Katie Williams: Absent

“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, 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’t really 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.

“IT’S HER,” EVAN SAYS, BOTH OF US GAZING UP AT THE FIGURE of Lucas on the school roof. “That’s Brooke. She’s possessed him.”

Memories lay themselves out in my mind like a hand of playing cards, one flipped over, then the next: Lucas murmuring, Yeah, right, when Mrs. Morello had suggested he was upset about Brooke’s death. Lucas standing in front of the overflowing sinks. Karma, man. Sucks when it finally comes around again. Lucas pointing to the spot on the tile, Brooke’s death spot. You should lie down on it.

I knew something was different about him, different from the popular Lucas goofing with his friends, different too from the Lucas who’d met me in the trees. I explained it away as the drugs, the guilt, the grief, but really, it was Brooke. Lucas flooding the bathroom? Brooke. Lucas ordering the burner girl onto the floor? Brooke. Lucas climbing to the school roof? Brooke. She figured out how to inhabit people, just like I did.

“She’s done it before,” I say. Evan isn’t looking up at the roof anymore. Now he’s staring at me. I have the impulse to give him a good shove, because it’s no good standing here gaping at each other, not when any minute Brooke could look down and see us. I duck between two parked cars, gesturing for him to follow me.

“We have to do something,” I insist.

“Paige,” he says.

“Don’t you get it? She blames Lucas for her death. She hates him.”

“Paige.” He winces. “I’m so sorry.”

“And now she’s up there on the roof. She’s going to make him jump. She’s going to make him jump like . . . ” I trail off. “Why are you sorry?”

Evan looks down.

“Why are you sorry?” I repeat.

Instead of answering, he asks, “What did you just say?”

“What did I . . . ” I shake my head. “That Brooke hates Lucas. That if we don’t do anything, she’s going to make him jump off the roof.”

“You said like.”

I peek over the car at the roof. Lucas is standing just where he was before, looking over the ledge. “Evan. Come on. We have to do something.”

“You said, ‘She’s going to make him jump like . . . ’ ”

“Did I? So what?” But something is rising in me. I picture myself standing on the ledge of the roof, fragile egg held out in front of me, sky above me a muddy sheet. “She’s going to make him jump off the roof like . . . I don’t know.”