Absent (Katie Williams)

memory about Paige?”
    Nothing.
    Not a word.
    Not that I care.
    I close my eyes, and the silence becomes a noise rushing under everything, like a TV set to static in the other room. If I listencarefully, I can almost hear another sound, one beneath the silence. My name. It’s as if a dozen people are whispering it in a string: Paige, Paige, Paige, Paige.
    “Right here,” I almost say. “I’m right here.”
    Mrs. Morello clears her throat, but this prompts no one to speak. We’re closing in on a minute now. People always call for a minute of silence, but really a minute is a long time when you’re—scuffling, whispering, fidgeting—alive. And a minute is forever when you’re shaking on the bathroom floor or standing on the lip of a roof, the miniature world arranged so carefully below you. You feel like you could live in that minute forever, like it would stretch its bounds for you, its sixty tick-ticks, and hold your entire life.
    But a minute always ends.
    “I didn’t know her much.”
    I look around to see who has finally spoken before realizing that the voice is coming from the end of the table. Wes Nolan.
    Everyone glares at Wes like he’s just farted or belched or whooped with joy, and I know they’re thinking—because I’m thinking it, too—What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan? Wes leans back in his chair, grinning his cantilevered grin like he enjoys making a target of himself.
    “But I wish I’d known her better,” he adds.
    I look to Usha, hoping that she’ll say something about me. Usha knows me better than anyone. We’ve been best friends since seventh grade, when the cafeteria tables somehow squared up without us. After a week sitting alone at a table meant for twenty, I noticed this chubby Indian girl brown-bagging it in front of her locker. We weren’t supposed to have food outside of the cafeteria, but when the hall monitor paused to tell the girl so, she looked at him with such a determined grin—the kind of grin kids pull for the camera, moreteeth than smile—that he unpaused without saying a word. Then she swung her grin to me; I might have walked the other way, too, except just then she reached into her sack and came up with an apple slice. Maybe that’s the memory Usha will share, how in seventh grade we crunched apple slices, and how every day for five years after that, the two of us ate lunch cross-legged on the floor in front of our lockers.
    But no. Usha doesn’t say anything. She just stares at her tabletop.
    Kelsey Pope speaks up instead, her hazel eyes shiny as tumbled stones, her cheek piercing winking in the UV light. “I can’t help but think we could have been friends, Paige and I.” She tucks the origami flower behind her ear.
    I make a noise too sharp to be a laugh. Evan and Brooke look over. “Friends with Kelsey Pope?” I say. “Not hardly. Not ever.”
    “It’s just so tragic,” Kelsey continues, and the others nod sagely at this wisdom. “I can’t imagine ever feeling sad enough to . . . oh. Nothing. Never mind.” Kelsey bites on her lip, a pouty pink stopper for her sentence.
    Suddenly, the silence becomes still. People stop spinning the chairs. Their eyes connect and disconnect across the table. “I told you,” a girl I don’t know whispers to her friend. I turn to the dead kids. Evan’s expression has gone flatter than usual. Brooke rakes her fingers through her ponytail.
    “Sad enough to what?” I ask, just as Wes says, “Never mind what?”
    Kelsey unstoppers her mouth. “I shouldn’t say anything.” She sucks in her lips, pooches them out again. “Up on the roof, she . . .”
    Kelsey trails off. Usha has finally raised her eyes from the table-top and fixed them on Kelsey with a ferocious glare. Before Kelsey can say another word, Usha pushes her chair away from the table with a screech and marches out of the room. We all look after her.
    “Oh, no,” someone breathes.
    “Sad enough to what?” I repeat, my voice too loud in my own ears. “Up on the roof, I what?”
    “I think maybe she’s saying—” Evan begins, but Mrs. Morello talks over him. “Everyone. Please. The official cause of death was an accidental fall.” She says it like she’s reading off a script.
    “Of course it was an accident,” I say. “What else would it have been?”
    The bell rings a wordless answer to my question, and everyone rises, hoisting backpacks, fishing for cell phones, and wandering out. Mrs. Morello hurries after them,