Absences

Laurie counts eighteen students on the first day of class, cramped inside a windowless room in the basement of the Biology and Human Sciences Tower. The students sit awkwardly on high stools behind four long laboratory tables with stubby gas valves and central sinks. All the stools are taken, and one boy is left to perch on the radiator cover near the eyewash station.

After brief introductions, Laurie asks the students to take turns reading a short Barthelme story out loud. It is weird and funny, and through it she hopes to convey that Introductory Writing Workshop will be enjoyable. That, likewise, she—their professor, new to teaching, new to Montana—will be enjoyable, and weird, and funny. Laurie doesn't really think of herself this way but can remember a time, not so far back, when other people thought she was all three of these things.

"I don't get it," one boy says. Max. She is still learning their names.

"Is this seriously a story about kids dying?" Hallie asks.

"This is super dark," Jorge agrees. A few others in his row nod in agreement.

Laurie riffles through her notes, really just half of one page. Is it dark? She wonders. She can't tell anymore, what hurts because of what's been going on, and what would have hurt before.

Then the silence is broken by the staccato laughter of the boy on the radiator. It goes on just a little longer than she's totally comfortable with.

Randall is the boy's name.

When he's finished, Laurie moves into a freewriting exercise and there comes an industrious silence. She notices the students are intermittently lifting their arms in the air and lowering them again, without asking any question. She's still trying to figure out what this is all about when one student, Oliver, gets up suddenly to leave. Her syllabus expressly states that this requires no special permission … this is college, and these are adults, though they seem unpardonably young. Still, she might have expected some sort of lipped "sorry" or mimed door-pointing from Oliver. Had she said something that made him decide to leave so suddenly? Had the Barthelme story triggered something, even? She studies it again: dead pets, dead children, dead parents. What had she been thinking?

The boy has taken his bag and everything.

The other students continue working without notice, still sporadically raising their hands.

When the door opens again, it is not her errant student but a pair of campus security guards.

"Student by the name of Larsen here? Oliver Larsen?"

"He just left a minute ago," Laurie says.

They look at each other and hurry off.

Oliver never comes back. Laurie never sees him again. No one ever explains.

There are fruit flies, she realizes later, looping lazily all around the room.

________

The following week, Laurie talks about Emily Dickinson and notices that even with Oliver's stool open, the other boy remains perched on the radiator. He—Randall—is wearing the same purple flannel shirt again. She notices his cheeks are wind-chapped and remembers that sting. Feels it again, whenever she looks at Randall.

Last November, her boyfriend, Tim, had driven them to Stowe for the weekend, to "cheer up" after the election. Some fraction of her had ceased functioning properly that night at the Javits Center, and she had warned him that it would certainly not be resuscitated by a weekend of hot cocoa, no matter how much Bailey's he poured in it. "Come on BP," he'd said—BP, her nickname at the office where they'd met. Short for "beanpole." She was too thin and very tall and people were unimaginative and inconsiderate. "Come on BP," he'd said. "You'll like the mountains."

And then, holy cow, she did like the mountains. Both of them. A pair of moody, protective gods in the fog. Cradling her in their middle, known as Smuggler's Notch. She lost three hours just staring out at them, no Bailey's required, while Tim wildcatted and underflipped. Dreaming of writing a novel about mountains. Mountains! It seemed...