Absent (Katie Williams)

but . . .” He pauses and looks into the dark of the basement. “I take it back. Things do change.”
    “Do you think Mr. Fisk could be gay?”
    He laughs. “If you only knew the hours I once spent asking myself that question.” He shakes his head ruefully. “But it doesn’treally matter, does it? What matters is that he considered me a friend. That he . . .” Evan’s voice, steady through the whole story, begins to shake now. “That he remembers me.”
    We listen to the noises of the dance above us, the thrum of the bass, the tangle of voices.
    “Ask me if I regret it,” Evan says.
    “I don’t have to ask that.”
    “Do it anyway. Please. I want to be able to say it.”
    “Okay. Do you regret it?”
    “Every day. Every day of my life.” He smiles at the word life.
    “There’s something I have to tell you. And I don’t know if I can.”
    “After what I just told you?” Evan snorts. “You can. You better.”
    “Okay.” I take a breath. “But please don’t hate me.” I explain everything I’ve been keeping secret from Evan, starting with the afternoon of the grief group meeting, when I thought I’d held Lucas Hayes’s hand, ending with tonight in the hallway when Usha said she’d seen me step off the roof. Evan doesn’t interrupt.
    When I finish, I expect him to yell at me, but instead he squints. It’s the faraway look he gets when he’s solving a complex math problem in his head.
    “You’re angry,” I say when I can’t stand the silence anymore. “I’m sorry. I should have told you about the inhabitations, about everything.”
    He’s still silent.
    “It’s just I knew what you’d say. You’d say that I shouldn’t do it, that I didn’t have the right.” I expel a long breath. “And that’s true. But I didn’t want to stop because . . . Evan, I got to be alive again.”
    He finally breaks his silence, but he doesn’t scold me, doesn’t say anything about my explanation. Instead, he says, “Brooke.”
    “What?”
    “We have to find Brooke.”
    “Why?” I say. “Evan?”
    But he’s already up and climbing the stairs to the school.
    We can’t find Brooke. She’s not at the dance. She’s not on her death spot. We resort to walking through the halls, poking our heads into empty classrooms, calling her name.
    “Evan, what is this?” I ask him after we’ve cleared the entire art and music wing. “Why do we have to find Brooke?”
    “I’ll tell you later. I promise.”
    “Why not now?”
    He bites his lip. “I want to be sure. Where should we look next?”
    “Maybe outside,” I suggest, leading Evan through the doors, out to the student parking lot. “Sometimes she hangs out on the—”
    Evan goes stock-still.
    I turn to see what he’s looking at.
    Harriet.
    She’s where I saw her before, crouched in the middle of the parking lot, on the site of her accident. We run to her, and this time we reach her before she disappears. She’s speaking urgently again, the same word over and over. And again, we can’t hear the sound of what she’s saying.
    “Can you make it out?” I ask Evan. “It’s . . . Is it . . . ?” A chill goes through me.
    Evan says it. “ ‘Brooke.’ She’s saying ‘Brooke.’ ”
    “What does it mean? Is Brooke in trouble?”
    “No,” Evan says. “I think she’s—”
    “Evan.” I gesture to Harriet, whose mouth has fallen open in fear. She points at something behind us. We turn.
    “What?” Evan says. “The school?”
    But I know where to look. I tilt my head up.
    There, on the school roof, stands a figure, face tipped to the sky. A guy, I can tell that much. He doesn’t stand up on the ledge—to my great relief—but on the flat of the roof. He peers over the ledge, though, as if assessing the drop to the ground. There’s something familiar about him. “Is it . . . ?” I ask, then answer myself. “It’s Lucas.”
    “No, it’s not,” Evan says.
    “It is,” I say. “I can tell. It’s definitely Lucas Hayes.”
    “No. Paige. Look at Harriet. Look.”
    I turn back to Harriet, and she holds her arm out straight, a direct line, finger pointed. And it’s obvious what she’s pointing at: Lucas Hayes on the edge of the roof. But the thing is, she’s still saying it, her lips are still forming the same one word: Brooke.
    Then she winks out.
    And Evan and I are left alone in the parking lot.

24: THE SCHOOL ROOF
    “IT’S HER,” EVAN SAYS, BOTH OF US GAZING UP AT THE FIGURE of Lucas