Absent

12: SOME GIRL WHO DIED

THE MEMORIAL MURAL WORKS JUST AS I’D HOPED IT WOULD. The next morning, I stand under it as the crowds come in from the parking lot. Almost everyone glances at the white sheet fastened to the wall as they pass it, and my name is whispered in the voices of a dozen different minds. Brooke and Evan stand with me.

“I hear it,” Brooke says, her eyes closed and her chin tipped up as if she has found a sunbeam to bask in. She opens her eyes. “You’re right. I’ve heard it before. I just didn’t know to listen for it. It’s them thinking of me. It’s . . .” She shakes her head.

“That’s great!” Evan says, overly cheery.

“You don’t hear anything?” I ask him.

“None of them knew me. How could they remember me?”

I think about that, being forgotten, being lost to time. That’ll be me someday, just like Evan. It’ll be them, too, all of them bustling by. Someday they’ll die and be forgotten. They just get a little longer to ignore the fact.

“It’s nice, though, right?” Evan continues, his voice scrubbed bright and shiny. “So many people thinking about you?”

“That all depends on what they’re thinking,” Brooke says.

He turns to me. “And Usha is painting the mural after all?”

“Yup,” I say. “She is.”

I wonder, nervously, if Usha would agree with that statement. I’ve been waiting for her since last night, the questions burning inside me: Does she remember asking Fisk to paint the mural? Does she remember any of it? The fight with the biblicals? The mysterious Lucas meeting? The conversation with Greenvale? I lived an entire afternoon of Usha’s life. Stole it from her, a rude little corner of my mind chides. Usha will have plenty of afternoons, I tell the corner. She can spare one of them.

When Usha finally arrives, I follow her to her locker and am surprised to find one of the biblicals, Jenny, waiting there wearing a stiff smile. Usha eyes her warily.

Shit, I think. I’m caught.

But then I realize that this is perfect. Surely, Jenny will talk about what happened in the cafeteria yesterday. And by Usha’s reaction, I can figure out what she remembers from when I was inhabiting her.

Jenny clicks her heels together smartly like a secretary on a TV show. “I want to apologize. For yesterday.”

Usha turns to her locker, dialing the lock in three quick moves, opening it with a fourth. “Why are you apologizing?” she says quietly, and my stomach lurches. Does she not remember any of it? Was the entire afternoon a blank? Did she close her eyes in the cafeteria and open them again, hours later, at the edge of school grounds? She must think she’s going crazy, losing time like that. Will she tell her parents or Mrs. Morello? Will they send her to the Greenvale facility like Greenvale Greene?

But then I realize over the whirr of my panicked thoughts that Usha is still talking. “If anyone apologizes, it should be me,” she tells Jenny. “I’m the one who yelled at you.” She bites her lip. “I don’t know why I yelled like that. I guess I lost my temper. I didn’t used to get angry, but it seems like I’m yelling at everyone these days. I’m sorry anyway.”

“No. You don’t need to . . . Don’t apologize. I had no right to start preaching about that stuff.” Jenny touches her fingers to the slats of the locker next to Usha’s. “I shouldn’t . . . not everyone believes . . .”

“But it’s a nice thing to believe.” Usha moves her bag from one shoulder to the other, gives the locker dial another spin without even looking at the numbers. “Sometimes I wish I could believe in something like that.”

“But you don’t have to . . . not to be friends with us.”

“Friends with you?” Usha’s mouth twists, and Jenny blushes.

She stammers, “I didn’t mean to assume. . . . That was a stupid thing to—”

“No. Hey. You can say that . . . you can . . . We could be friends.” She pauses. “But . . .”

“What?” Jenny says. “You can tell me.”

“You only wanted to be friends with me because of Paige.” Paige, her mind echoes. “I mean, didn’t you?”

“Oh.” Jenny moves her hand from the locker to her chest, a parody of surprise. It’s so broad, it’s almost like an impression of the biblicals that Usha or I would have done. Except, I realize, there’s no sarcasm there. Jenny means it. She means everything she says.

And this time Usha’s not laughing.

“Is that what you thought?” Jenny asks.

“It seemed like—”

“No, I know.” Jenny clasps her hands in front of her like a pleading silent-movie heroine, and again it’s obvious that she means this gesture sincerely. “After . . . what happened . . . we thought you could use someone to sit with at lunch. So, that was because of Paige, I guess. But that’s not why you’re our friend.”

“Why, then?”

“We like you. That’s all.”

“Okay.” Usha smiles her smile. “That’s okay, then.”

After Usha and Jenny head off to class, I sit at the base of Usha’s locker. This is how it will be now, I tell myself. Usha will have a new best friend. Lucas will have a new not-girlfriend. Everyone else will have their shocking suicide story. I’ll have some dried paint on a wall. Unless . . .

I go over the girls’ conversation in my head, weighing each sentence. Usha apologized for yelling at the biblicals. Could this be how it works? Not only does she remember everything I did yesterday, but from what she said, she accepts the actions as her own. She didn’t black out. She wasn’t watching me from behind her eyes. She wasn’t consciously trying to push me out of her body. I was her, and she was me. And if this is true, it means that I can be anyone, do anything.

When I return to the mural, the hallway is empty. The late bell has rung, and Brooke and Evan have moved on to their various time fillers—Evan to class, Brooke to wander. I still haven’t told them about my ability to inhabit people. Soon, I promise guiltily.

I startle as the school door slams open, barely regaining my hover when I hit the ground again. A good fifteen minutes after the tardy bell, and Lucas Hayes has arrived. Even though he’s late, he doesn’t hurry. Why bother? He has a pack of blank hall passes in his bag, the perk of being basketball captain. Lucas Hayes. My secret . . . something. Kelsey Pope’s very public ex-boyfriend.

And yes, I want to fix the rumor about my death. And yes, last night, I thought up a dozen different ways to do that. But first, there’s something I have to do, something I’ve always wanted to know. I want to know how Lucas Hayes really felt about me.

Inhabiting Usha’s body was one thing; inhabiting one of the testos’ bodies is a million things. I choose the least sweaty, least beefy of Lucas’s friends: lanky, shy Joe Schultz, who happens to pause by the mural on his way to the gym. Joe is so quiet, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard him talk before, so it’s strange to hear my name whispered in the deep, rumbling voice of his thoughts. Though it’s not nearly as strange as his body.

Usha and I had been best friends since middle school. We’d shared clothing, locker rooms, beds at slumber parties. Usha’s body was as familiar as another person’s body could be. Even so, it was little preparation for suddenly being her—different heights, different weights, different muscles pulling different bones. Essentially, different physics equations.

But, being Joe . . .

How can I describe it? If Usha’s body was a favorite pair of jeans, Joe’s is a Halloween costume.

For one thing, he’s a guy with, um, all the guy features. I try to avoid thinking about the soft, swinging weight between my legs, which forces me to adjust the width and roll of my steps. Also now, suddenly, I’m a good six inches taller, with long limbs and ropy muscles. Joe is an athlete, tall, fast, and strong. I can feel that just walking down the hall, the potential for power and speed. I have the impulse to double back to the gym and dunk a basketball like some stupid testo.

Instead, I head to the locker banks where I find Lucas and the testos in a cluster. I stand uncertainly at their backs, afraid to actually speak. I don’t know how to be a guy, much less a testo sort of guy. They’ll know. They’ll know right away. But then, one of them says, “Hey, Schultz.” And when I realize that he means me, I say, “Hey” back, and they shuffle aside to make room for me.

I expected the testos to be talking about free throws or girls’ tits or something, but in fact, they’re talking about Mr. Cochran and how he hasn’t yet returned from his leave.

“We should get a group of guys from the team and go over to his house,” Brian Mulligan is saying.

“I’ll go,” Chad Harp offers. “It’d suck to be sitting there thinking that you caused some girl’s death.” Their minds whisper my name.

“That’s what I mean,” Brian says. “He should know what people are saying. He should know that it wasn’t his fault.”

“Maybe it was his fault,” Lucas says softly.

The boys shift and look at each other nervously. I watch Lucas. The usual confidence is gone from his eyes. Today, he doesn’t look like the world is his birthday present; he doesn’t look like he even has a birthday.

“But, Luke, if that girl wanted to jump, what could he have done?”

“I don’t know.” Lucas scratches the back of his neck, studying the floor tiles. “But he was the teacher. Maybe he should have done something. Maybe he shouldn’t have walked away.”

Then there’s a pause. I take a breath, take a chance. “What if she didn’t jump?”

They all look at me with vague surprise. I wonder, belatedly, how often Joe speaks, much less speaks about gossip. He doesn’t seem like much of a presence; in fact, he didn’t offer any push-back when I inhabited him.

“Naw, dude. She jumped.” Brian slaps his hand flat on the locker for emphasis. “It’s all around the entire school.”

“But that’s just gossip,” I say.

“I heard that people saw her jump,” Chad says.

“Exactly.” Brian slaps the locker again. “There was a whole roof full of people.”

“You were there on the roof,” I say to Lucas, Joe’s heart suddenly pounding in his chest as I wait for Lucas’s answer. “Did you see it?”

“I was talking to Coach C,” he says, looking away.

“So you didn’t see it, then?” I press, half hopeful that he did, so that he can tell these guys how I didn’t jump, half relieved that he didn’t, because how awful to see someone die, someone you knew, someone you’d kissed. I touch a thumb to my lips. Joe’s lips. They’re chapped, my thumb rubbing against little flakes of peeling skin.

“I didn’t see it,” Lucas confirms, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt up around his neck. “Greg O. threw me his egg thing, that project they were doing, and it splattered. I was looking at that, everyone was. Then some girl screamed. And when I looked up again, the ledge was empty. She’d been right there a second ago, then she . . . wasn’t.”

His voice is thin, guarded. The same voice as when I’d said he’d practically saved a girl’s life. Don’t say that. I didn’t save her. And it strikes me that Lucas was there for both Brooke’s death and mine, and both times a second too late.

“That’s rough,” one of the guys says.

“First Brooke Lee, then Paige Wheeler,” someone adds, giving voice to my exact thoughts.

“Yeah, Hayes, why you gotta go around killing all the girls at our school?” another says, and the guys laugh darkly at this, until they realize that Lucas and I aren’t laughing along with them.

“You knew her, right?” I ask.

Lucas looks up at me, eyes flashing. “What?”

“Paige Wheeler. I heard . . . you knew her.”

Lucas presses his lips together, for a moment, the fear plain on his face. He drops his head, and when he looks up again, the fear is gone and his confidence is back.

“Not really,” he says smoothly.

I suddenly feel more solid than ever, solider than Joe, solider than flesh and bone. I feel like I’m made of stone and will never move again, not even a twitch.

“Not even a little bit?” I ask.

“Naw. She was just some girl,” Lucas says. “Some girl who died.”

I get away from the testos as quickly as I can. I want to stop this inhabitation; I wait for Joe to push me out, but he doesn’t. I’m stuck. Finally, I tell the hall monitor that I left my homework in my car, then I walk out all the way to the property line, stepping across it. From the edge of the roof, I look down to see what Joe will do. He stands there for a moment, like he’s walked into a room but forgotten what he meant to get there, then he shakes his head and turns back to the school.

Me, I feel like the object that’s been forgotten. I feel like the act of forgetting. When I felt this way before, I would go to Usha, who’d drag me out to her car, where she would play the right music (screamy) at the right volume (loud) and drive the right speed (fast). We would fly down those roads. Just fly.

Now I have no music, no car, no roads. No Usha. No flying.

But I do have Evan.

I take a seat next to him on the cupboards in the back of Fisk’s room. Evan must sense that something is wrong, but he doesn’t ask me anything. I know that I’ve only lived a short life and an even shorter afterlife, but I think I can say that this is a rare quality. Usha had it. Lucas, too, actually. The bastard.

Evan and I sit in silence until the class break, when I turn to him and say, “Apparently, I’m just some girl who died.”

“Who made that lovely remark?”

“Lucas Hayes.”

Evan squints. “And you care what Lucas Hayes says since . . . ?”

“Since I was hooking up with him.” I throw my hands up. “Now you know.”

Evan raises his eyebrows. “Oh. When were—?”

“From December until dead. Just a few months.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t know. No one knew. Because it was no big deal. Just a thing. A weird thing. So that’s it. So there.” I brush my hands together, done with it. Done with Lucas. I eye Evan. “So, Brooke didn’t tell you about Lucas and me?”

“She knew?”

“She was the only one who knew. She saw us.”

“No, she didn’t tell me.”

“But you don’t seem that surprised.”

He smiles briefly and unhappily. “It’s a familiar situation.”

“Is it? Not for me. Not that it matters. I mean, technically, he’s right. Technically that’s who I am: some girl who died.”

“That’s not who you are.”

We sit in silence again.

“Did you like him?” Evan asks.

“No. A little. He was nice. When we were alone, he was nice.”

“He’s a coward, though,” Evan says.

“Do you know him?”

“I know cowards.”

“Yeah, I guess he is.” I sigh.

I look to Evan, but he isn’t looking at me anymore. His gaze is at the front of the room, where Mr. Fisk sweeps a long arm, erasing the board.