I Was Here

by Gayle Forman

  “Am I looking?” I repeat.

  “For the person. From the note. Who helped her.”

  I don’t know why I’m so surprised that he knows this. He’s the one who knew it all along.

  My expression must give something away, because he nods slightly, like he understands. “Good,” he says.

  At the corner of his street, Scottie lets Samson off his leash. “Get him,” he says. I think he’s talking to the dog, but I realize he’s talking to me.

  When I get home, I take the Tylenol out of the medicine cabinet, dump the pills down the toilet, and bury the bottle in the garbage. A few days later, when Tricia gets her period and goes crazy trying to find the bottle, I play dumb.

  27

  The next time I go to the library, the front door is locked. Which is weird. I know the opening hours by heart. Closed Sunday and Mondays. Open Tuesdays from one to six. I check my phone. Tuesday, three thirty. I give the doors a shake and then, frustrated, a kick.

  I come back the next day, when the library should be open all day, but it’s the same thing. Mrs. Banks is inside, though. I knock on the door.

  “What’s going on?” I ask her when she unlocks it.

  “There was a small electrical fire over the weekend,” she tells me. “We have to rewire, and there’s no electricity in the building until then. We’ve been warning them about the wiring for years.” She shakes her head and sighs. “Budget cuts.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I cry. The library has become my lifeline, my conduit to All_BS. It’s already been four days since we last communicated, and I’m strung out.

  Mrs. Banks smiles. “Don’t worry. I’ve thought of that.” She goes back inside and returns with a shopping bag full of books. “You can keep them until we reopen. Shouldn’t be longer than a week or two. These are off the grid, so to speak,” she says with a wink. “So we’re on the honor system. But I trust you.”

  x x x

  The next time I have Internet access is Friday at Mrs. Chandler’s. But she’s there, so there’s no sneaking the signal. I’m desperate to hear from All_BS, desperate enough to explain to Mrs. Chandler about the library fire and ask if I can stay after work to check my email using her Wi-Fi connection. Mrs. Chandler looks at me a long time. “You don’t have Internet at your house?” she asks. I shake my head, embarrassed. “Of course,” she says. “Use it any time.”

  I’m itchy and anxious when I log on. What if All_BS has lost interest? But then I see the number of unread messages from him. The silence has worked in my favor. Used to hearing from me almost every day, except Sundays and Mondays, All_BS is clearly worried that I haven’t responded to his messages in nearly a week. The tone of his messages is one of increasing concern. I can’t quite tell if he’s worried that I offed myself without telling him—or that I changed my mind.

  Tricia always says that guys want you more when they think they can’t have you.

  I reassure him that it’s just Internet access issues. And then I think of Mrs. Chandler’s concerned face, and I get an idea.

  I don’t think I’ll have regular access to Internet again for a while, I write, playing up the library’s electrical problems. And I don’t know how I’ll do this without your help. I already chose my route, but if I don’t catch the bus soon, I might miss it. Is there any other way we can communicate? Like on the phone?

  It feels like it takes an hour for his response to arrive, though it only takes five minutes.

  That’s not wise, he writes back.

  I force myself to wait ten minutes before replying. I don’t see any other way, I write. And then I type my cell phone number. Call if you can.

  x x x

  I hear nothing. And without Internet, we can’t have our email communication either. I am disgusted to admit it to myself, but I miss the back and forth. Which really means I miss him.

  Work is tedious. No matter how much I scrub and polish, the houses still seem dingy to me. One morning I arrive at the Purdues’ and see Mr. Purdue’s car in the driveway, and I want to run away, but where is there to go? I steel myself and open the door with the key Mrs. Purdue hides for me under the fake rock.

  I’m in the kitchen, digging out the cleaning supplies from under the sink, when Mr. Purdue breezes in. “I took a sick day,” he informs me, answering a question I didn’t ask.

  “Hope you feel better.”

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s more of a mental health day.”

  I don’t answer as I head to the bathroom. I shut the door, even though that means the fumes will be stronger. I am leaning over the tub with a can of Clorox when I hear the door open behind me. The Purdues have two bathrooms; there is no need for him to use this one. I wait for him to turn around, but he doesn’t. He comes closer. He’s barefoot and I can hear the sound of his toes cracking against the tile floor.

  I stand up and turn around, the Clorox can still in my hand, my finger still on the nozzle. He takes a step toward me. The distance between us is already unnecessarily close, and then he takes another step.

  I hold the can to his face and squeeze out a tiny warning shot. “Just give me a reason,” I say. “Just one.” I mean to be tough, but to my ears it sounds almost pleading.

  He backs out of the bathroom, arms up in surrender. By the time I hear the tires squeal out of the driveway, my rage has passed. But unlike the last time he messed with me, I am not at all triumphant or Buffy-like. I already warned him once, but he just paid me ten more bucks and came back for more.

  x x x

  It’s a bleak night. Tricia is out with Raymond, and the neighbors next door are having a party. I still smell of bleach, even after my shower, and it’s like it’s not the bleach but Mr. Purdue’s lechery that won’t wash off.

  I can’t face looking at Final Solution notes, so I try to force myself to do something different. I leaf through a couple of library books, but the words swim on the page. I open Meg’s computer for a game of solitaire, but I wind up in her email program again. For the hundredth time I stare at the missing hole of mail, as if the deleted messages might magically materialize and answer all my questions. I back up and read the notes she wrote to Ben. I read what he wrote back

  You have to leave me alone. How that had pissed me off. Only it’s hard to summon the anger now. Because hadn’t I told her the same thing, just without words?

  Was she mad at me? For being too close? For pulling away? For not coming to Oregon over Christmas break? I pull up the email she wrote me after I broke our weeks of silence by telling her about Mr. Purdue’s first ass grab. Ha! That skeevy old bastard. How I wish I could’ve seen that! I know you’ll always be strong; you’ll always be my Buffy, she wrote.

  I take out my phone. Ben’s texts are still in the log, ending abruptly after I told him to stay away. My finger lingers over the call button. I imagine talking to him, telling him about Mr. Purdue today, telling him everything that’s been going on the past few weeks.

  It’s only when I hear the first ring that I realize I’ve actually hit call. When I hear the second ring, I remember how often his phone rang when we were sitting there watching TV together that day. I picture my call being the one that interrupts his time with some girl now—and with a sudden and abrupt disgust, I see that I’ve let myself become that girl. Before the third ring, I’ve hung up.

  Also in my text log is a message from Alice with Tree’s number. Call her, Alice exhorted. I haven’t, because the whole point of finding the mystery friend was to find All_BS. But right now Tree’s caustic bitterness seems to fit the mood.

  The world’s grumpiest peace-and-love hippie answers. “What?”

  “Is this Tree?” I ask, even though I can tell it is.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “It’s Cody.” I pause. “Meg’s friend.”

  Th
ere’s silence on the line, not a friendly one. She’s not going to speak. So I continue.

  “So, um, I saw Alice a few weeks ago.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Good old Tree. At least she’s consistent.

  “She mentioned that Meg might’ve confided in you about going on antidepressants or something,” I say.

  “Confided in me?” There’s something between a laugh and a bark. “Why would she do that? We didn’t exactly do each other’s nails.”

  It’s such a bizarre image that I almost smile. “It didn’t seem likely, but Alice mentioned you having said something. She couldn’t remember what.”

  “She never confided in me. But someone should’ve force-fed her a whole bottle of antidepressants. She so obviously needed them.”

  The almost-smile dies. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve never met anyone who spent so much time in bed. Except for my mom when she’s having a depressive episode.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She’s bipolar. I don’t know if Meg was. I never saw her manic, but I saw her depressed. Trust me, I know what that looks like.”

  I’m about to tell Tree about the mono, how tired Meg had sometimes gotten since then, how if she slept enough for five people, it was because she expended the energy of ten people. She needs a little time to rejuvenate, Sue would sometimes say, closing the door, sending me away.

  Then Tree says, “Plus, healthy people don’t talk that way about suicide.”

  The hair on the back of my neck rises. “What?”

  “We had a feminist lit class together, and one night me and her and a few other girls were in a café, studying at a table, and Meg starts quizzing everyone about how they’d off themselves. We were reading Virginia Woolf, and at first I thought it was because of that. Everyone had their half-baked answers. Guns or pills or jumping off a bridge, but not Meg. She was very specific: ‘I’d take poison and I’d do it in a hotel room and I’d leave the maid a big tip.’”

  Neither of us says anything. Because of course, that’s exactly what Meg did do.

  “At which point I told her that she should stop moping and get to the campus health center for some Prozac already.”

  A friend told me to go to the campus health center to get some meds.

  “It was you,” I whisper into the phone.

  I can hear her surprise crackle through the phone. “Me?”

  “She said a friend talked her into going to the campus health center, and I’ve talked to dozens of people, and no one ever mentioned a thing, no one thought to suggest it. Except you.”

  “We weren’t friends.”

  “Well, we were. We were best friends and not only did I not suggest this, I didn’t think to.”

  “Then we both failed her,” Tree says. And there’s such anger in her voice. And it’s then I get it. The animosity. It’s Meg. It’s the tentacles of her suicide, reaching out, burning people who barely knew her.

  “Sorry,” Tree mutters under her breath.

  “She listened to you. She went to the campus health center and got some meds.”

  “So what happened?” Tree asks. “Didn’t they work?”

  “It’s my understanding that you have to take them for them to work.”

  “She didn’t take them?”

  “Someone talked her out of it.”

  “Why would they do that? Those drugs saved my mom’s life.”

  I think of all the stuff on the boards, about the drugs numbing your soul. But that wasn’t it. It was because someone convinced Meg that her life wasn’t worth saving. That death was a better option. It was because, at the very end, when it should’ve been me whispering in her ear, telling her how amazing she was, how amazing her life was and would be again, it was All_BS doing the whispering.

  Tree is right about failing Meg. But it wasn’t her that did. It was me. I failed her in life. But I won’t fail her in death.

  28

  I’m vacuuming at Mrs. Driggs’s the next day when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and recognize the 206 area code, but the call has already gone to voice mail. A few seconds later it chimes to let me know there’s a message waiting.

  I stare at my phone in my palm, the vacuum motor whining. Why did he call back? Does he even know it was me who called him? Who knows if he even saved my number, and my outgoing voice mail message is now generic in case All_BS calls.

  Whatever he has to say—who is this? or something else—I don’t want to hear it. I go to delete the voice mail, but I hesitate, and in that moment the phone rings again and I’m relieved and ashamed in equal measures.

  “Hey,” I say, my heart pounding.

  There’s a slight pause on the line. “Repeat?” says the voice. The vacuum cleaner is still on, and it takes me a minute to understand that it’s not Ben. I flip the phone over to check the caller ID. It’s not the 206 number this time. It’s blocked. “Repeat,” the voice says again, and then I understand I’m not being asked to repeat anything.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who this is?”

  “I know.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “Oh. I’m at work.”

  He chuckles. “As am I.”

  His voice is not what I expected. It’s jovial, almost comforting. It’s like we already know each other.

  The vacuum is still droning. I turn it off. “There. Is that better?”

  “Yes.” He chuckles again. “If only I could turn off the noise at my work so easily. But I’ve found a quiet corner. Forgive the delay.”

  I listen then; in the background, there’s an electric clang of something. Cash registers?

  “One must choose the risks one takes and mitigate them.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Speaking of risks and choices, you have chosen?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “That’s very brave,” he says.

  “I’m scared.” It flies out. This absolute truth. All_BS seems to pull it from me. Which is an irony, of sorts.

  He continues: “You know what George Patton said? ‘All intelligent men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.’ That holds true for women, too, I’d say.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Have you decided on a method?” he asks.

  “Yes, I’m going to—”

  “Don’t,” he cuts me off. “That’s a personal decision.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I’m not just disappointed. I’m devastated. I want to tell him so badly.

  “Are all your affairs in order?”

  Affairs in order. That’s the language one of the sites he referred me to used. It had all the instructions about writing the note, creating a legally binding will.

  “Yes,” I answer. I feel dazed.

  “Remember, the opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity. You are bucking conformity, choosing your own path.”

  Somewhere it registers that Meg would’ve loved this sentiment, if he used it on her. She was all about bucking conformity, right up to the very end.

  “Now, like all things, it’s a matter of following through. Screw your courage—”

  “To the sticking place,” I finish the sentence without thinking.

  There’s a pause on the line. Something is being weighed. I’ve made a mistake.

  Then I hear a burst of commotion as the ambient background noise clangs through the phone. Electronic bleeping and the clatter of change. It’s the sound of slot machines, lots of them. A sound I recognize from the Indian casinos.

  “The door was locked,” I hear him bark, his own voice different now.

  “Sorry, Smith. Lock’s been busted for weeks.”r />
  There’s the sound of a door slamming, and the noise goes quiet again.

  “We should wrap this up,” he says in a formal tone. “Best of luck to you.”

  “Wait,” I say. I want him to send me the stuff I found in Meg’s trash: the encrypted documents, the checklist, more evidence, more proof to hang him with.

  But he’s gone.

  29

  That night I call Harry Kang.

  “Harry? It’s Cody.”

  “Cody . . . Hey . . . .” A car horn blares, and there’s a loud cacophony of people talking.

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  “In Korea, visiting my grandmother. Hold on.” I hear his phone shuffle and then the electric ping of a doorbell, and then it’s quieter. “There. I’m in a tea shop now. Seoul is nuts. What’s up?”

  “I might have enough information. Or I’ve gotten all I’m going to get.” All_BS’s last words echo in my ears. Best of luck. Like it was my high school graduation we were discussing. Or like he knew it was the last time we’d ever speak.

  “What do you have?”

  “This is what I know for sure. Actually, I don’t know anything for sure. Here’s what I have. I’m pretty sure he’s on the West Coast somewhere. He always seems to be having dinner when I am or things like that.”

  “That narrows it down to a few hundred million people.”

  “I have more. I think he might work at a casino. So, casino on the West Coast. Las Vegas?”

  “Which has a population of, what, a million people? If he’s even there. He could work anywhere in Nevada,” Harry says. “Gambling is legal statewide.”

  “Or he could work at an Indian casino anywhere,” I add.

  “Exactly. What else you got?”

  “His last name might be Smith. Someone called him that.”

  “It’s helpful to have a name, even if it’s the least helpful name in existence.” He pauses. “You have anything else?”

  “No. Our call got cut short.”

  “Call? He called you?”