Katie Williams: Absent

Usha doesn’t shake her head, she doesn’t raise her voice, she doesn’t argue. She simply says, “Paige stepped off the roof. I saw her. Everyone else was looking the other way, at those boys throwing things. But I was looking at her. And you were, too. You screamed. When she did it, you screamed, and everyone else looked. You don’t have to pretend. I saw it. I saw you see it.”

“But no,” I argue. “That’s impossible, because I—she—didn’t jump.”

“Kelsey,” Wes says, “maybe right now isn’t—”

My mind latches on to something. Usha and my conversation at the lunch table. “You said, you told Jenny, that I shouldn’t have said it, that I shouldn’t have said that Paige jumped.”

“I was mad that you told everyone, not because it was a lie, but because it was true.” Usha looks down at her crown, pulls free a strand of hair that was caught between the stones. When she looks up again, her expression is peaceful. “I’m not mad anymore. I was carrying it around, that secret, and it was hurting me. But after you said it, after everyone knew, I told my mom and we talked about it. I forgave you. And I painted. And I forgave her, too.”

I open my mouth, “But she couldn’t have jumped, she just, she turned and then—”

“She jumped,” Usha says, plain and soft. “She did.”

I start to say no, no way, you’re wrong, but I can’t say any of it because I’m falling all over again. Kelsey is slowly and firmly pushing me out of her body, and I can’t find my hold on her, can’t even find my feet. I’m sinking through the floor. I see a flash of the three of them—Wes, Kelsey, and Usha standing in a circle—before the floor takes me.

I land in the basement in a heap on my side. This time I don’t have the strength to get up. I draw my knees to my chest, rest my head in their valley, and listen to the ghost frogs singing softly around me.

“PAIGE,” A VOICE SAYS SOFTLY. “PAIGE,” IT SAYS AGAIN.

I can hear the music of the dance, faintly, from the gym up above. The dance is still going on, then.

“Paige,” the voice repeats.

I raise my head reluctantly.

Evan crouches in front of me. “What are you doing down here?”

“I fell through. I—” I choke on my words.

“What is it?”

I shake my head, dirt pressing against my cheek.

Just like in the grave.

“Here. Sit up,” Evan says.

I follow his instructions like a child. We sit in silence, Evan watching me steadily, until finally I manage to say, “Did I kill myself?”

Evan’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. You’ve always said that—”

“Because Usha said I did.”

“But those were rumors—” Evan begins.

“She said she saw it. That Kelsey saw it, too.” I swallow. “Usha wouldn’t lie. I thought Kelsey was lying about me, but it was the truth.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember it like that. And I don’t know why I would—no—I know that I wouldn’t do that. Not to Usha or to my parents. Or to myself. I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t be so selfish, so unfair to—”

Evan turns away from me, drops his head into his hands.

“Evan? What did I say? What is it?”

He raises his face, his expression pained. The music from the gym winds in, snaking itself around the two of us. Slowly, Evan points to the ceiling. “I died up there, you know.”

“In the gym,” I say. “I know.”

“Seventeen years ago.”

I glance at his clothes, and he catches it. “Fashions change. And then they change back. Someone once said the only constant is change.”

“Who was that?”

“Heraclitus. Ancient philosopher.”

“Sometimes I think nothing changes,” I say.

“There’s a quote for that, too.”

“Right. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ ”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” he recites.

“Show-off.”

“Sorry.” His smile looks like a stranger that has accidentally wandered onto his sad face. “Seventeen years of French class.”

“How did you die?”

“I killed myself.”

“Oh.”

“I snuck in at night with the gun from my parents’ safe. They kept it locked, but I’d figured out the combination years before.

“There’d been a basketball game, and so the floor was just washed and the doors were open for it to dry. 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. But then 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.