Katie Williams: Absent

Somehow, though.

Somehow.

On my death spot, the only place where I can touch the world, and the world me . . . my hand closes on his.

When I grab Lucas’s hand, his shoulder makes a popping sound and Brooke howls. But I hold on. The moment holds, too: me stretched over the edge of the roof, Lucas hanging below. The crowd draws a breath that sucks all the noise away, leaving Lucas swaying from side to side in a pocket of silence and space.

Then, the moment breaks. Brooke looks up at me through Lucas’s eyes. Her face crumples, and she lifts a hand to mine, grabs on tight.

“Save him,” she says.

Together we pull him onto the roof.

EVAN ARRIVES ON THE ROOF JUST BEFORE THE OTHERS. HE finds me kneeling on the ledge, my hand still clasped in Lucas’s hand, Brooke’s hand. Lucas has curled himself up into a ball, his head dropped to his chest, his face pale and waxen as carved soap.

“Please,” I say when I see Evan. “I don’t want to do this.” I nod to our clasped hands. “I don’t want to . . . but I’m scared to let them go.”

“It’s okay,” Evan says. He kneels next to me. “Brooke?” he says softly. No response.

“She’s still in there. She’s got to be, but my hand, Evan. I don’t want to hold her hand. She . . . what she did . . . I can’t hold her hand.”

“You can let go now,” he says.

“Can I? Because—”

“Paige. You’re done now. You can let go.”

I pull my hand free and climb from the ledge. As I do, I glance down at my classmates’ upturned faces, flushed and animated. Usha stands at the front of the crowd, her hands knotted at her chest, her fierce gaze on Lucas’s hunched back, as if she could hold him up there with the power of her eyes alone. Jenny stands on one side of her, Chris Rackham and Whitney Puryear on the other, their arms all around one another’s backs. At the far edge of the crowd, Kelsey leans against Wes, his arms and coat around her bare shoulders, his chin resting on the top of her head. I feel the memory of those arms around my shoulders, and they warm me, even though they’re just a memory, just ghosts. I scan the crowd, and there are dozens and dozens of other faces. They’re standing vigil, and I don’t think it’s because he is Lucas Hayes; I think it’s because he is one of them. One of us.

I retreat to the doorway just as Mr. Fisk is coming through it, followed by a couple of Lucas’s friends from the basketball team. Mr. Fisk stops, staring at Lucas, hunched over on that ledge. Evan looks up sharply, as if someone has called to him. He walks over to Mr. Fisk until he stands just in front of him and then, with a look of wonder, steps into him, disappearing.

“Evan?” I say.

Mr. Fisk gives a small nod and then, without a word, crosses the roof and encloses Lucas in his arms. When he has him, Mr. Fisk starts crying, his broad shoulders shaking with his sobs. In his arms, Lucas is shaking, too. “You’re okay now,” he says. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

Mrs. Morello and Principal Bosworth come up from the stairwell and stand by Lucas’s friends. The ambulances set up their call in the distance, but none of us turns to look for their lights. Instead, we stand there and watch them in silence, the man holding the boy. The man is the age Evan would be had he lived; the boy, the age he was when he died.

“When I woke up, the first thing I found out is that I was dead,” Brooke says, all bravado gone from her voice so that it is left small and sad, little more than a whisper.

It’s been two weeks since the dance, and I’ve finally agreed to talk with her, but only if Evan is there, and only if we meet in front of Usha’s mural, where I feel safe.

“The second thing I found out is that nothing had happened to the boys who’d killed me. No”—she frowns—“worse. Everyone thought Lucas was a hero. And then, a couple months after, he started up with you.” She finally meets my eyes, but I can’t look at hers. I turn to the mural, its colors, its shapes. “I didn’t hate you,” she says. “I didn’t ever hate you. I felt sorry for you. Because he was tricking you, like he did me.

“I thought I could warn you. I would try to touch your shoulder sometimes, your hand, to try to get your attention. And I would think, Stay away from him. He’s bad. He’s using you. You never felt me. Never heard me. Until that day on the roof—”

“That’s what you were doing?” I burst out. “Trying to warn me?”

“You don’t have to believe me.”

But, something about the way she says it, I do believe her.

“Then suddenly that day on the roof, I was you. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it was my imagination or a dream or something,” she continues. “But then I saw Lucas standing there across the roof, grinning at you. I wanted to scare him. I wanted . . . I was so angry. I was thinking you’d break a leg. I was thinking—”

“I died,” I tell her.

“I know.”

“Of course you do,” I say bitterly. “You know better than anyone.”

And now she’s the one who can’t meet my eyes.

“What happened next?” Evan prompts.

“Nothing,” she tells her clasped hands. “I didn’t know how to do it again, how to get inside someone. Not until you figured out that it’s when they think of us. I understood it then, what had happened with you on the roof, that if I could be you, I could be other people. I could be him.”

I look to Evan, startled. I had told her. I’d given her the key.

She puts her hands over her face, then drops them to her lap forlornly. “I promised myself just Lucas. Nothing big, nothing like the roof. Just little stuff. I got him suspended.”

“You messed with that burner girl,” I say.

“And Lucas wouldn’t have done that?” she asks, adding, “He just wouldn’t have asked her to prom.”

“But what about Harriet?” Evan says.

“And Heath?” I say.

“I didn’t mean it to happen like that,” she says.

“Seems like a lot of things didn’t happen the way you meant them to,” I observe.

“I was scared, so scared of you finding out. And Harriet was saying things that you could have . . . I just wanted her to leave the school. So I would be safe. And Heath, I was just going to—”

“Scare him?” I ask sarcastically.

“He deals to middle-schoolers, did you know that? Eleven, twelve-year-olds?” She pauses, sighs. “But the car was supposed to stop. It should have stopped. Heath would’ve been scared. Harriet would’ve been sent back to Greenvale.”

“Why didn’t it?” Evan asks.

“She saw me. Harriet did. When I got inside her, she knew I was there. She fought me. She kept pushing at me. I couldn’t get my foot on the pedal.”

“But at the prom, with Lucas,” I say in as even a voice as I can muster, “you weren’t just trying to scare him.”

“No,” she admits. “I wanted to hurt him. Like I was hurt. It’s just that it doesn’t stop, the anger, the pain, hating others, hating yourself.”

“It stops,” I say. “It stops when you decide to stop it.”

“I’m glad you saved him.” She bows her head. “I am.”

I stand and cross to the mural.

“Paige?” Brooke says, meek and wretched, but I’m not listening to her. I’m listening to them.

They’re whispering to me again, the warm voices, so warm that they sound like they’re singing my name. They sound far away, yet not far at all. I’ve been hearing them since the night of the dance, every time I visit the mural. What are they saying? I place my hand near the painted wall, then through it. There it is again, the sensation I felt before—sugar dissolved into water, music dissolved into air, the universe dissolved into stars and sky and worlds.