Absent

by Katie Williams

  “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.”

  “Ugh. She thinks she’s so edgy just because she broke up with Lucas Hayes and got a piercing at the mall.”

  “Meh. She’s not that bad,” Usha said. “Just kind of obvious.”

  “Usha Das!” Mr. Cochran called from the edge of the roof.

  “She is that bad,” I argued, “and then some more bad.”

  Usha shrugged then kissed my cheek with a smack before marching out to Mr. Cochran. Her contraption, which she held under one arm, was a cardboard replica of an old-fashioned plane, like the ones the Wright Brothers flew. It even had tiny paper-fastener propellers that spun. It must have taken hours to make, but it didn’t meet any of the assignment criteria; it wouldn’t protect her egg at all. Usha heaved it unceremoniously off the roof.

  A giggle came from Kelsey and the ponies. It always sounded like they were laughing at you. I shot them a glare and accidentally met Kelsey’s eyes, peering at me over the ponies’ heads. Her eyes were wide and hazel and framed in flourishes of liner. I imagined Lucas gazing into those eyes. I looked down at the box in my hands, picturing the egg—perfect, white, seamless—in its center. I wondered what Usha would think if she knew I was hooking up with Kelsey’s ex-boyfriend. I wondered what she’d think if she knew he’d stood me up.

  No, I knew what she’d think of that.

  “All right, Paige Wheeler!” Mr. Cochran called with a wave. Usha passed me on her way back and said happily, “Crash landing! Total yolk!”

  The closer I got to the edge of the roof, the bigger the sky seemed, the smaller the roof. Even smaller, me. It must have shown on my face, because when I reached Mr. Cochran, he clapped a reassuring hand on my back. “You okay there?”

  “Agoraphobia,” I mumbled.

  “You mean acrophobia.”

  “Right,” I agreed, though really I’d meant agoraphobia. It wasn’t that the
building was too high, but that the sky was too big. The empty sky, my empty stomach, so big that I’d be lost in them. The parking lot was below, beyond it the road where shiny cars, not yet dimmed by the stipple of winter road salt, drove steadily to the strip mall or the on-ramp or the Gas-N-Go, and then home, always eventually home. I stepped a foot up onto the lip of the roof, testing my fear. My heart thunked; the sky stretched itself wider.

  “Hey, now.” Mr. Cochran clucked at my foot. “Feet on the ground.”

  His words were underscored by a squeal of hinges. Mr. Cochran and I both turned at the sound of a door swinging open. The rest of the class had turned, too, and was squinting at the shadowy figure in the doorway that led down to the school. I blinked, trying to see who it was. When he stepped out into the light and I saw who he was, I blinked again, this time from surprise.

  “Lucas Hayes!” Mr. Cochran shouted. “What are you doing up here?”

  Lucas looked past Mr. Cochran, his eyes snagging mine, which filled me with something more expansive than my fear of the roof, more encompassing than the cold sky. He came here to see me. A smile worked its way onto my lips. As soon as I realized, I yanked it off my face. I refused to beam dumbly at the boy who’d just stood me up. After all, I wasn’t a no-respect burner girl. I wasn’t poor, dead Brooke Lee.

  “Coach C!” Lucas called. “I need you to sign this for me.” He waved a paper in his hand and looked past me like I wasn’t even there.

  Suddenly it felt like it was true, that I wasn’t there. And that made me feel embarrassed and resentful and tired, so completely tired that I wanted to lie down on the roof and stare out at the world with its toy cars, ribbon road, and twig trees. I turned away from Lucas and the rest of them, my arms still holding the egg contraption straight out into the big empty sky.

  “Stay here,” Mr. Cochran said to me, and I nodded. Where else would I go? Behind me, Mr. Cochran’s voice faded as he started across the roof to sign Lucas’s form. I looked down at my feet, the buckles of my boots dull under the hazy sky; one foot was still up on the roof’s lip. And, almost as if I were watching myself do it, my other foot stepped up to join it. The horizon retreated an inch more, another row of houses now in my view. It was a victory over my fear, I decided. A victory of twelve inches, but a victory nonetheless. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid anymore, not of the height, not the wide sky, not Kelsey Pope’s whispers or Lucas’s smile, which I could almost feel behind me, wedged between my shoulder blades.

  “Lucas!” a boy’s voice called. “Catch!”

  And then the unmistakable sound of a cracking egg, followed by a gasp from my classmates.

  “You were supposed to catch it!”

  I started to turn around; I had the impulse to find Lucas’s eyes again, sheepish from not having made the catch. Maybe this time our eyes would meet, and we would see each other, no more than a stretch of roof between us. But I must not have realized how close I was to the edge, because as I turned, my foot slipped. My stomach lurched; my breath filled my mouth in a phantom scream. Suddenly, I wasn’t looking out at Lucas’s eyes, but up at the sky, marbled and gray, no sun to be seen.

  I’m falling, I said to myself. Or maybe someone else said it to me.

  My head hit the edge of the roof. My teeth bit together. My vision burst with a flash of pain so bright it could have been the sun, burning through that wispy sky.

  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.