Absent (Katie Williams)

pleased that finally there’s no one, not even Greenvale Greene, willing to meet my eyes and smile back.

17: THE OUTCAST
    WES WAS THE TIPPING POINT. BY THE LAWS OF RIDICULOUS HIGH school logic, making up lies about a dead girl doesn’t touch Kelsey’s reputation, but getting rejected by Wes Nolan makes her the joke of the school. The next week, Brooke, Evan, and I follow behind Kelsey. Even the dead kids are interested in the fallout from Kelsey’s botched prom proposal. Me especially. And this time, I’m not disappointed. Kelsey walks to her locker in a rush of whispers, everyone repeating the same rumor that they’ve all already heard: Wes Nolan turned her down. Her! Kelsey Pope! Their whispers lilt with excitement, and their eyes shine with glee. I realize that they’ve been hoping for this. They’re glad to see her brought low. And I wonder if this is what popularity really is, people waiting to hate you in the open.
    The burners are the worst. Or at least the loudest. We pass a cluster of them by the drinking fountain.
    “Hey, Pope! Don’t you have something to ask me?” they call.
    “No, me!”
    “Me!” the girls chime in. “Me!”
    “I’ll even buy you that corsage,” Heath Mineo, fresh from his suspension, adds, somehow managing to make the word corsage sound lewd.
    For once, Wes Nolan doesn’t seem to find the joke funny. He ducks his head and disappears down the hall in the opposite direction, which only makes his friends laugh harder.
    “This is too much,” Evan says.
    “Not even close,” Brooke tells him. “People should get what they deserve.”
    “What did she do to deserve this? Ask the wrong person to prom?”
    “No,” Brooke says. “She spread rumors about Paige’s death. It’s karma, bitch. Right, Paige?”
    Both of them look at me.
    “I’m not going to feel bad for Kelsey Pope. Why should I?”
    “Because you know what it feels like to have a rumor spread about you,” Evan replies.
    “Yes,” I say. “Exactly.”
    It doesn’t take long for Evan and Brooke to grow bored with Kelsey’s long walks down barbed hallways. I keep following her anyway, until a near-silent lunch with the ponies and another razzing by two burner girls sends her to the office with complaints of an oncoming migraine. Maybe the gossip has reached even the teachers, because they let her sign out without protest. I follow her all the way to the school doors and watch her cross the parking lot, hair whipping in the wind, chin tucked down into her coat.
    She lied about you, I tell myself. She deserves what she gets.
    I’m sitting up on the roof when the final bell rings and, a moment later, dozens of voices begin to float up to me like balloons. Anotherday of school done. I peer down at them, the tiny people trickling out in pairs or clusters. I stand and stretch, thinking that I might sit in on the German Club meeting, which almost sounds like English if you listen to it sideways. I’m halfway across the roof when the tiny floating voices turn from balloons to firecrackers, screeching up into the air.
    The sound is so terrible, so startling, that I nearly lose my hover.
    They’re screaming. Everyone is screaming.
    Then, pitched up over the screams, a squeal of breaks.
    A suck of breath.
    A crash.
    I run back to the edge of the roof, scrambling up onto my death spot and looking down below.
    There they are:
    One set of tire tracks curls, the arc and color of shrieking rubber.
    Two bodies.
    One on the hood of the car.
    Another sprawled on the ground in front of it.
    By the time I reach the parking lot, there’s already a circle of people around the crash site. A few are on their cells. I hear the words “fast” and “nowhere” and a girl crying so gently it sounds like she’s singing a wordless song. Others have their phones held high, videotaping, their arms slowly waving with the weight of them, and I think of a concert when the audience holds up their lighters aflame. Most of the onlookers, though, stand in a stunned silence.
    The crowd is thick, but I find pockets of emptiness. I duck through here and there, finally walking out into the space at the crowd’s center.
    I recognize him at a distance by his shoe, which sits, empty of foot, in front of me. A week ago, I was wearing that sneaker. Thenote from Lucas had dropped out onto its toe. I look across the blacktop. Heath Mineo lies facedown on the ground, knees tucked to his chest and arms thrown wide, a white sock peeking out