Absent (Katie Williams) by Katie Williams Read Free Book Online

DON’T KNOW WHERE I am. The light is all wrong; even in the darkest hour of the night, the glow of the streetlamp outside my bedroom comes through the slats of my blinds, dissecting my room into strips of shadow and light.
    Then I remember that I’m not in my bedroom. I’m in the basement of the school, the dirt of the floor pressing against my cheek, the ghost frogs trilling around me. I must have fallen asleep in the library next to Evan and, once I’d stopped hovering, sunk through the floor all the way down to the basement. I’d dreamt I was falling, too, that dream everyone has where you wake up just before you hit the ground.
    Well, you do. You wake up.
    Me, I hit.
    When I climb the stairs, the halls are filled and the tardy bell is clanging. People buzz by, some of them carry crumpled brown bags, others the neon-potion dregs of energy drinks. That’s the bell for the end of lunch, then. I’ve slept through the whole morning.
    With a gut-twist, I remember the day before: Kelsey starting the rumor, Lucas skipping my grief group, Usha refusing to paint the mural. This afternoon, the crowd still crawls with whispers of my name, the suicide rumor coughed from mouth to ear like a virus. I search the groups for Patient Zero and her flapping silk banner of hair. My eyes narrow when I spot it. Kelsey Pope. I follow her all the way to art class.
    That I find Evan in the art room, hovering on the cupboards that line the back wall, is no surprise. He spends most of his day in the art room because, according to him, Mr. Fisk is the best teacher at Paul Revere High. But I’d forgotten that Usha has art this period, too. She stands at Mr. Fisk’s desk with her sketchpad open. As Kelsey takes a seat with her ponies, I approach the front of the room apprehensively. Usha and I have only fought once, back in ninth grade. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but I do remember that we didn’t talk for a week. And, it felt exactly like this: angry and shameful and resentful and regretful all at once. At least Usha doesn’t have her arms crossed over her chest today; at least she isn’t talking in that horrible detached voice about how she wants to forget me.
    “It’s just . . .” She holds the book out and turns her head away, as if she can’t bear to look at it. “It’s just something I tried.”
    Birds.
    She has drawn a flock of birds. The page is filled with them, gliding, flapping, and hovering. They are no birds I know, no robins, seagulls, egrets, or wrens. She has made up new breeds, new spreads of feather, new sequences of markings, new wingspans, bright eyes, scales, talons, crops, and crests. The style is cartoonlike, but not hasty, not comic; the shaft of each feather has been sketched out, the nostril of each beak. They are all in flight, these birds, and though there is no formation, no migration, their beaks all point in the same direction.
    Usha has always been able to draw, turning an errant scribble in my notebook margin into a tiny monster or hothouse flower. When I’d watched her draw, it had seemed so easy—a mark like this here, a line like so there—but whenever I’d tried to re-create one of Usha’s doodles myself, my monsters ended up smudgy blobs, my hothouse flowers, sticks. Usha would take the paper out of my clumsy hands and draw over it—a few quick lines, and suddenly my monster had charm, my flower had pollen and scent. I liked the fact that Usha could draw. In fact, I felt so fiercely proud of her that it was as if the talent were my own, as if there were something that special about me.
    Mr. Fisk makes a few remarks about perspective—neither of them mentions yesterday’s conversation about the mural—and I watch Usha retreat to her table, where she flips to a new page and begins to draw an ocean full of jellyfish.
    I walk to Evan at the back of the room.
    “Sleep well?” he asks with a grin.
    “Thanks for waking me up before I sank through the floor,” I tell