Absent (Katie Williams)

from beneath his crumpled body.
    Two burners stand over him.
    “I think I see breathing,” one of them says, his voice loud with shock.
    “Don’t move him,” the other warns, adding, “right?” He looks blindly at the crowd around him. “Right?”
    No one answers.
    There was a second body, I think fuzzily. On the car.
    I circle the car, with each step, a new sliver of the body on its hood becoming visible: a shirtsleeve, a skinny arm, a strand of lank hair. One more step, and I hear myself gasp.
    She lies curled over the dashboard, still half in the driver’s seat, her upper body resting on the hood. At first, I think she’s crying, but then I realize those are tears of safety glass in the corners of her closed eyes.
    It’s Harriet Greene.

18: AFTER THE ACCIDENT
    “I DIDN’T SEE HER, JUST THE CAR ,” CHRIS RACKHAM TELLS THE police. “It came around the end of the row there.”
    “I heard it before I saw it,” biblical Erin says. “It made that sound, you know, that screaming-car sound. The tires.”
    “At first it seemed like someone messing around, trying to get attention.” Lane Cosgrove shakes her ponytail. “But then we all realized . . . This. Isn’t. A. Joke.”
    “We jumped out of the way,” one of the burners says, and the officer writes a few quick lines. “Heath was just next to us. He jumped away, too. But then the car . . . it turned, like at Heath.”
    “It veered to the left there, where it hit him.” Whitney Puryear points to the tire tracks curling between the two rows of cars. “The brakes squealed anyway. But it was too late. You could see it was going to hit him.”
    “She broke through the windshield,” Joe Schultz says. “There was glass.”
    “She didn’t know him.” The burner shakes his head. “I don’t think so, anyway. I don’t think she really knew anyone.”
    “Maybe she had some sort of . . .” Lane pauses to pick the word carefully. “episode. Did any of the others tell you? Sophomore year, she was in a place, you know . . . a facility.”
    They call off classes for the next three days. The adults still come in, though, and hold an amazing number of meetings. Evan, Brooke, and I haunt the main office, waiting for news about Harriet and Heath, which arrives the next afternoon. Heath is conscious, but with a concussion and a broken collarbone, leg, and three ribs. He’ll finish the year out in the hospital and then at home.
    Harriet has yet to wake up. They’re officially calling it a coma.
    Over the following days, the silent crowd around the crash site fractures into a chaos of delayed reactions. The buttons on the secretary’s phone blink their demon eyes, and her litany of “holdpleaseholdpleaseholdplease” begins to loop in my head. Mrs. Morello and Mr. Bosworth hold near-hourly meetings, outlining the new parking lot regulations, the added trauma counseling, and screening for “at-risk” students.
    The teachers come out of these meetings shaking their heads.
    “What a year!” one of them groans.
    “This place is cursed,” another says.
    When I’m not following the drama in the office, I sit up on my death spot and look out over the parking lot, knowing that in the hospital across town, Harriet lies on a tide deeper than sleep, shallower than death. I remember her small, phlegmy voice whispering, I’m sorry that you’re dead.
    It all starts to seem petty, the rumors, my reputation, my revenge. What does it matter compared to Mr. and Mrs. Greene sitting stifflyin Bosworth’s office, a crumpled Kleenex twitching in Mrs. Greene’s hand? What does it matter compared to Harriet on the hood of the car, safety glass tears in the corners of her eyes? If she dies, I wonder, will she awake in the hospital? Or will she appear down below, a pale blinking girl in the dark lake of the parking lot?
    They bring the students back the following Monday. Most opt for the school bus, and the student parking lot is left two-thirds empty. My classmates are, days later, both sedated and enlivened by the car crash. They talk about it with the exhausted giddiness of kids who have stayed up too late at a slumber party. I wait by the mural sheet, which seems to have been permanently forgotten in the aftermath of Paul Revere High School’s latest tragedy. Forgotten, too, is what the mural memorializes. No one looks at it anymore. No one thinks of me. So this is what it feels like to be forgotten.
    Not forgotten is the shame of Kelsey