I Was Here

by Gayle Forman

  “How’s the big city?” she asks.

  “Big,” I reply. “Look, how do you feel about me bringing home a pair of kittens?”

  “How do you feel about living someplace else?”

  “It would be temporary. Until I find them a good home.”

  “Forget it, Cody. I raised you for eighteen years. I’m not taking on any more helpless creatures.”

  There are many things I resent about that sentiment; not the least is the implication that I’m a helpless creature that she’s coddled for years. I’d say I raised myself, but that would be unfair to the Garcias. When I got strep throat, it was Sue who noticed the gook on my tonsils and took me to the pediatrician for antibiotics. When I got my period, it was Sue who bought me pads. Tricia had just waved to the tampons in the medicine cabinet “for when the time comes,” not seeming to understand how terrifying the thought of inserting anything supersize absorbency might be to a twelve-year-old. As for the fifty hours of driving practice I needed to get my driver’s license, Tricia logged all of three of them. Joe did the remaining forty-seven, spending countless Sunday afternoons in the car with me and Meg.

  “I might be here a few more days,” I say. “Can you cover me at Ms. Mason’s on Monday? There’s forty bucks in it for you.”

  “Sure.” Tricia jumps at the money. She doesn’t ask me why I’m delayed or when I’ll be home.

  I call the Garcias next. It’s a little trickier with them because if I mention the kittens, they’ll offer to take them in, even though the way Samson is around cats, it would be a disaster. I tell Sue I need a day or two longer to tie up a few of Meg’s loose ends. She sounds relieved, doesn’t ask any more questions. Just tells me to take as much time as I need. I’m about to hang up. Then she says:

  “And, Cody . . .”

  I hate those And, Codys. It’s like a gun being cocked. Like they’re about to tell me they know everything. “Yeah?”

  There’s a long pause on the phone. My heart starts to pound.

  “Thank you,” is all Sue says.

  x x x

  Inside, I ask Alice about the best way to find homes for the kittens. Good homes. “You could put an ad on Craigslist, but I heard sometimes those animals wind up in research labs.”

  “Not helpful.”

  “Well, we could put up flyers. Everyone likes pictures of kittens.”

  I sigh. “Fine. How should we do that?”

  “Easiest to take a picture of the cats, maybe email it to yourself, add some text, and print them out. . . .” she begins. “It might be simpler to use Meg’s laptop; it has a built-in camera.”

  The eighteen-hundred-dollar computer her parents got her when she left for college. They’re still paying off the credit card bill for that.

  I go up to her room and find the computer in one of the boxes. I turn it on. It’s password protected, but I put in Runtmeyer, and her desktop pops up. I bring the computer downstairs while Alice poses the cats together, which is harder than you’d think, and I understand where the expression “herding kittens” comes from. Finally, I snap a picture. Alice quickly uses the desktop publishing function to make up a flyer, and I take the thing back to Meg’s printer to print out a test copy.

  I’m about to shut down her computer when I stop. Her email program is right there, right at the toolbar on the bottom, and without even thinking about it, I click it open. Immediately, a bunch of new mail downloads—junk, mostly, crap from anonymous people who don’t know she’s dead, though there are one or two Meg, We Miss You emails and one telling her she’s going to rot in hell because suicide is a sin. I delete that one.

  I’m curious to know what the last email Meg sent was. Who was it to? Was it the suicide note? As I click over to the sent mail folder, I look around as if someone is watching me. But of course, no one is.

  It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library fines?

  How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you keep carrying on?

  I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just says: Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you. Always.

  Was that her good-bye? Did she send me a good-bye that I somehow missed?

  I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.

  I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a bigbadben@podmail.com a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.

  You don’t have to worry about me anymore.

  It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.

  I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first saw him play, a bunch of thanks for coming to my show, thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are some notes about upcoming gigs.

  Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that Meg could flirt in for days.

  But then there’s this abrupt change in tone. It’s cool. We’re still friends, he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed. I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February is wiped out. Weird.

  I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says, Don’t worry about it. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly, that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister with ice in my veins: Meg, you have to leave me alone.

  Yeah, she left you alone, all right.

  Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says MUDHONEY. His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.

  I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben from Meg’s account, with the subject line: Back from the Dead.

  Your precious T-shirt, that is, I write. There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.

  I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send. It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email. When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives, and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter
. But then one time, you track down an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.

  x x x

  Alice and I blanket the part of Tacoma near the college with kitten flyers. Then she gets the smart idea of putting them up around this fancy health food store where the rich people shop. We take the bus, and on the way she tells me the place isn’t a Whole Foods, but they might get a Whole Foods here soon, and when I say, “How thrilling,” Alice says, “I know,” not catching the sarcasm at all, so I look out the window, hoping she’ll shut up.

  The trip is a bust because the store manager won’t let us hang flyers inside, so we hand them out to the well-heeled customers with their recycled bags and they all look at us like we’re offering them free crack samples.

  It’s after five by the time we get back, and even perky Alice is flagging. I’m furious and frustrated. I can’t believe it is this hard to find homes for kittens, and the whole thing seems like some kind of sick joke, with Meg getting the last laugh.

  The house smells of cooking, a weird, unpleasant odor of spices that don’t go together—curry, rosemary, too much garlic. Tree is back, sitting on the couch drinking a beer.

  “I thought you were leaving,” Tree says coolly.

  Alice tacks one of the cat flyers onto the bulletin board by the door, next to a large flyer for tomorrow’s Lifeline vigil. She explains how I’m trying to find homes for Pete and Repeat.

  Tree makes a face. “What, you have something against kittens?” I ask her.

  She wrinkles her nose. “It’s just Pete and Repeat. Those names. They’re so gay.”

  “I’m bisexual, and I don’t appreciate your derogatory use of gay,” Alice says, attempting to sound scolding but still somehow managing to sound chipper.

  “Well, sorry. I know they’re the dead girl’s cats, but the names are still gay.”

  When she says this, Tree seems less like a hippie than like one of the rednecks in our town. It makes me hate her both more and less.

  “What names do you prefer?” I ask.

  Without hesitating, she says, “Click and Clack. That’s what I call them in my head.”

  “And you think Pete and Repeat are bad?” Stoner Richard asks, appearing with a stained apron and a wooden spoon. “I think we should call them Lenny and Steve.”

  “Those aren’t cat names,” Alice says.

  “Why not?” Stoner Richard asks, holding up the spoon, the contents of which bear the strange odor of the kitchen. “Who wants a bite?”

  “What is it?” Tree asks.

  “Everything-in-the-fridge stew.”

  “You should add the cats,” Tree says. “Then she wouldn’t have to find homes for them.”

  “I thought you were a vegetarian,” Alice says acidly.

  Stoner Richard invites me to share his horrible concoction. It smells like the spices got into a rumble and everyone lost, though that’s not the reason I decline. I’m not used to company. I’m not sure when that happened. I used to have friends—not good ones, but friends—from school, from town. I used to be at the Garcias all the time. Used to seems far from where I am now.

  I leave the roommates to their meal and go into the kitchen for a drink. I bought a liter of Dr Pepper earlier and stowed it in the fridge, but Stoner Richard, in his zeal to cook, has moved everything, so I have to dig for it. And there, in the back, I find a couple of unopened cans of RC and my stomach drops out because the only person I’ve ever known to drink that is Meg. I fill an old Sonics cup with ice and RC. When I leave here, I don’t want to leave even the smallest part of her behind.

  I take my drink to the empty porch. But when I get there, I see the porch isn’t empty and I stop so suddenly, the drink sloshes out of the cup and onto my shirt.

  He’s smoking a cigarette, the cherry of it burning menacingly in the dim, gray twilight.

  I don’t know what surprises me most: that an email I sent actually had an impact. Or that he looks like he wants to kill me.

  I don’t give him the chance. I put my drink down on the porch railing and turn around and go upstairs, trying to take them slowly, trying to act calm. He’s here for the shirt, so I’ll get him the shirt. Throw it in his face and get him the hell out of here.

  I hear the sound of crunching gravel and then I hear him on the stairs behind me, and I’m not sure what to do, because if I call out for help then I look weak, but I saw that look in his eyes. It’s like he not only got my email but he got my hatred, too, and now it’s cycling back to me.

  I go into Meg’s room. His T-shirt sits on top of one of the piles where I left it. He’s followed me upstairs and is standing in her doorway. I hurl the shirt at him. I want him, every part of him, out of my space. But he just stands there. The shirt bounces off him and falls to the floor.

  “What the fuck?” he asks.

  “What? You wanted your shirt; there’s your shirt.”

  “What kind of person does that?”

  “What did I do? You said you wanted your T-shirt—”

  “Oh, cut the crap, Cody,” he interrupts. And it’s so startling to hear him say my name. Not Cowgirl Cody in his stupid flirtatious growl. But my name, plain, naked. “You sent me an email from a dead girl. Are you cruel? Or are you also some kind of crazy?”

  “You wanted your T-shirt back,” I repeat, but now I’m scared, so it loses some of its conviction.

  He glares at me. His eyes are a whole different color here, in the pale light of Meg’s room. And then I remember Meg’s last email. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. And the anger comes back.

  “Couldn’t you let her have a souvenir?” I ask. “Maybe you should do that, with the number of girls you probably screw. Hand out a commemorative T-shirt. But asking for it back? Now that’s classy.”

  “You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “So enlighten me.” There’s an edge of desperation in my voice. Because he’s right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe if I’d known, if I’d been more clued in these last few months, we wouldn’t be standing here.

  He stares at me like I am something putrid. And I can’t believe that this is the same smarmy flirt from last night.

  “What happened?” I ask. “Did you get bored with her? Is that what happens with you and girls? It’s a failure of imagination, because if you had gotten to know her at all, you would never have gotten tired of her. I mean, she was Meg Garcia, and who the hell are you, Ben McCallister, to tell her to leave you alone?” My voice threatens to crack but I won’t let it. There will be time to lose it later. There’s always time to lose it later.

  Ben’s face changes now. Ice crystals form. “How do you know what I told her?”

  “I saw your email: Meg, you have to leave me alone.” It sounded cruel before. But now, coming from me, it just sounds pitiful.

  His face is pure annihilation. “I don’t know what’s more disgusting: reading a dead girl’s email, or writing from a dead girl’s email.”

  “Takes disgusting to know disgusting,” I say, now a third grader.

  He looks at me, shaking his head. And then he leaves, his precious T-shirt a sad forgotten rag on the floor.

  7

  It takes about an hour after Ben leaves for me to calm down. And another hour after that to get the nerve to turn Meg’s laptop back on. Ben was right about one thing: I didn’t really know what I was talking about. The way he said that suggested Meg had done something to deserve his assholishness. I know Meg. And I know guys like Ben. I’ve
seen enough of them go through Tricia over the years.

  I open Meg’s email program again and go into her sent folder, but all I see are the earlier emails, the ones from November: her side of the flirtation, stuff about which musician wrote the best songs, who was the best drummer, which band was the most overhyped, underhyped. And then, before the holidays, it all abruptly stops. It doesn’t take a genius to see what happened: They slept together. Then he tossed Meg aside.

  But what’s less clear is this hole in Meg’s messages. I know we didn’t correspond much in the winter, but I’m pretty sure she wrote me some emails. I log onto my webmail program just to be sure I didn’t imagine it, and while January is kind of a blank, there are messages from February from her in my inbox. But those messages aren’t showing up in her sent folder.

  That’s weird. Did her computer have some sort of virus that ate several weeks of messages? Or did she move her messages somewhere? I start looking through her other applications, not sure what I’m looking for. I open up her calendar, but it’s empty. I check the trash, thinking maybe the deleted files will be there. There’s a bunch of stuff there, but most of what I open is gibberish. There’s one untitled folder. I try to open it, but the computer says I can’t open it in the trash. I drag the folder to the desktop and try again, but this time, I get a message that the file is encrypted. I’m afraid it might have some virus that’ll fry her computer, so I drag it back to the trash.

  It’s only nine thirty and I have not eaten, yet again, and I’m thirsty but don’t feel like going back downstairs. So I take off my clothes and lie down in Meg’s haunted bed, and right now the sheets smelling like her are kind of what I need. I know that by sleeping here, I’ll mingle my smell with hers, lessen hers, but somehow that doesn’t matter. That’s the way it always was before, anyhow.

  8

  I wake the next morning to a gentle rapping at my door. Bright sunlight is coming through the open shade. I sit up in the bed; my head is full of sand.

  There’s more knocking.