Absent (7 page)

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.

“
IT’S YOUR IMAGINATION,” EVAN SAYS BEFORE I’VE EVEN FINISHED
explaining. We stand in the hallway outside the art room, Greenvale nowhere in sight.

“It’s not. She looked right at me.”

“It’s happened to me before, too,” Evan explains. “You’re just seeing what you want to see. You think they’re looking at you, but really they’re always looking at something else.”

“Trust me. If I wanted someone to see me, it wouldn’t be Greenvale Greene. Besides, there was nothing behind me, just the wall.”

“Maybe she was looking at the wall.” Evan tilts his head. “Who is this again?”

“You know, Greenvale Greene. She was sitting right by the door.”

“I didn’t see anyone by the door.”

“I didn’t see her at first either. She was practically in the corner.
She’s pygmy-short, starvation-skinny, bangs in her face, huge eyes under the bangs.”

He shakes his head, no recognition. “Is she a well-rounder or a biblical or—” I’ve taught Evan all of Usha’s and my nicknames.

“No group. She’s . . . well, she’s crazy. Like, certified. Sophomore year she had some sort of breakdown and wouldn’t leave her bedroom. Her parents sent her to a place . . . a facility or whatever you call it.”

Evan adjusts the cuffs of his sweater so that they’re even on his wrists. “Greenvale is a strange name.”

“Her name isn’t really Greenvale. Technically, it’s Harriet. Greenvale is the name of the place where they sent her, and her last name is Greene, so everyone calls her Greenvale Greene.” I frown. “Unfortunate coincidence, I guess.”

Evan looks up from his sleeves. “If the place hadn’t been named Greenvale, they would have come up with something else to call her.”

I think of the nicknames Usha and I devised for our classmates with a tug of guilt. It wasn’t the same, I tell myself, calling someone a well-rounder or a pony or a testo. Besides, I wouldn’t have come up with the names if people didn’t try so hard to fit in their tidy boxes. Except Greenvale, I realize. She didn’t have a category, a group.

The bell rings, and the classroom doors pour out students. Evan and I back away from the crowds, but when Kelsey and the ponies pass us in a coltish, neighing herd, I start after them.

“Where are you going?” Evan calls.

I turn and shrug. “To hear what else she says about me.”

I trail along behind the ponies, listening for Kelsey to mention my supposed suicide again. But the group is caught up in a debate about whether a comment one of their friends made at lunch was intended to be bitchy. All the way to the science hall, the debate
rages on, and it isn’t until we reach the classroom door that I remember what Kelsey has last period.

Physics. The class where I died.

I haven’t been back here since that day. My old desk is still empty. The desks around it are empty, too, like the dead places in the ocean where the fish won’t swim and the coral has turned all broken and gray. Mr. Cochran is still on extended leave, and the class starts perfunctorily with the substitute dropping a quiz on everyone’s desk. Kelsey and the ponies dip their heads over their papers.

I wander the rows, pausing at Usha’s desk. She marks the questions correctly until she gets to the last one, where she pauses, pencil hovering over the options.

Discounting air resistance, what is the increase in speed for each second an object falls?

I actually remember this one from our egg-drop study packet.

Answer A reads
15 feet /second
²

Incorrect.

Answer C reads
56 feet /second
²

Also incorrect.

Answer B reads
32 feet /second
²

“Time,” the sub calls. “Pencils down.”

“It’s B,” I whisper to Usha. “Mark B.”

Usha dips her pencil to circle C. Without thinking, I put my hand over hers, willing it to B. My hand should swipe right through her hand, her paper, the wood of the desk. But it doesn’t; instead, it bumps against something. Or rather, something bumps against it. It’s been so long since I’ve felt something like this, it takes me a moment to place it: resistance. It’s a simple feeling, as if my hand has bumped into hers, but to me it’s alien. I gape at my hand, then
Usha’s. She hasn’t marked the paper yet. In fact, she’s stopped, pencil in midair, staring at the question like it’s staring right back at her.

“Usha?” I say.

This time, I hear her answer me.

Paige
.

I get a creeping sense of déjà vu. There’d been a similar whisper yesterday when Lucas and I stood at the edge of the road. What had happened exactly? Lucas had looked back at the burners’ circle. I’d heard a whisper of my name, and then . . . On impulse, I reach out and put my hand through Usha’s. Again, it bumps against something, but this time I push back, I push
through
it. I’m holding Usha’s hand just like I did with Lucas’s.

Then I realize that I’m not holding her hand at all. My hand
is
Usha’s hand.
I’m holding her pencil
. I can feel the crimped wood of it, the keen edge of the paper under my other hand, the pebbly plastic of the chair beneath me, the firm tile of the floor resting under the soles of my shoes. I suck in a breath of surprise and feel even more surprise as I draw actual air into actual lungs.

I am Usha.

I move my hand (Usha’s hand) and mark B.

I stare at the quiz, the trail of lead that I’ve left behind.

I’m bumped again. This time it’s bigger than a bump; it’s more like a rough shove, like when someone “unintentionally” plows into you in the hallway. I’m shoved out. Usha is above me, shaking her head foggily, and I’m not just shoved out; I’m sinking through the floor. I drop through the cottony insulation and sheathed electrical cords, through a government class set up like a mock court, through another floor that becomes a ceiling, another classroom flickering with the light of a projector, another floor, and then the basement,
and a stack of old gymnastics mats that, comically, do nothing to break my fall. My legs drop through the mats, and I land at last, crouching on the dirt floor next to a croaking pair of ghost frogs.

As soon as I get my feet under me, I stand and race up the stairs, slamming my hovering boot soles down neatly on each step. I climb the next flight and the next and the next. Then it’s down the hall and through the door into the physics classroom.

The sub ambles between the desks, sweeping up the last remaining quizzes. Usha’s quiz is still on her desk, but he’s headed to her now. I hurry forward, heedless of the desks that pass through my legs, focused only on the rectangle of white paper as if it’s a beacon, a lit doorway through which I must pass.

I get there a moment before he does and glimpse the quiz paper just as he snatches it away.

I see it, though, the last answer.

Marked B.

“DO YOU EVER HEAR PEOPLE SAY YOUR NAME?”
I ASK BROOKE and Evan.

Mere feet away, the goalie paces from one end of the goal to the other. We’re in the soccer goal, right inside where the ball is kicked, Brooke stretched out long, Evan and I crouched under the drape of the net. The field is bald but for a few stubborn patches of ashen snow. The team is shivering, sweatshirt sleeves pulled over their hands. I can feel it, too, the cold, but it doesn’t chap or sting me. It’s as if I’m only imagining what it feels like to be cold, as if I’m only saying the word
cold
. It’s round in my mouth like a stone.

Shouts sail from the other end of the field, where the soccer ball dances between the feet of the eager players. I’m hoping the ball will stay over there. Brooke, however, likes it when the play comes this way. She rises and mimics the goalie’s movements, shifting behind him. If a kick gets by, she’ll pivot as if to catch the ball that
he couldn’t. But, of course, it just punches through her gut and socks into the net behind her.

“Do people talk about me?” Brooke says. “Yeah, all the time. They say, ‘Brooke Lee is hanging around your boyfriend’ or ‘Brooke Lee has syphilis’ or ‘Brooke Lee is getting an abortion after school.’ ”

“I mean since you died.”

“In that case, it’s more like ‘Brooke Lee traded hand jobs for cocaine’ or ‘Brooke Lee snorted lines off the bathroom floor.’ ”

I look away guiltily. Usha and I used to say things like that about Brooke. Everyone did. Though that’s hardly a good defense.

“Do you mean
just
your name?” Evan asks. “Like someone is whispering it, but you don’t know who?”

I sit up on my knees. “You’ve heard it, too?”

“I used to hear it. Down the hall or just behind me.
Evan, Evan
. Really quiet. Almost too quiet to hear.” Brooke and I share a look. This is the most Evan has ever spoken about his death.

“Could you tell where it was coming from?”

“Not really. I heard it mostly right after I died, then less, then eventually it stopped. I haven’t heard it in years.” He looks away with a half shrug. “Honestly, I thought I’d gone crazy. Crazy enough to hear things, anyway.” He looks at me. “But you hear it? Your name?”

“Sometimes,” I say carefully. “One of the times, I thought it was Usha’s voice.” That’s what it had sounded like, that moment during the physics quiz when I’d plunged my hand into hers. It was the same whisper that she’d leaned over, desk to desk, and poured into my ear during class hundreds of times before.

When I climbed back up to the physics classroom, I tried to repeat what I’d done, to slip back into Usha’s body. I tried for the rest of the hour, but this time there wasn’t a bump; there wasn’t anything.
My hands passed through her like she wasn’t even there, even though I knew it was me; I was the one who wasn’t there.

I’d tried it with other people to see if that might work—up and down the rows, even the stupid sub, even Kelsey Pope. Nothing. When the final bell had rung, I’d walked out into the busiest intersection of the hallways and let them walk through me, all of them—well-rounders, biblicals, testos, burners, and the rest. The waves of people marched through me, and I’d tried to re-create the feeling I’d had with Usha of something fitting into place, a seat belt clicking, a deadbolt turning. But at the end of it, they were a procession of ghosts, and I was standing alone in an empty hallway.