Absent (Katie Williams)

scared,” Evan says, “to lie like that.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I’m surprised at the vehemence in my voice. “It doesn’t matter if he was scared or in trouble or what. He should have said that he was there with her. He should have said that they were there together. He shouldn’t have said he didn’t know her, that she was just some girl.”

20: THE DROP CLOTH
    I MAKE A NEW PLAN THE NEXT DAY TO FOLLOW LUCAS HAYES until he thinks of me. I will walk into Bosworth’s office and make Lucas tell the truth about his part in Brooke’s death. And Lucas won’t be able to take it back later because I’ll tell Bosworth to question Heath; I’ll tell him to call Lucas’s parents right then and there so that I can confess to them, too. It’s the truth. They’ll have to believe it.
    But the next morning, Lucas doesn’t come to school. And when Kelsey and Wes saunter in from the parking lot, their shoulders bumping lightly as their steps fall together, I find myself following them instead, straining to hear the hum of their conversation, a tremor in my middle.
    Neither Kelsey nor Wes thinks of me that morning. They find each other during passing breaks and take their lunches out to the courtyard. They sit close on the flagstones, sharing body heat. I watch them through the windows from inside the school. It’s too cold out there, even for a dead girl who can no longer feel thingslike cold. Wes makes a comment that causes Kelsey to throw her head back and laugh. Would she be able to make him laugh? Yesterday, I had.
    I step through the brick and glass out into the courtyard.
    “. . . sit inside with your friends?” Wes is saying when I get in earshot.
    Kelsey makes a face. “No thanks.”
    “You’re in a fight?” Wes asks.
    “No fight. We’re just not friends.” Kelsey picks up a piece of foil from her lunch, adjusts it so that it makes a reflection on the flagstones. “I did some things. I don’t know why. They were just little things, like wearing the wrong kind of clothes.”
    “Or asking the wrong kind of guy to the dance?” Wes raises an eyebrow.
    She smiles down at her foil, makes the reflection dance.
    My little things, I think. The things I made her do.
    “At first it was just an impulse, an experiment. And it was like they thought I was someone else entirely. Some stranger. I was sure I’d ruined everything, my friendships, my entire senior year, myself. But then”—she squints—“I started to be okay with it. I started even to like it. I didn’t have to be so careful to be nice and pretty and just this way. I could just . . .” She flips the foil onto the flagstones, where it joins with its reflection. “Be.”
    After lunch, art class takes the two of them past the drop cloth for my old mural. They glance at it, my name spoken in unison by their thoughts. Before I’ve thought about it, I’m pushing my way into Kelsey and blinking up at Wes through her hazel eyes. I reach out to take his hand, but have to pull back because he’s still gazing at the drop cloth, his mind whispering, Paige.
    “What are you thinking about?” I ask him.
    “Oh,” his eyes flick to me, back to the drop cloth. “Her, I guess. Paige Wheeler.”
    “You knew her?”
    “Just a little.”
    My gaze falls on the sketchbook tucked under his arm. “Why did you draw all those pictures of her, then?”
    He turns, nakedly surprised, my name gone from his thoughts mid-syllable, as if it has dropped through a trapdoor. “You saw those?”
    “You drew them because she died?”
    “Actually I drew these before she died. Or before I knew, anyway. I drew them that afternoon. Seventh period.”
    “When she fell,” I whisper.
    He offers me the sketchbook. I take it gingerly, flip through the pages, my face appearing before me again and again, but with small differences between each drawing, as if I’m changing my expression, as if I’m moving. That girl who is me. Who isn’t me.
    “Why did you draw them?” I ask again.
    “I don’t know. Maybe I liked her.”
    I’m standing on tile floor, hard and cold and square beneath my feet, but suddenly it feels like I can’t count on the ground at all. It’s like my first days learning to hover, when the floor was an iced-over lake—one wrong step, and I’ll fall through.
    “Maybe?” I hear my voice say.
    “All right, not maybe. I liked her.”
    “You should have told her.”
    Wes smiles humorlessly. “Well, what do you know? I