Absent (16 page)

“If it’s embarrassing, you have to tell.”

“No, if it’s embarrassing, I don’t have to tell.”

“Come on. You can make up for insulting me.”

I smacked his arm. “You liked the insult.”

“I like lots of things,” he says.

“Fine. Here it is. It’s embarrassing because I thought it made me special, because Lucas Hayes was special, and he’d chosen me. Turns out, I could have been anyone.”

“You?” Wes says softly. “But you’re Kelsey Pope, remember?”

I look up to see if he’s mocking me, and he is, but in the nicest way possible.

“Can I tell you what really happened? In the bathroom?”

He nods.

I comb the grass next to me, all in one direction, then all in the other. “It wasn’t that they were kissing.” I shake my head, still not understanding what I’d seen, only understanding what it made me feel, sick and scared. “They were, then they stopped. And then he asked her to lie down on the spot where Brooke Lee, where she . . .”

“Died?” Wes asks incredulously.

“It was . . .” I shiver. “I don’t know. He wasn’t like that before. With me. He was nice. He was actually really nice and normal.”

“Was he nice? Really? Because—” He stops, but I already know what he’s going to say. I can hear it in his thoughts. “Can you keep a secret?”

I nod.

“Paige Wheeler and Lucas Hayes were together.”

“They were?” I try to sound surprised.

“I saw them in those trees by the soccer field a couple of times. Kissing. They didn’t see me.” His lip curls.

“You look like you disapproved.”

“Yeah, I did, sorta.”

I shake my head. “Why did you even care?”

“I got the feeling that he’d talked her into keeping it a secret and . . .” He looks away. “I don’t know. No way to treat a pretty girl.”

“Pretty?” I say, my surprise becoming real.

His eyes narrow. “There’s more types of pretty than yours, you know.”

“Oh, no, that’s not . . . I didn’t mean it the way you think I meant it.”
Kelsey
, I remind myself.
He thinks I’m Kelsey
.

He thinks I’m pretty
, my mind counters, unbidden.

We walk back in silence across the field. I’m aware of his shoulder next to mine, his swinging arm, the rise and fall of his walk. I’m aware of the amount of space between us, mere inches. Just before we reach the school building, I stop. He stops, too.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he replies. He looks at me, squinting. “You’re different.”

“Different how?”

“From how I thought you’d be.”

You are, too
, I think, but instead I blurt out, “Would you go to prom with me?”

He blinks. “Didn’t you already ask me that?”

“No,” I say. “That wasn’t me.”

“An imposter, then?”

“Yes,” I agree. “An imposter. But this is me right now. Asking you. To prom.”

For a long moment, Wes doesn’t say anything. Then, inch by inch, one side of his mouth lifts into a grin.

I STAY IN KELSEY FOR THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON. WES AND I
arrive late in the art room to stunned silence from our classmates. No whispers, though, no laughs. I almost smile in gratitude. We sit at our usual opposite tables, not looking at each other, but after class, he falls in step with me again, walking me all the way to physics, the halls around us holding their breath.

He doesn’t mention the prom until just before we part ways, when he runs a hand through his shaggy hair and says, “I seem to remember you saying that I don’t have to get a corsage.”

“No corsage necessary. And,” I think quickly, “you don’t have to pick me up. We can meet here at school. In the hall by that sheet for the mural.”

“No meeting parents either?” He grins. “I didn’t realize I was going to get lucky.” The grin disappears as he hears his own words. “Oh. I mean . . . I didn’t mean—”

I laugh until the embarrassment on his face becomes laughter, too.

“So, prom?” he says.

“So, prom,” I agree, the words—no less who I am, no less the person I’m speaking them to—surreal.

I sit through physics in a daze. But beneath the disbelief is a little green sprout of happiness, like the ivy in the crevice of the roof ledge. But with it comes another feeling: regret as wide and deep as those first days after my death. What if I hadn’t wasted my time—my
self
—on a guy who was only around for kisses in the trees? Would I have noticed the crooked-smiled burner who wanted to know me better? What if I hadn’t pushed him away with my nicknames and judgments? Who would he have turned out to be? Who would I have been?

It’s the memory of Lucas and the burner girl that finally pierces my fog. When the last bell rings, I walk Kelsey out to the road and then descend from my death spot to Mr. Fisk’s classroom, where I stutter through the strange story of Lucas and the burner girl in the bathroom to the increasingly appalled expression on Evan’s face.

“We have to tell Brooke,” Evan says. “Where do you think she is? Maybe the gym? The soccer field?”

“I don’t think we should say anything,” I protest, well aware of all the other secrets I’ve been keeping from Evan, too. “Brooke already hates Lucas. This will just make it worse.”

“But what if he does it again? What if she walks in on it? If he’s doing it on her death spot, it’s only a matter of time before she does.”

And he’s right, I know, but just when I gather the words to argue some more anyway, a voice behind us says, “Save your ethical debate.”

The two of us turn to find Brooke in the doorway.

“I already walked in on him,” she says.

“You saw? You mean, Lucas and—”

“His latest disposable girl?” She makes an angry, ugly scoffing sound. “Yeah, I saw.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t
you
apologize for Lucas Hayes. And”—she pauses as if deciding something—“don’t be angry at me.” Her mouth twists. “Or, on second thought,
be
angry at me. I would.”

I shake my head. “Why would I be angry at you?”

“Because.” Brooke’s gaze is so level and still, it’s almost like she’s forcing herself to meet my eyes. “Because I should have told you a long time ago.”

“Told me what?”

She bites her lip. Unbites. “About Lucas Hayes and me.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

But this is a lie. I do understand. I’ve understood since I saw Lucas with the burner girl. I’ve understood from the moment he pointed to Brooke’s death spot and asked her to lie down. Maybe part of me understood before that. The meeting with Heath. The flooding of Brooke’s bathroom.
Don’t say that
, Lucas had said to me in the burners’ circle when I’d told him he’d practically saved a girl’s life.
Because I didn’t save her
, he’d said.

“You were together,” I say slowly.

Brooke nods, her face coldly pretty, the way sharp things are, glittering, daring you to touch them. “We met up. Like you. We hooked up. Like you. If anyone else was around, he would ignore me. Like you.”

Like you
, her words whisper in my mind.
Like you
. “How long?” I say, and my voice sounds like an echo in my ears.

“From the end of junior year until the day I died. He didn’t want anyone to know, though, and so no one did. I can keep a secret.” Her mouth quirks. “Like you.”

“And that day? The day you died?” Evan asks.

“It was Lucas, wasn’t it?” I say, thinking of the conversation I overheard between him and Heath in the bathroom. “He was the one who bought the cocaine. Who wanted to use it.”

“Did he get you to try it, too?” she asks.

“No.”

“I’m surprised. But it was probably just a matter of time. He has a real nose for it, you know?” She wraps her ponytail around and around her hand, then unwraps it. Wraps it and unwraps it, like a boxer wrapping his fists. “I’ll be honest. He didn’t have to convince me much. I wanted to try it. We did it a couple of times together, after school, one weekend. That afternoon, we were supposed to go to his house because his mom was at work. But then Bosworth was monitoring the parking lot, so we couldn’t get out, and who cares anyway, right? We’d just do it there in the bathroom and find our way off campus once Bosworth left.” She pulls her ponytail across her face, hiding the crumple of her mouth and chin. “He handed it to me, you know that? Said,
You first
. And maybe something was wrong with it. Maybe something was wrong with me. I don’t know, but it started to burn. My whole brain was burning. My eyes.” She closes her eyes and exhales a shuddering breath. “And he watched it happen. He stood there staring while I died.”

“And, when they found you, he said he didn’t know you.” I say the rest for her, the story everyone at the school knows. “He said he’d been walking by and heard a noise, like someone had fallen, and he’d gone in and found you on the floor.”

“Innocent bystander,” she says, eyes narrowing. “Big hero. Who wouldn’t believe him? Everyone knew the kind of girl I was. No one even questioned it.”

“He must have been scared,” Evan says, “to lie like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I’m surprised at the vehemence in my voice. “It doesn’t matter if he was scared or in trouble or what. He should have said that he was there with her. He should have said that they were there together. He shouldn’t have said he didn’t know her, that she was just some girl.”

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
.