Absent (Katie Williams)

moves, opening it with a fourth. “Why are you apologizing?” she says quietly, and my stomach lurches. Does she not remember any of it? Was the entire afternoon a blank? Did she close her eyes in the cafeteria and open them again, hours later, at the edge of school grounds? She must think she’s going crazy, losing time like that. Will she tell her parents or Mrs. Morello? Will they send her to the Greenvale facility like Greenvale Greene?
    But then I realize over the whirr of my panicked thoughts that Usha is still talking. “If anyone apologizes, it should be me,” she tells Jenny. “I’m the one who yelled at you.” She bites her lip. “I don’t know why I yelled like that. I guess I lost my temper. I didn’t used to get angry, but it seems like I’m yelling at everyone these days. I’m sorry anyway.”
    “No. You don’t need to . . . Don’t apologize. I had no right to start preaching about that stuff.” Jenny touches her fingers to the slats of the locker next to Usha’s. “I shouldn’t . . . not everyone believes . . .”
    “But it’s a nice thing to believe.” Usha moves her bag from one shoulder to the other, gives the locker dial another spin without even looking at the numbers. “Sometimes I wish I could believe in something like that.”
    “But you don’t have to . . . not to be friends with us.”
    “Friends with you?” Usha’s mouth twists, and Jenny blushes.
    She stammers, “I didn’t mean to assume. . . . That was a stupid thing to—”
    “No. Hey. You can say that . . . you can . . . We could be friends.” She pauses. “But . . .”
    “What?” Jenny says. “You can tell me.”
    “You only wanted to be friends with me because of Paige.” Paige, her mind echoes. “I mean, didn’t you?”
    “Oh.” Jenny moves her hand from the locker to her chest, a parody of surprise. It’s so broad, it’s almost like an impression of the biblicals that Usha or I would have done. Except, I realize, there’s no sarcasm there. Jenny means it. She means everything she says.
    And this time Usha’s not laughing.
    “Is that what you thought?” Jenny asks.
    “It seemed like—”
    “No, I know.” Jenny clasps her hands in front of her like a pleading silent-movie heroine, and again it’s obvious that she means this gesture sincerely. “After . . . what happened . . . we thought you could use someone to sit with at lunch. So, that was because of Paige, I guess. But that’s not why you’re our friend.”
    “Why, then?”
    “We like you. That’s all.”
    “Okay.” Usha smiles her smile. “That’s okay, then.”
    After Usha and Jenny head off to class, I sit at the base of Usha’s locker. This is how it will be now, I tell myself. Usha will have a new best friend. Lucas will have a new not-girlfriend. Everyone else will have their shocking suicide story. I’ll have some dried paint on a wall. Unless . . .
    I go over the girls’ conversation in my head, weighing each sentence. Usha apologized for yelling at the biblicals. Could this be how it works? Not only does she remember everything I did yesterday, but from what she said, she accepts the actions as her own. She didn’t black out. She wasn’t watching me from behind her eyes. She wasn’t consciously trying to push me out of her body. I was her, and she was me. And if this is true, it means that I can be anyone, do anything.
    When I return to the mural, the hallway is empty. The late bell has rung, and Brooke and Evan have moved on to their various time fillers—Evan to class, Brooke to wander. I still haven’t told them about my ability to inhabit people. Soon, I promise guiltily.
    I startle as the school door slams open, barely regaining my hover when I hit the ground again. A good fifteen minutes after the tardy bell, and Lucas Hayes has arrived. Even though he’s late, hedoesn’t hurry. Why bother? He has a pack of blank hall passes in his bag, the perk of being basketball captain. Lucas Hayes. My secret . . . something. Kelsey Pope’s very public ex-boyfriend.
    And yes, I want to fix the rumor about my death. And yes, last night, I thought up a dozen different ways to do that. But first, there’s something I have to do, something I’ve always wanted to know. I want to know how Lucas Hayes really felt about me.
    Inhabiting Usha’s body was one thing; inhabiting one of the testos’ bodies is a million things. I choose the least sweaty, least beefy of