I think of the nicknames Usha and I devised for our classmates with a tug of guilt. It wasn’t the same, I tell myself, calling someone a well-rounder or a pony or a testo. Besides, I wouldn’t have come up with the names if people didn’t try so hard to fit in their tidy boxes. Except Greenvale, I realize. She didn’t have a category, a group.
The bell rings, and the classroom doors pour out students. Evan and I back away from the crowds, but when Kelsey and the ponies pass us in a coltish, neighing herd, I start after them.
“Where are you going?” Evan calls.
I turn and shrug. “To hear what else she says about me.”
I trail along behind the ponies, listening for Kelsey to mention my supposed suicide again. But the group is caught up in a debate about whether a comment one of their friends made at lunch was intended to be bitchy. All the way to the science hall, the debate rages on, and it isn’t until we reach the classroom door that I remember what Kelsey has last period.
Physics. The class where I died.
I haven’t been back here since that day. My old desk is still empty. The desks around it are empty, too, like the dead places in the ocean where the fish won’t swim and the coral has turned all broken and gray. Mr. Cochran is still on extended leave, and the class starts perfunctorily with the substitute dropping a quiz on everyone’s desk. Kelsey and the ponies dip their heads over their papers.
I wander the rows, pausing at Usha’s desk. She marks the questions correctly until she gets to the last one, where she pauses, pencil hovering over the options.
Discounting air resistance, what is the increase in speed for each second an object falls?
I actually remember this one from our egg-drop study packet.
Answer A reads 15 feet /second2
Incorrect.
Answer C reads 56 feet /second2
Also incorrect.
Answer B reads 32 feet /second2
“Time,” the sub calls. “Pencils down.”
“It’s B,” I whisper to Usha. “Mark B.”
Usha dips her pencil to circle C. Without thinking, I put my hand over hers, willing it to B. My hand should swipe right through her hand, her paper, the wood of the desk. But it doesn’t; instead, it bumps against something. Or rather, something bumps against it. It’s been so long since I’ve felt something like this, it takes me a moment to place it: resistance. It’s a simple feeling, as if my hand has bumped into hers, but to me it’s alien. I gape at my hand, then Usha’s. She hasn’t marked the paper yet. In fact, she’s stopped, pencil in midair, staring at the question like it’s staring right back at her.
“Usha?” I say.
This time, I hear her answer me.
Paige.
I get a creeping sense of deja vu. There’d been a similar whisper yesterday when Lucas and I stood at the edge of the road. What had happened exactly? Lucas had looked back at the burners’ circle. I’d heard a whisper of my name, and then . . . On impulse, I reach out and put my hand through Usha’s. Again, it bumps against something, but this time I push back, I push through it. I’m holding Usha’s hand just like I did with Lucas’s.
Then I realize that I’m not holding her hand at all. My hand is Usha’s hand. I’m holding her pencil. I can feel the crimped wood of it, the keen edge of the paper under my other hand, the pebbly plastic of the chair beneath me, the firm tile of the floor resting under the soles of my shoes. I suck in a breath of surprise and feel even more surprise as I draw actual air into actual lungs.
I am Usha.
I move my hand (Usha’s hand) and mark B.
I stare at the quiz, the trail of lead that I’ve left behind.
I’m bumped again. This time it’s bigger than a bump; it’s more like a rough shove, like when someone “unintentionally” plows into you in the hallway. I’m shoved out. Usha is above me, shaking her head foggily, and I’m not just shoved out; I’m sinking through the floor. I drop through the cottony insulation and sheathed electrical cords, through a government class set up like a mock court, through another floor that becomes a ceiling, another classroom flickering with the light of a projector, another floor, and then the basement, and a stack of old gymnastics mats that, comically, do nothing to break my fall. My legs drop through the mats, and I land at last, crouching on the dirt floor next to a croaking pair of ghost frogs.
As soon as I get my feet under me, I stand and race up the stairs, slamming my hovering boot soles down neatly on each step. I climb the next flight and the next and the next. Then it’s down the hall and through the door into the physics classroom.
The sub ambles between the desks, sweeping up the last remaining quizzes. Usha’s quiz is still on her desk, but he’s headed to her now. I hurry forward, heedless of the desks that pass through my legs, focused only on the rectangle of white paper as if it’s a beacon, a lit doorway through which I must pass.
I get there a moment before he does and glimpse the quiz paper just as he snatches it away.
I see it, though, the last answer.
Marked B.
9: NAMES
“DO YOU EVER HEAR PEOPLE SAY YOUR NAME?” I ASK BROOKE and Evan.
Mere feet away, the goalie paces from one end of the goal to the other. We’re in the soccer goal, right inside where the ball is kicked, Brooke stretched out long, Evan and I crouched under the drape of the net. The field is bald but for a few stubborn patches of ashen snow. The team is shivering, sweatshirt sleeves pulled over their hands. I can feel it, too, the cold, but it doesn’t chap or sting me. It’s as if I’m only imagining what it feels like to be cold, as if I’m only saying the word cold. It’s round in my mouth like a stone.
Shouts sail from the other end of the field, where the soccer ball dances between the feet of the eager players. I’m hoping the ball will stay over there. Brooke, however, likes it when the play comes this way. She rises and mimics the goalie’s movements, shifting behind him. If a kick gets by, she’ll pivot as if to catch the ball that he couldn’t. But, of course, it just punches through her gut and socks into the net behind her.
“Do people talk about me?” Brooke says. “Yeah, all the time. They say, ‘Brooke Lee is hanging around your boyfriend’ or ‘Brooke Lee has syphilis’ or ‘Brooke Lee is getting an abortion after school.’ ”
“I mean since you died.”
“In that case, it’s more like ‘Brooke Lee traded hand jobs for cocaine’ or ‘Brooke Lee snorted lines off the bathroom floor.’ ”
I look away guiltily. Usha and I used to say things like that about Brooke. Everyone did. Though that’s hardly a good defense.
“Do you mean just your name?” Evan asks. “Like someone is whispering it, but you don’t know who?”
I sit up on my knees. “You’ve heard it, too?”
“I used to hear it. Down the hall or just behind me. Evan, Evan. Really quiet. Almost too quiet to hear.” Brooke and I share a look. This is the most Evan has ever spoken about his death.
“Could you tell where it was coming from?”
“Not really. I heard it mostly right after I died, then less, then eventually it stopped. I haven’t heard it in years.” He looks away with a half shrug. “Honestly, I thought I’d gone crazy. Crazy enough to hear things, anyway.” He looks at me. “But you hear it? Your name?”
“Sometimes,” I say carefully. “One of the times, I thought it was Usha’s voice.” That’s what it had sounded like, that moment during the physics quiz when I’d plunged my hand into hers. It was the same whisper that she’d leaned over, desk to desk, and poured into my ear during class hundreds of times before.
When I climbed back up to the physics classroom, I tried to repeat what I’d done, to slip back into Usha’s body. I tried for the rest of the hour, but this time there wasn’t a bump; there wasn’t anything. My hands passed
