Absent (Katie Williams)

them with my eyes as they curl into nothing.

21. SOMEONE ELSE’S DAUGHTER
    EVAN, BROOKE, AND I SIT IN A ROW IN FRONT OF HARRIET’S accident site for the rest of the afternoon.
    Evan turns to me. “You’re sure you don’t know what she was trying to say?”
    “I was too far away. It was the same thing, though. The same word or two words. And, like I told you, she pointed to the school, then to herself.”
    Evan frowns.
    “What is it?” I ask.
    “Something’s been bothering me,” he says. “You know it’s just been me here for . . . a while.”
    “How long?” Brooke asks.
    “Years,” Evan admits.
    “Decades?” I whisper.
    He looks down. “A while,” he repeats. “And that makes sense because it’s a school. No one’s supposed to die in high school.”
    I feel a twinge as he says this. It’s true. I look around at the three of us. We weren’t supposed to die so young. “But then there was Brooke,” I say, “and me, and now maybe Harriet.”
    “All in the same year,” Brooke finishes.
    “It’s like they say,” Evan traces over the tire tracks with his finger, “this place is cursed.”
    I still fully intend to make Lucas admit the truth to Principal Bosworth, but he doesn’t show up the next day either. Only half of the upperclassmen show anyway because prom is tonight. It’s tradition to spend the morning sleeping in, the afternoon getting sandblasted and shellacked at the salon.
    I hang out in the main office, waiting for a call about Harriet. I expect Evan and Brooke to be there, too, but this morning it’s just me. Bosworth and Mrs. Morello are both shut up in his office, and the secretary is playing solitaire on the computer, no calls ringing. Twenty minutes later, Kelsey Pope slinks into the office, hair in wet ropes, features faint without their usual makeup. I’m surprised she’s here at school and not at home readying herself for the dance.
    “Can I get a late pass?” she asks the secretary.
    While the secretary bends to get the form, Kelsey picks up a flyer from the front counter, fiddling with it. I think of the origami flower she folded at my grief group meeting. Just then, the office door opens and Bosworth ushers out the people from his meeting.
    Those people are my parents.
    My mother emerges first, purse wrapped tightly under her arm. My father follows, his hand set on her shoulder, as if this small touch is necessary to their forward momentum, though I can’t tell if he is guiding her or she is leading him out the door.
    “. . . for coming in today, Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler,” Bosworth is saying.
    At the sound of their name, Kelsey thinks of me, Paige. Without a thought, I step into her, and thankfully, she doesn’t resist.
    My mother is buttoning up a dark jacket that I’ve never seen before; she must have bought it new for spring. My father reluctantly takes Bosworth’s offered hand, giving it a tepid shake. I scan them for other differences, new wrinkles, dark circles, white hairs, but it’s like trying to think about your parents by their given names instead of Mom and Dad. I can’t see anything except that they’re overwhelmingly my parents right there in front of me. They’re my parents walking past me out the office door. They’re my parents who might leave this school, never to come back.
    “Wait!” I shout.
    Everyone looks at me. My mother has a polite expression on her face, as if she doesn’t even know me. Which she doesn’t, I remind myself. And I decide that I’d exchange all of Kelsey’s beauty in a second to look like my mother’s daughter right now.
    “Wait,” I repeat. I take a tripping step toward my mom.
    She raises her eyebrows, forehead wrinkling.
    I have no idea what to say. I look down at Kelsey’s hands, still holding the half-folded flyer. I scan its heading and thrust it forward. “You should come to the spaghetti dinner next week.”
    “Oh,” my mother says faintly.
    “It’s to raise money for the jazz band.”
    “Kelsey,” Bosworth warns. “These are—”
    “It’s a really good cause,” I talk over him. “Music and the arts and education, and lots of people come to it, parents come to it,” I finish lamely.
    “I think that’s enough for now,” Bosworth says.
    But my mother steps past him and takes the flyer from me. “Maybe we will come. I like music.” She smiles briefly. “Thank you for telling us about this, . . . ?” She waits for my name.
    “Kelsey,” I say. I hold the paper for