Absent (21 page)

“When I woke up, the first thing I found out is that I was dead,” Brooke says, all bravado gone from her voice so that it is left small and sad, little more than a whisper.

It’s been two weeks since the dance, and I’ve finally agreed to talk with her, but only if Evan is there, and only if we meet in front of Usha’s mural, where I feel safe.

“The second thing I found out is that nothing had happened to the boys who’d killed me. No”—she frowns—“worse. Everyone thought Lucas was a hero. And then, a couple months after, he started up with you.” She finally meets my eyes, but I can’t look at hers. I turn to the mural, its colors, its shapes. “I didn’t hate you,” she says. “I didn’t ever hate you. I felt sorry for you. Because he was tricking you, like he did me.

“I thought I could warn you. I would try to touch your shoulder sometimes, your hand, to try to get your attention. And I would think,
Stay away from him. He’s bad. He’s using you
. You never felt me. Never heard me. Until that day on the roof—”

“
That’s
what you were doing?” I burst out. “Trying to warn me?”

“You don’t have to believe me.”

But, something about the way she says it, I do believe her.

“Then suddenly that day on the roof, I
was
you. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it was my imagination or a dream or something,” she continues. “But then I saw Lucas standing there across the roof, grinning at you. I wanted to scare him. I wanted . . . I was so angry. I was thinking you’d break a leg. I was thinking—”

“I died,” I tell her.

“I know.”

“Of course you do,” I say bitterly. “You know better than anyone.”

And now she’s the one who can’t meet my eyes.

“What happened next?” Evan prompts.

“Nothing,” she tells her clasped hands. “I didn’t know how to do it again, how to get inside someone. Not until you figured out that it’s when they think of us. I understood it then, what had happened with you on the roof, that if I could be you, I could be other people. I could be him.”

I look to Evan, startled.
I
had told her.
I’d
given her the key.

She puts her hands over her face, then drops them to her lap forlornly. “I promised myself just Lucas. Nothing big, nothing like the roof. Just little stuff. I got him suspended.”

“You messed with that burner girl,” I say.

“And Lucas wouldn’t have done that?” she asks, adding, “He just wouldn’t have asked her to prom.”

“But what about Harriet?” Evan says.

“And Heath?” I say.

“I didn’t mean it to happen like that,” she says.

“Seems like a lot of things didn’t happen the way you meant them to,” I observe.

“I was scared, so scared of you finding out. And Harriet was saying things that you could have . . . I just wanted her to leave the school. So I would be safe. And Heath, I was just going to—”

“Scare him?” I ask sarcastically.

“He deals to middle-schoolers, did you know that? Eleven, twelve-year-olds?” She pauses, sighs. “But the car was supposed to stop. It should have stopped. Heath would’ve been scared. Harriet would’ve been sent back to Greenvale.”

“Why didn’t it?” Evan asks.

“She saw me. Harriet did. When I got inside her, she knew I was there. She fought me. She kept
pushing
at me. I couldn’t get my foot on the pedal.”

“But at the prom, with Lucas,” I say in as even a voice as I can muster, “you weren’t just trying to scare him.”

“No,” she admits. “I wanted to hurt him. Like I was hurt. It’s just that it doesn’t stop, the anger, the pain, hating others, hating yourself.”

“It stops,” I say. “It stops when you decide to stop it.”

“I’m glad you saved him.” She bows her head. “I am.”

I stand and cross to the mural.

“Paige?” Brooke says, meek and wretched, but I’m not listening to her. I’m listening to them.

They’re whispering to me again, the warm voices, so warm that they sound like they’re singing my name. They sound far away, yet not far at all. I’ve been hearing them since the night of the dance, every time I visit the mural. What are they saying? I place my hand near the painted wall, then through it. There it is again, the sensation I felt before—sugar dissolved into water, music dissolved into air, the universe dissolved into stars and sky and worlds.

“Paige?” Brooke says, even meeker. “Can you forgive me?”

I take my hand from the wall, hold it tight in my other hand.

“No,” I tell Brooke. “I can’t forgive you.”

Her face falls. “Yeah,” she mutters, “I knew that.”

“Not yet,” I say. “Not right now.”

I look to Evan, who nods.

“But,” I say, thinking of those voices, the sound of them, “I choose to try.”

MRS. MORELLO ARRANGES A SMALL GATHERING FOR THE
unveiling of the mural—just Usha, Mr. Fisk, Brooke’s parents, and mine. It is, in fact, the perfect number of attendees; everyone who should be there is.

But when Brooke sees her parents, she backs to the far end of the hall and stares at them longingly. She braids her ponytail, unbraids it, braids it, unbraids it, as if it is she and not the hair that is constantly binding and unraveling. I find a little forgiveness in the twists of her hair.

I stand next to my parents, whose hands are knotted in each other’s. Usha and Mr. Fisk each take one end of the drop cloth and pull, the sheet billowing out before floating to the ground. The mural is in front of us. My parents cry, but they smile while they cry. My name sings off them, their thoughts blending into one voice. The first voices ever to say my name, I realize, the first ones to think it.

I say their names back to them.

“Mom,” I say, “Dad.”

“Paige,” their thoughts say back to me.

We call each other’s names into the silence of the hall, and suddenly the hall isn’t silent anymore.

Sometimes, in those last weeks of school, students still come and stand in front of the mural—biblicals, well-rounders, testos, burners, ponies, whoever—and study it. Sometimes one of them thinks my name. Sometimes I don’t know what they’re thinking, just that it isn’t about me. But it doesn’t matter if they are thinking of me or not, because Usha was thinking of me when she painted it. Once I stopped getting in the way of her painting it, that is. She’d created something infused with memories of me, of grief and loss. But also of letting go. Of moving on.

It’s a warm Saturday in June when Evan, Brooke, and I watch the seniors, shiny columns in their graduation robes, cross the length of the gym and share hearty handshakes with Principal Bosworth. Usha wears a mortarboard decorated with every trinket and medium from Mr. Fisk’s room. Wes and Kelsey lean across their folding chairs and make out until Mrs. Morello swats them with a program to get them to stop. Harriet sits in the front row, blinking rapidly, as if she’d woken up from her coma just this morning instead of a month ago. A seizure, they’d finally decreed, had caused her to lose control of the car. Close enough. Heath isn’t at graduation. His parents have chosen to homeschool him, especially after the other matter of the drugs Lucas had told Principal Bosworth about. And in fact, Lucas is at graduation, even if he isn’t graduating with the rest of our class. He sits up in the stands with his parents, looking more like the Lucas that I’d known, his posture an easy slouch, his blue eyes lazy
and laughing. At the end of the ceremony, when the newly named graduates throw their hats in the air, he is the first to stand up and cheer. The hats’ golden tassels flip up into the air like miniature suns before reaching an apex and falling back to the ground.

After graduation, Lucas weaves through polite clusters of relatives and rows of vacated folding chairs. He catches the billowing sleeve of Usha’s robe, and she turns with a slightly surprised “Hey.”

“Hey. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” She pulls at the tassel on her hat. “Are you—?”

“Maybe. After summer school.”

“Good luck, then.” She starts to turn away.

“Wait. That night on the roof. When I . . . when I . . . ”

“When you went stargazing?” she finishes with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Lucas agrees gratefully. “When I went stargazing. I don’t remember much of it. I mean it’s all kind of hazy, but . . . but you knew Paige, right? You were her friend, right?”

“Her best friend,” Usha corrects him.

“This is going to sound crazy, but up there on the roof, I think—I don’t know—but I think, she’s the reason I didn’t jump. I think maybe she was up there with me. I felt . . . ” He turns his hand palm up, looks at it. “I don’t know.”

Usha combs out the strands of her tassel, watching him carefully.

“Crazy, right?” he says.

Usha shrugs. “Maybe not. Who knows what happens after life? I mean, I’m not ruling anything out.”

“Not ruling anything out.” Lucas grins. “I like that.” He turns to go, but then stops and turns back. “I knew her, you know. Paige.”

Usha tilts her head. “You did?”

“Yeah. I liked her. She was rude and sweet and cranky and funny and . . . she was just . . . I don’t know . . . she was just the type of
girl you’d want to know.” He frowns. “I still don’t understand what made her—”

“Stop,” Usha says. “What you said before? Stop there. That was Paige.”

He nods. “Yeah, you’re right. That was Paige.”

With graduation over, the school is still but for the quiet sweep of the custodian’s push broom, the metal slide of a filing cabinet, the infrequent clack of a teacher’s heels. The school is ours again, us dead kids. We stand in front of the mural.

Evan tilts his head skeptically. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Be patient,” I tell him. “Be quiet.”

I look down at the little dark moth in the corner. Usha painted the wall for Brooke and for me, but I painted that moth for Evan. I hope it’s enough.

“Brooke?” I ask, leaning forward to see her on Evan’s other side.

She shakes her head. “No. Nothing.”

“What are we looking for?” Evan asks.

“I don’t know.” I let my eyes wander from bird’s feather to dragonfly eye to plane propeller to dragon’s forked tongue. “It’s like how the death spots feel firm, this feels the opposite. It feels like . . . it feels like—I don’t know—like clouds dissolving into sunlight, like seeds blowing on the wind, like laughter catching between friends, like—”

“Life,” Evan suggests. “At least how I remember it.”

“Yeah, maybe like that. Maybe like life.”

“Wait,” Brooke says, her voice a cracked whisper. “Listen.”

Evan and I hush. At first, it’s a murmur, but as I listen, it grows into a chorus, into a crowd—not one voice but hundreds, thousands,
all calling my name. It’s like everyone I ever knew is thinking about me, remembering the best thing they could. It’s like everyone I ever knew is calling my name, calling me to come meet them.

I turn to Evan. “Do you hear it?”

He says, “They’re saying my name.”

“What do we do?” I ask.

But it’s Brooke who answers, backing up a step, and then with one last look at me, running forward and throwing herself through the wall. Except she doesn’t go through it, and she doesn’t hit it. For a moment, it’s as if she’s become a part of the mural, a vivid collection of colors and shapes, but also a girl. Then she’s gone.

“A life spot,” Evan breathes.

“Are you scared?” I say. “I’m scared.”

Evan nods. “But I’m ready. Are you?”

I take a last look at the empty hallway. I turn to Evan. “Together?”

We step forward.

KATIE WILLIAMS
is also the author of
The Space Between Trees
, which
Publishers Weekly
called “a darkly beautiful, emotionally honest story” in a starred review. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Texas in Austin, her short stories have appeared in
The Atlantic, American Short Fiction
, and
Best American Fantasy
, among other publications. She writes and teaches in Berkeley, California. Visit her at
www.katiewilliamsbooks.com
.