• Пожаловаться

Katie Williams: Absent

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Katie Williams: Absent» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. год выпуска: 2013, категория: Фантастические любовные романы / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

любовные романы фантастика и фэнтези приключения детективы и триллеры эротика документальные научные юмористические анекдоты о бизнесе проза детские сказки о религиии новинки православные старинные про компьютеры программирование на английском домоводство поэзия

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

libcat.ru: книга без обложки

Absent: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Absent»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

When seventeen-year-old Paige dies in a freak fall from the roof during Physics class, her spirit is bound to the grounds of her high school. At least she has company: her fellow ghosts Evan and Brooke, who also died there. But when Paige hears the rumor that her death wasn't an accident--that she supposedly jumped on purpose--she can't bear it. Then Paige discovers something amazing. She can possess living people when they think of her, and she can make them do almost anything. Maybe, just maybe, she can get to the most popular girl in school and stop the rumors once and for all.

Katie Williams: другие книги автора


Кто написал Absent? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

Absent — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Absent», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

When I arrive in the library that night, I don’t tell Evan what Usha said about me. If I say it out loud, I’ll . . . I don’t know what. Can’t cry. Not an option. No working tear ducts. So I pretend it didn’t happen. Not just Usha refusing to paint the mural—all of it. I pretend I didn’t fall, didn’t die. I pretend that my friend Evan and I are staying late to work on a project for school, that we were accidentally locked in the library. We’ll pass the time reading random passages out loud until, in the morning, the janitor will open the door to find us blinking in the early light. He’ll say, “What are you two doing in here?”

Once Evan and I have finished our snippets of reading, we meet up at the empty spot on the far side of the stacks where the card catalog used to be. The carpet is still tamped down in a square from the old catalog’s weight, and we settle into this depression. How much did they weigh, all those slips of paper? Even the ink printed on them must have weighed something.

“Look!” Evan points at the light fixture. A moth flutters around it. “I used to stick the neck of my desk lamp out my window at night just to see the moths do that.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Why?” Evan asks.

“Because. They think they see something beautiful, but they can’t get to it. They hit the glass. They keep hitting it until either they knock themselves out or they get fried.”

He considers this. “I don’t know. I like their optimism.”

We both watch the moth for a minute, batting its head and wings against the light fixture.

“Evan? How long have you been here?”

“A long time,” he says, which is always his answer. He won’t tell me how long he’s been here, and he won’t tell me how he died. His clothes are the normal sort—jeans, sneakers, a wool sweater—but there’s something vaguely outdated about them, like items Usha and I might pass over in the Goodwill bin. Otherwise, he’s skinny and freckly, his hair parted in a tidy line. He looks like a teenager, but who knows how old he really is.

“Do you think there’s something after this?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “No heavenly light has ever shone for me.”

“You believe in that, then? In heaven?”

He looks at me sidelong. “Do you?”

“I never went to church.” I snort. “Maybe that’s why I’m stuck here.”

“Well, I went to church. Or rather, I was required to go.”

“So you believe in God and all that?”

He taps a finger against his bottom lip. “I found church to be an unreliable source. I liked some of what they had to say. Other things, I didn’t.”

“You mean about gay people?”

His eyes widen, and I immediately wish I could unsay it. I’ve known since I first met him, something in his movement, his words, his sense of humor, his quality of kindness. Some people you don’t know for sure, or you think you do, but then you’re wrong. With Evan, it’s unmistakable. It’s part of who he is.

“I’m not . . .” He shakes his head.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s no big deal. Lots of people . . . Usha made out with a girl at summer camp once, and lots of other people are gay . . . or whatever. There’s an after-school club, an official one, with an adviser. It’s your favorite, actually, Mr. Fisk, and—”

“I’m just not that interested in—” He winces. “I’m more interested in the world of the mind. I don’t even have a body, so why should I think about that other stuff? Right?”

“Sure.” I think about how much I still think about Lucas and that other stuff. How when I think about it now, it’s almost like I have a body again.

We’re quiet then, quiet enough that I can hear the books around me creaking in their shelves, rustling their pages, stretching their spines, as if they have something to add to the conversation. Which some of them probably do.

Maybe we should be trying to forget her, Usha said. I wonder if everyone Evan knew has forgotten him. They’ve surely moved on anyway, graduated. Just like Usha will, and Lucas, and the rest of them, too. All my classmates will go on to college and jobs and families and lives. There won’t be grief groups with remembrances. If they think of me, it’ll only be once in a while, that poor girl who killed herself. And I’ll still be here. In high school.

“I don’t want them to think it,” I admit, and my voice comes out so weak that I hate the sound of it, all desperate and wobbly. “I don’t.”

“Paige? What?”

“I don’t want everyone to think I killed myself.”

“I know,” Evan says soothingly. “I know.”

“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

“Usha said . . .” I have to make myself say it. “She said she wouldn’t paint the memorial mural. She said she wasn’t sad, she was angry. At me.” My voice gets louder and shakier with each word, but I can’t stop it. The tears are trapped in my dead body, just like I’m trapped here in this school. “She said that she wanted to forget me. And if my parents ever thought that I did this to myself, that I wanted this—”

“Paige,” Evan repeats helplessly.

I wave him away, close my eyes, and take a few breaths. When I speak again, my voice is calm and certain. “They’re not going to remember me like that. I’m going to find a way to change it.”

“How?” Evan asks gently. “We can’t talk to anyone, can’t touch anything, can’t do anything. What can you do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I tell him, “but something. I’ll find a way to do something. I’m not going to end like this.”

6: HOW I DIED

ON THE LAST DAY OF MY LIFE, I STOOD UNDER A LATE FEBruary sky, the gray clouds pulled thin and high over our heads like a veil. The sun was somewhere behind there, but I didn’t know where. Maybe if I scanned the sky slowly, I’d find a spot to the west where the clouds burned white instead of gray, and that’d be the sun. Otherwise, it was all sky, from top of head to soles of shoes, and we were up there in it, because our physics teacher, Mr. Cochran, had gotten permission to take us onto the roof for our egg-drop project.

We, the physics class, clumped at the center of the roof’s flat, cement slab, as far as possible from the foot-high lip around its edge where Mr. Cochran stood. We shivered and stumbled against each other, but we didn’t break ranks. Mr. Cochran had been very clear: he had a quiz ready. If there was any running, any pushing, any “tomfoolery,” we would march right down and take it.

“Let’s not have you ending up like your eggs,” he kept saying.

That afternoon, I was a good kid. We all were good kids, good eggs. We stood at the center of the roof as we were told to. We didn’t run; we didn’t push; we didn’t tomfool. It’s possible we whispered. It’s possible we poked, and perhaps we turned to the roof’s edge like how the bean plants in Mrs. Zimmer’s biology room turned toward the dirty windows, even though they only opened inward, and then only a crack. I was alive then, though that wasn’t something I thought about, because it wasn’t remarkable; it just was.

“You were late again,” Usha informed me, as if I didn’t already know that. We stood as far from the rest of the group as we could without getting yelled at. Usha had fashioned her hair into a stiff egg-yolk mohawk in honor of our egg drop. It was the end of the day, though, and she’d started to smell like leftover breakfast.

Читать дальше

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Absent»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Absent» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё не прочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Absent»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Absent» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.