front of her, tugging nervously at his hair, then his jacket collar.

“So you made it up?” she says. “The whole thing?”

I try to rush over to them, to inhabit Chris before he can answer, but there are too many people between us, many of them stopped and gawking at Whitney and Chris, many of them thinking my name. If I run through them, I may well inhabit someone other than Chris. I try to weave through the gaps between people, but I already know I can’t get there in time.

Chris says something hushed, and Whitney responds with, “But there’s no investigation?”

And I’m close enough now to hear Chris say, “No investigation, no anything. My mom didn’t say anything to me about Kelsey Pope or Paige Wheeler.”

Whitney wrinkles her nose and booms, “Why would you tell us all that, then?”

I’ve reached them now, and they’re both thinking about me, but instead of inhabiting them, I hang back, curious to know what Chris will say next.

“I think . . .” He takes a breath and lets it out, whistling through his nose. “I just wanted to see if you’d believe me. I don’t know. I got an impulse and then I was saying it. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. As soon as I said it, I felt terrible.”

“Have you told the others?”

“Yesterday, as soon as I could. But I couldn’t find you.”

“My mom picked me up early. I had a dentist’s appointment,” Whitney says, sounding more put out about being the last one to know the truth than about being lied to in the first place.

“You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” Chris asks. “About what I said?”

“Maybe just a couple people,” she answers slowly.

“Well, take it back,” Chris says evenly. “Tell them the truth.”

“What am I even supposed to say?”

Chris shrugs. “Tell them I’m a liar.”

No
, I think as the bell rings and Chris and Whitney disappear along with my brilliant plan.
Kelsey is the liar
.

And you
, something in me whispers.
You lied, too
.

“Paige,” a voice says at my back. I turn to find Evan’s pale eyes and each one of his many freckles blaring concern.

“Why aren’t you in class?” I point up. “That was the late bell.”

“I was going and then I saw you standing here.”

“I was just . . .” I turn around in a slow circle in the middle of the empty hallway and stop back where I started. “I give up.”

“You give up?”

“I give up. I accept it. Everyone thinks I’m a jumper, a suicide.”

“People are going to think what they think,” Evan says. “But you know the truth. You know who you are.”

“Do I?” I ask. “I don’t know.”

“Well, then”—he nods curtly—“
I
know who you are.”

I can’t take his pitying expression anymore. I stick out my tongue.

“Yeah,” he says. “See? That about sums you up.”

FISK MUST HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE DROP CLOTH
entirely because it’s still tacked on the wall the next day. It’s not as effective as it was at first, though. Fewer and fewer people look at it when they pass by; fewer still think of me. One of the only people who does spare me a thought is Kelsey Pope. She canters in with her herd of ponies, glancing at it once, then twice, each time her thoughts calling my name.

I haven’t wanted to inhabit Kelsey, haven’t wanted to be trapped in her perfect form. I’d told myself it was a last resort. If all other attempts to kill the suicide rumor failed, then I would make Kelsey tell everyone how she’d made it up. But after what happened with Chris Rackham, I’ve learned that even that won’t work. As soon as I’m no longer controlling Kelsey, she’ll just take back anything I’ve said. She’ll just lie again.

I give up.

Kelsey looks back at the drop cloth a third time, thinking my name. I trail after the ponies, both bothered and intrigued that
Kelsey is thinking so much about me. Is she regretting the rumor she started? Or, more likely, is she planning to say something else next?

When they reach Kelsey’s locker, the group of ponies around it is somehow larger than ever.

And it’s jumping up and down.

“Kelsey!” they shriek. And somehow they reform their circle with Kelsey and me at its center.

“You’re a nominee!” they say as they jump, their voices rising and falling with gravity. “For prom!”

“Congratulations!” they all gush, as if Kelsey has already won. As if she isn’t nominated queen for every dance. As if a paste-crown coronation in the school gym is anything but absurd. This time when Kelsey thinks of me, I
don’t
hesitate. I step forward. Suddenly, I’m balancing on tippy-heeled boots and counterbalancing a dozen pounds of hair. Worse, there’s what feels like a pebble stuck inside my mouth. I poke my tongue at it and find the back to Kelsey’s piercing. The ponies press in around me, expressions morphing from gleeful to vaguely confused.

“You’re not smiling,” one of them notices.

“You’re not jumping,” one says.

“She’s always nominated,” another adds archly. “Maybe it’s not a big deal.”

“You know who
wasn’t
nominated this time?” the first pony says in my ear, and before I can voice a guess, “Lucas Hayes. He’s gotten
so
weird.”

“Good move dumping him.”

“Kelsey always knows which way the wind is blowing,” someone whispers with acid, but when I turn to see who has said this, a camera phone is in my face, and two other ponies have appeared giddily at my side. “Here they are,” the pony photographer announces, then
lowers the camera. “Kelsey, you’re
still
not smiling. Let’s try again: Here they are, the prom court!”