If the teacher noticed Melanie’s presence, she didn’t let on. She took attendance but didn’t remark about the one unresponsive student, and then she started the students at crayons. Susie made her usual drawing of a square house with symmetrical windows, centered between lollipop trees. Melanie tried to capture the wall ahead of her, with its individual alphabet letter cards, A through J, along the top of the blackboard (the alphabet continued, but not on that wall). When the teacher circulated to appreciate the art, she murmured at Susie’s and chuckled at Melanie’s.

That was the only teacher attention Melanie acquired. Mostly she hung back during the subsequent story reading, and wondered when the teaching would begin. Melanie had often been sent to bed when she wasn’t tired, and she’d been through a horrific tonsillectomy two months earlier, followed by a long, nauseated, sleepless night in a crib in the pediatric ward, so she had developed the ability to endure the passage of time quietly. She didn’t like to be still and silent, but she could do it.

In general Melanie was unimpressed with Susie’s kindergarten too. It was a slight improvement over her own – one boy actually protested about rest time – and she was glad she had checked it out, but she wasn’t learning, and she was bored. She tried to talk about her disappointment with Susie when they were on the playground, but her friend looked at her with a slightly blank, semi-puzzled expression. “I think it’s fun; I want more stickers,” Susie said with her weird teeth, and Melanie felt more alone than she did at bedtime, stuck in her bed in her room and not tired at all.

When the half-day was over the girls walked out the doors with everyone else and looked for their guardians. Melanie’s mom’s Buick was easy to spot – big and dark green with its stylish chrome holes on the sides in front of the doors. They clambered onto the fuzzy backseat.

“How was the day, girls?” Melanie’s mom asked as she pulled the car away from the school. Susie mumbled something and Melanie said, “Better than yesterday.”

“Oh, really? That’s good to hear.”

“Yeah, well it’s because I went to Susie’s room today.”

“You what?” Melanie’s mom sounded annoyed at first, but then she loosened her fingers on the steering wheel and looked at Melanie in the rear view mirror. “What do you mean?”

“Well I didn’t like my class yesterday, so I went to Susie’s today. And it was better.”

“How was it better?”

“Oh, they just did more interesting things.”

“Like…?”

“Like the teacher called out each kid’s name, and then the kid got to say ‘Here’ or ‘Present.’”

Her mother paid attention to driving for a few seconds and then said, “Did the teacher call your name?”

“No.”

“That’s because you were absent.”

That’s how Melanie learned the meaning of the word. It was the first entry in what became her life lexicon, established in 1955. Over the years other words were added, like “precious” and “subtext” and “whore,” but “absent” remained significant.

For one thing, natural speller Melanie always had trouble with “absence.” She was never secure about the penultimate letter. But the bigger deal was in her. She grew up with other white suburban baby boomers. She was in the San Francisco bay area in 1966, when her generation woke up and blew up. She was more indoctrinated by messages of peace-and-love, of being present and living in the here-and-now, than by any pledges of allegiance or propaganda films. Her friends were massaged and Rolfed and encountered, and some lived for awhile in extreme cults.

Melanie tried and then tried not to scoff. But the truth is, she’s always been more comfortable being absent. Melanie lives best in absentia.