“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 His clothes are the normal sort—jeans, sneakers, a wool sweater—but there’s something vaguely outdated about them, like items Usha and I might pass over in the Goodwill bin.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.
“Headbang for me,” I said to distract her, and she obliged, making a rocker scowl as she dipped her head. As soon as she’d finished, she went right back to “You were late yesterday. And twice last week.” She poked a finger at my chest.
“Okay, okay, it’s not a big deal. I forgot this.” I held up my egg contraption. “I had to go back to my locker and get it.”
“That took fifteen minutes?”
“I stopped to fix my hair. Not everyone has such a resilient hairstyle.” I tweaked one of the peaks of her mohawk.
“True, true,” Usha allowed, “but since when do you care about your hairstyle?”
The truth was, I hadn’t been late because of homework or hair. I’d been late because I’d been waiting for Lucas Hayes in the burners’ circle. After lunch, I’d found a note he’d left in my locker with a hastily drawn tree and a six, which meant to meet him in the burners’ circle during sixth period, and I’d skipped American lit to do it. But he hadn’t been there. No one had. I’d sat at the base of a tree for half an hour, scratching patterns in the dirt and staring up at the protective branches above me, before someone had finally arrived. And that someone hadn’t been Lucas.
What are you even doing here, Wes Nolan? I thought when the sound of footsteps produced the cargo- jacketed, shaggy-haired burner. Wes was accompanied by Heath Mineo, the school drug dealer, so short and corrupt that he resembled a tiny mafia boss from the cartoons. Wes extracted a pack of cigarettes and tapped it against the trunk of one of the trees.
“Hey, look, it’s Wheels!” Wes said.
I rolled my eyes.
“You know her?” Heath asked as if I weren’t standing right there.
“Not even a little,” I said at the same time Wes said, “A little.”
“Someone stand you up?” Wes asked, flipping out two cigarettes and passing one to Heath.
I studied him for a moment, then dismissed him. There was no way he could know about Lucas and me. He
