Katie Williams: Absent

“It’s not so bad.” Evan turns and looks at the hall, the flow and burble of students rushing by us. “I mean, it could be worse. We have classes and the library and people all around us.”

I open my mouth to say something sarcastic about the meager joys of still having high school, but then Evan adds, “We have each other.” And I decide to shut up because until Brooke arrived in September, Evan was here alone. For how long, he won’t say.

“You get used to it,” Evan says, like he can read my mind. “You’re already getting used to it.”

Brooke raises an eyebrow. “Settle in for the world’s longest detention.”

It’s the same thing I’d told myself: that I was getting used to it, coming to terms, or whatever nonsense phrase Mrs. Morello might use for it. But suddenly I feel . . . what? Unsettled. Unfinished. Restless. A restless ghost. Why? Because of some stupid rumor? The phrase “accidental fall” spoken in Mrs. Morello’s emphatic tone repeats in my head. I feel it all over again, the giddy dread of my foot stepping back and finding no ground under it.

The bell rings, interrupting my thoughts.

“Come to Fisk’s class with me,” Evan urges.

“No thanks.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You? Skip class?” Evan considers it his sworn duty to attend each and every class period, even though his name doesn’t appear on any roster. Brooke, on the other hand, brags that she hasn’t attended a full class since she was alive. The best part of being dead, she claims.

Evan shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling in precise intervals. “They’re playing dodgeball in the gym. Maybe we can see someone lose a tooth again.”

“You looked like you were gonna puke last time that happened.”

“Well, this time I’ll close my eyes and think of the tooth fairy.”

“Go to class, Evan,” I say. “I’m immune to your attempts at cheer-upped-ness.”

Evan looks skeptical. “You sure?”

“Allergic, in fact.” I take a step backward. “If it makes you happy, I’ll go to class, too.”

“Why anyone would willingly go to class,” Brooke mutters.

“I think they’re dissecting frogs today in junior bio,” I say.

“And that cheers you up?” Evan asks.

“I find it therapeutic.” The school is lousy with ghost frogs, chloroformed for dissection. Beige, green, leopard-spotted, they gather in the corners of the basement, croaking softly, blinking their marbled eyes, and hopping through the cinder-block walls.

“If you’re sure,” Evan says, clearly relieved to have gotten out of dodgeball.

“Sure I’m sure. Maybe we can find the new frogs tonight. We can say to them, ‘You must have been so sad, frog.’ ” I imitate Kelsey’s tremulous voice. “ ‘What friends we might have been.’ ”

I’ve lied to Evan. I have no intention of attending a class where I’ve already been marked permanently, irrevocably, absent. As soon as he turns the corner, I head out to the student parking lot, telling myself I’m just looking for some fresh air (air that I can’t even breathe), telling myself I’m just looking for the sun (sun hidden behind spring storm clouds), telling myself I’m not (definitely not) looking for Lucas Hayes.

On my way to the burners’ circle, I balance atop the cement stoppers that line the lot. Just after my death—three weeks ago now—I couldn’t have balanced like this, couldn’t even have walked down the school hall without sinking through the tiles, down to the basement where finally the earth would’ve stopped my fall with its sediments, its fossils, its underground rivers, and—deep below—its glowing, churning core.

I spent the first week after my death stuck on the packed-dirt floor of the school basement, surrounded by an army of croaking ghost frogs. I sat in their midst, sometimes crying, sometimes rocking, sometimes staring vacantly at the skinny freckled boy who would sit across from me speaking, in patient tones, words that I couldn’t stand to hear. Then one day, for no good reason, I felt like I could bear to see the world again. But when I tried to mount the first step of the stairs, my foot sank straight through it, back down to the dirt, where I suppose I now 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 earning their 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.