Absent (19 page)

I land in the basement in a heap on my side. This time I don’t have the strength to get up. I draw my knees to my chest, rest my head in their valley, and listen to the ghost frogs singing softly around me.

“PAIGE,” A VOICE SAYS SOFTLY. “PAIGE,” IT SAYS AGAIN
.

I can hear the music of the dance, faintly, from the gym up above. The dance is still going on, then.

“Paige,” the voice repeats.

I raise my head reluctantly.

Evan crouches in front of me. “What are you doing down here?”

“I fell through. I—” I choke on my words.

“What is it?”

I shake my head, dirt pressing against my cheek.

Just like in the grave.

“Here. Sit up,” Evan says.

I follow his instructions like a child. We sit in silence, Evan watching me steadily, until finally I manage to say, “Did I kill myself?”

Evan’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. You’ve always said that—”

“Because Usha said I did.”

“But those were rumors—” Evan begins.

“She said she
saw
it. That Kelsey saw it, too.” I swallow. “Usha wouldn’t lie. I thought Kelsey was lying about me, but it was the truth.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember it like that. And I don’t know why I would—no—I know that I
wouldn’t
do that. Not to Usha or to my parents. Or to myself. I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t be so selfish, so unfair to—”

Evan turns away from me, drops his head into his hands.

“Evan? What did I say? What is it?”

He raises his face, his expression pained. The music from the gym winds in, snaking itself around the two of us. Slowly, Evan points to the ceiling. “I died up there, you know.”

“In the gym,” I say. “I know.”

“Seventeen years ago.”

I glance at his clothes, and he catches it. “Fashions change. And then they change back. Someone once said the only constant is change.”

“Who was that?”

“Heraclitus. Ancient philosopher.”

“Sometimes I think nothing changes,” I say.

“There’s a quote for that, too.”

“Right. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ ”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,”
he recites.

“Show-off.”

“Sorry.” His smile looks like a stranger that has accidentally wandered onto his sad face. “Seventeen years of French class.”

“How did you die?”

“I killed myself.”

“Oh.”

“I snuck in at night with the gun from my parents’ safe. They kept it locked, but I’d figured out the combination years before.

“There’d been a basketball game, and so the floor was just washed and the doors were open for it to dry. That’s how I got in. I took it as a sign. The janitor was on the other side of the building. I could hear the radio. And I thought,
He’ll be the only one to hear the shot. He’ll be the one to find me
. I tried to remember what he looked like so that I could picture him, his face, but then I remembered that he was the night janitor, and so I’d never even seen him. I imagined him anyway. I pictured my grandfather with a thick white moustache, holding a wet mop.

“Then I thought,
Every day he cleans up after kids, and now he can clean up an actual kid
. Do you think that’s funny?”

“No. That’s not funny,” I say.

“I took my shoes off to walk across the floor, so I wouldn’t mess up how he’d washed it, and
that
seemed funny. I couldn’t laugh, though, because it’s . . . Did you ever notice that it’s harder to laugh when you’re alone?”

I nod.

“I put my shoes back on when I got to the seal. I didn’t want to die in my socks. I’d thought I was going to put the gun in my mouth, but then when I was there, I didn’t want to have to, you know, taste the metal.”

“Evan,” I murmur, but I don’t have anything good to say after that. Or anything at all. So, he keeps talking, his eyes fixed on the dirt floor.

“I put the gun to my temple instead. And I stood there. I stood there for a long time, so long my arm got tired, and I had to rest it. It was heavy. Guns are heavy. I thought about just going home. But
then it would be the same, wouldn’t it? The next week and the next and the rest of my life, really. Because it wasn’t going to go away, even after I graduated and got away from Paul Revere,
I’d
still be the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And, if my father ever found out—”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I say, wishing that I could’ve said this seventeen years ago to the boy in the gym.

“Thank you.” He looks at me. “I know that now. I mean, I
believe
it now. Did you do the math? I’d be thirty-four years old. I guess I
am
thirty-four years old. I’ve had as much death as I did life. That’s a long time to learn a lesson.”

I reach out across the floor and put my hand through Evan’s. “Tell me the rest.”

“There’s not much left to tell. I lifted the gun again, and I pulled the trigger.”

I close my eyes and hear the crack of the shot, a sound louder than a gym full of cheering students. In the gym’s empty center, I see a shadow-thin boy falling to the floor. Then I force my eyes open, because Evan has never looked away from me.

“I woke up a few days later, I guess. At first I didn’t know where I was, some basement, but then I heard them up above me, sneakers squeaking, boys shouting to pass the ball. Gym class.” Evan smiles wryly. “I was trying to escape high school, and I ended up right back in it.”

“What did you do next?”

“A lot of freaking out. The school had covered up the fact that there was a suicide in the gym, the entire fact that it was a suicide, for that matter. No one talked about it, actually. It was like I’d just disappeared.

“For a while, I followed the night janitor, who turned out to be not my grandpa, of course, but this little Dominican woman. She talked to herself, and so I’d fill in the gaps in her conversation. Sometimes her responses would fit what I’d just said. I still think maybe she could—not hear me, but who knows? She retired ten years ago.

“I followed my friends around, too, watched them graduate. This one guy, I was in love with him, but he was so popular and so much a guy’s guy. Sometimes I suspected that he might feel . . . but I was never brave enough to ask.” He pauses. “Then, just a couple years ago, he came back and started teaching here.”

“Mr. Fisk.” I can tell by Evan’s face that I’m right. “That’s why you sit in his class? Evan, he’s the adviser for those meetings I told you about where gay kids—”

“I know. A couple weeks ago, I heard him talking to a student about that group.”

Me
, I think. That student talking to Mr. Fisk was me pretending to be Chris Rackham.

“He said he’d had a friend, and I heard it. I heard him think my name.”

“You did?”

“I lost my hover. I dropped right through the floor.”

I remember turning to find Evan’s cupboard empty. I’d thought he’d left the room, that he hadn’t heard any of it.

“I went to one of those meetings. Those kids. It’s not perfect, but . . .” He pauses and looks into the dark of the basement. “I take it back. Things do change.”

“Do you think Mr. Fisk could be gay?”

He laughs. “If you only knew the hours I once spent asking myself that question.” He shakes his head ruefully. “But it doesn’t
really matter, does it? What matters is that he considered me a friend. That he . . .” Evan’s voice, steady through the whole story, begins to shake now. “That he remembers me.”

We listen to the noises of the dance above us, the thrum of the bass, the tangle of voices.

“Ask me if I regret it,” Evan says.

“I don’t have to ask that.”

“Do it anyway. Please. I want to be able to say it.”

“Okay. Do you regret it?”

“Every day. Every day of my life.” He smiles at the word
life
.

“There’s something I have to tell you. And I don’t know if I can.”

“After what I just told you?” Evan snorts. “You can. You better.”

“Okay.” I take a breath. “But please don’t hate me.” I explain everything I’ve been keeping secret from Evan, starting with the afternoon of the grief group meeting, when I thought I’d held Lucas Hayes’s hand, ending with tonight in the hallway when Usha said she’d seen me step off the roof. Evan doesn’t interrupt.

When I finish, I expect him to yell at me, but instead he squints. It’s the faraway look he gets when he’s solving a complex math problem in his head.

“You’re angry,” I say when I can’t stand the silence anymore. “I’m sorry. I should have told you about the inhabitations, about everything.”

He’s still silent.

“It’s just I knew what you’d say. You’d say that I shouldn’t do it, that I didn’t have the right.” I expel a long breath. “And that’s true. But I didn’t want to stop because . . . Evan, I got to be alive again.”

He finally breaks his silence, but he doesn’t scold me, doesn’t say anything about my explanation. Instead, he says, “Brooke.”

“What?”

“We have to find Brooke.”

“Why?” I say. “Evan?”

But he’s already up and climbing the stairs to the school.

We can’t find Brooke. She’s not at the dance. She’s not on her death spot. We resort to walking through the halls, poking our heads into empty classrooms, calling her name.

“Evan, what is this?” I ask him after we’ve cleared the entire art and music wing. “Why do we have to find Brooke?”

“I’ll tell you later. I promise.”

“Why not now?”

He bites his lip. “I want to be sure. Where should we look next?”

“Maybe outside,” I suggest, leading Evan through the doors, out to the student parking lot. “Sometimes she hangs out on the—”

Evan goes stock-still.

I turn to see what he’s looking at.

Harriet.

She’s where I saw her before, crouched in the middle of the parking lot, on the site of her accident. We run to her, and this time we reach her before she disappears. She’s speaking urgently again, the same word over and over. And again, we can’t hear the sound of what she’s saying.

“Can you make it out?” I ask Evan. “It’s . . . Is it . . . ?” A chill goes through me.

Evan says it. “ ‘Brooke.’ She’s saying ‘Brooke.’ ”

“What does it mean? Is Brooke in trouble?”

“No,” Evan says. “I think she’s—”

“Evan.” I gesture to Harriet, whose mouth has fallen open in fear. She points at something behind us. We turn.

“What?” Evan says. “The school?”

But I know where to look. I tilt my head up.

There, on the school roof, stands a figure, face tipped to the sky. A guy, I can tell that much. He doesn’t stand up on the ledge—to my great relief—but on the flat of the roof. He peers over the ledge, though, as if assessing the drop to the ground. There’s something familiar about him. “Is it . . . ?” I ask, then answer myself. “It’s Lucas.”

“No, it’s not,” Evan says.

“It is,” I say. “I can tell. It’s definitely Lucas Hayes.”

“No. Paige. Look at Harriet. Look.”

I turn back to Harriet, and she holds her arm out straight, a direct line, finger pointed. And it’s obvious what she’s pointing at: Lucas Hayes on the edge of the roof. But the thing is, she’s still saying it, her lips are still forming the same one word:
Brooke
.

Then she winks out.

And Evan and I are left alone in the parking lot.

“IT’S HER,” EVAN SAYS, BOTH OF US GAZING UP AT THE FIGURE
of Lucas on the school roof. “That’s Brooke. She’s possessed him.”

Memories lay themselves out in my mind like a hand of playing cards, one flipped over, then the next: Lucas murmuring,
Yeah, right
, when Mrs. Morello had suggested he was upset about Brooke’s death. Lucas standing in front of the overflowing sinks.
Karma, man. Sucks when it finally comes around again
. Lucas pointing to the spot on the tile, Brooke’s death spot.
You should lie down on it
.

I knew something was different about him, different from the popular Lucas goofing with his friends, different too from the Lucas who’d met me in the trees. I explained it away as the drugs, the guilt, the grief, but really, it was Brooke. Lucas flooding the bathroom? Brooke. Lucas ordering the burner girl onto the floor? Brooke. Lucas climbing to the school roof? Brooke. She figured out how to inhabit people, just like I did.