Absent

3: A LESSON FROM THE SCHOOL SLUT

THE FEELING IN BETWEEN THE CURB AND THE ROOF, EVEN though it lasts only a moment, isn’t a pleasant one. It’s a flattening, separating, pressing feeling, like a meager pat of butter scraped thin over burnt toast. Once it’s over, I feel lumped back together again, but all wrong. I open my eyes and look down at the parking lot below. I scuff my shoes against the cement lip that runs foot-high around the edge of the school roof. A safety feature. Ha.

I don’t have to think about holding myself in place here on the roof’s ledge. I don’t have to worry about hovering. Besides the soil of the earth, this is the only spot in the school where the world can touch me and I can touch it. I didn’t die from hitting the ground; I died from hitting my head right here on this ledge. This little section of concrete is where my skull cracked and the shards of bone pushed themselves up into the squish of my brain, stopping its flashes and flickers. My death spot.

I let the soles of my boots relax onto the cement, let the breeze pick up the stray bits of hair that have eternally escaped my rubber band. A curl of ivy grows from a crack in the cement at my feet; on its end, a tiny pointed green leaf. I reach down and pluck it, just because I can. Though as soon as I pull it from its vine, the little leaf drifts through the tips of my fingers and down to the parking lot below. I wish I’d let it alone to keep growing.

Each time I step over the school’s property line, I end up back here. Just like when Brooke steps over the school property line, she appears on the floor of the school bathroom or Evan on the seal of the gym floor. When we try to escape, the school takes us back to where we died. Our death spots.

I look out at the neighborhood across the road. My house is over there, too far away to see, small and green with dark red trim, colors my father always threatened to paint over. When I was little, I begged him not to. The Christmas House, that’s what the kids at school called it, and it had felt special to live in a house with such a name. As I’d grown older, the specialness had worn off, the colors reverting themselves to simple green and red. At some point, I’d stopped protesting when my father talked about how any day now he’d repaint the house. Just do it, I’d finally said. You keep talking about it. After that, he’d never mentioned it again. It occurs to me now that maybe the real reason my father had kept saying he’d repaint the house was just to hear me ask him not to.

There are so many things to lose.

I search the horizon for the house that I can’t even see. I think again of my parents. Will someone tell them what Kelsey said at the grief group meeting? Will they think that I killed myself? Even if they don’t believe it, would a tiny part of them wonder if it was true? I imagine their faces the saddest I’ve ever seen them, my father’s brow folded up into wrinkles, the sound of my mother’s crying, small expulsions of breath like she’s being punched in the stomach again and again.

The thought takes my feet out from under me. I sit down and drop my head into my hands, wishing my death spot would allow for tears. I come here when it rains anyway, turn my face up and let the drops plink on my cheeks. The moment I step off my death spot and back onto the roof, I’m dry again, like the rain never was. I lift my face from my hands, scanning the clouds for dark spots, for flickers of lightning.

“Thought you’d be up here,” a voice says behind me.

I turn. Brooke sits on the cage of one of the whirring industrial fans, inspecting a hole in her jeans.

“I hate these jeans, you know? But that morning, everything else was unwearably dirty. Leave it to me to OD on laundry day.” She works her finger around the frayed edge of the hole. “I had this other pair I wish I could be wearing. People wrote all over them. Everyone I know wrote on them. Like I was famous.”

I remember those jeans, the denim faded to a soft parchment. And she isn’t exaggerating. Nearly every inch of them was covered in messages, signatures, and doodles. And when I say every inch, I mean even the butt, even the inner thighs. People said it was the guys she had sex with who got signature space there. It was the school joke: sign the slut. She must not know about that part.

“I wonder where they are now,” she says. “My mom probably burned them. She was always threatening to.”

“You don’t think she would keep them?” I picture my own mom standing in front of my closet jammed with musty thrift-store finds. She wouldn’t throw anything away. She’d keep it all on the hangers.

“When I was alive, I wanted everything to change. Now it never will. Same stupid hole in my jeans. Same stupid school.”

Brooke hops down from the fan and crosses the roof to where I sit on the ledge. She peers over the side. We both look at the ground below.

“I’ve done it, you know,” she says. “I’ve jumped.”

“Off a roof?”

“Off this roof.”

I feel cold, like the wind isn’t hitting me anymore, but rushing straight through me. “When?”

“After you died. I wondered what it felt like for you.”

“Did it hurt when you hit the ground?” I ask.

“Did it hurt for you?” she asks back, her voice cracking on the word hurt.

“I wasn’t awake for that part. I hit here.” I touch the roof’s ledge. The cement shows no stain of blood, no chip of bone, no sign I was even there. “That hurt. But it also . . . the whole thing felt like I was watching it happen. Like I was watching myself slip. Fall. They say that’s what shock feels like.”

I look up from the ground and out across the parking lot, the last bits of winter’s snow piled and rock-riddled like scraps left on a plate.

“Did it hurt when you OD’d?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Did it feel like you were watching it happen?”

“It felt like I was watching stupid Lucas Hayes lean over me, trying to get his cell phone out of his bag. Then he stared at it forever, and I was, like, Dial 911. How hard is that? Not that I could manage to tell him that, since I was busy going into cardiac arrest at the time. What’s his excuse?”

“He was probably scared,” I say.

“Scared of getting in trouble,” she says.

“It must have been a shock to walk in on.”

“A shock to walk in on,” she repeats. “Yeah, that must have been real traumatic for Lucas compared to, you know, dying.” She studies me. “Did he tell you that? That he was in shock?”

“I didn’t really, you know, know him or anything,” I say.

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Lying. I know about you and Lucas. I used to watch you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I mumble.

She ticks off on her fingers. “I mean the notes he put in your locker, the secret looks in the hall, the trips out there.” She points to the burners’ trees, tiny across the black stretch of parking lot. “Of course I couldn’t follow you there.” And she couldn’t have. It’s across the school property line; that’s why the burners meet there to smoke. “But I have an imagination and, if you believe the gossip, plenty of experience with that kind of thing.”

“We didn’t . . . we only . . . we only kissed,” I splutter. I shake my head. “You knew?” I’m not sure how I feel. Relieved? I think I feel relieved. “No one knew. I didn’t even tell Usha.”

“Why not? Wasn’t she your best friend or something?”

“It was no big deal.” I leave the other reasons unspoken: that I didn’t know how to explain it, me hooking up with some testo. The testo. The celebrated Lucas Hayes, Mr. Slam Dunk, Mr. Gleam Tooth. And then, the reason I only sometimes admitted, that if the truth had gotten out, it would have been over. Lucas wouldn’t have wanted to meet me anymore.

Brooke eyes me like she knows all my reasons anyhow. “So Lucas never told you about how he stood there and watched me die?”

“Sometimes he said things that . . . I know he wished he could have done something.”

“Something,” Brooke echoes. “Or nothing.”

“He was scared. He tried.”

“Just like he tried to be your boyfriend?”

“I never asked him for that. It wasn’t a big deal with labels and corsages and things. I’m not that type of girl.”

“Did he make you memorize that little speech?” she asks bitterly.

“I’d think if anyone would understand, it’d be you.”

“Why? Because I was the school slut? At least I wouldn’t pretend not to know someone because it would hurt my reputation.”

“He wasn’t doing that,” I say, but it sounds weak even to me.

For a long moment, we stare out across the street at the houses lit up for the night. Tiny yellow windows. You have no idea how warm those lights are until you’re outside the circle of their glow.

“Brooke?”

“Yeah?”

“When you were watching us?”

“Yeah?”

“Did it look like . . . ? Did it seem like Lucas . . . ?” I give up.

“Did it look like he liked you?” Brooke asks for me.

“Not that it matters,” I mumble.

Brooke’s laugh is dark enough to douse a few of those lights across the street. “Here’s a lesson from the school slut: They always look that way when they’re kissing you.”

I don’t know what to say to that. We stand in silence.

“It’s not so bad, you know,” Brooke finally says, “having them think things about you that aren’t true. They all think I was a druggie.”

“Brooke. You died of a cocaine overdose.”

“I wasn’t a druggie, though. I only tried it a couple of times.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“That’s it. It’s like a ridiculous after-school special: The chick gets pregnant the first time she has sex, the kid crashes the first time he drives drunk, the girl dies . . .”

She doesn’t finish the last one. Her mouth twitches, like only a fraction of the smile can make it through. “I’m just saying, we’re dead now. What does it matter what they say? How is it any different from what they said about us when we were alive?”

You’re right, I should say. It doesn’t matter about them. But I can’t quite get the words out, so I don’t say anything, just pick out patches of dark across the road, trying to guess which house will be the next to turn on its lights.