Absent (Katie Williams)

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 agood 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.”
    “Like you?” Evan asks.
    “No. That’s not what I was going to say.”
    Evan repeats the sentence. “ ‘She’s going to make him jump like . . . she made me’?”
    “I slipped,” I tell him. “It was an accident. I slipped.”
    But had I?
    I hadn’t committed suicide. I knew that much.
    But Usha said she’d seen me step off the roof, that Kelsey had seen it, too. And maybe Kelsey had seen it, because that’s what she’d told people, that I’d jumped. Why would she say that? Why would both of them say it?
    I picture it again: the roof. One of my feet stepping up onto the ledge, then the other. Mr. Cochran heading back to Lucas. Someone shouting Catch! The sound of the egg breaking. I’d started to turn because I’d decided that I was going to smile at him, even though I’d been chiding myself for smiling at him a moment before. Like some no-respect burner girl, I’d thought, like poor, dead Brooke Lee.
    I’d thought of her.
    I’d invited her in.
    Horror rises in me, wider and giddier than the bleak gray sky. I’m falling again. I’m falling. Except I’m not; I’m still here, standing on the ground.
    “It was her,” I whisper. “Brooke. She inhabited me. She stepped off the roof.”
    “I’m sorry,” Evan repeats. “I’m so sorry.”
    “But why? Why would she do that?”
    “Because you were with Lucas?”
    “You think she was jealous? You’re wrong. She hated him.”
    “She hated him.” Evan nods. “And so she could make him watch it all over again, his girlfriend dying.”
    “I wasn’t his girlfriend,” I reply automatically, thinking how ridiculous this now sounds. Then I think of something else. “When I was alive, Brooke was following me. Harriet told me.”
    Evan sucks in a breath. “Did she tell you that in front of Brooke?”
    “Harriet!” I clap my hand over my mouth. “Do you think Brooke—”
    “Made Harriet get into the accident?” Evan asks.
    “She hit Heath Mineo,” I say.
    “Who sold Lucas the drugs she OD’d on,” Evan finishes.
    “Evan”—my voice breaks—“she killed me.”
    The weight of it hits me, and I curl up, wishing I could sink lower