Absent (Katie Williams)

they’re the only thing holding her to the ground, her head tilted back, her painted lips the highest point of her body. Lucas’s mouth presses down on hers.
    I step back into the shadow of the entranceway, watching them. The kiss stretches on for minutes that must in reality be only seconds, and I can do nothing but stare. It looks different from the way he’d kissed me, as if her lips actually are a fruit he’s downing in bites, no regard for stem or seeds. It’s the girl who finally pulls free; the lower half of Lucas’s face is ripe with her dark lipstick.
    “Do you want to know where it was?” Lucas asks.
    She nods, her eyes wide.
    Lucas points to the place on the floor by the sinks: Brooke’s death spot. Then, he cocks his head and says, “You should lie down on it.”
    “Lie down?” she repeats uncertainly. “Like, on the floor?”
    “Come on,” Lucas says.
    “I don’t know.”
    “But if I wanted you to?”
    With a smile that might be a grimace, she does. And when he bends down to kiss her there on the floor, I finally regain the ability to move.
    Maybe we should be trying to forget.
    Harriet’s safety glass tears.
    Kelsey’s real tears.
    The sketch of the girl under the tree.
    She’s just some girl who died.
    It’s too much.
    I don’t care about them.
    Any of them.
    I don’t care.
    I don’t care.
    These tears mean I don’t care.
    I run past Wes and the burner boys, their faces blurring through the scrim of my tears. I run past Usha, nearly knocking her from her ladder. The late bell rings, but I don’t turn back. I slam the doors out to the parking lot and race across the soccer fields behind the school, their grass sucked gray and dry from the winter that just passed. I find a stretch of brick wall and slide to the ground. Here they are, tears I couldn’t cry before, wet on my cheeks and hands.
    “Hey,” a voice says between half-caught breaths. “Hey, there.”
    I look up, and he’s standing there, all shaggy hair and tattered coat. He wavers as the tears rise to my eyes, then clears as they fall.
    “What are you doing here, Wes Nolan?”
    “I followed you,” he says, adding, “barely. You run fast.”
    “This isn’t what it looks like,” I tell him.
    “What does it look like?”
    “Like I’m upset.”
    He cocks his head. “You’re not upset?”
    “Don’t look at me. I’m all tears and snot.”
    “Okay. I won’t look.” He turns away gamely. “So things have been pretty rough, huh?”
    “No kidding,” I say, then I realize what he must mean: that things have been rough for Kelsey because he turned her down. “I’m not upset over you, you know.”
    He raises his eyebrows, and I wonder if that sounded insulting. I wonder, after that, why I even care if it did.
    “I saw Lucas Hayes in the bathroom,” I explain. “He was making out with some burner.”
    “A burner?” Wes asks. “Like on a stove?”
    “No. A burner like a girl who burns things—cigarettes, pot—who smokes things.”
    “Oh. Like me,” he says.
    “Yeah,” I say uncomfortably. “I guess, yeah.”
    “A burner,” he tries out the word, smiles at it. “I like that.”
    “It’s supposed to be an insult.”
    “Okay.” He smiles wider. “I still like it.”
    “Of course you do.”
    “You used to go out with Lucas Hayes, right?”
    “Last year.”
    “So you still like him, huh?”
    I bite Kelsey’s lip and look across the field at the burners’ circle where I used to wait, listening for the soft crush of pine needles that would mark Lucas’s step, my heart beating at the possibility of that sound, my ears echoing with the absence of it, my mind protesting that I didn’t care one way or the other. “Well, I did,” I admit. “I liked him. I liked Lucas Hayes.” And I laugh because I did. I really did like him. Prince Basketball. Mr. Gleam Tooth. High Testo himself. Lucas Hayes.
    Wes nods. “Most girls seem to.”
    “Yeah. Most girls,” I scoff. But in this case, most girls was me. “But I don’t anymore.” And as I say it, I know that it’s true. I don’t. I couldn’t like someone who said that, who said I was some girl who died. “I think that maybe I liked the idea of him more than the actual him: Lucas Hayes.”
    “Lucas Hayes,” Wes repeats.
    “It’s embarrassing, but . . .”
    “If it’s embarrassing, you have to tell.”
    “No, if it’s embarrassing, I don’t have to tell.”
    “Come on. You can make up for insulting me.”
    I smacked his