Humbeline and Bertilia. But their real names are perfectly normal: Jenny, Erin, and Rachel.
I peel a strip off my orange and decide that I’m ready to try talking.
“Hey,” I say. It works. The voice that comes out is Usha’s. “I need to ask you something. As friends,” I add for good measure.
“Of course you can,” Jenny says.
“You’ve heard the rumors about Paige’s death, right?” I ask. My question is accompanied by a faint stirring, a jostling inside me. Is that you, Usha? I wonder, setting my palms flat on the table. I’m sorry, but I need you right now, just for a minute. Please don’t push me out. The stirring comes again. It’s not nearly as strong as yesterday’s shove, so I push back against it, focusing on being solid and still and here. It’s sort of like hovering, like holding yourself in place.
The biblicals share a look, their bangs clean lines across their foreheads.
“Have you? Heard them?” I prod.
“No, I don’t think so,” one says in a tone that makes it clear she has.
“Really? You haven’t heard that Paige committed—”
“We try not to gossip,” Rachel cuts in.
“Okay, fine. But you have ears. People say she jumped. You heard that, right?”
“We heard it,” Erin admits grimly. “Everyone’s heard it.”
“Well, I just want you to know—as a friend—that it’s not true.” Again comes the stirring feeling; this time, I ignore it.
The girls look at each other, then back at me.
“We hope it’s not true,” Rachel says.
“It’s not,” I say. “I was there. She fell.”
“We hope so,” Rachel repeats. “We pray for her.”
I stare at her. She blinks back at me placidly.
“You what?”
“Pray for her,” Rachel says uncertainly. She’s heard something in my voice, something sharp-nailed, quick- tempered, and trapped in a small space. She continues, “If she killed herself, she can’t go to heaven.”
“What if there is no heaven?” I say.
“Pardon?”
“You know: tra-la-la heaven? What if it doesn’t exist?”
The biblicals’ smiles disappear, then reappear like cards in a magic trick.
“It’s all right if you don’t believe right now,” Jenny says. “It takes time to—”
Enough of this. As if it isn’t painful enough to be stuck here, stuck here forever, without having to hear this. I cut Jenny’s sentence clean in half: “I don’t believe or not believe. I know. I know, and I’ll tell you so that you can know, too. Heaven doesn’t exist. It’s a story you’ve made up so that you can feel better about dying. But you know what? You die, and it’s not better. It’s just like it was before. Except worse because you’re dead.”
Suddenly I’m standing, with all of them staring up at me. The orange is squeezed in my palm, its sticky juice running down all the way to my wrist.
“It can be hard to understand His reasons—” Erin begins.
“You’re not listening to me. There are no reasons. There is no Him, no pillows stuffed with fluffy clouds, no free harps at the door. No door. There isn’t a heaven for you or for me. There’s just this.”
Their Chapsticked lips part in surprise. As I turn away from the table, I realize that half the cafeteria is staring at me. I stride past them and almost run smack into Kelsey Pope, who stands gawking at the recycling station with her empty tray. Her eyes widen, and she shuffles back, bumping into the bin.
“By the way,” I say, “we never would have been friends.” I drop the deflated orange at her feet and storm out of the cafeteria, my boots squeaking in anger with each step.
I end up in Brooke’s bathroom, washing juice off my hand and arm. My anger has left as quickly as it came, and now I just feel empty and tired. And sticky. I glance into the mirror above the sink and meet the brown eyes of Usha’s reflection. I make a face, feeling the skin and muscles pull into the shape I’ve told them to, but it’s my expression on Usha’s face, not her own.
That’s when I realize my mistake: I’ve become one of the only people I want to talk to. Now Usha is further away than ever.
I wrap my arms around myself, feeling Usha’s body, round arms, breasts, and stomach. It’s pleasant, this extra flesh, as if it were here to comfort me. I shake my head, and Usha’s bob swings against my cheeks and ears. I haven’t worn my hair this short since I was little. I feel young and then, suddenly, very, very old.
You’re only seventeen, I tell myself.
You’re only seventeen forever, my self answers back.
I exhale. I hadn’t expected to get so angry. I shouldn’t have yelled at those biblicals. They weren’t trying to hurt me. Maybe they’ll leave Usha alone now anyway. That seemed to be what she’d wanted. But she hadn’t wanted it enough to yell at them, I think guiltily. That was you.
Usha? I think as loud as I can. No answer, no stirring inside me, no shove. I wonder where she is now, if she saw the whole thing, hidden back there behind my eyes. Or maybe she’s gone to sleep and will wake when I leave her. Forget that I don’t even know how to leave her. Yesterday in physics, I’d only inhabited her for a second before I’d been pushed out again. As an experiment, I try to welcome it, the shove, but it doesn’t come. My feet stay in Usha’s red boots, planted firmly on the dirty tile. And I have to admit, I’m a little relieved that it didn’t work, that I still have her body for at least a little while longer.
I flick water at my reflection in the mirror. It’s all getting complicated. I’d been so focused on getting into Usha’s body that I hadn’t thought about what would happen after I was in it. And now I’d ruined my opportunity to stop the suicide rumor by making a scene. People would hardly believe Usha if she told them that my death wasn’t a suicide, not now that she’d acted so crazy in front of the whole school.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Usha’s reflection, but the words come out in her voice, not mine. “I’m going to make it better.”
But how? If only I could become more people, different people, then it’d be easy to reverse the gossip and set the record straight. To do that, though, I’d need more people to think about me more often. Or I’d need to predict when they’d think about me.
I stop.
I look in the mirror. Usha’s face is smiling at me. I’m smiling at me. And I deserve it, this smile, because I’ve just had the best idea.
Mr. Fisk is in the middle of another glazing explanation when I show up in the doorway to his classroom. When he sees me lingering there, he signals for the class to pause, setting the lump of clay on the mat in front of him and walking to me while wiping earthy streaks onto his pants.
“Usha, what is it?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s all right. You look flushed.”
“I do?” I touch my cheeks.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m okay. But . . .”
“Yes? You’re okay?”
“I’m okay, but I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“I want to paint the memorial mural.” My words are answered with a shove so enormous that I nearly take a step back. I hold on tight, though, wrapping my arms around my body. (Usha’s body.)
“You’re sure?” Mr. Fisk asks.
“Completely.” I nod emphatically. “I want to paint the mural. I want people to remember Paige.”
11: PAINTING EYES
