Absent (Katie Williams)

That’s how I got in. I took it as a sign. The janitor was on the other side of the building. I could hear the radio. And I thought, He’ll be the only one to hear the shot. He’ll be the one to find me. I tried to remember what he looked like so that I could picture him, his face, but then I remembered that he was the night janitor, and so I’d never even seen him. I imagined him anyway. I pictured my grandfather with a thick white moustache, holding a wet mop.
    “Then I thought, Every day he cleans up after kids, and now he can clean up an actual kid. Do you think that’s funny?”
    “No. That’s not funny,” I say.
    “I took my shoes off to walk across the floor, so I wouldn’t mess up how he’d washed it, and that seemed funny. I couldn’t laugh, though, because it’s . . . Did you ever notice that it’s harder to laugh when you’re alone?”
    I nod.
    “I put my shoes back on when I got to the seal. I didn’t want to die in my socks. I’d thought I was going to put the gun in my mouth, but then when I was there, I didn’t want to have to, you know, taste the metal.”
    “Evan,” I murmur, but I don’t have anything good to say after that. Or anything at all. So, he keeps talking, his eyes fixed on the dirt floor.
    “I put the gun to my temple instead. And I stood there. I stood there for a long time, so long my arm got tired, and I had to rest it. It was heavy. Guns are heavy. I thought about just going home. Butthen it would be the same, wouldn’t it? The next week and the next and the rest of my life, really. Because it wasn’t going to go away, even after I graduated and got away from Paul Revere, I’d still be the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And, if my father ever found out—”
    “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I say, wishing that I could’ve said this seventeen years ago to the boy in the gym.
    “Thank you.” He looks at me. “I know that now. I mean, I believe it now. Did you do the math? I’d be thirty-four years old. I guess I am thirty-four years old. I’ve had as much death as I did life. That’s a long time to learn a lesson.”
    I reach out across the floor and put my hand through Evan’s. “Tell me the rest.”
    “There’s not much left to tell. I lifted the gun again, and I pulled the trigger.”
    I close my eyes and hear the crack of the shot, a sound louder than a gym full of cheering students. In the gym’s empty center, I see a shadow-thin boy falling to the floor. Then I force my eyes open, because Evan has never looked away from me.
    “I woke up a few days later, I guess. At first I didn’t know where I was, some basement, but then I heard them up above me, sneakers squeaking, boys shouting to pass the ball. Gym class.” Evan smiles wryly. “I was trying to escape high school, and I ended up right back in it.”
    “What did you do next?”
    “A lot of freaking out. The school had covered up the fact that there was a suicide in the gym, the entire fact that it was a suicide, for that matter. No one talked about it, actually. It was like I’d just disappeared.
    “For a while, I followed the night janitor, who turned out to be not my grandpa, of course, but this little Dominican woman. She talked to herself, and so I’d fill in the gaps in her conversation. Sometimes her responses would fit what I’d just said. I still think maybe she could—not hear me, but who knows? She retired ten years ago.
    “I followed my friends around, too, watched them graduate. This one guy, I was in love with him, but he was so popular and so much a guy’s guy. Sometimes I suspected that he might feel . . . but I was never brave enough to ask.” He pauses. “Then, just a couple years ago, he came back and started teaching here.”
    “Mr. Fisk.” I can tell by Evan’s face that I’m right. “That’s why you sit in his class? Evan, he’s the adviser for those meetings I told you about where gay kids—”
    “I know. A couple weeks ago, I heard him talking to a student about that group.”
    Me, I think. That student talking to Mr. Fisk was me pretending to be Chris Rackham.
    “He said he’d had a friend, and I heard it. I heard him think my name.”
    “You did?”
    “I lost my hover. I dropped right through the floor.”
    I remember turning to find Evan’s cupboard empty. I’d thought he’d left the room, that he hadn’t heard any of it.
    “I went to one of those meetings. Those kids. It’s not perfect,