Katie Williams: Absent

“A kissing badge, huh? How’d you practice your skill? On the troop leader or the other little boys?” I inquired of his puckered-up face.

“You’re sick, Paige Wheeler.”

“The sickest,” I said happily.

“I like that about you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I do.” He paused, looking suddenly serious. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind that you messed up my physics project?”

“Mind being my secret.”

So he had heard me almost say “secret girlfriend.” I could feel the blood lighting up my cheeks, and I silently cursed my pallor. Kelsey Pope, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, tanned herself to a crisp year round; no one ever knew when she was embarrassed. If she ever had anything to be embarrassed about, that is.

“I don’t mind,” I told Lucas. “After all, you’re my secret, too.”

He smiled at this and touched my blood-lit cheek.

This time, I let him kiss me.

And I didn’t even think about wincing.

The opposite, in fact.

When we pulled away, Lucas got up and walked to the edge of the trees, scanning the soccer field and parking lot for people. He glanced back at me before stepping out.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “You’ll wait a few minutes?” He left the rest unspoken: So no one will see us together.

I stayed among the trees and watched him walk across the field, his footsteps pressing through the snow. When I walked out after him, I’d leave my footsteps behind me, too. It struck me that someone later, seeing them, would imagine two people walking side by side.

Today, the trees of the burners’ circle stand tall and silent. I can’t go in, but I can see that no one is sneaking out from between their trunks. Behind me, a door bangs open, and I turn. Three freshman boys clump by the far doors of the school. With a shove, they send one of their number into the parking lot. He ventures to a patch of tar that’s darker than the rest of the blacktop. When he reaches it, he bends down and touches it. His friends hoot in approval, and he runs back with a triumphant smile, his hand held in the air like a lit torch.

A dare to touch it.

The school door opens again, startling the boys. When they see who it is, they slide into a tighter group, feigning nonchalance. The boy who touched the patch of tar hides his hand behind his back, even though the tar dried weeks ago and his fingers are unmarked.

Lucas Hayes lopes out, followed by two of his testo teammates, laughing about something one of them said on the other side of the doors. When Lucas didn’t show up at today’s grief group, I’d secretly hoped that he was sitting out here in our circle of trees. A grief group meeting of one. But the truth is as plain as the laughter on his face. It’ll be all over the school by now, the rumor that I jumped. Has Lucas heard it? Does he believe it?

Lucas parts from his friends and continues across the lot on his own. I watch carefully as he passes the burners’ circle, and my breath catches when he glances at it. At me. I imagine him saying my name close to my ear. Paige. But then his eyes flick over me and onto the road. Of course he can’t see me. And really, it’s not so different from the times before my death when we would pass in the cafeteria or the hall and his eyes would move past me. No, through me.

I catch up to him at the edge of the lot and stand next to him on the frosty hunch of grass that separates school from road. A steady stream of minivans flows past the school. As Lucas waits for a break in the traffic, I study his profile, remembering how sometimes he’d reach over and pluck an object from the ground—a bent twig, an abandoned lighter, a skeletal leaf—and gaze at it with guileless eyes. He looked at everything in the world like it was a present he’d just opened. And it was heady, being lifted from your wrappings and looked at anew, just as much as it was infuriating, the invisible tag with his name on it.

“I didn’t like you,” I say, even though he can’t hear me. “I just liked kissing you. You know that, right?”

And then something possesses me, and I reach over and grab his hand. As I do, Lucas turns and looks back at the burners’ circle. Underneath the rush of afternoon traffic, I hear it again. Paige.

And my hand.

It bumps against his.

It catches.

I’m not saying that I’m holding Lucas’s hand. I’m not saying that. But instead of passing through, my hand settles in his like it’s found a pocket of space where it fits. I stare down at it. When I was alive, Lucas and I never held hands.

I start to feel something in the center of me dissolving like sugar into water, like snow on the pavement, like my body when Lucas kissed me deep. But just as the feeling starts to grow, Lucas turns and spots a break in the traffic. He leaps off the curb, his hand falling free of mine. Before I know it, he’s disappeared between the houses across the street.

I step off the curb after him, across the invisible property line that separates school grounds from the rest of the world. But unlike Lucas, my feet don’t land on the blacktop of the street in front of me. Instead, with one small step, I find myself hundreds of feet back and three stories above where I just was. I now stand on the lip of the school roof.

THE FEELING IN BETWEEN THE CURB AND THE ROOF, EVEN though it lasts only a moment, isn’t a pleasant one. It’s a flattening, separating, pressing feeling, like a meager pat of butter scraped thin over burnt toast. Once it’s over, I feel lumped back together again, but all wrong. I open my eyes and look down at the parking lot below. I scuff my shoes against the cement lip that runs foot-high around the edge of the school roof. A safety feature. Ha.

I don’t have to think about holding myself in place here on the roof’s ledge. I don’t have to worry about hovering. Besides the soil of the earth, this is the only spot in the school where the world can touch me and I can touch it. I didn’t die from hitting the ground; I died from hitting my head right here on this ledge. This little section of concrete is where my skull cracked and the shards of bone pushed themselves up into the squish of my brain, stopping its flashes and flickers. My death spot.

I let the soles of my boots relax onto the cement, let the breeze pick up the stray bits of hair that have eternally escaped my rubber band. A curl of ivy grows from a crack in the cement at my feet; on its end, a tiny pointed green leaf. I reach down and pluck it, just because I can. Though as soon as I pull it from its vine, the little leaf drifts through the tips of my fingers and down to the parking lot below. I wish I’d let it alone to keep growing.

Each time I step over the school’s property line, I end up back here. Just like when Brooke steps over the school property line, she appears on the floor of the school bathroom or Evan on the seal of the gym floor. When we try to escape, the school takes us back to where we died. Our death spots.

I look out at the neighborhood across the road. My house is over there, too far away to see, small and green with dark red trim, colors my father always threatened to paint over. When I was little, I begged him not to. The Christmas House, that’s what the kids at school called it, and it had felt special to live in a house with such a name. As I’d grown older, the specialness had worn off, the colors reverting themselves to simple green and red. At some point, I’d stopped protesting when my father talked about how any day now he’d repaint the house. Just do it, I’d finally said. You keep talking about it. After that, he’d never mentioned it again. It occurs to me now that maybe the real reason my father had kept saying he’d repaint the house was just to hear me ask him not to.