I Was Here

by Gayle Forman

  He looks at me, his face gone hard, the Ben from the stage, the Ben from Meg’s room that first time. “Oh, I had a father,” he says. “Who do you think I learned it from?”

  x x x

  At four thirty, Harry texts that they’re wrapping up and should be there soon. I start to gather my stuff, and Ben and I go wait out front.

  “Am I going to see you again?” he asks.

  My breath catches. I’m not sure why.

  “Because if I’m not,” he continues, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Oh, okay.” So this why he wanted me to come up. Not to see the kittens. But to take his confession. “Go ahead then.”

  He takes a long drag on his cigarette and when he exhales, there’s not nearly enough smoke. It’s like all that toxic stuff stayed in him.

  “She cried. After we slept together. She cried. She’d been okay, and then she was crying.”

  “Was she drunk?” I ask. “Like, really drunk?”

  “You mean did I fuck her when she was passed out? Jesus, Cody, I’m not that big of a shitbag.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people are.”

  And I tell him. About Meg’s other first time. That party, sophomore year. She’d done a bunch of Jägermeister shots and had been making out with Clint Randhurst. Things went too far too fast. And though she didn’t exactly say no, she definitely hadn’t said yes. To make matters even worse, Clint must’ve been the one to give her mono. Because after that was when she got sick.

  After Clint, Meg swore that she was never going to do that again unless it was with someone she truly cared about. Which is how I know she cared about Ben, even if maybe she shouldn’t have.

  “So it wasn’t you. You weren’t the reason she cried. Or if she did, it was happiness, or relief maybe. She clearly liked you. Maybe that’s why she cried.” I tell him this to unburden him—or maybe to unburden me; at Meg’s insistence I never told anyone about Clint. But if anything, Ben looks more cut up. He shakes his head, looks down, and doesn’t say anything.

  When the Do-Gooder Van pulls up, Stoner Richard sees Ben’s downcast eyes and looks at me. “What’d he do now?” Richard asks.

  “Nothing.” I climb in the van.

  “If you find anything else on her computer, will you tell me?” Ben asks.

  “Okay.”

  He closes the door behind me and knocks on it two times. And then we drive away.

  13

  Harry works on the computer all night. And then the next morning. When I wake up, early, his light is on and I’m not entirely sure he’s been to sleep.

  “I’ve almost got it,” he says, eyes gleaming with excitement. “This was such an unusual encoding. Did Meg do it herself?”

  I shake my head, shrug.

  “If she did, then I mourn her loss even more.” Now he shakes his head. “We could’ve had so much fun geeking out together.”

  I smile politely.

  “You never know people, do you?” he asks.

  No. You don’t.

  x x x

  Alice wakes up a few hours later and tackles me in a hug like we are best friends.

  “Where were you yesterday?” she asks.

  “No one was here. I went to Seattle with the guys.”

  “I waited for you and then you didn’t come back so I went to the movies. Never mind. You’re here now. I’m going to make us French toast!” she declares. “With homemade bread.”

  I follow her into the kitchen. She goes to slice the loaf of bread but can’t get a knife through it. I suggest we go out instead.

  We go back to the diner I spent the night in a few weeks ago. Alice doesn’t like it because the eggs aren’t free-range, but I like it because the breakfast special is two ninety-nine. Alice gabs on about her term, her upcoming finals, summer back in Eugene, which she says, if the weather is nice, is like living in Eden, including the nakedness in some circles. She invites me to come down before she goes to Montana for her summer job. I put on a tight smile. I’m not sure what else to do, because she’s acting like we’re friends, and we’re not friends, we are mutual acquaintances, only the person we’re mutually acquainted with is no longer.

  “Why’d you go to Seattle yesterday?” she asks after a bit.

  “To see the kittens.”

  “And Ben McCallister?”

  “Yeah, he was there too.”

  Her eyes flicker up. “He’s pretty hot, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so? He and Meg had a thing, right?”

  I think of Ben’s tawdry description of it. I fucked her, he’d said, so full of distaste, for Meg, for the act, for himself, I wondered why he even bothered. “I wouldn’t classify it as ‘a thing.’”

  “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that thing.”

  Alice seems so sweet, so young, so innocent. What would happen to her after she’d been used and abused by Ben? It’s not a pretty picture. “Yes, you would.”

  When we’re finishing up breakfast, Harry texts me. Cracked it.

  I pay for both breakfasts, and we hustle back to the house. Harry is waiting for us on the porch, Meg’s computer in his lap. “Look,” he says.

  I look.

  There’s a document open. It has a professional letterhead reading Hi-Watt Industrial Cleaning Company and some numbers.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a business license.”

  “Why would she have that on her computer?”

  “You need a license to buy this.” He clicks over to another window. It has a list of lethal chemical agents, where to procure them, how to procure them, expected physical effect, and “success rates.” The poison Meg used is listed. It has one of the highest success rates.

  I start to feel sick to my stomach.

  “There’s more,” Harry says. He opens another document, this one a sort of checklist, the kind of thing you’d get in a class. But when I peer closer, I see the items in the left-hand column are a sort of syllabus for death. Order poison. Pick day. Write note. Clear email/browser cache. Email note on time-delay delivery.

  “Oh God . . .” I begin.

  “Cody,” Harry says, with an edge of warning in his voice. “There’s more.”

  He opens a simple text document. In an almost breezy tone, it congratulates whoever’s reading this on making the brave and ultimate step toward self-determination. It goes on to say: We have no say in our births, and generally little say in our deaths. Suicide is the one exception. It takes a brave soul to choose this path. Suicide can be a sacred rite of passage. The note continues, listing sickening specific details on the best places and times to do it, how to conceal plans from loved ones. It even offers tips for what to write in the suicide note. Portions of the sample note are Meg’s, verbatim.

  I lean over the porch banister and throw up into the wild tangle of lavender hydrangea. Alice is crying, and Harry is looking mildly panicked, like he has no idea what to do with either of us.

  “Who would do such a thing?” I gasp.

  Harry shrugs. “I did a little more digging, Googling some of the advice from the notes, and it turns out there are a lot of ‘suicide support groups.’”

  “Support groups?” Alice asks, confused.

  “To encourage suicide, not prevent it,” I say.

  Harry nods. “They used to be more active online, but now there are only a few left. Which might explain all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy. This literature seems to come from one group in particular. The Final Solution. Nice name.” He shakes his head in mild disgust. “Whoever originated these files clearly didn’t want to get found out.” Harry smiles, then seems to remember he shouldn’t. “The irony is, if she’d kept the files unencrypted and thrown them awa
y, they wouldn’t be on her hard drive anymore.”

  “How do you know for sure it’s this Final Solution group?” Alice asks.

  “Meg cleared her browser history, but didn’t empty her cache.” He looks at me, then at the computer. “The Final Solution was in there.”

  14

  Tricia, the town-crier, has alerted about half of Shitburg that I’ve gone to Tacoma again, which means that Joe and Sue have found out, only I don’t realize that until they call me up and invite me over for dinner, and when I get there, they blindside me with the simple question of why I went back.

  “I left in a rush last time and I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

  “Oh, Cody, you didn’t have to do that,” Sue says. She shakes her head and dumps some boiled-in-a-bag pasta onto my plate; it looks like something Tricia would make. “You’re so good to us.”

  My secret—Meg’s secret—feels caustic. I hadn’t intended for it to be a secret. The entire bus ride home, I’d debated whether or not to tell them—would it make any difference? Would it bring them more grief?—never coming to a decision, but avoiding the Garcias when I got back. And then three days had gone by, and the decision seemed to have made itself.

  Sue clears the dishes. She eyes my plate but doesn’t mention how little I’ve eaten. I notice that she just pushed her food around too. “Will you stay?” she asks. “Joe finally went into her room.”

  Meg’s room, which, according to Scottie, no one had really gone into since her death. Scottie said he’d peeked in a few times because it looked the same as always, like Meg was about to come home. I could picture it so clearly: the messy desk full of wires and soldering guns. The corkboard with its collage of old record albums, charcoal drawings, and photos. The graffiti wall, as we called the one opposite the windows that had this ugly floral wallpaper. Until Meg got inspired and tore it down and Sharpied all over the underlying plaster with favorite quotes and lyrics. Sue had been so mad about that, first because it was defacing property and then because members of their church, who’d been over for a potluck, thought that some of Meg’s writing was sacrilegious. “You know how people are, Joe,” Meg had overheard Sue saying. But Joe had come to Meg’s defense. Who cared about those gossips? If the wall was a good outlet for Meg, leave it be. They could paint over it when she moved out. They never did, though. Now I doubt they ever will.

  “We found some of your things,” Joe says. “And some things of Meg’s you might like.”

  “Another time,” I say. “I have to be up early for work.”

  Is this how it is with lies? The first one comes hard, the second one easier, until they slip off your tongue easier than truths—maybe because they are easier than truths.

  I let myself out. But before the door shuts behind me, Scottie is there, leashing Samson.

  “Walkies?” he says to me.

  “I gotta hurry,” I reply.

  “That’s okay. Samson likes to run, dontcha, boy?”

  I take off at a fast clip, and Scottie easily keeps up with me because he’s ten and he has legs up to his elbows. Samson bounds along, sniffing for things to pee on.

  When we’re at the end of the block, he asks me why I went back to Tacoma.

  “I told you. I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

  I don’t know if it’s harder to lie to kids or if they just have better bullshit detectors, but in either case, he gives me this cynical look that hurts my heart. “Why’d you really go?” he asks.

  “Scottie, can we not do this?”

  “Just tell me why you went. You found something, didn’t you?”

  Scottie is tall and rangy and has Sue’s blond hair, though it’s starting to darken. I know he thinks all his innocence has been destroyed, but he’s only ten years old. It hasn’t. And if it has, he has time to get it back. But not if I tell him. How she posed as a buyer from a cleaning company to order what should’ve been a heavy-duty upholstery detergent. How she went through all this extra trouble, because that was the Meg way, but also because she apparently was so hell-bent on dying, she needed the chemical with the smallest margin of error. How meticulously she plotted it, in that Meg fashion, like this were another concert she was trying to score a backstage pass to. First we’ll try the publicists and if that doesn’t work, we can try the radio station, and failing that, we can always ask some of our band contacts to put in a word for us, she’d say. Her plans worked. They always worked.

  Meg may not have sent Scottie the suicide letter, but she did send him an I love you farewell note. I think she wanted to leave him with that. If I tell Scottie what I found, I’ll wreck that, maybe wreck him, too. And we’ve already lost one Garcia this year. I shake my head. “Nothing to find, Scottie, except for lint on the carpet.”

  And then I leave him there. On the corner. In the dark.

  15

  After I decided I wouldn’t be going to UW but would be staying at home and attending the local community college, Tricia demanded I get a job. The Dairy Queen was hiring, so I asked for an application. I handed it in to the manager, who turned out to be Tammy Henthoff.

  “You’re friends with that Garcia girl?” she asked, squinting at my application.

  “Meg? Yeah. She’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s in college in Tacoma now, on a full scholarship,” I added. I was so proud of her.

  “Uh-huh.” Tammy was not impressed. Or maybe she was just defensive. Since she’d run off with Matt Parner, people around here hadn’t been all that nice to her. She’d lost her job at the car dealership where her husband had worked, and I’d heard that Matt’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Melissa, and all her friends had taken to driving by the DQ and shouting nasty things. Not that Tammy didn’t deserve it. But Matt still had his job at the Jiffy Lube and no one drove by there yelling whore.

  While Tammy was interviewing me, a bunch of high school students came by. The DQ had always been the local hangout, and it was then that I realized that if I got the job, I’d be serving burgers to people I’d spent the last four years not exactly snubbing, but sort of. Meg knew everyone here and she had her admirers for sure, but she wasn’t close with that many people. She had her family, the people she met online, and me. In middle school, teachers started calling us the Pod and it took, and then all sorts of people referred to us as that. We were known as a twosome. Even Tammy Henthoff, seven years out of high school, knew about us. Working here, it would be a daily barrage: Aren’t you Meg’s friend? And the piggyback question to that: If so, why are you still here?

  Right about the same time, the night manager at the restaurant where Tricia works inquired if she knew anyone trustworthy who could clean her house, Tricia asked me—almost on a dare, it seemed; she knew how much I hated cleaning. But you can be good at things you hate. Pretty soon that one job turned into two and four and now six.

  Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a call about a job as an attendant at Pioneer Park. Sue knew the woman who ran the parks department, and somehow, in the midst of everything, she put a word in for me and I got called in for an interview.

  It was a good job, decent pay, benefits even. On the day of the interview with the superintendent, I walked to the park. And then I saw the rocket ship.

  Pioneer Park was where Meg and I learned to ride our bikes. Where we’d run through the sprinklers and dreamed of the swimming pool the town sometimes talked about putting in there (it never happened; nothing here ever does). It was a place that wasn’t her house or my house or school or the DQ, where we could be alone and talk.

  The capsule at the top of the rocket ship was like our magical private clubhouse. Anytime we climbed the rickety stairs and ladder up to the nose cone, we were the only people there, though it was obvious from all the ever-changing graffiti that we weren’t the only people to come up here.

  Reading the gr
affiti out loud was one of our favorite things to do. There were hearts of couples long since broken up, and lyrics nobody remembered anymore. New stuff was always being scrawled over the old, though one line, Meg’s favorite, remained gouged into the metal: I Was Here. She loved that. “What more can you say, right?” she’d ask. She’d written the phrase on her own graffiti wall and kept threatening to get a tattoo of it one day, if she ever got over her fear of needles.

  The whole deathtrap probably should’ve been condemned years ago, but it wasn’t. It was the highest point in town, and on clear days you could see for miles. Meg used to say you could see all the way to the future.

  I turned around. I never even called the superintendent to cancel.

  So I still clean houses. Maybe it’s for the best. Toilets are anonymous. They have no stories to tell, no recriminations to fling. They just take crap and flush.

  Since coming back from this last trip to Tacoma, I actually find myself looking forward to work. The scrubbing, the endless repetition, the arriving at a manky sink, attacking it with bleach and steel wool and after a time, leaving it gleaming . . . befores/afters in life are never quite so stark.

  Today I clean two houses in a row, hauling laundry and ironing pillowcases, and cleaning the squared kitchen tile with a squeegee. The tile isn’t really tile; it’s linoleum. But that’s how Mrs. Chandler likes it done, and who I am to argue?

  Over the next few days, when I’m not working, I carry my cleaning zeal over to Tricia’s and my tiny house, taking bleach and an old toothbrush and going at the shower grout, which has gone black with mildew. Tricia is so shocked when she sees the tiles go from gray to their previous white-and-blue state, she doesn’t even say anything sarcastic.

  I keep myself busy in a frenzy until I don’t have a gig, and our house is as clean as it’s been since we moved in. I sit on my bed and organize my earnings by bill denominations: I’ve made two hundred and forty bucks this week alone. I have to give Tricia one hundred dollars for my share of bills, but that leaves me with quite a surplus, and nothing to spend it on. Theoretically, I am saving for the move to Seattle. Theoretically, I learned in physics that the universe is expanding at a rate of, like, forty-five miles a second, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel that way when you’re standing still.