Absent (Katie Williams)

belong.
    It took Evan nearly forever to teach me how to suspend myself just millimeters above the school floor (or a set of stairs or the seat of a chair) so that I could approximate the postures of life. Hovering, he calls it. Even now, if I don’t use a tiny corner of my mind to hold myself just so, I will sink until I hit the earth, however far below that might be. Now, only weeks later, I can hover pretty easily. It was easy once I figured out it wasn’t so different from the ways in which life requires you to hold yourself just so.
    I’ve become so adept at hovering that I can, with concentration, jump from one cement stopper to the next, which I do all the way to the adjacent soccer field. I tread out across the field, as close to the burners’ circle as I can get. The circle is just a cluster of trees earningtheir leaves back in patches, a spotty effect like a Boy Scout sash only half-filled with badges.
    Lucas Hayes was in Boy Scouts when he was little. He told me when we met among those trees on the day before I died. He could still list off all the badges he’d earned, he said. “Prove it,” I said, and so he had, from American Heritage to Wilderness Survival. As he spoke, he assembled my physics project, twisting the strands of wire into the cardboard box. He gave one of the wires a new twist with the name of each badge.
    “You’re still a Boy Scout.” I nudged him with my shoulder, the tree bark rasping against the back of my jacket. The snow was still on the ground, except in the burners’ circle, where the tree branches held it off of us, as if this place were set aside for us, preserved.
    “Careful.” He lifted the box. “There’s an egg in here, you know.”
    “Yes, I know. It’s my project you hijacked. Besides, you’re doing it all wrong.” He hadn’t been, but I could twist the wires just as well as he could.
    He handed the project back to me with his flashbulb smile.
    “See? Like this,” I said.
    “For the record, I’m not a Scout anymore. I dropped out in sixth grade.”
    “Well, maybe you’re not a Scout, but you’re still Scout-like. Admit it, you still have that sash.”
    “It was a vest, actually, and really, I’m not as good as all that.”
    “Why? Because you have a secret—” I bit down on my sentence.
    I’d almost said girlfriend, which I was not. Not at all. We’d agreed on that from the start. Who needed the looks in the hallway? Not to mention the gossip. Besides, it was no big deal. He was just a stupid testo.
    A stupid testo who happened to be good at kissing.
    Fortunately, Lucas didn’t seem to have heard my slip. “Come on,” I babbled for cover. “You’re captain of the whatever team.”
    “You know it’s basketball,” he said. “And baseball in the spring.”
    “You get good grades,” I continued, “probably mostly by smiling at the teachers. Yeah, that’s the smile I mean. And on top of it all, you’re the school hero. You practically saved a girl’s life.”
    Lucas’s smile shut off. “Don’t say that.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I didn’t save her.”
    And it was true. Lucas had called for help when he found her, but by the time they’d gotten there, Brooke Lee was dead. An overdose. Cocaine.
    “Sorry,” I murmured. And I was.
    “How about you?” Lucas said, his smile back, though at half wattage. “Were you a Girl Scout?”
    “Nope. Not me. I’m not much for dressing identically and earning badges.”
    “That reminds me. I forgot to mention one other thing I earned a badge for.” He leaned close, the cloud of his breath puffing against my face. I should have earned a badge for not wincing at Lucas’s pick-up lines.
    “A kissing badge, huh? How’d you practice your skill? On the troop leader or the other little boys?” I inquired of his puckered-up face.
    “You’re sick, Paige Wheeler.”
    “The sickest,” I said happily.
    “I like that about you.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “I do.” He paused, looking suddenly serious. “You don’t mind, do you?”
    “Mind that you messed up my physics project?”
    “Mind being my secret.”
    So he had heard me almost say “secret girlfriend.” I could feel the blood lighting up my cheeks, and I silently cursed my pallor. Kelsey Pope, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, tanned herself to a crisp year round; no one ever knew when she was embarrassed. If she ever had anything to be embarrassed about, that is.
    “I don’t mind,” I told Lucas. “After all, you’re my