Absent (Katie Williams)

to watch. Though none of them speak to me, all of their minds whisper my name. I grin. It’s already working.
    Brooke and Evan show up near the end of the hour. I’m careful to let my gaze pass over them like I can’t see them. For a moment, I worry that they’ll be able to see me, Paige, standing here plain as can be in Usha’s clothing. Or maybe I’ll appear as a misty apparition, smothering Usha in a Paige-shaped fog.
    “So this is it?” Brooke asks archly. “That chick better not paint me fat.”
    “Paige should see this,” Evan says.
    “Paige should see two mucky dots of black paint?”
    “Yeah, let’s find her.”
    “Oh, yes. Let’s hurry,” Brooke says sarcastically.
    “Come on,” Evan cajoles. “Even if she pretends to be all tough, this will make her totally happy.”
    On the ladder, my brush pauses. I don’t do that, I think, annoyed.
    But Brooke snorts laughter. “Want to make a bet about how many times she shrugs and says, ‘I don’t care’?”
    “I bet five times,” Evan says.
    “Fine. I bet six.”
    “That’s cheap,” Evan says, “betting one over mine.”
    “That’s how the game is played, mister,” Brooke replies. Then there’s silence, and I’m about to turn around to see if they’re still there when Brooke speaks again. “Do you think there will ever be a time when we don’t care? When this—here, now—is our new life? And what came before was just . . . before?”
    “I hope not,” Evan says.
    “Why? Don’t you want to forget about all that?”
    “It was my life,” he says simply.
    “I’d forget it all if I could,” Brooke says, “but then they gotta go and paint a damn mural to remind me.”
    “I don’t know,” Evan says as they walk away. “I think a mural might be kind of nice. Think of it. Something there just for you.”
    After they leave, I climb down off the ladder and paint something tiny, right by the baseboard. Sure it’s still a little blobby and uneven, but it’s recognizably a moth. A miniature secret moth, something there just for Evan.
    That’s when Lucas Hayes marches past, telltale gold pass in his hand. He doesn’t think my name; he’s too busy glancing over his shoulder to even notice the mural or me, crouched behind my ladder. I expect to see his requisite group of testos following behind as if the coach has ordered them to practice formation even as they walk down the hall. But when Lucas glances over his shoulder once more, I realize that he’s not waiting for his friends, but rather making sure that no one is following him.
    Which is when I decide to do just that.

    The girls’ bathroom in the hall outside the gym is pristine. No knots of shed hair on the floor, no lipstick kisses on the mirror, or soap grime in the sink basins. Even the tile looks new here, its grout bright white, although it’s years old.
    Why so clean?
    No one uses it.
    If you’re near the gym and you have to go, you use the bathrooms in the locker room or you backtrack to the one near the art room because, despite appearances, this bathroom isn’t a bathroom. It’s a trading depot. What’s traded here? A variety of goods and services: cigarettes, pot, soda bottles half-drained and refilled with booze, gropes, cheat sheets, gossip, swirlies, clothing ensembles, fake IDs, burner saliva and (it’s rumored) other bodily fluids, forged hall passes, reputations, and, this past September, a girl’s life.
    Since Brooke’s death, most kids skirt the bathroom, though a few still linger when they pass, as if the door might swing open, revealing some whirling vortex, some forbidden fruit, a crimson-skinned secret of mortality offered just to them.
    I follow Lucas at a distance, watching him walk into the girls’ bathroom without breaking his stride. After counting to ten, with pulse pounding, I follow him in. Thankfully, the tiled entryway is empty. Two voices float from around the corner, where the sinks and stalls are.
    “. . . have to choose here?” Lucas says.
    “But this is the best spot,” the other voice says. A guy. He sounds familiar, but I can’t place him. “Everyone thinks it’s creepy, so they don’t come here.”
    “I’d rather not come here either.”
    “That’s new.”
    “No it’s not,” Lucas says in a dangerous tone. “You think I like coming back here?”
    “Calm down. Let’s just do it and you can leave.”
    Then, a rustling, and I can barely keep myself from peeking around the corner to see what