Absent (Katie Williams)

this. “I don’t know. I like their optimism.”
    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 His clothes are the normal sort—jeans, sneakers, a wool sweater—but there’s something vaguely outdated about them, like items Usha and I might pass over in the Goodwill bin.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.”

6: HOW I DIED
    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