Absent

13: I AM EVERYONE

OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, I LURK BY THE MURAL, covered in a sheet like old furniture, waiting for someone to pass and think of me, which someone always eventually does. Then, quick as a whisper, I’m in their skin. I am everyone. I’m a burner, a testo, a biblical, a well-rounder, a nobody. Most of all, I am alive.

With every new inhabitation, I hang around the person’s group of friends. I say as little as possible so that I don’t give myself away, and even still sometimes I say the wrong thing, and they all turn and look at me funny. But it’s not like they could ever guess the truth. It’s not like they could know who I really am. And when I can, I guide the conversation to poor Paige Wheeler’s suicide, poor dead Paige.

My lines are simple: “That’s such a lie. Kelsey Pope just wants attention. You know how girls like her are.” Most groups agree with me immediately and shake their heads at the duplicity of spoiled, self-centered Kelsey Pope. A scant few argue that no one would lie about something so terrible, especially not Kelsey, who’s really sweet if you get to know her. Once I’m out, I listen carefully for the suicide rumor to snuff out. But it is stubborn. Unlike me, it lives on.

Every day at lunch, I inhabit Jenny, Usha’s new best friend. We don’t sit and eat at Usha’s locker, like she and I used to, but in the cafeteria with the other biblicals.

“Do you ever wonder what Paige would think of this?” I say to the table one afternoon. “If she were here?”

“Like her spirit?” Erin asks. “Like, looking down at us?”

“More like just here, invisible in the school.”

“What movies have you been watching?” The biblicals laugh and gently shake their heads.

“But there’s purgatory, right?” I ask them. “That’s in the Bible.”

Usha looks up from her lunch. “You’re saying that high school could be a kind of purgatory?”

“Or hell,” one of the biblicals says.

“Hell for sure,” another agrees.

“No, it’s purgatory,” Usha maintains. “Think about it. We’re all here waiting, right? Waiting to move on, to find out what’s next.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I say, and she looks over at me. There’s something in my tone that I didn’t intend. Something like longing.

I spot Lucas across the cafeteria at a table thick with ponies and testos. He’s laughing at something, the sound of it bright and open, his eyes in crinkles. But today, his laughter doesn’t charm me. It’s like watching the levels of music on a synthesizer instead of listening to music itself. I hear his voice again: She was just some girl who died.

I suddenly regret not telling Usha about Lucas and me. She wouldn’t have laughed at me for liking a testo. And she wouldn’t have told anyone if I’d asked her not to. Though she would have asked me why it had to be a secret, and she would have known that it was Lucas’s secret, not mine. Thinking about what Usha would have said allows me to admit the truth to myself: I would’ve walked down the hall with Lucas, sat with him at lunch, put on the dress and gone to prom, all that stupid stuff. He just never asked.

“Hey,” Usha says, giving my sleeve a tug.

“Sorry,” I say. “Distracted.”

“Me, too.” Usha smiles. “Like about ninety-nine percent of the time.”

I smile back.

“That rumor about Paige?” I say. “You were right. I don’t believe it.”

Usha’s smile shrinks up. “I was right?”

“Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, when you told us that it wasn’t true? You were right.”

Usha sighs. “Look. I was just . . . saying things. I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

“But Paige was your friend, right?”

She crosses her arms over her chest, not like she’s hugging herself, but like she’s holding herself together. “She was.”

“So you don’t think she’d—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Usha says firmly.

“Okay, but you know that Kelsey Pope was probably just trying to get attention and be dramatic, right? I mean, it’s just a stupid rumor.”

“It’s . . .” Usha picks at her orange.

“It’s what?” I prompt. “Usha?”

Usha looks up. “Kelsey shouldn’t have said it. Now can we please talk about anything else?”

I feel a twinge of anger mixed in among the stew of desperation and loss. Usha had told Mr. Fisk that I was supposed to be her friend, but Usha was supposed to be my friend, too. So why would she believe the worst about me?

After lunch, I walk Jenny out to the property line and hurry to the art room in time to inhabit Usha for another session of mural painting. This attempt at painting doesn’t go any better than our other sessions, but I’m afraid not to inhabit her. She didn’t want to paint the thing in the first place; she could very easily tell Mr. Fisk that she’s going to quit. So, I get up on that ladder and pretend I’m artistic. I add a line that might be the bridge of my nose, a curve that could be my upper lip, a sweep that I mean to be Brooke’s jawline, the cup of her ear. I stand back to assess my work. It doesn’t even look like two girls’ faces, just shapes. I eye the little moth at the bottom of the wall, waiting for its wings to flutter.

I spend the next day as tiny-boned Heath Mineo. His gossip is of a different sort entirely. Kids sidle up to him, twenties soft in their palms, and murmur drug orders—a series of names and numbers I don’t try to decode. I throw in a skeptical comment about Paige Wheeler’s suicide when I can, but the burners are much too eager to believe it was suicide; they don’t even listen.

I decide that I’m not too keen on being the school drug dealer. Not after what happened to Brooke. I wait until the guidance office is empty and squeeze the ill-gotten twenties into Mrs. Morello’s canister for harelipped children. I’ve prepared for some resistance from Heath, a hearty shove for giving all his money away, and I’m surprised when there’s nothing, not a stir. Maybe Heath has some ambivalence about his dealing, after all.

While I’m in the office, I retrieve Heath’s locker combination from the school secretary, who seems unfazed that Heath would have forgotten it. I’ve resolved to find Heath’s stash and flush it, and who cares how he explains that to himself tomorrow? But when I open his locker to look, a note falls at my feet. I stare at the folded square of paper resting on the toe of Heath’s sneaker, then snatch it up and open it with a shiver of premonition.

It has with a five written under it.

I know that code. I know that blocky handwriting. In fact, I’ve received the same note myself.

So instead of joining the flow of students returning to class, I walk in the opposite direction, toward the forbidden bathroom, where I expect to find Lucas Hayes waiting for me.

Too bad I get stopped on the way by Principal Bosworth, who, it turns out, knows that Heath has Algebra II this period, located nowhere near the gym. He walks me all the way back to class, where Mrs. Kearny ignores me huffily, like I’ve personally wronged her and will now be punished with the silent treatment. It takes half the hour and repeated pleas before she hands over the hall pass.

“Two minutes,” she says.

“Two,” I agree, wrenching the pass from her pincer fingers.

I run all the way to the other end of the school in a minute flat, and as I run, I think about the note tucked in Heath’s pocket. I think about how everyone else saw Lucas as this perfect specimen: gleaming smile, transcript, and trophies in the case. And I’d seen him that way, too, emphasis on the surface sparkle. Until I’d started to see him as someone else, someone who’d fix my physics project for me, someone nice, someone I might be able to like. But we’d been wrong about Lucas, my classmates and I. Or at least we’d been working with incomplete information. Turns out, Lucas is also the type of guy who has secret meetings with the school drug dealer. Turns out he’s the type of guy who’ll pretend he didn’t know you, even after you’re dead.

I round the corner and see the bathroom door in front of me. I push through it at a jog and am three steps in before I realize that my steps are splashing. I look down at my feet.

Water.

I hadn’t noticed it at first, the shhh! of the faucets running. When I turn the corner, there’s Lucas, standing in front of the overflowing sinks like he’s guarding them from potential harm. The sinks wobble with the shine of water that pours over their sides. This is no simple paper-towel-stuffed drain; this is a full-on flooding.

“Did you do this?” I ask Lucas.

His smile is like a fishhook, and his voice has a sharp, sarcastic edge to it. “Nah, I just happened to walk in on it.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“We should go,” I say. “The water’s almost out the door.”

Lucas tilts his head, his hair falling over one eye. “No. Let’s stay.”

“But they’ll think we did it.” I pause. “They’ll think I did it.”

“That’s probably true,” Lucas admits, shaking his head. “Karma, man. Sucks when it finally comes around again.”

“What are you talking about? Why are you acting like this?”

“Like what?” he says.

“Are you on something?”

He laughs at this, a dry, narrow laugh. “Just high on life.”

“I’m going,” I tell him. “And I think you should, too.”

“Really, Heath? Is that what you think I should do?”

“Yeah, it is,” I say. “But stay if you want. I’m going.”

I’m good as my word. I turn and splash back out of the bathroom and straight into Mrs. Morello and Principal Bosworth.

Three days’ suspension for Lucas and Heath, and no one will listen when I protest that I, Heath, wasn’t part of the flooding. As I’ve predicted, Mr. Bosworth fingers me as the ringleader. In fact, he keeps saying to Lucas, “You can tell us if you weren’t a part of this, son.” Lucas doesn’t deny his guilt, but he doesn’t exonerate Heath either. Guess Heath is the same as me, some guy Lucas doesn’t know.

We sit in the office for two full periods waiting for the adults to fill out the requisite paperwork and make the parent-or-guardian phone calls. Our classmates peer through the glass walls as they pass, double-taking at the sight of Lucas and me awaiting punishment together. And so the rumors will be shifting again. Heath practically lives in the office, but I wonder what they’ll say about Lucas, the school Boy Scout, the school hero, hauled in for the same crime. Mrs. Morello makes an impassioned plea for Mr. Bosworth to consider where the vandalism took place, that Lucas might be grappling with some very understandable issues around Brooke Lee’s death.

“Yeah, right,” Lucas says, only loud enough for me to hear it.

It’s not until Heath’s stepfather drives him away—as he turns out of the parking lot, I’m yanked from the backseat of the car and deposited on the school roof—that I remember Usha and the mural. The bell for sixth rang nearly half an hour ago. By the time I reach the hallway by the student parking lot, it’s too late. Usha is standing on a ladder, drop cloth pooling on the floor below her. Any questions I might have had about what she would do with the mural are answered. She brandishes a paintbrush, dripping white, and swipes over the lines of Brooke’s and my faces, turning them back into blank wall.

“No,” I whisper.

It’s gone, my connection to people, to life. She’s erasing it, sweep by sweep. Erasing me. I stand there staring.

Maybe we should be trying to forget.

Until I feel someone staring just as intently at me.

Both Usha and I turn at the clang.

Greenvale Greene has dropped a can of paint. She kneels to pick it up, but she keeps glancing at me, her eyes wild under the brush of her bangs.

“What happened?” Usha says, and when Greenvale doesn’t answer, she begins to climb down the ladder. “You okay?”

I step toward Greenvale. “Can you see me?”

She turns back to the paint, but a small moan escapes her mouth.

“Greenvale?” Usha says.

“You can,” I say. “You can see me!”

I take another step.

Greenvale bolts.