Absent (Katie Williams)

its waters.
    As I’m walking, I’m remembering how when I’d come home, the steam from the kitchen would puff out to greet me only a second before my mother’s voice, calling, Paige? That you, honey? Then at dinner, my parents and I would go around the table in turn, each of us sharing one event from our day. It had to be something tiny, like eating a different type of bread for lunch or seeing a strangelymarked cat on a windowsill. Today, I could say, I came home after school. Today I came home. I’m walking faster across the lot, and then I’m running toward the road, running onto it, running, running home, running—
    Off the ledge of the roof.
    The momentum is still in my body, but before it can carry me forward, I crouch down and grab the lip of the roof, holding myself teetering on the brink of the building. It was too much to hope that I could leave. And yet I’d let myself hope it. I should have known that it’d be just like before, that the school wouldn’t let me go, that it’d pick me up and set me back down on my death spot.
    My hands, when I look down at them, are my own—nails clipped straight across, star-shaped scar on one knuckle, opal ring inherited from my grandmother. I am me again. I cling to that little square of cement, feeling the rough of it under my palms, the only thing I can feel. The second I step off this square of cement, I’ll be insubstantial again—no dark green front door, no steam on my cheeks, no voice calling from the kitchen, no cat, no bread. My hands won’t even be cold anymore, because they aren’t really hands. I press my palms against my eyes.
    When I lower my hands, I’m looking out across the parking lot, its car roofs laid out like tarot cards on a table. Past the cars, a chubby Indian girl in red rubber boots walks determinedly across the road where I can’t go. She sinks down in her wool coat, letting it shield her from the wind. She wears no gloves, and her hands are pink from the cold. After a moment, she raises her hands to her mouth, blowing hot breath before shoving them into her pockets to keep them warm.

12: SOME GIRL WHO DIED
    THE MEMORIAL MURAL WORKS JUST AS I ’ D HOPED IT WOULD . The next morning, I stand under it as the crowds come in from the parking lot. Almost everyone glances at the white sheet fastened to the wall as they pass it, and my name is whispered in the voices of a dozen different minds. Brooke and Evan stand with me.
    “I hear it,” Brooke says, her eyes closed and her chin tipped up as if she has found a sunbeam to bask in. She opens her eyes. “You’re right. I’ve heard it before. I just didn’t know to listen for it. It’s them thinking of me. It’s . . .” She shakes her head.
    “That’s great!” Evan says, overly cheery.
    “You don’t hear anything?” I ask him.
    “None of them knew me. How could they remember me?”
    I think about that, being forgotten, being lost to time. That’ll be me someday, just like Evan. It’ll be them, too, all of them bustling by. Someday they’ll die and be forgotten. They just get a little longer to ignore the fact.
    “It’s nice, though, right?” Evan continues, his voice scrubbed bright and shiny. “So many people thinking about you?”
    “That all depends on what they’re thinking,” Brooke says.
    He turns to me. “And Usha is painting the mural after all?”
    “Yup,” I say. “She is.”
    I wonder, nervously, if Usha would agree with that statement. I’ve been waiting for her since last night, the questions burning inside me: Does she remember asking Fisk to paint the mural? Does she remember any of it? The fight with the biblicals? The mysterious Lucas meeting? The conversation with Greenvale? I lived an entire afternoon of Usha’s life. Stole it from her, a rude little corner of my mind chides. Usha will have plenty of afternoons, I tell the corner. She can spare one of them.
    When Usha finally arrives, I follow her to her locker and am surprised to find one of the biblicals, Jenny, waiting there wearing a stiff smile. Usha eyes her warily.
    Shit, I think. I’m caught.
    But then I realize that this is perfect. Surely, Jenny will talk about what happened in the cafeteria yesterday. And by Usha’s reaction, I can figure out what she remembers from when I was inhabiting her.
    Jenny clicks her heels together smartly like a secretary on a TV show. “I want to apologize. For yesterday.”
    Usha turns to her locker, dialing the lock in three quick