Absent (Katie Williams)

Kim was there on the roof. She said you couldn’t fall off. There’s a ledge thing—you can see it from the ground. You’d have to step up onto it.”
    “But what if Paige stepped up onto the ledge and then slipped?” I counter.
    “Why would she step up onto the ledge?” someone asks.
    “Because . . . I don’t know. To see a little farther, to be a little higher. To be daring.”
    They look at me blankly.
    “Yeah,” Whitney says. “She totally jumped.”
    “But she didn’t,” I say. “Kelsey made it up.”
    “How would you know that?” Whitney asks.
    I can hardly say, Because I’m Paige and I didn’t jump. “Because of my mom,” I say instead.
    All the well-rounders look up from their puddings now. “Your mom told you something about the suicide?” one of them asks.
    “She did.” I lean in. “But she made me promise not to tell anyone.”
    “Maybe you shouldn’t,” half the table replies, while the other half urges, “Tell us.” Thus follows a debate about the ethics and loopholes of parental secrets. The matter is finally decided by Whitney Puryear’s unimpeachable argument: “Well, you have to tell us now.”
    “All right.” I lower my voice. “But you have to promise not to say anything.”
    They all promise.
    In my hushed tone, I say, “Kelsey Pope is being investigated for slander.”
    “By the police?” a girl asks skeptically.
    “Of course not,” I say. “By the school board.”
    “Really?” Whitney says. “Kelsey’s under investigation?” She looks pleased.
    “Yeah.” I gird myself against the deep unconscious part of Chris that will push against this bald lie. The push comes, and I hold on until it passes. “The forensic examiners looked at the trajectory of the fall and the angle of the body.” (I silently thank my own mother’s addiction to trashy crime shows.) “It was definitely a fall. An accident.”
    “They can tell that?”
    “Of course. It’s science.”
    “It is science,” someone else adds. “It’s not like how they show it on those TV shows—twenty minutes with a microscope, and you find the magic hair. In reality, it’s legitimate.”
    “Exactly.” I nod. “Science.”
    “Then the suicide was just a rumor? That’s the slander?”
    “Yep.”
    “So Kelsey lied.”
    “Yep,” I say again.
    “What’s going to happen to her?” Whitney asks.
    “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. They’re just looking into it. Besides, it’s just a rumor.”
    “Yeah, but that’s a pretty sick rumor,” Whitney says. “I mean, think about how Paige Wheeler’s friends must feel. Or her parents.”
    “Right,” I say. “Exactly.”
    “If it were up to me, I’d suspend her,” Whitney continues. “Or expel her. Something permanent-record for sure.”
    The others voice their agreement in unison.
    I hide a smile. “You guys won’t tell anyone, right?”
    The next morning, I stand under the drop cloth and wait anxiously to see how Chris’s new rumor is faring. I hear nothing from the early arrivals, and my mood starts to sink under the weight of another failed plan. The thick of students marches in minutes before the bell, and still nothing. It’s nowhere.
    I was so sure it was going to work. Everyone knows Chris Rackham wouldn’t lie; he is always completely and totally honest. And besides, yesterday at lunch, the well-rounders had all seemed to believe him.
    “What’s wrong with you?” I grumble at the milling crowd.
    They walk on, oblivious. People want to believe bad things, I tell myself, glaring around at my classmates. They want to believe the most shocking story. They see you as the worst version of yourself.
    Then, at the end of the hall, I hear my name. It’s Whitney Puryear, her voice loud enough for everyone to hear. Chris Rackham stands in front of her, tugging nervously at his hair, then his jacket collar.
    “So you made it up?” she says. “The whole thing?”
    I try to rush over to them, to inhabit Chris before he can answer, but there are too many people between us, many of them stopped and gawking at Whitney and Chris, many of them thinking my name. If I run through them, I may well inhabit someone other than Chris. I try to weave through the gaps between people, but I already know I can’t get there in time.
    Chris says something hushed, and Whitney responds with, “But there’s no investigation?”
    And I’m close enough now to hear Chris say, “No investigation, no anything. My mom didn’t say anything