She came with her father. They were standing in the corner near the glass case that held a chalice used during the Revolutionary War, when the church had been a hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Dewitt were making small talk with them. At home on her desk, Mrs. Dewitt had a poem of Ruth’s. On Monday she was going to the guidance counselor with it. It was a poem about me.

“My wife seems to agree with Principal Caden,” Ruth’s father was saying, “that the memorial will help allow the kids to accept it.”

“What do you think?” Mr. Dewitt asked.

“I think let bygones be bygones and leave the family to their own. But Ruthie wanted to come.”

Ruth watched my family greet people and noted in horror my sister’s new look. Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women. Samuel Heckler was holding Lindsey’s hand. A word from her readings popped into her head: subjugation. But then I saw her notice Hal Heckler through the window. He was standing out by the oldest graves in the front and pulling on a cigarette butt.

“Ruthie,” her father asked, “what is it?”

She focused again and looked at him. “What’s what?”

“You were staring off into space just now,” he said.

“I like the way the graveyard looks.”

“Ah kid, you’re my angel,” he said. “Let’s grab a seat before the good ones get taken.”

Clarissa was there, with a sheepish-looking Brian Nelson, who was wearing a suit of his father’s. She made her way up to my family, and when Principal Caden and Mr. Botte saw her they fell away and let her approach.

She shook hands with my father first.

“Hello, Clarissa,” he said. “How are you?”

“Okay,” she said. “How are you and Mrs. Salmon?”

“We’re fine, Clarissa,” he said. What an odd lie, I thought. “Would you like to join us in the family pew?”

“Um” – she looked down at her hands – “I’m with my boyfriend.”

My mother had entered some trancelike state and was staring hard at Clarissa’s face. Clarissa was alive and I was dead. Clarissa began to feel it, the eyes boring into her, and she wanted to get away. Then Clarissa saw the dress.

“Hey,” she said, reaching out toward my sister.

“What is it, Clarissa?” my mother snapped.

“Um, nothing,” she said. She looked at the dress again, knew she could never ask for it back now.

“Abigail?” my father said. He was attuned to her voice, her anger. Something was off.

Grandma Lynn, who stood just a bit behind my mother, winked at Clarissa.

“I was just noticing how good Lindsey looked,” Clarissa said.

My sister blushed.

The people in the vestibule began to stir and part. It was the Reverend Strick, walking in his vestments toward my parents.

Clarissa faded back to look for Brian Nelson. When she found him, she joined him out among the graves.

Ray Singh stayed away. He said goodbye to me in his own way: by looking at a picture – my studio portrait – that I had given him that fall.

He looked into the eyes of that photograph and saw right through them to the backdrop of marbleized suede every kid had to sit in front of under a hot light. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone. He knew that no one ever really looked the way they did in photos. He knew he didn’t look as wild or as frightened as he did in his own. He came to realize something as he stared at my photo – that it was not me. I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn’t want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn’t want to look at me anymore, either. I watched him as he placed the photograph in one of the giant volumes of Indian poetry in which he and his mother had pressed dozens of fragile flowers that were slowly turning to dust.

At the service they said nice things about me. Reverend Strick. Principal Caden. Mrs. Dewitt. But my father and mother sat through it numbed. Samuel kept squeezing Lindsey’s hand, but she didn’t seem to notice him. She barely blinked. Buckley sat in a small suit borrowed for the occasion from Nate, who had attended a wedding that year. He fidgeted and watched my father. It was Grandma Lynn who did the most important thing that day.

During the final hymn, as my family stood, she leaned over to Lindsey and whispered, “By the door, that’s him.”

Lindsey looked over.

Standing just behind Len Fenerman, who was now inside the doorway and singing along, stood a man from the neighborhood. He was dressed more casually than anyone else, wearing flannel-lined khaki trousers and a heavy flannel shirt. For a moment Lindsey thought she recognized him. Their eyes locked. Then she passed out.

In all the commotion of attending to her, George Harvey slipped between the Revolutionary War gravestones behind the church and walked away without being noticed.

Ten

At the statewide Gifted Symposium each summer, the gifted kids from seventh to ninth grade would get together for a four-week retreat to, as I always thought of it, hang out in the trees and pick one another’s brains. Around the campfire they sang oratorios instead of folk songs. In the girls’ showers they would swoon over the physique of Jacques d’Amboise or the frontal lobe of John Kenneth Galbraith.

But even the gifted had their cliques. There were the Science Nerds and the Math Brains. They formed the superior, if somewhat socially crippled, highest rung of the gifted ladder. Then came the History Heads, who knew the birth and death dates of every historical figure anyone had ever heard of. They would pass by the other campers voicing cryptic, seemingly meaningless life spans: “1769 to 1821,” “1770 to 1831.” When Lindsey passed the History Heads she would think the answers to herself. “Napoleon.” “Hegel.”

There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again – no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.

Samuel was a Master. His heroes were Richard Feynman and his brother, Hal. Hal had dropped out of high school and now ran the bike shop near the sinkhole, where he serviced everyone from Hell’s Angels to the elderly who rode motorized scooters around the parking lots of their retirement homes. Hal smoked, lived at home over the Hecklers’ garage, and conducted a variety of romances in the back of his shop.

When people asked Hal when he was going to grow up, he said, “Never.” Inspired by this, when the teachers asked Samuel what he wanted to be, he would say: “I don’t know. I just turned fourteen.”

Almost fifteen now, Ruth Connors knew. Out in the aluminum toolshed behind her house, surrounded by the doorknobs and hardware her father had found in old houses slated for demolition, Ruth sat in the darkness and concentrated until she came away with a headache. She would run into the house, past the living room, where her father sat reading, and up to her room, where in fits and bursts she would write her poetry. “Being Susie,” “After Death,” “In Pieces,” “Beside Her Now,” and her favorite – the one she was most proud of and carried with her to the symposium folded and refolded so often that the creases were close to cuts – “The Lip of the Grave.”

Ruth had to be driven to the symposium because that morning, when the bus was leaving, she was still at home with an acute attack of gastritis. She was trying weird all-vegetable regimes and the night before had eaten a whole head of cabbage for dinner. Her mother refused to kowtow to the vegetarianism Ruth had taken up after my death.