Absent (Katie Williams)

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.
    I back away, all the way away, back to Usha’s table and plant myself on an empty stool, Usha’s pencil scratching next to me like a reassuring whisper. My eyes hadn’t met Wes’s, not like that, I think. I hadn’t been waiting there for him. I’m angry, I realize. So angry I might start shouting.
    At who? a small voice asks. About what?
    At Wes of course, I think. How dare he draw me like that!
    I pull in a breath and realize that I’ve been staring blindly at Usha’s hand working across the page. She hasn’t been drawing jellyfish, as I’d first thought, but parachutes. The domes are not made of translucent flesh, but panels of fabric. Not tentacles hanging down, but ropes, a curled skydiver dangling from each one. She’s even drawn harnesses, the tiny buckles holding them to parachutes that lower