Absent (15 page)

“I think I see breathing,” one of them says, his voice loud with shock.

“Don’t move him,” the other warns, adding, “right?” He looks blindly at the crowd around him. “Right?”

No one answers.

There was a second body, I think fuzzily. On the car.

I circle the car, with each step, a new sliver of the body on its hood becoming visible: a shirtsleeve, a skinny arm, a strand of lank hair. One more step, and I hear myself gasp.

She lies curled over the dashboard, still half in the driver’s seat, her upper body resting on the hood. At first, I think she’s crying, but then I realize those are tears of safety glass in the corners of her closed eyes.

It’s Harriet Greene.

“I DIDN’T SEE
HER
, JUST THE CAR
,”
CHRIS RACKHAM TELLS THE
police. “It came around the end of the row there.”

“I heard it before I saw it,” biblical Erin says. “It made that sound, you know, that screaming-car sound. The tires.”

“At first it seemed like someone messing around, trying to get attention.” Lane Cosgrove shakes her ponytail. “But then we all realized . . . This. Isn’t. A. Joke.”

“We jumped out of the way,” one of the burners says, and the officer writes a few quick lines. “Heath was just next to us. He jumped away, too. But then the car . . . it turned, like
at
Heath.”

“It veered to the left there, where it hit him.” Whitney Puryear points to the tire tracks curling between the two rows of cars. “The brakes squealed anyway. But it was too late. You could see it was going to hit him.”

“She broke through the windshield,” Joe Schultz says. “There was glass.”

“She didn’t know him.” The burner shakes his head. “I don’t think so, anyway. I don’t think she really knew anyone.”

“Maybe she had some sort of . . .” Lane pauses to pick the word carefully. “
episode
. Did any of the others tell you? Sophomore year, she was in a place, you know . . . a
facility
.”

They call off classes for the next three days. The adults still come in, though, and hold an amazing number of meetings. Evan, Brooke, and I haunt the main office, waiting for news about Harriet and Heath, which arrives the next afternoon. Heath is conscious, but with a concussion and a broken collarbone, leg, and three ribs. He’ll finish the year out in the hospital and then at home.

Harriet has yet to wake up. They’re officially calling it a coma.

Over the following days, the silent crowd around the crash site fractures into a chaos of delayed reactions. The buttons on the secretary’s phone blink their demon eyes, and her litany of “holdpleaseholdpleaseholdplease” begins to loop in my head. Mrs. Morello and Mr. Bosworth hold near-hourly meetings, outlining the new parking lot regulations, the added trauma counseling, and screening for “at-risk” students.

The teachers come out of these meetings shaking their heads.

“What a year!” one of them groans.

“This place is cursed,” another says.

When I’m not following the drama in the office, I sit up on my death spot and look out over the parking lot, knowing that in the hospital across town, Harriet lies on a tide deeper than sleep, shallower than death. I remember her small, phlegmy voice whispering,
I’m sorry that you’re dead
.

It all starts to seem petty, the rumors, my reputation, my revenge. What does it matter compared to Mr. and Mrs. Greene sitting stiffly
in Bosworth’s office, a crumpled Kleenex twitching in Mrs. Greene’s hand? What does it matter compared to Harriet on the hood of the car, safety glass tears in the corners of her eyes? If she dies, I wonder, will she awake in the hospital? Or will she appear down below, a pale blinking girl in the dark lake of the parking lot?

They bring the students back the following Monday. Most opt for the school bus, and the student parking lot is left two-thirds empty. My classmates are, days later, both sedated and enlivened by the car crash. They talk about it with the exhausted giddiness of kids who have stayed up too late at a slumber party. I wait by the mural sheet, which seems to have been permanently forgotten in the aftermath of Paul Revere High School’s latest tragedy. Forgotten, too, is what the mural memorializes. No one looks at it anymore. No one thinks of me. So this is what it feels like to be forgotten.

Not forgotten is the shame of Kelsey Pope.

She arrives late, and I know that walk. She’s spent the entire morning, while getting ready for school, telling herself to be tough. She’ll show them she doesn’t care, even though they still titter and whisper. Which they still do. I follow after, wondering how long she’ll be able to keep it up.

Turns out, not long.

The hall is full when Kelsey reaches her locker. No ponies gather around it. No surprise. Kelsey doesn’t glance over to where they are gathered at another pony’s locker. She keeps her eyes on her own locker, spinning the dial and giving it a yank.

Hundreds of prom tickets spill out at her feet.

We, all of us in the hall, stare at the pastel slips of paper scattered around Kelsey like confetti. Kelsey stares, too, her eyes surprised at first, until she picks up one slip and then drops it fluttering to the floor.

Even from a few yards back, I can see that the ticket is professionally printed.
The well-rounders
, I think. They’re the ones who organize the prom, who print the tickets. It takes less than a second for me to spot Whitney Puryear, her face lit with an anticipation almost like hunger.

The hallway explodes in sound. It’s not laughter, not all of it, but enough of it is. I watch as Kelsey’s eyes fill with tears.

This is it. Exactly what I’d engineered, exactly what I’d said I’d wanted. How is vindication supposed to feel? It should feel like the parts snap into place. It should feel like eating a bowl of warm, thick soup on a cold day. It should feel like suddenly you’re solid again.

I watch the tears tremble in Kelsey’s eyes and feel nothing.

Suddenly, I find myself stepping through people, directly through their mouths curled in laughter, their hands lifted to shield a whisper, their narrowed, judgmental eyes. I arrive in front of Kelsey.

“Think of me,” I order. “You dumb pony, think of me.”

But why would she?

Maybe because my old best friend steps out into the middle of the hall and shouts, “Shut up!” Usha balls her hands on her hips. “All of you, shut up!”

Kelsey stares at Usha, tears finally spilling over her cheeks, cutting across the expression of confusion on her face. She opens her mouth, but before she can speak, her voice thinks my name:
Paige
. It’s enough.

I turn her around, chin lifted—damn the tears, damn the tickets, damn the laughter—and walk her through the crowd, a queen through the jackals, until the laughter fades away behind us.

And that’s how it remains for the next week and a half. Every day, I wait until Kelsey thinks of me, then I inhabit her. I take her
through her day—classes, lunch, worst are hallways—like the whispers and stares don’t exist. She doesn’t push back at me now, but then again, I don’t do anything she wouldn’t do herself.

Evan starts to ask where I’ve been. Even with Fisk’s classes, he’s started to notice that I’m not around.

“I’m here and there,” I say lightly.

“You’re where and where?” he asks.

I almost tell him. But I can’t. It’s the same feeling as when I couldn’t tell Usha about my hook-ups with Lucas. I don’t know how to explain why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing. I just didn’t think revenge would feel like this. Shameful. Petty. Mean. All the things I’ve accused Kelsey of, now it’s me.

The next Wednesday, two weeks since the car accident, I walk Kelsey out of the cafeteria and see Wes and his burner friends clustered in the hall that leads to art class. Though Kelsey has to sit across the room from Wes in art, I’ve been trying to skirt him elsewhere because, maddeningly, no matter how I try to avoid it, my eyes always somehow land on his. As they do now. Before his friends even see me, Wes’s eyes catch mine. Fortunately, there’s a door a few steps away.

I duck into Brooke’s bathroom to wait for the burners to disperse, but as I turn the corner to the sinks, I freeze.

Lucas stands in the same exact spot where he stood on the afternoon when he guarded the flooding sinks. I hadn’t seen him since we’d sat together in Principal Bosworth’s office, though I knew he must have been back from his suspension. It surprises me that I’d forgotten about him, the boy I used to look for at every ring of the bell. The girl with him is young, maybe only a freshman, though she’s trying hard to look older, with a mouth dark as poisoned fruit
and clunky boots that must make each step heavy. She floats up from the boots as if they’re the only thing holding her to the ground, her head tilted back, her painted lips the highest point of her body. Lucas’s mouth presses down on hers.

I step back into the shadow of the entranceway, watching them. The kiss stretches on for minutes that must in reality be only seconds, and I can do nothing but stare. It looks different from the way he’d kissed me, as if her lips actually are a fruit he’s downing in bites, no regard for stem or seeds. It’s the girl who finally pulls free; the lower half of Lucas’s face is ripe with her dark lipstick.

“Do you want to know where it was?” Lucas asks.

She nods, her eyes wide.

Lucas points to the place on the floor by the sinks: Brooke’s death spot. Then, he cocks his head and says, “You should lie down on it.”

“Lie down?” she repeats uncertainly. “Like, on the floor?”

“Come on,” Lucas says.

“I don’t know.”

“But if I wanted you to?”

With a smile that might be a grimace, she does. And when he bends down to kiss her there on the floor, I finally regain the ability to move.

Maybe we should be trying to forget
.

Harriet’s safety glass tears.

Kelsey’s real tears.

The sketch of the girl under the tree.

She’s just some girl who died
.

It’s too much.

I don’t care about them.

Any of them.

I don’t care.

I don’t care.

These tears mean I don’t care.

I run past Wes and the burner boys, their faces blurring through the scrim of my tears. I run past Usha, nearly knocking her from her ladder. The late bell rings, but I don’t turn back. I slam the doors out to the parking lot and race across the soccer fields behind the school, their grass sucked gray and dry from the winter that just passed. I find a stretch of brick wall and slide to the ground. Here they are, tears I couldn’t cry before, wet on my cheeks and hands.

“Hey,” a voice says between half-caught breaths. “Hey, there.”

I look up, and he’s standing there, all shaggy hair and tattered coat. He wavers as the tears rise to my eyes, then clears as they fall.

“What are you doing here, Wes Nolan?”

“I followed you,” he says, adding, “barely. You run fast.”

“This isn’t what it looks like,” I tell him.

“What does it look like?”

“Like I’m upset.”

He cocks his head. “You’re not upset?”

“Don’t look at me. I’m all tears and snot.”

“Okay. I won’t look.” He turns away gamely. “So things have been pretty rough, huh?”

“No kidding,” I say, then I realize what he must mean: that things have been rough for Kelsey because he turned her down. “I’m not upset over you, you know.”

He raises his eyebrows, and I wonder if that sounded insulting. I wonder, after that, why I even care if it did.

“I saw Lucas Hayes in the bathroom,” I explain. “He was making out with some burner.”

“A burner?” Wes asks. “Like on a stove?”

“No. A burner like a girl who burns things—cigarettes, pot—who smokes things.”

“Oh. Like me,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say uncomfortably. “I guess, yeah.”

“A burner,” he tries out the word, smiles at it. “I like that.”

“It’s supposed to be an insult.”

“Okay.” He smiles wider. “I still like it.”

“Of course you do.”

“You used to go out with Lucas Hayes, right?”

“Last year.”

“So you still like him, huh?”

I bite Kelsey’s lip and look across the field at the burners’ circle where I used to wait, listening for the soft crush of pine needles that would mark Lucas’s step, my heart beating at the possibility of that sound, my ears echoing with the absence of it, my mind protesting that I didn’t care one way or the other. “Well, I did,” I admit. “I liked him. I liked Lucas Hayes.” And I laugh because I did. I really did like him. Prince Basketball. Mr. Gleam Tooth. High Testo himself. Lucas Hayes.

Wes nods. “Most girls seem to.”

“Yeah. Most girls,” I scoff. But in this case, most girls was me. “But I don’t anymore.” And as I say it, I know that it’s true. I don’t. I couldn’t like someone who said that, who said I was some girl who died. “I think that maybe I liked the idea of him more than the actual him: Lucas Hayes.”

“Lucas Hayes,” Wes repeats.

“It’s embarrassing, but . . .”