by Gayle Forman
“Come in.” My voice is a croak.
Alice is standing there, another mug of coffee in her hand, harvested by hand by Nicaraguan dwarves, no doubt.
I rub my eyes, accept the coffee with a grunt of gratitude. “What time is it?”
“It’s noon.”
“Noon? I slept, like, fourteen hours.”
“I know.” She looks around the room. “Maybe it wasn’t Meg. Maybe this room is like that field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz and has a soporific effect.”
“What do you mean?”
“She slept an awful lot. Like, all the time. If she wasn’t hanging out with her ‘cool Seattle friends’”—she makes air quotes here—“then she was sleeping.”
“Meg likes—liked—to sleep a lot. She ran at such high octane. She needed the sleep to rejuvenate.”
Alice looks skeptical. “I never met a person who slept as much as that.”
“Also, she had mono in tenth grade,” I explain, and as soon as I say it, I remember how awful that year was. Meg was out of school as much as she was in it; whole months she had to do independent study because she was so laid flat.
“Mono?” Alice asks. “Why would that make her tired still?”
“She had a really bad case of it,” I reply, remembering how the Garcias wouldn’t let me come over and see her, in case I caught it too.
“Sounds more like Epstein-Barr or something.” She sits down on the edge of her bed. “I didn’t know that about her. I didn’t get to know her very well.”
“You only moved in a few months ago.”
She shrugs. “I know the others. And I don’t think they got to know her either. She was a little standoffish.”
If Meg loved you, she loved you, and if she didn’t . . .The girl didn’t suffer fools. “You just have to try to get to know her.”
“I did,” Alice insists.
“You can’t have tried that hard. I mean, there couldn’t have been a wellspring of love to have put that album cover up on the door.”
Alice’s Bambi eyes fill with tears. “We didn’t put that up. She did. And we were told not to take anything down.”
Meg put the cover up. I’m sure the suicide experts would call that a warning sign, a call for help, but it’s hard not to see Meg’s twisted sense of humor in it somehow. A final calling card. “Oh,” I say. “That actually makes sense.”
“It does?” Alice asks. “It seemed so morbid to me. But like I said, I didn’t know much about her. I’ve probably spent more time with you than I did with her,” she says wistfully.
“I wish I could say you weren’t missing much, but you were.”
“Tell me about her. What was she like?”
“What was she like?”
Alice nods.
“She was like . . .” I open my arms to show bigness, the possibilities being endless. I’m not sure if this describes Meg, or how I always felt when I was around her.
Alice looks so beseeching. So I tell her more. I tell her about the time Meg and I got seasonal jobs as telemarketers—the most boring job in the world—and to keep us entertained, Meg did all these different voices for the calls. She wound up doing so well with her voices and selling so much of the crap that she surpassed her daily quota and kept getting sent home early.
I tell her about the time our local library’s budget got slashed so badly that it could only open three days a week, which was a major drag for me because when I wasn’t at the Garcias’, I practically lived at the place. Meg didn’t use the library nearly as much as me, but that didn’t stop her from going on a mission to stop the closures. She finagled one of those moderately known, now hugely famous, bands she’d become friendly with from her blog to play a Kill Rock Stars, Not Books benefit concert, which brought people from all over the place to our town and raised some twelve thousand dollars, which was great. But because the band was already well known, and Meg was such an attractive poster child, we wound up getting all this national press, and the library was shamed into extending its hours.
I tell her about when Scottie, always a picky eater, got so bad that he became anemic. The doctors said he had to eat more iron-rich food, and Sue was beside herself because the kid would not eat healthy, no matter what. But Meg knew Scottie was obsessed with tractors, so she went on eBay and found these tractor-shaped food molds and mashed up potatoes and meat and spinach and put it all in a tractor mold and Scottie gobbled it up.
Then there was the time Tricia and I had the world’s worst fight and I ran away to find my dad, even though Tricia claimed he’d moved away years ago. I got as far as Moses Lake before I ran out of money and courage, and just as I was about to start blubbering and lose my shit, Meg and Joe pulled up. They’d been trailing my bus the whole time. But I don’t tell Alice about that. Because that’s the kind of story you share with a good friend. And I’ve only ever had one of those.
“So that was Meg,” I say, finishing up. “She could do anything. Solve anything for anyone.”
Alice pauses, digesting that. “Except for herself.”
9
The latest Megan Luisa Garcia Funeral Show is being held at a small promontory down on the Sound. A guitar player and a violinist play that Joan Osborne song “Lumina.” Someone reads some Kahlil Gibran. The crowd isn’t huge, about twenty people, and everyone’s wearing their regular clothes. The guy running the show is from the campus counseling center but, thankfully, he doesn’t turn the whole thing into a suicide-prevention public- service announcement, bulleting all the different warning signs that we all so clearly missed. He talks about despair, how it thrives in silence. It’s one of the things that drive people like Meg to do what they did and in the aftermath, the despair that she left behind—even for people who may not have known her—has to be honored and felt.
Then he looks out at the assembled group, and even though I’ve never met him, and even though I’m sitting off to the side next to Alice, and even though it was only begrudgingly that I agreed to go to this thing because I felt bad about accusing Alice of putting up that Poison Idea cover, his eyes stop on me.
“I know a lot of us are struggling to make sense of this. That we didn’t know Meg well might make the burden less, but it makes the processing hard. I’m told we have her good friend Cody present, who I imagine is also grappling with this.”
I shoot dagger eyes at Alice because clearly she outed me, but she returns my gaze with a level stare.
The guy up front continues: “Cody, I’d like to invite you to share, if you’d like, anything about Meg. Or share what it is that you’re going through.”
“I’m not going up there,” I whisper to Alice through gritted teeth.
She stares at me, all wide-eyed innocence. “What you told me before was so helpful. I thought maybe it would help other people too. And you.”
Everyone else is now staring at me. I want to kill Alice, who’s nudging me up. “Just tell them about the library, about the food for her brother,” she whispers.
But when I get up there, what comes out isn’t cute stories about libraries or bands or picky eaters.
“You want me to tell you something about Meg?” I ask. It’s a rhetorical question, and my voice is pure sarcasm, but all those innocent lambs bob their heads encouragingly.
“Meg was my best friend, and I thought we were everything to each other. I thought we told each other everything. But it turns out, I didn’t know her at all.” I taste something hard and metallic. It’s an ugly flavor, but I savor it, the way you relish the taste of your own blood when you have a loose tooth. “I didn’t know anything about her life here. I didn’t know about her classes. I didn’t know about her roommates. I didn’t know that she’d adopted two sick kittens and nursed them back to health only to leave them homeless. I didn’t know that she went to clubs in Seattle and h
ad friends up there and crushes on guys who broke her heart. I was supposedly her best friend and I didn’t know any of this because she didn’t tell me.
“She didn’t tell me that she found life to be so unbearably painful. I mean, I didn’t even have a clue.” A kind of laugh escapes, and I know that if I’m not very careful, what follows will be something I don’t want to hear, that no one wants to hear. “How can you not know that about your best friend? Even if she doesn’t tell you, how can you not know? How can you believe someone to be beautiful and amazing and just about the most magical person you’ve ever known, when it turns out she was in such pain that she had to drink poison that robbed her cells of oxygen until her heart had no choice but to stop beating? So don’t ask me about Meg. Because I don’t know shit.”
Someone gasps. I look out at the crowd, everyone, dappled in sunlight. It’s a beautiful day, full of the promise of spring: clear skies, puffy clouds, the sweet scent of early flowers blowing in on the breeze. It’s wrong that there should be days like this. That spring should come. Some part of me thought it would stay winter this year.
I see some people are crying. I made them cry. I’ve become toxic. Drink me and die. “I’m sorry,” I say before I bolt.
I run off the grassy area, back to the road, heading out of the park, toward the main street. I need to get out of here. Out of Tacoma. Out of Meg’s world.
I hear footsteps behind me. It’s probably Alice or possibly Stoner Richard, but I have nothing to say to them, so I keep running, but whoever’s behind is faster than I am.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. I spin around. His eyes, this time, look like the color of a sky after sunset, almost violet. I’ve never seen someone whose eyes change colors, like some mood ring to the soul. If he even has a soul.
We stare at each other for a minute, catching our breath.
“I can tell you things. If you want.” His voice has that growl, but there’s also a hesitancy.
“I don’t want to know those things.”
He shakes his head. “Not that. But I can tell you things. If you want. About her life here.”
“How would you know? If she was just a one-night stand?”
He gestures his head in an away-from-here motion. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
“Why are you even here?”
“Her roommate gave me the flyer,” he says, answering how he knew about the service but not why he came.
We stand there. “Come on. Let’s just go talk,” he says.
“Why? Do you know why she killed herself?”
Recoil. Like the recoil of a gun. It’s what he does again. Like he’s been physically yanked back. Only this time, it’s not anger that’s on his face; it’s something else. “No,” he says.
We walk a ways to a McDonald’s. I’m suddenly ravenous, hungry for something that is not vegetarian or organic or healthy but is bred in a daily misery. We both get Quarter Pounder Extra Value Meals and take them to a quiet table next to the empty playground.
We eat in silence for a while. And then Ben starts talking. He tells me about Meg arriving on the indie-band scene, immediately making friends with a lot of the local musicians, which sounds like her. He tells me about how easy it was for her, this eighteen-year-old college student from Bumfuckville, Eastern Washington, swanning in and everyone eating out of her hand, which also sounds like her. At first he was jealous of her, because when he came here from Bend, Oregon, two years ago, he felt like he’d been hazed by the music community before they’d let him play in the sandbox. He tells me about the faux fights they used to have about who was a better drummer: Keith Moon or John Bonham. Who was a better guitar player: Jimi Hendrix or Ry Cooder. Who wrote the catchiest songs in the world: Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. He tells me about Meg adopting the kittens, hearing them crying in a box in a Dumpster near the downtown Tacoma homeless shelter where she worked a few hours a week. She dug them out, brought them to the vet, and spent hundreds of dollars to get them well. He tells me how she hit up some of the more successful musicians in town for donations to pay for the treatments, which, again, sounds exactly like Meg, and how she fed them baby formula with eyedroppers because they were too small to eat cat food. Of all the things he tells me, it’s this image, of Meg coaxing tiny orphan kittens to eat, that makes me want to cry.
But I don’t. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask. Now it’s my voice that sounds like a growl.
Ben’s pack of cigarettes sits on the table, and in lieu of smoking one, he clicks the lighter on and off, the flame hissing each time. “You seemed like you needed to know.” The way he says it sounds like an accusation.
“Why are you telling me this?” I repeat.
Ben’s eyes are momentarily illuminated by the flame. And once again, I can see there are so many shades of guilt. Ben’s, like mine, is tinged with red-hot fury, hotter than the fire he’s toying with.
“She talked about you, you know,” he says.
“Really? She didn’t talk about you.” Which is untrue, of course, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she had a moniker for him. Anyhow, turns out that he wasn’t the tragic one.
“She told me how at one of your cleaning jobs, some guy tried to grab your ass and you twisted his arm so far behind his back that he yelped and then upped your pay.”
Yeah, that happened to me with Mr. Purdue. A ten-dollar-a-week raise. That’s how much an unwanted cop of my ass is worth.
“She called you Buffy.”
And more than the thing with Mr. Purdue, that’s how I know that Meg did tell him about me. Buffy was her nickname for me when she thought I was being particularly kick-ass, à la Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. She called herself Willow, the magical sidekick, but she had it wrong: she was Buffy and Willow, strength and magic, all folded into one. I was just basking in her glow.
It feels wrong that he knows this about me, like he has seen my embarrassing baby pictures. Details he has no right to. “She told you a lot for a one-night stand,” I say.
He looks pained. What a good faker he is, that Ben McCallister. “We used to be friends.”
“I’m not sure friends is the word for it.”
“No,” he insists. “Before it all shot to shit, we were friends.”
The emails. The banter. The rock talk. The sudden change. “So what happened?” I ask, even though I know what happened.
Still, it’s shocking to hear him say it, the way he says it: “We fucked.”
“You slept together,” I correct. Because I know that much. I know that Meg, after what happened to her that other time, would not have done that with someone unless she was into him. “Meg wouldn’t just fuck someone.”
“Well, I fucked her,” Ben repeats. “And when you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.” He flicks the lighter on and lets it go dark again. “I knew it would, and I still did it.”
Now that’s he’s being honest, it’s both repellent and magnetic, like a terrible car crash you can’t help rubbernecking, even though you know it’ll give you nightmares later. “Why would you do that, if you knew that it would ruin things?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “You know how it is, when it’s in the moment and it’s all happening and you don’t think about the day after.” He looks at me, but the thing is, I don’t know. It would probably shock people to learn, but I’ve never. When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. Most of the time it seems inevitable anyway. Still, I didn’t need put a nail in the coffin by screwing any of the losers in Shitburg.
I don’t say anything, just stare at the empty playground.
“We only did it the once, but it was enough. Right after, everything went south.”
“When?” I ask.
“I dunno. Around Thanksgiving. Why?”
That makes sense. Her sleeping-with-the-bartender email came before the holidays. But the kittens? Those she found after winter break. And the thing with Mr. Purdue grabbing my ass had happened in February, a few weeks before she died. “But if things went south a while ago, how do you know all this recent stuff, about the cats? About me?”
“I thought you read the emails.”
“Only a couple.”
He grimaces. “So you didn’t see all the stuff she wrote me?”
“No. And a bunch of her mail is missing, between, like, January and the week before she died.”
A puzzled look passes over Ben’s face. “Do you have a computer here?”
“I can use Meg’s. In her room.”
He pauses, as if considering. Then he crumples up our empty food wrappers. “Let’s go.”
x x x
Back in Meg’s room, he launches his webmail program. He does a search for her name and a whole screen of emails pop up. He scoots out of the chair and I sit down in it. Repeat comes bounding through the open door to claw at the cardboard boxes.
I start at the beginning, the flirty banter, all the stuff about Keith Moon and the Rolling Stones. I look at Ben.
“Keep going,” he says.
And I do. The flirtation grows. The emails get longer. And then they sleep together. It’s like a black line drawn in space. Because after, Ben’s emails become distant, and Meg’s kind of desperate. And then they just get weird. Maybe if they were written to me they wouldn’t seem so weird. Except they were to Ben, a guy she slept with once. She wrote him pages and pages of stuff, everything about her life, the cats, me; it reads like very detailed journal entries. The more he tried to push her away, the more she wrote. She wasn’t totally clueless. It’s clear she knew what she was doing was odd because she ended several notes, some of which were eight or ten pages long, with a need for reassurance: We’re still friends, right? Like she’s asking for permission to keep telling him all this stuff. I’m embarrassed to be reading this, embarrassed on her behalf, too. Is this why she deleted her sent mail?