Absent

2: THE BURNERS’ CIRCLE

“I’M NOT EVEN THE SUICIDE TYPE,” I SAY.

“The suicide type?” Evan raises an eyebrow.

“You know. Black-haired girls with blond roots and notebooks full of poems with the word crepuscular in them. Or guys who wear all beige and won’t talk unless it’s about their Japanese sword collection, and then they won’t stop talking.”

“I don’t know,” Brooke says. “You kinda look like the type to me.” She stares pointedly at my feet.

“What? They’re just boots! I like all the buckles.”

“I think maybe there isn’t a suicide type,” Evan says.

We’ve gathered to the side of the hallway, clear of the students rushing from this class to that. Brooke stands at the drinking fountain, her hand pressed to the spigot. A testo from the wrestling team lumbers up and pushes the button, making the water arc straight through Brooke’s palm, unimpeded, into the steel drain. This is not to say that Brooke is translucent. In fact—tight-jeaned, liquid-eyelined, licorice-whip of a ponytail—she appears solid as anything. But the water pierces her hand all the same. The testo bends to drink, taking only a sip before he backs away with a grimace.

Brooke cackles. “Look! My hand makes the water taste funny.”

Evan shakes his head. “Don’t start trouble.”

But all Brooke wants to do is start trouble, just as much as Evan wants to prevent it, just as much as I don’t care what either of them does.

“He’s the third one in a row who wouldn’t drink.” Brooke turns to the bustling hallway and cries like a barker, “Water here! Get your fresh water!”

“It’s just a rumor,” Evan tells me. “They’ll get tired of it once someone starts a new rumor.”

“But even if they stop gossiping about it, they’ll still think it,” I say. “That’s how I’ll be remembered: Paige the Jumper. Paige the Suicide Case.”

“Look on the bright side,” Brooke says. “Eventually they’ll all graduate.”

“I was going to graduate, go to college.” I sigh. “Maybe no one told the schools that I died. Maybe they’ll still send the letters. Maybe they’re holding a spot for me somewhere.”

“Where did you apply?” Evan asks.

“Oregon State, Washington State, USC.”

Brooke has stopped with her drinking fountain and is staring at me strangely. When I meet her gaze, her eyes flit away. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about colleges in front of Brooke. Even if she hadn’t died, she probably wouldn’t have applied anywhere. According to the gossip, her interests were in activities other than the academic. What happens to a girl like Brooke after high school?

“They’re all on the other side of the country,” Evan notes.

“I wanted to go somewhere else. Leave Michigan. Leave here. And now,” I gesture at our surroundings, “here I am.”

“Here we are,” Brooke echoes.

“It’s not so bad.” Evan turns and looks at the hall, the flow and burble of students rushing by us. “I mean, it could be worse. We have classes and the library and people all around us.”

I open my mouth to say something sarcastic about the meager joys of still having high school, but then Evan adds, “We have each other.” And I decide to shut up because until Brooke arrived in September, Evan was here alone. For how long, he won’t say.

“You get used to it,” Evan says, like he can read my mind. “You’re already getting used to it.”

Brooke raises an eyebrow. “Settle in for the world’s longest detention.”

It’s the same thing I’d told myself: that I was getting used to it, coming to terms, or whatever nonsense phrase Mrs. Morello might use for it. But suddenly I feel . . . what? Unsettled. Unfinished. Restless. A restless ghost. Why? Because of some stupid rumor? The phrase “accidental fall” spoken in Mrs. Morello’s emphatic tone repeats in my head. I feel it all over again, the giddy dread of my foot stepping back and finding no ground under it.

The bell rings, interrupting my thoughts.

“Come to Fisk’s class with me,” Evan urges.

“No thanks.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You? Skip class?” Evan considers it his sworn duty to attend each and every class period, even though his name doesn’t appear on any roster. Brooke, on the other hand, brags that she hasn’t attended a full class since she was alive. The best part of being dead, she claims.

Evan shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling in precise intervals. “They’re playing dodgeball in the gym. Maybe we can see someone lose a tooth again.”

“You looked like you were gonna puke last time that happened.”

“Well, this time I’ll close my eyes and think of the tooth fairy.”

“Go to class, Evan,” I say. “I’m immune to your attempts at cheer-upped-ness.”

Evan looks skeptical. “You sure?”

“Allergic, in fact.” I take a step backward. “If it makes you happy, I’ll go to class, too.”

“Why anyone would willingly go to class,” Brooke mutters.

“I think they’re dissecting frogs today in junior bio,” I say.

“And that cheers you up?” Evan asks.

“I find it therapeutic.” The school is lousy with ghost frogs, chloroformed for dissection. Beige, green, leopard-spotted, they gather in the corners of the basement, croaking softly, blinking their marbled eyes, and hopping through the cinder-block walls.

“If you’re sure,” Evan says, clearly relieved to have gotten out of dodgeball.

“Sure I’m sure. Maybe we can find the new frogs tonight. We can say to them, ‘You must have been so sad, frog.’ ” I imitate Kelsey’s tremulous voice. “ ‘What friends we might have been.’ ”

I’ve lied to Evan. I have no intention of attending a class where I’ve already been marked permanently, irrevocably, absent. As soon as he turns the corner, I head out to the student parking lot, telling myself I’m just looking for some fresh air (air that I can’t even breathe), telling myself I’m just looking for the sun (sun hidden behind spring storm clouds), telling myself I’m not (definitely not) looking for Lucas Hayes.

On my way to the burners’ circle, I balance atop the cement stoppers that line the lot. Just after my death—three weeks ago now—I couldn’t have balanced like this, couldn’t even have walked down the school hall without sinking through the tiles, down to the basement where finally the earth would’ve stopped my fall with its sediments, its fossils, its underground rivers, and—deep below—its glowing, churning core.

I spent the first week after my death stuck on the packed-dirt floor of the school basement, surrounded by an army of croaking ghost frogs. I sat in their midst, sometimes crying, sometimes rocking, sometimes staring vacantly at the skinny freckled boy who would sit across from me speaking, in patient tones, words that I couldn’t stand to hear. Then one day, for no good reason, I felt like I could bear to see the world again. But when I tried to mount the first step of the stairs, my foot sank straight through it, back down to the dirt, where I suppose I now belong.

It took Evan nearly forever to teach me how to suspend myself just millimeters above the school floor (or a set of stairs or the seat of a chair) so that I could approximate the postures of life. Hovering, he calls it. Even now, if I don’t use a tiny corner of my mind to hold myself just so, I will sink until I hit the earth, however far below that might be. Now, only weeks later, I can hover pretty easily. It was easy once I figured out it wasn’t so different from the ways in which life requires you to hold yourself just so.

I’ve become so adept at hovering that I can, with concentration, jump from one cement stopper to the next, which I do all the way to the adjacent soccer field. I tread out across the field, as close to the burners’ circle as I can get. The circle is just a cluster of trees earning their leaves back in patches, a spotty effect like a Boy Scout sash only half-filled with badges.

Lucas Hayes was in Boy Scouts when he was little. He told me when we met among those trees on the day before I died. He could still list off all the badges he’d earned, he said. “Prove it,” I said, and so he had, from American Heritage to Wilderness Survival. As he spoke, he assembled my physics project, twisting the strands of wire into the cardboard box. He gave one of the wires a new twist with the name of each badge.

“You’re still a Boy Scout.” I nudged him with my shoulder, the tree bark rasping against the back of my jacket. The snow was still on the ground, except in the burners’ circle, where the tree branches held it off of us, as if this place were set aside for us, preserved.

“Careful.” He lifted the box. “There’s an egg in here, you know.”

“Yes, I know. It’s my project you hijacked. Besides, you’re doing it all wrong.” He hadn’t been, but I could twist the wires just as well as he could.

He handed the project back to me with his flashbulb smile.

“See? Like this,” I said.

“For the record, I’m not a Scout anymore. I dropped out in sixth grade.”

“Well, maybe you’re not a Scout, but you’re still Scout-like. Admit it, you still have that sash.”

“It was a vest, actually, and really, I’m not as good as all that.”

“Why? Because you have a secret—” I bit down on my sentence.

I’d almost said girlfriend, which I was not. Not at all. We’d agreed on that from the start. Who needed the looks in the hallway? Not to mention the gossip. Besides, it was no big deal. He was just a stupid testo.

A stupid testo who happened to be good at kissing.

Fortunately, Lucas didn’t seem to have heard my slip. “Come on,” I babbled for cover. “You’re captain of the whatever team.”

“You know it’s basketball,” he said. “And baseball in the spring.”

“You get good grades,” I continued, “probably mostly by smiling at the teachers. Yeah, that’s the smile I mean. And on top of it all, you’re the school hero. You practically saved a girl’s life.”

Lucas’s smile shut off. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t save her.”

And it was true. Lucas had called for help when he found her, but by the time they’d gotten there, Brooke Lee was dead. An overdose. Cocaine.

“Sorry,” I murmured. And I was.

“How about you?” Lucas said, his smile back, though at half wattage. “Were you a Girl Scout?”

“Nope. Not me. I’m not much for dressing identically and earning badges.”

“That reminds me. I forgot to mention one other thing I earned a badge for.” He leaned close, the cloud of his breath puffing against my face. I should have earned a badge for not wincing at Lucas’s pick-up lines.

“A kissing badge, huh? How’d you practice your skill? On the troop leader or the other little boys?” I inquired of his puckered-up face.

“You’re sick, Paige Wheeler.”

“The sickest,” I said happily.

“I like that about you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I do.” He paused, looking suddenly serious. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind that you messed up my physics project?”

“Mind being my secret.”

So he had heard me almost say “secret girlfriend.” I could feel the blood lighting up my cheeks, and I silently cursed my pallor. Kelsey Pope, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, tanned herself to a crisp year round; no one ever knew when she was embarrassed. If she ever had anything to be embarrassed about, that is.

“I don’t mind,” I told Lucas. “After all, you’re my secret, too.”

He smiled at this and touched my blood-lit cheek.

This time, I let him kiss me.

And I didn’t even think about wincing.

The opposite, in fact.

When we pulled away, Lucas got up and walked to the edge of the trees, scanning the soccer field and parking lot for people. He glanced back at me before stepping out.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “You’ll wait a few minutes?” He left the rest unspoken: So no one will see us together.

I stayed among the trees and watched him walk across the field, his footsteps pressing through the snow. When I walked out after him, I’d leave my footsteps behind me, too. It struck me that someone later, seeing them, would imagine two people walking side by side.

Today, the trees of the burners’ circle stand tall and silent. I can’t go in, but I can see that no one is sneaking out from between their trunks. Behind me, a door bangs open, and I turn. Three freshman boys clump by the far doors of the school. With a shove, they send one of their number into the parking lot. He ventures to a patch of tar that’s darker than the rest of the blacktop. When he reaches it, he bends down and touches it. His friends hoot in approval, and he runs back with a triumphant smile, his hand held in the air like a lit torch.

A dare to touch it.

The school door opens again, startling the boys. When they see who it is, they slide into a tighter group, feigning nonchalance. The boy who touched the patch of tar hides his hand behind his back, even though the tar dried weeks ago and his fingers are unmarked.

Lucas Hayes lopes out, followed by two of his testo teammates, laughing about something one of them said on the other side of the doors. When Lucas didn’t show up at today’s grief group, I’d secretly hoped that he was sitting out here in our circle of trees. A grief group meeting of one. But the truth is as plain as the laughter on his face. It’ll be all over the school by now, the rumor that I jumped. Has Lucas heard it? Does he believe it?

Lucas parts from his friends and continues across the lot on his own. I watch carefully as he passes the burners’ circle, and my breath catches when he glances at it. At me. I imagine him saying my name close to my ear. Paige. But then his eyes flick over me and onto the road. Of course he can’t see me. And really, it’s not so different from the times before my death when we would pass in the cafeteria or the hall and his eyes would move past me. No, through me.

I catch up to him at the edge of the lot and stand next to him on the frosty hunch of grass that separates school from road. A steady stream of minivans flows past the school. As Lucas waits for a break in the traffic, I study his profile, remembering how sometimes he’d reach over and pluck an object from the ground—a bent twig, an abandoned lighter, a skeletal leaf—and gaze at it with guileless eyes. He looked at everything in the world like it was a present he’d just opened. And it was heady, being lifted from your wrappings and looked at anew, just as much as it was infuriating, the invisible tag with his name on it.

“I didn’t like you,” I say, even though he can’t hear me. “I just liked kissing you. You know that, right?”

And then something possesses me, and I reach over and grab his hand. As I do, Lucas turns and looks back at the burners’ circle. Underneath the rush of afternoon traffic, I hear it again. Paige.

And my hand.

It bumps against his.

It catches.

I’m not saying that I’m holding Lucas’s hand. I’m not saying that. But instead of passing through, my hand settles in his like it’s found a pocket of space where it fits. I stare down at it. When I was alive, Lucas and I never held hands.

I start to feel something in the center of me dissolving like sugar into water, like snow on the pavement, like my body when Lucas kissed me deep. But just as the feeling starts to grow, Lucas turns and spots a break in the traffic. He leaps off the curb, his hand falling free of mine. Before I know it, he’s disappeared between the houses across the street.

I step off the curb after him, across the invisible property line that separates school grounds from the rest of the world. But unlike Lucas, my feet don’t land on the blacktop of the street in front of me. Instead, with one small step, I find myself hundreds of feet back and three stories above where I just was. I now stand on the lip of the school roof.