Absent

1: MARCH GRIEF GROUP MEETING

AT THE MARCH GRIEF GROUP MEETING, MY FORMER CLASSMATES steer their chairs in lazy circles, bumping the armrests against one side of the table, then the other. Posters stare down at them, pouting teen models labeled with pretend afflictions: Anorexia! Gonorrhea! Steroids! Depression! On the table, a row of Kleenex boxes issues its scratchy white blossoms. How many tears would it take to soak this supply? How many nose blows? How many muffled sobs? They should advertise on the side of the box: Good for the average break-up, fourteen sad movies, or the death of a small dog. Not that anyone here is crying over the death of a small dog. Or the death of a teenage girl. Though I suppose the dog has a better chance of earning a few tears.

We dead kids sit on the floor in the corner of the room: one, two, three. On my left, Evan holds his skinny body upright, like it’s a posture contest. On my right, Brooke slumps so far forward that she manages to display the fraying lace of both bra in the front and underwear in the back. I sit between them, knees pulled to chin, the buckles of my boots clinking around my ankles when I shift, like Marley’s chains. The three of us never would have sat together when we were alive.

At least I fold up easily in my soft-skin clothes—old jeans and a velvety jacket from one of Usha’s vintage scrounges. She’s convinced me to like about used clothes what most people hate: the other bodies that have unstiffened their elbows and knees, stretched out their pockets, salted them with sweat, only to toss the clothes out at the precise moment when they are really ready to be worn. Even the rubber band that holds my hair in a twist at the edge of my vision was scooped off a teacher’s desk.

“They’ll talk about you now, Paige. You’ll see,” Brooke whispers.

“Like I care what they say.” And I don’t. Care. They had one of these grief group meetings after Brooke’s death back in September. Now they’ve added my death to the agenda. Two birds, one stone. Two dead girls, one conference room. I’m only here because Evan kept pestering me to come.

“If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll say you were friendly and free-spirited.” Brooke puts sarcastic emphasis on the words the group has just used to describe her.

“Those were nice things to say,” Evan tells her.

“They were nice ways of saying slut,” Brooke replies.

Friendly and free-spirited—those aren’t words my former classmates will use to describe me. My words probably live in the S section of the alphabet: sarcastic, smart-mouthed, slouchy.

Usha stares at the fake wood of the conference table. She’s wearing her mechanic’s jumpsuit, the one with the Orville nametag on it. I was the one who’d pulled that jumpsuit from the two-dollar bin at the Salvation Army, but I let her have it because she’d held it up to herself and twirled. I wasn’t the twirling type of girl, but Usha was. Or at least she used to be. Since my death, she’s been the tabletop-staring type of girl. I wish I could tell her that I’m okay. I wish I could tell her that I miss her.

I catalog the other faces around the table. Next to Usha perches the gaggingly beautiful Kelsey Pope, who tears out a strip of notebook paper and begins to fold it into an origami flower. By the end of the meeting, that flower is going to be tucked behind her petal of an ear; you can bet on it. I’m surprised to see Kelsey here because it’s not like we were friends. Maybe she wants people to think she is deep. Maybe she wrote a poem about it. At the foot of the table, shaggy-haired Wes Nolan fingers something in his pocket, obviously something forbidden—a lighter, a little bag of pot, a folding knife. Everyone knows he’s only here to get out of class.

All in all, fifteen of my former classmates have gathered for one final chance to memorialize Brooke and me. Fifteen out of the 632 students at Paul Revere High School. What percentage is that? I start to do the math in my head, but stop because I already know the number will be pathetically low.

And then there are the people who didn’t bother to come at all.

Lucas Hayes, for example.

Not that I expected him to.

“Paige Wheeler.” Mrs. Morello, the guidance counselor, stretches my name until it’s completely out of shape. She wears a blue sweater as if we were little kids for whom red means anger, pink means love, and blue means sadness. “Who would like to share a memory about Paige?”

Nothing.

Not a word.

Not that I care.

I close my eyes, and the silence becomes a noise rushing under everything, like a TV set to static in the other room. If I listen carefully, I can almost hear another sound, one beneath the silence. My name. It’s as if a dozen people are whispering it in a string: Paige, Paige, Paige, Paige.

“Right here,” I almost say. “I’m right here.”

Mrs. Morello clears her throat, but this prompts no one to speak. We’re closing in on a minute now. People always call for a minute of silence, but really a minute is a long time when you’re—scuffling, whispering, fidgeting—alive. And a minute is forever when you’re shaking on the bathroom floor or standing on the lip of a roof, the miniature world arranged so carefully below you. You feel like you could live in that minute forever, like it would stretch its bounds for you, its sixty tick-ticks, and hold your entire life.

But a minute always ends.

“I didn’t know her much.”

I look around to see who has finally spoken before realizing that the voice is coming from the end of the table. Wes Nolan.

Everyone glares at Wes like he’s just farted or belched or whooped with joy, and I know they’re thinking—because I’m thinking it, too—What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan? Wes leans back in his chair, grinning his cantilevered grin like he enjoys making a target of himself.

“But I wish I’d known her better,” he adds.

I look to Usha, hoping that she’ll say something about me. Usha knows me better than anyone. We’ve been best friends since seventh grade, when the cafeteria tables somehow squared up without us. After a week sitting alone at a table meant for twenty, I noticed this chubby Indian girl brown-bagging it in front of her locker. We weren’t supposed to have food outside of the cafeteria, but when the hall monitor paused to tell the girl so, she looked at him with such a determined grin—the kind of grin kids pull for the camera, more teeth than smile—that he unpaused without saying a word. Then she swung her grin to me; I might have walked the other way, too, except just then she reached into her sack and came up with an apple slice. Maybe that’s the memory Usha will share, how in seventh grade we crunched apple slices, and how every day for five years after that, the two of us ate lunch cross-legged on the floor in front of our lockers.

But no. Usha doesn’t say anything. She just stares at her tabletop.

Kelsey Pope speaks up instead, her hazel eyes shiny as tumbled stones, her cheek piercing winking in the UV light. “I can’t help but think we could have been friends, Paige and I.” She tucks the origami flower behind her ear.

I make a noise too sharp to be a laugh. Evan and Brooke look over. “Friends with Kelsey Pope?” I say. “Not hardly. Not ever.”

“It’s just so tragic,” Kelsey continues, and the others nod sagely at this wisdom. “I can’t imagine ever feeling sad enough to . . . oh. Nothing. Never mind.” Kelsey bites on her lip, a pouty pink stopper for her sentence.

Suddenly, the silence becomes still. People stop spinning the chairs. Their eyes connect and disconnect across the table. “I told you,” a girl I don’t know whispers to her friend. I turn to the dead kids. Evan’s expression has gone flatter than usual. Brooke rakes her fingers through her ponytail.

“Sad enough to what?” I ask, just as Wes says, “Never mind what?”

Kelsey unstoppers her mouth. “I shouldn’t say anything.” She sucks in her lips, pooches them out again. “Up on the roof, she . . .”

Kelsey trails off. Usha has finally raised her eyes from the table-top and fixed them on Kelsey with a ferocious glare. Before Kelsey can say another word, Usha pushes her chair away from the table with a screech and marches out of the room. We all look after her.

“Oh, no,” someone breathes.

“Sad enough to what?” I repeat, my voice too loud in my own ears. “Up on the roof, I what?”

“I think maybe she’s saying—” Evan begins, but Mrs. Morello talks over him. “Everyone. Please. The official cause of death was an accidental fall.” She says it like she’s reading off a script.

“Of course it was an accident,” I say. “What else would it have been?”

The bell rings a wordless answer to my question, and everyone rises, hoisting backpacks, fishing for cell phones, and wandering out. Mrs. Morello hurries after them, waving a half-signed attendance sheet. In a matter of seconds, the room is empty.

Empty but for us dead kids.

Evan, Brooke, and I look at each other across the detritus of the meeting—shredded tissues, the origami flower, a forgotten pen.

“Sad enough to jump,” I say. “That’s it, isn’t it? She was saying I killed myself.”

I wait for them to deny it. They don’t. Evan reaches out to touch my arm, never mind that we can’t touch each other. But I don’t want comfort, his or anyone’s. I take a step back.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I say. “Even if I were sad enough to think of it, I wouldn’t be so . . .”

“So what?” Evan asks.

“So weak.”

Evan drops his hand to his side. My eyes follow its trajectory, and I picture a girl standing on the edge of a roof. I picture her stepping off, one foot and then the next, and then an empty space where she had been. I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. I feel like I’m falling now, the sick swoop of gravity in my throat and gut. My eyes land on Usha’s empty chair, thrust out farther than the others.

“Usha thinks I jumped,” I say. “Did you see her face?”

“Paige,” Evan murmurs.

“It doesn’t matter what Morello tells them about accidents. They’ll all keep saying it. It’ll go around the whole school. Everyone will hear it.” Lucas will hear it, a mean little corner of my mind whispers. “Oh, God. Do you think it’ll get back to my parents?”

“No,” Evan says immediately. “No way. It’s just kids gossiping.”

“But what if it does? It could. As long as they think . . . they all think . . .,” I sputter out.

“I thought you didn’t care what they think,” Brooke says quietly.

I pick Brooke’s words up and pull them to myself like flat sheets of armor. “You’re right. I don’t care at all.”