by Gayle Forman
The big terrarium with its lush rainforest inside is now gone. As is the snake, Hendrix. What happened to it? Did it die, or did Mrs. Driggs get rid of it when Jeremy was convicted?
When Mrs. Driggs shows me to Jeremy’s room, my stomach lurches, just as it had done four years ago when Jeremy had taken that mouse out of a bag and dumped it into Hendrix’s cage. I hadn’t expected the mouse to be so petlike—so pink and white that it was almost translucent. The way it stood so still, except for its little quivering nose, you could tell it knew what fate was in store for it. The snake, coiled in the corner, didn’t move either, didn’t let on that it noticed lunch had arrived. For a while, they both just stayed like that. And then Hendrix sprang into action and, in one fluid motion, strangled the mouse. Once it was dead, Hendrix lazily unhinged its jaws and began to swallow it whole. I couldn’t watch anymore, so I went to wait in the kitchen. Mrs. Driggs was there, paying the bills. “Dreadful business, isn’t it?” she asked. At first I thought she was talking about the bills, but then I realized she meant the snake.
Meg said you could see the lump of the mouse in the snake’s body, and when she went back a day later, it was still there, although smaller. She was fascinated by the whole thing and returned a few times to see Hendrix eat. I didn’t. Once was enough for me.
x x x
About three weeks after that day together in Seattle, I get a call from Ben.
“You don’t write; you don’t call,” he says in a joking voice. “Don’t you care about the kittens?”
“Are they okay?” I ask, worried he’s calling to tell me they got smashed by a truck or something.
“They’re fine. My housemates are looking after them.”
“Why aren’t you?” In the background, I hear lots of noise, people, clinking glasses. “Where are you?”
“Missoula,” he answers. “Bass player for Fifteen Seconds of Juliet broke her arm so we got asked to be Shug’s opening band on a mini-tour. What are you up to?”
What am I up to? I’ve been cleaning other people’s houses and festering at my own, reading and rereading the posts between Meg and All_BS, trying to figure out where to go from here. After that last set of dispatches, their communication dwindles, so it’s pretty clear they took their conversation off the boards. Only where? I couldn’t find anything on Meg’s computer. I found the new email address All_BS instructed her to set up on the boards, but when I emailed it, the message bounced. I asked Harry to look into it. He said the account was activated and disabled within three days, so Meg probably set it up solely for All_BS to instruct her how to contact him directly. “Sounds like they were being careful,” he wrote. “And so should you.”
Careful. Maybe that explains all the deleted sent emails. Meg covering her tracks, quietly so.
I also can’t stop obsessing about this friend who told her to go on meds. Who was it? Some sort of confidante? If so, did Meg also confide about the Final Solution people?
I checked with Alice to see if she’d mentioned meds to Meg, but Alice said no, nor had she seen any evidence of Meg taking prescription drugs. Alice asked Stoner Richard, who called me and said that he didn’t know anything but that I should try some of Meg’s Seattle friends. I’d already thought of Ben, and when Richard had said that, it made me think again that he might be the confidant Meg referred to. But not enough to call him.
“Same old, same old,” I tell Ben.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks.
“Nothing. I don’t know. How come?”
“You live near Spokane, right?”
“Near is a relative term out here. About a hundred miles.”
“Oh. I thought it was closer.”
“Nope. Why?”
“We’re playing in Spokane tomorrow night. Last show before we truck back home. I thought you might want to come.”
I open the file folder I have, containing printouts of Meg’s posts. I’ve been going over and over them, and I’m no closer to finding out who All_BS is. I suspect he’s a guy and that he’s older. But that’s just a gut feeling. Maybe Ben can connect me with the mystery friend. Maybe he is the mystery friend.
I don’t want to see Ben. Or maybe I don’t want to want to see him. But I need to see him, so I say yes.
x x x
Getting to Spokane is expensive and a pain, because the last bus back is pretty early and I don’t want to get stuck there for the night. I ask Tricia if I can use her car.
“Can’t. Gonna earn me some mad money.” She mimes a slot machine and makes a ca-ching sound. “Wanna come?”
Tricia loves to gamble, maybe because it’s the one area in her life where she actually has decent luck. When I was younger, she dragged me with her to the Indian casino in Wenatchee a few times.
“No, thanks,” I tell her.
I catch a bus to Spokane, figuring I can talk to Ben and skip out on his show if I can’t get a lift back tonight. On the ride out, I alternate between nervous and nauseated, but that’s pretty standard these days. Spending all this time trying to find Meg and All_BS has put me in a perpetual state of anxiety. I’ve had trouble eating and sleeping, and I’ve lost so much weight, Tricia says I look supermodely.
It’s a short walk from the downtown station to the taqueria where Ben told me to meet him. It’s so hot and dry and dusty, winter having jumped right into summer without ever passing spring this year, which seems fitting. All extremes, no time for gentle transitions.
Ben is already at the near-empty restaurant, in a booth in the back. He jumps up when I come in, and he looks both tired—probably from being on the road—and happy—maybe also from being on the road.
When I get to the edge of the booth, we both just stand there for a second, unsure of what to do. After a slightly awkward pause, I say: “Should we sit?”
He nods. “Yeah, sitting’s good.”
There’s a six-pack on the table. “It’s BYO,” Ben explains. “Do you want one?”
I take a beer. The waitress sets down a basket of chips and some salsa, and I scoop some up, and find that I can actually eat it. Ben and I drink our beers and small-talk for a bit. He tells me about the tour, about the floors they’ve slept on, about sharing a toothbrush with the drummer because he lost his. I tell him that’s disgusting. That you can buy toothbrushes at any 7-Eleven. But he says it wouldn’t make as good a story, and I’m reminded that Ben McCallister is all about the artifice.
We talk about the cats, and he has pictures on his phone, a sort of ridiculous amount of kitten pictures for a guy to have. Our food comes out, and we talk about other bullshit stuff, and after a while it starts to become clear that I’m sidestepping my way around the thing I should be talking about. The reason I’m here.
I take a deep breath. “So, I found some stuff.”
Ben looks at me. And those eyes. I have to look away. “What stuff?”
“On Meg’s computer. And then from there.” I start off by telling him about the documents Harry decrypted. I’d planned to show him the posts Meg wrote to All_BS—I’ve brought them with me—but I don’t get the chance, because he’s jumping down my throat.
“I thought you said you were going to tell me if you found anything,” he says.
“I’m telling you now.”
“Yeah, but only because I called you. What if I hadn’t?”
“Sorry. There didn’t seem much point.”
I don’t mean anything by it, but he leans back in the booth, and I can tell he’s pissed.
“Cowgirl Cody rides alone, huh?” he says with that growl.
“Didn’t used to,” I say. I push away my plate. My appetite has vanished again. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
He’s silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know.”
I press my fingers against my eye
s until everything goes black. “So, look. Meg talked about confiding in someone who told her to go to her campus health center and get antidepressants. I thought maybe she was talking about you.”
He snorts. “Yeah, right.”
“What do you mean, ‘Yeah, right’? She sent you all those emails.”
“There was nothing about antidepressants in them.” He pops open another can of beer. “You read them. They were like stream of consciousness. She wasn’t writing to me so much as at me.”
“Yeah, I guess. . . .”
“And I told her to piss off, Cody. Remember?” He fiddles with his pack of cigarettes. “It wasn’t me. It was probably one of her housemates.”
“It wasn’t Alice or Richard, and according to them, not any of the people from Cascades. Though maybe it was, I don’t know who she knew. But Richard thought it was more likely one of her friends in Seattle.”
Ben shrugs. “Could be. Not me, though. But why does any of this matter now?”
Because if she confided in someone about the meds, maybe she also confided about All_BS and the boards. But I don’t tell Ben about Final Solution. I’m worried he’ll get angry again, even though he doesn’t have any right to.
“I need answers,” I say, keeping it vague.
“Can’t you just ask at the health center?”
I shake my head. “Can’t. There’s a patient-confidentiality thing.”
“Yeah, but the patient’s dead.” Ben stops, as if this is news to me.
“They still won’t tell. I tried.”
“Maybe her parents could try.”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Because they don’t know about this.”
“You haven’t told them?”
No. I haven’t told them about any of this. The secret feels larger than before, almost tumorous. There is no way I can tell the Garcias now. It would devastate them. But I keep thinking that maybe if I find out more about All_BS, enough to do something to actually help, then I can tell them. Then I can face them. I haven’t been around their house in a few weeks. Sue keeps leaving me voice mails, asking me for dinner, but the thought of being in a room with them . . .
“I just can’t,” I say, laying my head on the table.
Ben reaches out to touch my hand, a gesture that is both surprising and surprisingly comforting. “Okay,” he says. “We can hit the clubs in Seattle. Find out if she talked to anybody.”
“We?” The word is a relief.
Ben nods. “We head home tomorrow morning. You ride back with us. We can go around to the clubs. It’s Saturday night, so everyone will be out. We’ll ask around. We can go through her emails again. We’ll find some answers.”
x x x
That night at the show, I watch Ben carefully. The band is good—not great, but good. And Ben does his growly, throaty, thrusty trick, and I can see his charisma. I can see the girls in the crowd responding to him, and I forgive Meg a little bit for this. He would’ve been hard to resist.
At one point, Ben shields his eyes and peers out into the floodlights, just like he did the first time I saw him play. Only this time, I get the distinct impression he really is looking for me.
19
After the show, we crash at someone’s house. I share a room with a very pierced college student named Lorraine, who’s pretty nice, even if she won’t shut up about the guys in the band. Ben and the rest of the Scarps camp out on the couch or in the basement in sleeping bags. The next morning, we all eat Dumpster-dived bagels and then load up.
“Prepare yourself,” Ben says.
“For what?”
“The reek. Eight nights of travel. You’ll get a case of jock itch just sitting in the van.”
The rest of the band eye me suspiciously. Do they know I’m the dead one-night-stand’s friend?
I sit down on a makeshift bench of two-by-fours stacked on top of a couple of amps. Ben sits next to me. We get onto I-90, and the guys bicker about what they should listen to. No one says a word to me. When we stop for gas and the guys go load up on junk food, I ask Ben what the deal is.
“I’m breaking the code.”
“What code?”
“No girls in the van.”
“Oh.”
“But you’re not a girl.” He looks embarrassed. “Not that kind anyway.”
“What kind am I?”
Ben shakes his head. “I’m not sure yet. A previously undiscovered species.”
I fall asleep somewhere outside of Moses Lake and wake up with a start, leaning against Ben, my ears popping as we come down the Snoqualmie Pass.
“God, sorry.”
“That’s okay.” He’s smiling a little.
“Did I drool?”
“I’ll never tell.”
He keeps grinning.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just, you broke your promise, about never sleeping in my vicinity.”
I jerk away from him. “Technically, I broke it last night, when I slept under the same roof as you. Score yourself a point, Ben. It’s the only one you’re going to get off me.”
His eyes flash, and for a second there’s that Ben, the asshole. I’m kind of glad to have him back. But then he scoots a little away, muttering something.
“What was that?”
“You don’t have to bite my head off.”
“I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?” My voice is laced with sarcasm, and I’m not sure why I’m so pissed off all of a sudden.
Ben scoots farther away, and I’m surprised to realize that maybe I did hurt his feelings.
“Look, I’m sorry . . .” I begin. “I’m tired and kind of keyed up about all this.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t mean to be a dick.”
He smiles again.
“Now what?”
“Most girls wouldn’t describe themselves as dicks.”
“Would you prefer I call myself a cu—”
“Don’t,” Ben interrupts. “I fucking hate that word.”
“Really? Most guys I know seem to think it’s interchangeable for female.”
“Yeah. My father is one of those guys. Used to call my mother that. All the time.”
“That’s gross.”
“What’s gross is her putting up with it.”
For all of Tricia’s faults, and they are legion, she mostly leaves her boyfriend drama out of the house. Guys never stay at our place. She goes to theirs. If they call her foul names, at least I never have to hear them.
“Why’d she put up with it? Your mom?” I ask.
Ben shrugs. “She got pregnant with my brother when she was seventeen. Married my dad. Had three more by the time she was twenty-three, so she was kind of stuck with him. Meanwhile he’s out and about, carousing. He has two more kids by his girlfriend; it’s an open secret. Everyone knows. Including my mom. But she still stayed married to him. They only got a divorce when my dad’s girlfriend threatened to take him to court for child support. Cheaper and easier to dump my mom and marry the girlfriend. He knew my mom wasn’t the kind to sue.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It gets worse. Mom’s finally free of the bastard and we’re all older, a little independent. Things seem to be going okay. And what’s she do? Goes and gets pregnant again.”
“How many are you?”
“My mom had five kids, four with my dad, one with her current douchebag. And my dad has two others that I know of, but I’m pretty sure he has more. He believes birth control is the woman’s responsibility.”
“You’re like the redneck Brady Bunch.”
“I know.” He laughs. “Only we didn’t have a housekeeper like what’s her n
ame?”
“Alice,” I answer.
“Alice.” He smiles. “Ours would have to have a white-trash name, like Tiffani.”
“Or Cody.”
Ben looks perplexed. I remind him that I clean houses for a living.
His face actually flushes. “Sorry, I forgot. I meant no disrespect.”
“Oh, please, it’s a little late for that now,” I say, though I’m smiling and then he is too.
“So what’s your story?” he asks.
“My story? You mean like my family?”
He raises his eyebrow, like he just bared all, and now it’s my turn.
“Not much to tell. It’s sort of like your story and the opposite of it. It’s just me and my mother, Tricia. No dad.”
“Did they split up?”
“Never together. She refers to him as the sperm donor, though he wasn’t, obviously, because that would’ve meant Tricia actually intended to have me.” Tricia has remained uncharacteristically quiet about my father, and over the years I’ve suspected it’s because he is married. I picture him sometimes, in a nice house, with a nice wife and nice kids, and half the time I resent the hell out of him for it, but the other half of the time, I sort of understand. It’s a good life, that. If I were him, I wouldn’t want someone like me to fuck that up either.
“Tricia thinks she raised me on her own,” I continue, “but really, it was the Garcias who raised me.”
“Meg’s family?”
“Yeah. They’re like a real family. Mom, Dad, two kids.” I pause to correct myself but look at Ben and see I don’t have to. “Family dinners. Games of Scrabble. That kind of stuff. Sometimes I think if I hadn’t met Meg, I never would’ve known what a normal family was like.”
I stop. Because remembering all those times at the Garcias, watching movies on their worn couch, making plays and forcing Scottie to act in them, staying up too late by the dwindling fire on camping trips—all of that fills me with warmth. But. Always the but.
