Absent

20: THE DROP CLOTH

I MAKE A NEW PLAN THE NEXT DAY TO FOLLOW LUCAS HAYES until he thinks of me. I will walk into Bosworth’s office and make Lucas tell the truth about his part in Brooke’s death. And Lucas won’t be able to take it back later because I’ll tell Bosworth to question Heath; I’ll tell him to call Lucas’s parents right then and there so that I can confess to them, too. It’s the truth. They’ll have to believe it.

But the next morning, Lucas doesn’t come to school. And when Kelsey and Wes saunter in from the parking lot, their shoulders bumping lightly as their steps fall together, I find myself following them instead, straining to hear the hum of their conversation, a tremor in my middle.

Neither Kelsey nor Wes thinks of me that morning. They find each other during passing breaks and take their lunches out to the courtyard. They sit close on the flagstones, sharing body heat. I watch them through the windows from inside the school. It’s too cold out there, even for a dead girl who can no longer feel things like cold. Wes makes a comment that causes Kelsey to throw her head back and laugh. Would she be able to make him laugh? Yesterday, I had.

I step through the brick and glass out into the courtyard.

“. . . sit inside with your friends?” Wes is saying when I get in earshot.

Kelsey makes a face. “No thanks.”

“You’re in a fight?” Wes asks.

“No fight. We’re just not friends.” Kelsey picks up a piece of foil from her lunch, adjusts it so that it makes a reflection on the flagstones. “I did some things. I don’t know why. They were just little things, like wearing the wrong kind of clothes.”

“Or asking the wrong kind of guy to the dance?” Wes raises an eyebrow.

She smiles down at her foil, makes the reflection dance.

My little things, I think. The things I made her do.

“At first it was just an impulse, an experiment. And it was like they thought I was someone else entirely. Some stranger. I was sure I’d ruined everything, my friendships, my entire senior year, myself. But then”—she squints—“I started to be okay with it. I started even to like it. I didn’t have to be so careful to be nice and pretty and just this way. I could just . . .” She flips the foil onto the flagstones, where it joins with its reflection. “Be.”

After lunch, art class takes the two of them past the drop cloth for my old mural. They glance at it, my name spoken in unison by their thoughts. Before I’ve thought about it, I’m pushing my way into Kelsey and blinking up at Wes through her hazel eyes. I reach out to take his hand, but have to pull back because he’s still gazing at the drop cloth, his mind whispering, Paige.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask him.

“Oh,” his eyes flick to me, back to the drop cloth. “Her, I guess. Paige Wheeler.”

“You knew her?”

“Just a little.”

My gaze falls on the sketchbook tucked under his arm. “Why did you draw all those pictures of her, then?”

He turns, nakedly surprised, my name gone from his thoughts mid-syllable, as if it has dropped through a trapdoor. “You saw those?”

“You drew them because she died?”

“Actually I drew these before she died. Or before I knew, anyway. I drew them that afternoon. Seventh period.”

“When she fell,” I whisper.

He offers me the sketchbook. I take it gingerly, flip through the pages, my face appearing before me again and again, but with small differences between each drawing, as if I’m changing my expression, as if I’m moving. That girl who is me. Who isn’t me.

“Why did you draw them?” I ask again.

“I don’t know. Maybe I liked her.”

I’m standing on tile floor, hard and cold and square beneath my feet, but suddenly it feels like I can’t count on the ground at all. It’s like my first days learning to hover, when the floor was an iced-over lake—one wrong step, and I’ll fall through.

“Maybe?” I hear my voice say.

“All right, not maybe. I liked her.”

“You should have told her.”

Wes smiles humorlessly. “Well, what do you know? I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“I mean, are you sure you did? Because I don’t think—”

“I made it pretty clear.”

Had he? I think back to the smirks that might have been smiles, the mockery that might have been flirtation. And then, there was that moment in the burners’ circle. If you were meeting me, he’d said, I’d make a point of being here.

And what had I said to that ridiculous burner, that annoying joker who was Wes Nolan? I’d make a point of losing track of time.

That’s what I’d said.

All my time is gone now. I won’t get to chart the crookedness of another boy’s smile. I won’t get to leap giddily from teasing gibe to gibe. I won’t get to walk down the hallway with him like Kelsey did today, everyone noting, They’re together. Those two. I won’t get to fall in love. I’ve never been in love.

I turn to Wes and ask the question I don’t want to ask, the question I have no right to ask, the question that I’m already asking: “If you liked her, if you liked Paige, what are you doing here with me?”

“Kelsey,” he says, and I’m surprised by how the sound of her name on his tongue suddenly hurts me. “Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“That’s right. She’s dead now.”

Wes reaches out, and I take a step back, his fingers grazing the place where I’d been. This time, the problem isn’t that he’s thinking my name, but that he isn’t.

“I can’t—” I say, and I don’t know how to finish. I can’t what? What is it that I can’t do with Wes?

Besides nothing.

Besides anything.

I turn and walk away from the hurt in his eyes, the light in her eyes, too, that girl under the tree.

As I march Kelsey out of the school and across the parking lot, here are the things I don’t care about: I don’t care that I’m making Kelsey skip class. I don’t care that I made her break things off with Wes. I don’t care that she might like him. I don’t care that he might like her back. I don’t care that he’s not following me. Her. Whoever. I don’t care that he might have liked me. I don’t care about him. I don’t care about myself.

I’m walking faster and faster in Kelsey’s tippy-top boots, until she’s across the road and I’m back where I belong, up on the school roof. The parking lot stretches out in front of me. One time, not so long ago, it must have been a field, not a parking lot. What happens to the grass when they lay all that tar over it?

I’ll tell you what happens.

It dies.

I stare down at the blacktop.

Something catches my eye.

A movement.

Something.

Nothing.

I blink.

Harriet Greene.

There she is, right down there in the parking lot. She stands on the accident site, at the end of the curling tire tracks. She looks around her, bewildered, turns in a slow circle.

“Harriet!” I shout.

Then, she’s gone.

Blink again and she’s back. This time, though, she’s flickering, like a guttering candle. She’s there, then not, there, not.

There.

I glance over my shoulder, taking in the distance back across the roof, back to the door, down through the school. She could disappear again any moment. There’s not time to get down there, not time for the stairs.

I take a shaking breath and step up on the ledge.

I don’t look down at the ground below me. I know what I’ll see if I do, that little patch of tar darker than the rest. Instead, I steel myself. Instead, I do what they all said I did.

I jump.

This time, I’m awake for the fall. Each set of windows I pass blazes with reflected light, like a flashbulb. I have enough time to think, Thirty-two feet per second squared, before I land in a heap, the ground jarring up through whatever part of me has been left in this world. I stand, but find I can’t manage to hover, not after the shock of that fall. I limp forward, toes skimming through the asphalt. Harriet is still there in front of me (thank God), only yards away.

She’s seen me now. She’s shouting something. But the volume is turned off. I can see her, but there’s no sound.

I wave my arms, gesture to my ears. “Harriet! I can’t hear you!”

Her silent shouts become more frantic. She points back at the school, then at herself. I’m almost there, close enough to see that she’s saying the same thing over and over, but she’s flickering again, and I can’t make out the word her lips are forming.

Then she’s gone.

I stand at the end of the tire tracks, follow them with my eyes as they curl into nothing.