Absent (Katie Williams)

conversation to poor Paige Wheeler’s suicide, poor dead Paige.
    My lines are simple: “That’s such a lie. Kelsey Pope just wants attention. You know how girls like her are.” Most groups agree with me immediately and shake their heads at the duplicity of spoiled, self-centered Kelsey Pope. A scant few argue that no one would lie about something so terrible, especially not Kelsey, who’s really sweetif you get to know her. Once I’m out, I listen carefully for the suicide rumor to snuff out. But it is stubborn. Unlike me, it lives on.
    Every day at lunch, I inhabit Jenny, Usha’s new best friend. We don’t sit and eat at Usha’s locker, like she and I used to, but in the cafeteria with the other biblicals.
    “Do you ever wonder what Paige would think of this?” I say to the table one afternoon. “If she were here?”
    “Like her spirit?” Erin asks. “Like, looking down at us?”
    “More like just here, invisible in the school.”
    “What movies have you been watching?” The biblicals laugh and gently shake their heads.
    “But there’s purgatory, right?” I ask them. “That’s in the Bible.”
    Usha looks up from her lunch. “You’re saying that high school could be a kind of purgatory?”
    “Or hell,” one of the biblicals says.
    “Hell for sure,” another agrees.
    “No, it’s purgatory,” Usha maintains. “Think about it. We’re all here waiting, right? Waiting to move on, to find out what’s next.”
    “Yeah, exactly,” I say, and she looks over at me. There’s something in my tone that I didn’t intend. Something like longing.
    I spot Lucas across the cafeteria at a table thick with ponies and testos. He’s laughing at something, the sound of it bright and open, his eyes in crinkles. But today, his laughter doesn’t charm me. It’s like watching the levels of music on a synthesizer instead of listening to music itself. I hear his voice again: She was just some girl who died.
    I suddenly regret not telling Usha about Lucas and me. She wouldn’t have laughed at me for liking a testo. And she wouldn’t have told anyone if I’d asked her not to. Though she would have asked me why it had to be a secret, and she would have known that itwas Lucas’s secret, not mine. Thinking about what Usha would have said allows me to admit the truth to myself: I would’ve walked down the hall with Lucas, sat with him at lunch, put on the dress and gone to prom, all that stupid stuff. He just never asked.
    “Hey,” Usha says, giving my sleeve a tug.
    “Sorry,” I say. “Distracted.”
    “Me, too.” Usha smiles. “Like about ninety-nine percent of the time.”
    I smile back.
    “That rumor about Paige?” I say. “You were right. I don’t believe it.”
    Usha’s smile shrinks up. “I was right?”
    “Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, when you told us that it wasn’t true? You were right.”
    Usha sighs. “Look. I was just . . . saying things. I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
    “But Paige was your friend, right?”
    She crosses her arms over her chest, not like she’s hugging herself, but like she’s holding herself together. “She was.”
    “So you don’t think she’d—”
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” Usha says firmly.
    “Okay, but you know that Kelsey Pope was probably just trying to get attention and be dramatic, right? I mean, it’s just a stupid rumor.”
    “It’s . . .” Usha picks at her orange.
    “It’s what?” I prompt. “Usha?”
    Usha looks up. “Kelsey shouldn’t have said it. Now can we please talk about anything else?”
    I feel a twinge of anger mixed in among the stew of desperation and loss. Usha had told Mr. Fisk that I was supposed to be herfriend, but Usha was supposed to be my friend, too. So why would she believe the worst about me?
    After lunch, I walk Jenny out to the property line and hurry to the art room in time to inhabit Usha for another session of mural painting. This attempt at painting doesn’t go any better than our other sessions, but I’m afraid not to inhabit her. She didn’t want to paint the thing in the first place; she could very easily tell Mr. Fisk that she’s going to quit. So, I get up on that ladder and pretend I’m artistic. I add a line that might be the bridge of my nose, a curve that could be my upper lip, a sweep that I mean to be Brooke’s jawline, the cup of her ear. I stand back to assess my work. It doesn’t even look like two girls’ faces, just shapes. I eye the little moth