Absent (17 page)

“What are you thinking about?” I ask him.

“Oh,” his eyes flick to me, back to the drop cloth. “Her, I guess. Paige Wheeler.”

“You knew her?”

“Just a little.”

My gaze falls on the sketchbook tucked under his arm. “Why did you draw all those pictures of her, then?”

He turns, nakedly surprised, my name gone from his thoughts mid-syllable, as if it has dropped through a trapdoor. “You saw those?”

“You drew them because she died?”

“Actually I drew these
before
she died. Or before I knew, anyway. I drew them that afternoon. Seventh period.”

“When she fell,” I whisper.

He offers me the sketchbook. I take it gingerly, flip through the pages, my face appearing before me again and again, but with small differences between each drawing, as if I’m changing my expression, as if I’m moving. That girl who is me. Who isn’t me.

“Why did you draw them?” I ask again.

“I don’t know. Maybe I liked her.”

I’m standing on tile floor, hard and cold and square beneath my feet, but suddenly it feels like I can’t count on the ground at all. It’s like my first days learning to hover, when the floor was an iced-over lake—one wrong step, and I’ll fall through.

“Maybe?” I hear my voice say.

“All right, not maybe. I liked her.”

“You should have told her.”

Wes smiles humorlessly. “Well, what do you know? I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“I mean, are you sure you did? Because I don’t think—”

“I made it pretty clear.”

Had he? I think back to the smirks that might have been smiles, the mockery that might have been flirtation. And then, there was that moment in the burners’ circle.
If you were meeting me
, he’d said,
I’d make a point of being here
.

And what had I said to that ridiculous burner, that annoying joker who was Wes Nolan?
I’d make a point of losing track of time
.

That’s what I’d said.

All my time is gone now. I won’t get to chart the crookedness of another boy’s smile. I won’t get to leap giddily from teasing gibe to gibe. I won’t get to walk down the hallway with him like Kelsey did today, everyone noting,
They’re together. Those two
. I won’t get to fall in love. I’ve never been in love.

I turn to Wes and ask the question I don’t want to ask, the question I have no right to ask, the question that I’m already asking: “If you liked her, if you liked Paige, what are you doing here with me?”

“Kelsey,” he says, and I’m surprised by how the sound of her name on his tongue suddenly hurts me. “Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“That’s right. She’s dead now.”

Wes reaches out, and I take a step back, his fingers grazing the place where I’d been. This time, the problem isn’t that he’s thinking my name, but that he isn’t.

“I can’t—” I say, and I don’t know how to finish. I can’t what? What is it that I can’t do with Wes?

Besides nothing.

Besides anything.

I turn and walk away from the hurt in his eyes, the light in her eyes, too, that girl under the tree.

As I march Kelsey out of the school and across the parking lot, here are the things I don’t care about: I don’t care that I’m making Kelsey skip class. I don’t care that I made her break things off with Wes. I don’t care that she might like him. I don’t care that he might like her back. I don’t care that he’s not following me. Her. Whoever. I don’t care that he might have liked me. I don’t care about him. I don’t care about myself.

I’m walking faster and faster in Kelsey’s tippy-top boots, until she’s across the road and I’m back where I belong, up on the school roof. The parking lot stretches out in front of me. One time, not so long ago, it must have been a field, not a parking lot. What happens to the grass when they lay all that tar over it?

I’ll tell you what happens.

It dies.

I stare down at the blacktop.

Something catches my eye.

A movement.

Something.

Nothing.

I blink.

Harriet Greene.

There she is, right down there in the parking lot. She stands on the accident site, at the end of the curling tire tracks. She looks around her, bewildered, turns in a slow circle.

“Harriet!” I shout.

Then, she’s gone.

Blink again and she’s back. This time, though, she’s flickering, like a guttering candle. She’s there, then not, there, not.

There.

I glance over my shoulder, taking in the distance back across the roof, back to the door, down through the school. She could disappear again any moment. There’s not time to get down there, not time for the stairs.

I take a shaking breath and step up on the ledge.

I don’t look down at the ground below me. I know what I’ll see if I do, that little patch of tar darker than the rest. Instead, I steel myself. Instead, I do what they all said I did.

I jump.

This time, I’m awake for the fall. Each set of windows I pass blazes with reflected light, like a flashbulb. I have enough time to think,
Thirty-two feet per second squared
, before I land in a heap, the ground jarring up through whatever part of me has been left in this world. I stand, but find I can’t manage to hover, not after the shock of that fall. I limp forward, toes skimming through the asphalt. Harriet is still there in front of me (thank God), only yards away.

She’s seen me now. She’s shouting something. But the volume is turned off. I can see her, but there’s no sound.

I wave my arms, gesture to my ears. “Harriet! I can’t hear you!”

Her silent shouts become more frantic. She points back at the school, then at herself. I’m almost there, close enough to see that she’s saying the same thing over and over, but she’s flickering again, and I can’t make out the word her lips are forming.

Then she’s gone.

I stand at the end of the tire tracks, follow them with my eyes as they curl into nothing.

EVAN, BROOKE, AND I SIT IN A ROW IN FRONT OF HARRIET’S
accident site for the rest of the afternoon.

Evan turns to me. “You’re sure you don’t know what she was trying to say?”

“I was too far away. It was the same thing, though. The same word or two words. And, like I told you, she pointed to the school, then to herself.”

Evan frowns.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Something’s been bothering me,” he says. “You know it’s just been me here for . . . a while.”

“How long?” Brooke asks.

“Years,” Evan admits.

“Decades?” I whisper.

He looks down. “A while,” he repeats. “And that makes sense because it’s a school. No one’s supposed to die in high school.”

I feel a twinge as he says this. It’s true. I look around at the three of us. We weren’t supposed to die so young. “But then there was Brooke,” I say, “and me, and now maybe Harriet.”

“All in the same year,” Brooke finishes.

“It’s like they say,” Evan traces over the tire tracks with his finger, “this place is cursed.”

I still fully intend to make Lucas admit the truth to Principal Bosworth, but he doesn’t show up the next day either. Only half of the upperclassmen show anyway because prom is tonight. It’s tradition to spend the morning sleeping in, the afternoon getting sandblasted and shellacked at the salon.

I hang out in the main office, waiting for a call about Harriet. I expect Evan and Brooke to be there, too, but this morning it’s just me. Bosworth and Mrs. Morello are both shut up in his office, and the secretary is playing solitaire on the computer, no calls ringing. Twenty minutes later, Kelsey Pope slinks into the office, hair in wet ropes, features faint without their usual makeup. I’m surprised she’s here at school and not at home readying herself for the dance.

“Can I get a late pass?” she asks the secretary.

While the secretary bends to get the form, Kelsey picks up a flyer from the front counter, fiddling with it. I think of the origami flower she folded at my grief group meeting. Just then, the office door opens and Bosworth ushers out the people from his meeting.

Those people are my parents.

My mother emerges first, purse wrapped tightly under her arm. My father follows, his hand set on her shoulder, as if this small touch is necessary to their forward momentum, though I can’t tell if he is guiding her or she is leading him out the door.

“. . . for coming in today, Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler,” Bosworth is saying.

At the sound of their name, Kelsey thinks of me,
Paige
. Without a thought, I step into her, and thankfully, she doesn’t resist.

My mother is buttoning up a dark jacket that I’ve never seen before; she must have bought it new for spring. My father reluctantly takes Bosworth’s offered hand, giving it a tepid shake. I scan them for other differences, new wrinkles, dark circles, white hairs, but it’s like trying to think about your parents by their given names instead of
Mom
and
Dad
. I can’t see anything except that they’re overwhelmingly my parents right there in front of me. They’re my parents walking past me out the office door. They’re my parents who might leave this school, never to come back.

“Wait!” I shout.

Everyone looks at me. My mother has a polite expression on her face, as if she doesn’t even know me. Which she doesn’t, I remind myself. And I decide that I’d exchange all of Kelsey’s beauty in a second to look like my mother’s daughter right now.

“Wait,” I repeat. I take a tripping step toward my mom.

She raises her eyebrows, forehead wrinkling.

I have no idea what to say. I look down at Kelsey’s hands, still holding the half-folded flyer. I scan its heading and thrust it forward. “You should come to the spaghetti dinner next week.”

“Oh,” my mother says faintly.

“It’s to raise money for the jazz band.”

“Kelsey,” Bosworth warns. “These are—”

“It’s a really good cause,” I talk over him. “Music and the arts and education, and lots of people come to it, parents come to it,” I finish lamely.

“I think that’s enough for now,” Bosworth says.

But my mother steps past him and takes the flyer from me. “Maybe we will come. I like music.” She smiles briefly. “Thank you for telling us about this, . . . ?” She waits for my name.

“Kelsey,” I say. I hold the paper for as long as I can without keeping it from her, and then I let it slide through my fingers. She takes it, running her hand over it to smooth the creases away.

I follow my parents out of the office, pretending to bend over the drinking fountain so that I can keep watching them. They grow smaller and smaller down the hall.

When I can’t see them anymore, I walk to the social studies hall and stand at the window set into the door of Mr. Pon’s classroom as one and another and another of the kids notice me, all of them smirking at the sight of my face peering in. Finally, one of them takes pity on me and nudges Wes Nolan. When Wes looks up from his textbook, I’m praying that his expression won’t be angry. And it isn’t. He raises his hand and calls the teacher’s name.

When we find an empty classroom, shutting the door behind us, I step forward and, before he can say anything, I say, “You can kiss me.”

“Kelsey.”

“What?”

“I think we should talk about—”

“I don’t care. I don’t care if you think of her.”

“Her?” he says, then blanches. “Oh, no. No. I wouldn’t pretend that you’re, I wouldn’t imagine that you’re . . .”
Paige
, his mind whispers, even if he won’t say it.

But that was not what I meant. Actually, I meant the opposite. I meant that I don’t care if he thinks of Kelsey when he’s kissing me.

“You can hold me,” I say. “Maybe right now you can just hold me.”

He nods. “Okay. That’d be okay.”

His coat smells like cigarettes, his chin rests on the top of my head in Kelsey’s damp hair. His hands don’t rub my back consolingly, but just hold me, like the earth holds me when I set my feet on it. He doesn’t think my name again. He doesn’t think
Paige
. But I meant it. I don’t care.