Absent

7: SKETCHES OF BIRD AND GIRL

I WAKE UP WITH A GASP. FOR A SECOND, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I am. The light is all wrong; even in the darkest hour of the night, the glow of the streetlamp outside my bedroom comes through the slats of my blinds, dissecting my room into strips of shadow and light.

Then I remember that I’m not in my bedroom. I’m in the basement of the school, the dirt of the floor pressing against my cheek, the ghost frogs trilling around me. I must have fallen asleep in the library next to Evan and, once I’d stopped hovering, sunk through the floor all the way down to the basement. I’d dreamt I was falling, too, that dream everyone has where you wake up just before you hit the ground.

Well, you do. You wake up.

Me, I hit.

When I climb the stairs, the halls are filled and the tardy bell is clanging. People buzz by, some of them carry crumpled brown bags, others the neon-potion dregs of energy drinks. That’s the bell for the end of lunch, then. I’ve slept through the whole morning.

With a gut-twist, I remember the day before: Kelsey starting the rumor, Lucas skipping my grief group, Usha refusing to paint the mural. This afternoon, the crowd still crawls with whispers of my name, the suicide rumor coughed from mouth to ear like a virus. I search the groups for Patient Zero and her flapping silk banner of hair. My eyes narrow when I spot it. Kelsey Pope. I follow her all the way to art class.

That I find Evan in the art room, hovering on the cupboards that line the back wall, is no surprise. He spends most of his day in the art room because, according to him, Mr. Fisk is the best teacher at Paul Revere High. But I’d forgotten that Usha has art this period, too. She stands at Mr. Fisk’s desk with her sketchpad open. As Kelsey takes a seat with her ponies, I approach the front of the room apprehensively. Usha and I have only fought once, back in ninth grade. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but I do remember that we didn’t talk for a week. And, it felt exactly like this: angry and shameful and resentful and regretful all at once. At least Usha doesn’t have her arms crossed over her chest today; at least she isn’t talking in that horrible detached voice about how she wants to forget me.

“It’s just . . .” She holds the book out and turns her head away, as if she can’t bear to look at it. “It’s just something I tried.”

Birds.

She has drawn a flock of birds. The page is filled with them, gliding, flapping, and hovering. They are no birds I know, no robins, seagulls, egrets, or wrens. She has made up new breeds, new spreads of feather, new sequences of markings, new wingspans, bright eyes, scales, talons, crops, and crests. The style is cartoonlike, but not hasty, not comic; the shaft of each feather has been sketched out, the nostril of each beak. They are all in flight, these birds, and though there is no formation, no migration, their beaks all point in the same direction.

Usha has always been able to draw, turning an errant scribble in my notebook margin into a tiny monster or hothouse flower. When I’d watched her draw, it had seemed so easy—a mark like this here, a line like so there—but whenever I’d tried to re-create one of Usha’s doodles myself, my monsters ended up smudgy blobs, my hothouse flowers, sticks. Usha would take the paper out of my clumsy hands and draw over it—a few quick lines, and suddenly my monster had charm, my flower had pollen and scent. I liked the fact that Usha could draw. In fact, I felt so fiercely proud of her that it was as if the talent were my own, as if there were something that special about me.

Mr. Fisk makes a few remarks about perspective—neither of them mentions yesterday’s conversation about the mural—and I watch Usha retreat to her table, where she flips to a new page and begins to draw an ocean full of jellyfish.

I walk to Evan at the back of the room.

“Sleep well?” he asks with a grin.

“Thanks for waking me up before I sank through the floor,” I tell him.

“Aw, but you looked so peaceful.” Every once in a while, I get a peek past Evan’s hall-monitor exterior, and what’s beneath is pure infuriation. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Keeping an eye on her.” I nod over at Kelsey, who’s in a huddle with the other ponies, the light bouncing off their flat-ironed hair. “What do you think she’ll say about me next?”

“Maybe nothing.”

I give him a look.

“Maybe it just slipped out,” he says. “Maybe she didn’t mean to—”

Precisely then, a whisper of my name hisses from the pony table. “Hear that?”

“Hear what?” Evan asks.

“Over there. They just said my name.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Evan says. “They’re not even talking. They’re all looking at something.” He squints. “What is that?”

It turns out to be a sketchbook, but the ponies are clustered so tightly around it that we can’t even see the white of the page.

“I wasn’t looking for it, I swear,” one of them is saying, her voice chock-full of delight. “It was open in his cubby, like he’d left it that way on purpose. I couldn’t not see it.”

“And it’s whose again?” Kelsey asks.

“You know, that one kid. Wes Nolan.”

“Who?” Kelsey repeats.

“You know. That goofy stoner who sits over there.”

“Oh, yeah,” the other pony says. “Buy a new coat once a decade, you know?”

“And he drew all of these?” Kelsey asks.

“There are pages of them.”

The girls are still blocking the sketchbook, which is just as well. I can already imagine the huge mammaries and drooling zombies Wes Nolan has been drawing. This has nothing to do with me, and I’m already turning away when Kelsey says, “Do you think she posed for these? She couldn’t have, right?”

A girl posed for Wes Nolan’s drawings?

“She must have,” the pony with the book says. “He couldn’t have drawn these all from memory.”

“And I don’t want to be mean,” the other pony adds, “but who knows what she might have done? Right, Kelse?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Who?” Evan says, trying to hop up to see and then land on the floor in a hover, with limited success.

The ponies fall silent. My mind isn’t silent, though. It’s packed with my own name, shouted in a roar that fills my ears. Me. They’re talking about me. Then one of them shifts, and I can see it.

The edges of the paper are a cloud of blurred lead that clears in the paper’s center to reveal a girl sitting at the base of a tree. She’s slouched in a graceful curl, knees drawn to her chest. Her hair falls in a messy cascade of strands and shadows across a determined jaw and chin. There’s a stick in her hand, and she’s scratching designs in the dirt. Kelsey flips through the other pages, and there the girl is again and again. Always at the tree, always with a stick. In most of the sketches, she’s looking down at the designs she’s drawn, but in a few, her face is turned toward the viewer, her eyes wide and luminous, her lips bow-shaped and touched with a smile. She is much more delicate, more charming, much prettier than I ever could be. She is also, unmistakably, me.

I back away, all the way away, back to Usha’s table and plant myself on an empty stool, Usha’s pencil scratching next to me like a reassuring whisper. My eyes hadn’t met Wes’s, not like that, I think. I hadn’t been waiting there for him. I’m angry, I realize. So angry I might start shouting.

At who? a small voice asks. About what?

At Wes of course, I think. How dare he draw me like that!

I pull in a breath and realize that I’ve been staring blindly at Usha’s hand working across the page. She hasn’t been drawing jellyfish, as I’d first thought, but parachutes. The domes are not made of translucent flesh, but panels of fabric. Not tentacles hanging down, but ropes, a curled skydiver dangling from each one. She’s even drawn harnesses, the tiny buckles holding them to parachutes that lower them gently to the ground.

Evan arrives at my shoulder. “That was something.”

“It was nothing,” I say tersely.

But I look at the door, suddenly worried that Wes will bang through it, tardy as usual, with his stupid crooked grin and stupider jokes. I tell myself that it might not have even been me, the girl he drew. She hadn’t even looked like me. Not really. I didn’t have those eyes. Not that smile.

“Well, at least we found the next rumor about you,” Evan says.

“You see how she is? Who knows what she might decide to say next.”

“Actually, it was her friend who found—”

“The sick thing is she doesn’t even know me. She knows nothing about me. She’s just saying things for . . . I don’t know why. Why do people say things like that?”

I shoot an evil look in the general direction of the ponies, but my eyes land on the table by the door. I hadn’t seen it before, because it is small and situated in the corner and it holds only one student sitting by herself.

Greenvale Greene is looking right at me.

Our eyes lock. Hers are so light they’re nearly colorless. Her clothes—the same jeans and hoodie as anyone else’s—appear somehow ill-fitting and out of style, like wrinkled hand-me-downs. Her hair, lank and unbrushed, falls in her eyes.

Greenvale Greene, I think.

Paige Wheeler, a voice whispers in return.

I glance over my shoulder to see what Greenvale is really looking at, surely someone else behind me. But no one is there except for Evan and the blank wall. And when I turn back, Greenvale isn’t there either. A flash of bony elbow, the sole of an off-brand shoe, and the door to the art room slams shut.

“Who was that?” Mr. Fisk looks up. “Who just left?”

“Harriet Greene,” someone says. This is followed by a ripple of the word Greenvale, spoken almost as a superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder or touching the points of the cross.

“Maybe she could ask for a hall pass next time,” Fisk says.

“Maybe she really had to go,” someone suggests, which elicits laughter.

I wonder if they’d still have laughed if they’d seen her face before she ran from the room. Eyes wide, mouth open in fear.

It was as if she’d seen a ghost.