Absent (5 page)

We both watch the moth for a minute, batting its head and wings against the light fixture.

“Evan? How long have you been here?”

“A long time,” he says, which is always his answer. He won’t tell me how long he’s been here, and he won’t tell me how he died. His clothes are the normal sort—jeans, sneakers, a wool sweater—but there’s something vaguely outdated about them, like items Usha and I might pass over in the Goodwill bin. Otherwise, he’s skinny and freckly, his hair parted in a tidy line. He looks like a teenager, but who knows how old he really is.

“Do you think there’s something after this?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “No heavenly light has ever shone for me.”

“You believe in that, then? In heaven?”

He looks at me sidelong. “Do you?”

“I never went to church.” I snort. “Maybe
that’s
why I’m stuck here.”

“Well, I went to church. Or rather, I was required to go.”

“So you believe in God and all that?”

He taps a finger against his bottom lip. “I found church to be an unreliable source. I liked some of what they had to say. Other things, I didn’t.”

“You mean about gay people?”

His eyes widen, and I immediately wish I could unsay it. I’ve known since I first met him, something in his movement, his words, his sense of humor, his quality of kindness. Some people you don’t know for sure, or you think you do, but then you’re wrong. With Evan, it’s unmistakable. It’s part of who he is.

“I’m not . . .” He shakes his head.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s no big deal. Lots of people . . . Usha made out with a girl at summer camp once, and lots of other people are gay . . . or whatever. There’s an after-school club, an official one, with an adviser. It’s your favorite, actually, Mr. Fisk, and—”

“I’m just not that interested in—” He winces. “I’m more interested in the world of the mind. I don’t even have a body, so why should I think about that other stuff? Right?”

“Sure.” I think about how much I still think about Lucas and
that other stuff
. How when I think about it now, it’s almost like I have a body again.

We’re quiet then, quiet enough that I can hear the books around me creaking in their shelves, rustling their pages, stretching their spines, as if they have something to add to the conversation. Which some of them probably do.

Maybe we should be trying to forget her
, Usha said. I wonder if everyone Evan knew has forgotten him. They’ve surely moved on anyway, graduated. Just like Usha will, and Lucas, and the rest of them, too. All my classmates will go on to college and jobs and families and lives. There won’t be grief groups with remembrances. If they think of me, it’ll only be once in a while, that poor girl who killed herself. And I’ll still be here. In high school.

“I don’t want them to think it,” I admit, and my voice comes out so weak that I hate the sound of it, all desperate and wobbly. “I don’t.”

“Paige? What?”

“I don’t want everyone to think I killed myself.”

“I know,” Evan says soothingly. “I know.”

“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

“Usha said . . .” I have to make myself say it. “She said she wouldn’t paint the memorial mural. She said she wasn’t sad, she was angry. At me.” My voice gets louder and shakier with each word, but I can’t stop it. The tears are trapped in my dead body, just like I’m trapped here in this school. “She said that she wanted to forget me. And if my parents ever thought that I did this to myself, that I
wanted
this—”

“Paige,” Evan repeats helplessly.

I wave him away, close my eyes, and take a few breaths. When I speak again, my voice is calm and certain. “They’re
not
going to remember me like that. I’m going to find a way to change it.”

“How?” Evan asks gently. “We can’t talk to anyone, can’t touch anything, can’t
do
anything. What can you do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I tell him, “but something. I’ll find a way to do something. I’m not going to end like this.”

ON THE LAST DAY OF MY LIFE, I STOOD UNDER A LATE FEB
ruary sky, the gray clouds pulled thin and high over our heads like a veil. The sun was somewhere behind there, but I didn’t know where. Maybe if I scanned the sky slowly, I’d find a spot to the west where the clouds burned white instead of gray, and that’d be the sun. Otherwise, it was all sky, from top of head to soles of shoes, and we were up there in it, because our physics teacher, Mr. Cochran, had gotten permission to take us onto the roof for our egg-drop project.

We, the physics class, clumped at the center of the roof’s flat, cement slab, as far as possible from the foot-high lip around its edge where Mr. Cochran stood. We shivered and stumbled against each other, but we didn’t break ranks. Mr. Cochran had been very clear: he had a quiz ready. If there was any running, any pushing, any “tomfoolery,” we would march right down and take it.

“Let’s not have you ending up like your eggs,” he kept saying.

That afternoon, I was a good kid. We all were good kids, good eggs. We stood at the center of the roof as we were told to. We didn’t
run; we didn’t push; we didn’t tomfool. It’s possible we whispered. It’s possible we poked, and perhaps we turned to the roof’s edge like how the bean plants in Mrs. Zimmer’s biology room turned toward the dirty windows, even though they only opened inward, and then only a crack. I was alive then, though that wasn’t something I thought about, because it wasn’t remarkable; it just was.

“You were late again,” Usha informed me, as if I didn’t already know that. We stood as far from the rest of the group as we could without getting yelled at. Usha had fashioned her hair into a stiff egg-yolk mohawk in honor of our egg drop. It was the end of the day, though, and she’d started to smell like leftover breakfast.

“Headbang for me,” I said to distract her, and she obliged, making a rocker scowl as she dipped her head. As soon as she’d finished, she went right back to “You were late yesterday. And twice last week.” She poked a finger at my chest.

“Okay, okay, it’s not a big deal. I forgot this.” I held up my egg contraption. “I had to go back to my locker and get it.”

“That took fifteen minutes?”

“I stopped to fix my hair. Not everyone has such a resilient hairstyle.” I tweaked one of the peaks of her mohawk.

“True, true,” Usha allowed, “but since when do you care about your hairstyle?”

The truth was, I hadn’t been late because of homework or hair. I’d been late because I’d been waiting for Lucas Hayes in the burners’ circle. After lunch, I’d found a note he’d left in my locker with a hastily drawn tree and a six, which meant to meet him in the burners’ circle during sixth period, and I’d skipped American lit to do it. But he hadn’t been there. No one had. I’d sat at the base of a tree for half an hour, scratching patterns in the dirt and staring up at the
protective branches above me, before someone had finally arrived. And that someone hadn’t been Lucas.

What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan?
I thought when the sound of footsteps produced the cargo-jacketed, shaggy-haired burner. Wes was accompanied by Heath Mineo, the school drug dealer, so short and corrupt that he resembled a tiny mafia boss from the cartoons. Wes extracted a pack of cigarettes and tapped it against the trunk of one of the trees.

“Hey, look, it’s Wheels!” Wes said.

I rolled my eyes.

“You know her?” Heath asked as if I weren’t standing right there.

“Not even a little,” I said at the same time Wes said, “A little.”

“Someone stand you up?” Wes asked, flipping out two cigarettes and passing one to Heath.

I studied him for a moment, then dismissed him. There was no way he could know about Lucas and me. He was just trying to make a joke because when it came to Wes Nolan, everything was a joke.

Look at that. You’re alone and friendless.

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

“I’m just sitting here. That okay with you?”

“Free country,” he said. “Free trees.”

Wes and Heath smoked their cigarettes down in near silence while I returned to my dirt patterns, silently urging them to go, knowing that Lucas wouldn’t show if they were here. But, maddeningly, when Heath finally dropped his butt in the mulch and left, Wes remained. I reached for my phone, but then brought my hand back. I didn’t want Wes to see me checking the time.

“It’s five minutes until the bell,” he said, visibly pleased with himself. “So whoever you’re meeting probably isn’t going to come.”

“I’m not meeting anyone.” Instead of my phone, I took my egg-drop project out of my bag, unwrapping it from the sweater I’d used to cushion it.

Wes slid two more cigarettes out of the pack, offering one to me.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Why not? It gives you superpowers, you know.”

“What? Like cancer?” I said, then grimaced. Everyone knew that Wes Nolan’s dad had died of stomach cancer freshman year.

But if my comment bothered Wes, he didn’t show it, saying, “Enough chemo, and you’ll glow like a superhero.” He tucked the cigarette back into the pack and nodded at my project. “What’s in the box?”

“You want to hear about my physics homework?”

“I’m here smoking. You’re here
not
smoking. Why not pass the time?”

“It’s an egg drop.”

“Like the soup?”

“Like you drop an egg off the roof, idiot,” I said, and he grinned wider at the insult. “We had to create an enclosure for the egg using stuff from around the house, and today we’re going to drop them from the school roof. If it doesn’t break, you pass.”

“And if it
does
break, you make egg-drop soup.” He blew out a plume of smoke. “Can I see it?”

“Only if you promise not to pretend to drop it as a joke.”

“You know me only too well, Paige Wheeler.”

He turned the gift box around in his hands, studying its tiny springs (pilfered from three remote controls), peeking under the lid.

“How does it work?”

“The springs are hooked to a Ziploc bag full of shaving cream, and the egg is in the middle of the bag.”

“Kind of a like an airbag in a car. Clever.” Then, of course, he pretended to drop it.

“Does everything have to be a joke to you?”

He grinned. “Why not?”

“Because not everything’s funny.”

“What? Don’t you like to laugh?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t like to laugh?”

“You, maybe. You always scowl at me.”

“Say something actually funny, and I’ll laugh.”

“Knock, knock,” he said.

“Who’s there?” I asked reluctantly.

“Me,” he said.

“Me who?”

He grinned. “Just me.”

“That’s the joke?” I asked. “Knock, knock, who’s there? Just me. That’s not a joke. That’s ridiculous.”

“Ah, but you’re laughing.”

“Yeah. At its ridiculousness.”

He was close enough that I could smell the cigarettes on him and, under that, another even smokier smell, like burnt leaves. One of his eyes was squintier than the other from the unevenness of his grin, but both eyes were the same warm brown.
If there’s anyone whose smile would be asymmetrical
, I thought. But it must have been the kind of smile that made you want to smile back because that, I realized, was what I was doing.

I pulled away so quickly that my head clocked the tree trunk behind me. “Lucas helped me with it,” I said, pointing to the project still in his hands.

“Lucas, huh?” Wes grunted, his smile dropping so fast I half expected to hear it shatter on the ground. “As in Lucas Hayes? As in the person you’re
not
waiting for.”

“I told you. I’m not meeting anyone.”

Wes handed me back the box, then he flipped his cigarette onto the ground, stubbing it out with his heel, and walked to the edge of the burners’ circle. But just before leaving, he turned around. “You know, if you were meeting me, I’d make a point of being here.”

“And I’d make a point of losing track of time.”

The grin was back, like I had complimented him instead of insulting him.

“Why are you smiling?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “that was funny.” He tipped a salute and disappeared with the faint call of the school bell.

I’d waited another ten minutes for Lucas. He never came, and that, not hair or homework and definitely not Wes Nolan, was why I’d been late to physics.

Back on the roof, Usha’s interrogation about my lateness was interrupted by a burst of talk from Kelsey and her ponies. The ponies were examining Kelsey’s new piercing, a diamond stud in place of a beauty mark.

“. . . brought a picture”—the wind caught Kelsey’s voice—“so it’d be just like Marilyn’s.”

“Marilyn Manson’s?” I said loudly.

Kelsey turned and wrinkled her nose. “No. Marilyn Monroe. The piercing artist said that I resemble her. Crazy, right?” The ponies circled up, probably to assure her that it wasn’t crazy, not the slightest bit.

“Oh, that’s right,” I said to Usha. “Marilyn Monroe had a bunch of plastic surgery, too.”

“Geez, Paige.” Usha socked me in the arm. “Fight in your own weight class.”