by Gayle Forman
Ben is watching me, like he’s waiting for me to say something else.
“But if that’s what happens to normal, what hope is there for the rest of us?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. Like he just doesn’t know either.
20
We get back to Ben’s house and he unpacks his stuff, and we both spend a half hour shining a flashlight around the walls and watching Pete and Repeat chase the beam. It’s possibly the most fun I’ve had in months.
Ben makes a list of the clubs that Meg most often hung out in. None of them will get going until around eleven, and they’ll stay happening until four in the morning. We pound shots of espresso at his neighborhood café before setting off in his Jetta.
The first club is that one in Fremont I met Ben at. He introduces me to a group of groovy-looking girls in cute dresses and cool shoes—Meg people. They’re all about a decade older, but that wouldn’t have stopped her. When Ben explains who I am, one of the women embraces me in a spontaneous hug. Then she holds me at arm’s length and says: “You’ll get through it. I know it seems like you won’t, but you will.” Without asking anything more, I get that she, too, has been through this, has been left behind, and it makes me feel less alone.
None of these women knows anything about Meg going to the health center; most didn’t even know she went to college. If Meg didn’t tell them even this, chances are she didn’t tell them about the Final Solution. I don’t bring it up.
We go to another club. We’re barely past the bouncer when a girl with blonde choppy hair flings herself into Ben’s arms. “Where have you been?” she demands. “I’ve texted you, like, a hundred times.”
Ben doesn’t hug her back, just sort of taps her uncomfortably on the shoulder, and after a minute, she takes a few steps back, jutting her lip into a fake pout. Then she spots me.
“Hey, Clem,” Ben says. He seems tired. “I’ve been on tour.”
“Tour, huh? That’s what you’re calling it now,” she says, still looking at me.
“Hey. I’m Cody.”
“Cody’s a friend of Meg’s,” Ben adds. “Did you know Meg Garcia?”
Clem swivels toward Ben now. “Seriously? Are you, like, organizing a sorority for your castoffs? Can we, like, all wear matching outfits?” She rolls her eyes and pouts for real now. Then she makes a disgusted pff sound before flouncing off, giving Ben the finger as she goes.
“Sorry about that,” Ben says. To his shoes.
“Why should you be sorry?”
“She was . . . It was a while ago . . .” he begins, but I wave my hands to stop him.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
He starts to open his mouth as if to say more, but then he spots a guy with thick horn-rimmed glasses and the most elaborate pompadour I’ve ever seen. He’s standing with a girl with short bangs and bright red lipstick. “That’s Hidecki,” Ben says. “He knew Meg pretty well.”
Ben introduces us and we talk for a bit, but neither Hidecki nor the girl he’s with know anything about Meg or the health center. After a while, I run out of questions, and Hidecki asks about the cats.
“You know about the cats?”
The girl he’s with tells me that Hidecki donated a hundred dollars to their rehabilitation fund. “So he feels invested,” she says.
“A hundred dollars,” I say. “You must like cats.”
“I liked Meg,” he corrects. “She also saved me at least that much money when she fixed my amplifier.”
“She fixed your amp?”
He nods. “Swapped the volume pot and showed me how to do it. I was skeptical, but she knew how to handle a soldering gun.”
“Yeah. She did,” I say. “And the cats are fine. Ben adopted them, actually.”
“Ben?” He gives Ben a look I wouldn’t exactly describe as friendly.
“Yeah. Even has pictures on his phone. Ben, show him your pictures.”
“Another time,” Ben says tersely. “We should hit some more clubs.”
We go to three more places. I meet all these people who knew Meg. Who miss Meg. But no one knows about the health center. I get some names and email addresses of other people she was friendly with. By four in the morning, we have no direct leads but a bunch of contacts to follow up on. I’m so tired, my legs feel like they might collapse from under me, and the whites of Ben’s eyes are redder than Stoner Richard’s after a few bowls. I suggest we call it a night.
When we get back to his house, he leads me to his bedroom. I stop in the hallway outside of it, like it’s radioactive in there. He looks at me. “You crash in here. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“That’s okay. I’ll take the couch,” I reply.
“It’s more comfortable here. And quiet.”
I wince. “Sorry, Ben, but there’s, like, a petri dish of half of Seattle’s female population on your sheets.”
“It’s not like that, Cody.”
I scoff. “Really?”
“Clem was a while—oh, forget it. I’ll just change the sheets for you.”
“I’m fine to take the couch.”
“Let me change the damn sheets, Cody.” I can’t blame him for being pissed. It is five in the morning, and he did just come back from an eight-night tour of sleeping on floors and in vans. But even so, he makes the bed, plumping the pillows and pulling down the comforter in one corner so it looks all inviting.
I snuggle into the pillows. The cats scramble to the foot of the bed and tuck in there, their nightly spot, I gather.
I hear Ben brush his teeth, and then I hear the floorboards creaking under his feet. He stops in his doorway, and for a second I’m scared he’s going to come in and for a second I’m scared I might want him to. But he just stands there.
“Good night, Cody.”
“Good night, Ben.”
x x x
I sleep until noon and wake up rested, the achiness I wear like a second skin gone. When I go into the kitchen, Ben’s already up, drinking coffee and talking to his housemates, whom he introduces me to. He’s eating a bowl of granola and offers me some.
“I can get it,” I say. I find a bowl from the drying rack and the granola from the cupboard, and it’s weird how I’m making myself at home here.
Ben grins at me, like he recognizes the novelty of this, too, and then chats with his housemates about the tour. They’re nice, not the rocker types I’d expected but students and people with jobs. One of the guys grew up in a town about twenty miles from where I live, and we lament the state of eastern Washington, stuck in some kind of time warp, and question why, when you cross the Cascades, heading east, do people start talking with southern accents?
The sun is out and Mount Rainier is lording it over the city, and it’s one of those days that make you forget what happens here between October and April. After breakfast Ben and I walk down the steps leading to the yard. Off to one side is a big bunch of lumber, all covered with a tarp.
“What’s that?” I ask Ben.
He shrugs. “Just something I do in my multitude of spare time.”
I pull up the tarp. Under is the beginnings of some shelves, all clean sloping lines like the ones up in the house. “You made these?” I ask.
He shrugs again.
“They’re really good.”
“Don’t sound so shocked.”
“Not shocked. More like mildly surprised.”
We sit down on the wooden steps and watch Pete and Repeat chase leaves and tackle each other.
“They do know how to enjoy themselves,” he says.
“What? Wrestling?”
“Just being.”
“Maybe I should come back as a cat.”
He gives me a sidelong glance.
“Or a goldfish. Some dumb animal.”
“Hey,” he says, mock offended on Pete’s and Repeat’s behalf.
“Look how easy it is for them. What good is all of our intelligence if it makes us crazy? I mean, other animals don’t kill themselves.”
He watches the cats, who have turned their attention to yanking on a fallen twig. “We don’t know that for sure. Animals might not swallow poison, but maybe they stop eating or separate from the herd, knowing it means they’ll be someone’s dinner that way.”
“Maybe.” I point at the cats. “Still, I’d like to be carefree like that again. I’m starting to doubt I ever was. Were you?”
Ben nods. “When I was little. After my dad left, before my mom hooked up and got pregnant with my little sister. Me and my brothers used to go exploring. We’d go swim in the river or build forts in the forest behind where we lived. It was like being Tom Sawyer.”
I look at Ben, trying to imagine him young and unburdened.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks. “You don’t think I’ve read Tom Sawyer?”
I laugh. It’s a strange sound, that.
“I’ve read Huck Finn, too. I am very intellectual.”
“I don’t know if you’re intellectual, but I know you’re smart. Meg would’ve had no patience for you if you weren’t. No matter how pretty you are.” I feel myself blush a little, and look away.
“You’re no stranger to pretty, Cody Reynolds,” he replies. “For a dick, that is.”
I turn back to look at him, and for a second I forget about everything. And then I remember that I can’t forget. “So, I have to tell you something else.”
Ben’s eyes, they change, like a traffic light going from green to yellow.
“I found other things from Meg. Things she’d posted on this suicide support group.”
Ben cocks his head.
“It’s not that kind of support group.”
His eyes change again, from yellow to red. Stop. But I can’t stop.
“You should probably just read it. I brought a printout. It’s up in your room with my stuff.”
I follow him upstairs in total silence, the warmth of the day replaced with a chill, though the sun is still plenty strong. I pull out the big sheaf of papers. “You should start at the beginning.”
I watch him read. And it’s like watching an avalanche. First a few drifts of blowing snow, and then a wave of it, and then his entire face is collapsing. The sick feeling comes back, magnified a hundred times over by what’s playing out all over his face.
When he puts down the last page, he stares up at me, and his expression, it’s awful. It’s fury and guilt, which I can handle because I’m used to them, but also fear and dread, which set off bombs in my gut. “Fuck!” he says.
“I know, right?” I say. “He had a hand in it. In her dying.”
But he doesn’t respond. Instead, he goes to his own laptop and brings it to the futon. He opens up his email program and goes to Meg’s emails. He scrolls through them until he finds the one he’s looking for. It was written two weeks before she died.
“Read,” he says in a ruined voice.
He points to midway through the screen.
I haven’t been coming to Seattle as much lately, as you’ve probably noticed, and I have to admit that at first it was because I was feeling kind of low and awkward about what went down between us. I still can’t believe I acted the way I did. But it’s not like that anymore. Remember, a while back you told me to find someone else to talk to? I have. A whole bunch of someones. Some incredibly intelligent people who have a very contrarian way of looking at things, and you know how that’s always appealed to me, going against the grain. I think it’s why I’ve always been drawn to music and to bands and to things like that, but you guys don’t have the lock on rebellion. There are so many avenues. There are so many ways to live, to define what living means for you and you alone. We are so narrow in our thinking, and once you understand that, once you decide to not abide by these artificial constraints, anything is possible and you are so liberated. Anyhow, that is what I’ve been learning from this new community. And they are really helping me. I have no doubt people will be surprised by the direction I take, but that’s life in the punk rock world, right? Anyhow, I gotta run. I’ve got a bus to catch.
I finish reading and look up. Ben is crouched on the corner of the futon. “She was trying to tell me,” he says. “About her fucked-up suicide group. She was trying to tell me.”
“You couldn’t have known from that.”
“She was trying to tell me,” Ben repeats. “In all those emails. She was trying to tell me. And I told her to leave me alone.” He slams his fist into the wall. The plaster cracks. And then he does it again, and his knuckles start to bleed.
“Ben. Stop it!” I leap over to his corner of the bed and grab his fists before he can punch the wall a third time. “Stop it! It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”
I repeat the words that I wish someone would say to me, and then suddenly we are kissing. I taste his grief and his need and his tears and my tears.
“Cody.” He whispers my name. And it’s the tenderness of it that shocks me back to reality.
I leap off the bed. Cover my lips. Tuck in my shirt. “I have to go,” I say.
“Cody,” he repeats.
“I have to get home now. I have to work tomorrow morning.”
“Cody,” he implores.
But I’m out of the room, the door slamming behind me before he has a chance to say my name again.
21
Tricia’s in a good mood. The weekend I lost big in Seattle, she won big at the Indian casino, so even after paying for the expenses of food, hotel, and gas, she comes home two hundred dollars richer. She fans out the twenties that night at dinner and says we should splurge on something. For Tricia, this usually means something expensive and useless that she sees on the Home Shopping Network, like an ice-cream maker that she’ll use twice and then turn into a receptacle for more junk.
“What do you think we should get?” she asks me.
“A year’s worth of Internet.”
“Why do you keep going on about that?”
I don’t say anything.
“There is a guy.” She smirks at me. “I knew it all along. You’d better not get pregnant!”
If there is one thing Tricia has pounded into me over the years, it’s not to make the same mistake she did.
“You’ve been to Tacoma, what, three times now? And you want an Internet connection so you can go into chat rooms and do what you do. Don’t tell me it’s not a guy.”
After the kiss, Ben tried to get me to calm down, but I grabbed my stuff and started walking toward the bus station, and he was forced to give me a ride. In the car he said, “It’s okay, Cody.” And I said, “How can you say that? I don’t know if she can see us. If she’s up there or down there, watching us. But if she is, she’s disgusted. You know that, right?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows?”
“I know. And it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m disgusted.”
He didn’t say anything else after that. At the station, I asked him to forward me all those long emails Meg had sent him and, after that, never to contact me again.
“It’s not a guy,” I tell Tricia now.
“If you say so.”
In the end, she buys a decorative fire pit.
x x x
I have read every post I can find written by All_BS. He doesn’t post that much. But he posts enough that it’s clear he’s there, paying attention. And the name? All_BS? What’s that all about? Is it short for “All Bullshit”? As in, “These boards are all bullshit”? Or as in, “Life is”?
x x x
One day, on the way home from t
he library, I see Sue driving out of the parking lot of the fried chicken fast-food restaurant. My impulse is to duck out of the way.
“Need a ride?” she asks, pulling up alongside me.
I peer into the car. There’s no Joe, no Scottie, just a big bag, already seeping with grease. Sue moves the chicken to the backseat and opens the door for me.
“Where you headed?” she asks, as if there are multiple possible destinations.
“Home,” I say, which is true. “Tricia’s waiting for me,” I add, which is not, but I’m worried she’s going to invite me over and I can’t face that, especially right now, with the folder full of Final Solution printouts in my hand.
“We haven’t seen much of you,” Sue says. “I’ve left you some messages.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “We want you to get on with your life.”
“I am,” I say. The lies slip off my tongue so easily now, they barely register as untrue.
“Good. Good.” She looks at the folder, and I start to sweat. I think she’s going to ask about it, but she doesn’t. The silence grows and gapes between us, shimmering like the heat on the empty asphalt.
It’s not a big town, and within five minutes we are home. I’m relieved to find Tricia’s car in the driveway, if only because it backs up my story.
“Maybe come for dinner one night next week,” Sue says. She glances toward the bag in the backseat; the deep-fried smell has now settled throughout the car. “If you come, I can make the chili you like. I’m starting to cook again.”
“Chili would be great,” I say, opening the door. As I shut it, I catch a glimpse of Sue’s face in the side mirror, and I understand that we’re both of us liars now.
x x x
The next day, I clean Mrs. Driggs’s house. It’s one of my easiest jobs because it is usually immaculate. I strip her bed, the sheets smelling like old lady, even though Mrs. Driggs can’t be more than ten years older than Tricia. I scrub the bathtub, self-clean the oven, Windex the windows. I save Jeremy’s room for last. It creeps me out a bit, the ghostliness of it, vacuuming the shag carpet, still bearing the treads from last week’s cleaning.
