I Was Here

by Gayle Forman

  “Day after tomorrow. Give me your address.”

  And so I don’t have a choice. That night, I casually tell Tricia that someone is staying over.

  “Your boyfriend?” she accuses.

  “There is no boyfriend,” I say. Then I think of Ben and then I get mad at myself for thinking of Ben and then I justify thinking of Ben because he was the object of her interrogation the last time this subject came up.

  “Then who is it you’re talking on the computer with?”

  “I’m not talking to anyone. I can’t, because we don’t have Internet access.”

  “Ha! But you want it. And now you’re blushing. You’re hiding something.”

  This time, she’s right. But not about a boyfriend. All_BS and I recently moved our conversation off the message boards and onto an anonymous communication software, and now we “talk” frequently. Our conversations, however, are frustratingly limited by library hours.

  They are also frustratingly not about suicide. At least not specifically. We speak in generalities, and sometimes I forget who I’m chatting with. Last week, I mentioned that I had a cold coming on, and he sent a recipe for a tea made of ginger and apple juice. When it worked, I made a crack about the irony of him curing my cold. “Nice to know someone cares,” I wrote. When he asked me what I meant by that, I started typing a message about Tricia, until I realized what I was doing and deleted it.

  I had to be more careful, not answer his messages spontaneously, or I’d screw up. So now when I’m at the library, I save his messages to my Meg file and when I’m at home, I write my responses, sending them the next time I’m online. It’s a frustrating and clunky system, but the delay forces caution.

  “The person staying over is Alice,” I tell Tricia. “I met her in Tacoma. She needs a place to crash on her way to Montana.” There. The truth, or a sliver of it. One of the things I’ve learned from dealing with All_BS is that if you hew close to the truth, it’s much easier to lie.

  “Hasn’t she ever heard of a motel?” Tricia asks.

  “I’ll take the couch; she can have my room.”

  Tricia sighs. “No. You can take my bed. I’ll stay at Raymond’s.”

  I nod, as if the idea never occurred to me.

  x x x

  The next night, at precisely six o’clock, Alice arrives, tooting her horn as she comes down the street like she’s the marshal of a July Fourth parade. Some of the neighbors come out to see what the commotion is, and Alice waves to them, grinning.

  “So this is where you live?” she says.

  I nod.

  “It’s not what I expected. It’s so . . . small.” She stops. “Not your house. Your house is big. I mean, the town.”

  My house is a cinder-block cell with two tiny bedrooms. Small would be a step up.

  Now she’s flustered. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you seem so streetwise. I’d have thought you grew up somewhere else.”

  “Nope. This is me.”

  We go inside. I show Alice to my room. I’ve put clean sheets on the bed for her. She flops back onto it, taking in the band flyers on my wall, all the pictures of me and Meg.

  “So this is where Meg grew up too?”

  I nod again.

  “How long did you guys know each other?”

  “A long time.”

  There’s a picture of the two of us at a rodeo, maybe from fifth grade. The bucktoothed phase. “Is that you?” Alice asks, leaning in.

  I should take all this down. “Yep.”

  “You must have a lot of history here.”

  I think of the Dairy Queen. The rocket ship. The Garcias’ house. “Not really,” I say.

  We’re silent for a while. Then Alice announces she’s taking me out to dinner. “No arguments!”

  “All right. Where do you want to go?”

  “What are our options?”

  “Your usual fast food. A bar and grill where my mother works, but trust me, you don’t want to go there. A diner. A couple of Mexican places.”

  “Is the Mexican any good?”

  Joe always said that Sue’s cooking was better than his mother’s, and much better than any of the places in town. We almost never went to them. “Not particularly.”

  “I passed a Dairy Queen on the way in. We could go there.”

  I picture the DQ, Tammy Henthoff, the usual suspects hanging out. “Let’s do Mexican,” I say.

  We head over to Casa Mexicana, full of red booths and velvet paintings of bullfighters. Our waiter is this guy Bill, whom Tricia used to hang out with, which is how it always is in Shitburg. We order our food, and then Alice asks for a strawberry margarita with a shot of tequila. Bill cards her, and she hands over an ID.

  “And a virgin for you, Cody?” Bill asks with a smirk.

  I hate this town. I can’t even order a meal without it feeling loaded. “Just a Dr Pepper.”

  “Are you twenty-one?” I ask Alice when Bill leaves.

  “No, but Priscilla Watkins is.” She hands over her fake ID.

  I’m impressed. I didn’t think Alice had it in her.

  As we wait for our drinks, the Thomas family comes in. Mrs. Thomas sort of waves; Mindy, who seems to be arguing with her sister over a hair-straightening iron, ignores me. I shake my head.

  “What?” Alice asks.

  How do you explain Shitburg to someone who describes her hometown as Eden?

  Bill returns with the drinks. As soon as he’s gone, I grab Alice’s shot and down it. “Order another one.”

  We keep drinking. Alice grows maudlin. She starts talking about Meg. Loudly. How she wishes she could’ve known her better. How glad she is that she knows me. Somewhere it registers that she is saying nice things, but Mindy Thomas is two booths over and I want Alice to shut up.

  When the food comes, Alice starts shoveling it into her mouth. “Oh. Yum. This is so good. We have, like, no good Mexican in Eugene!”

  “Hmm,” I say, forking a mass of cheese off the enchilada. It peels away like skin after a sunburn. I push it to the side and try the rice.

  “So, have you talked to Ben McCallister?” Alice asks out of the blue.

  It’s a dark restaurant, so she can’t see my face go red. “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I dunno. You two seemed like you had a . . . a spark.”

  A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark. When we first started talking, All_BS quoted that to me—Dante, he said it was. I think he was trying to explain how simple musings could lead to big life-changing ideas. His way of encouraging me, and I had to remind myself not to be reassured by it, because the life- changing idea he was selling me on was life-ending.

  “No spark,” I say. I push my plate away.

  “That’s probably good.”

  “Why?” I hear the challenge in my voice.

  “For one, Meg was totally gaga over him.”

  “I thought you claimed you didn’t know her at all.”

  “I didn’t. But she talked about Ben. And invited us to come to his band’s gigs. So she must’ve been.”

  “Her inviting you to a gig wasn’t Meg being into Ben; it was Meg being Meg.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a while, just slurps to the bottom of her drink. “Oh, that reminds me. Did you ever find the person Meg confided in about taking antidepressants?”

  “Nope.”

  “I might know who it is.”

  “You think?” I don’t care anymore, because the point of finding that person was to find All_BS, and I already did that.

  “I’m not positive, but I think it’s Tree.”

  “Tree? Right!”

  “I think it was,” Alice says, sounding wou
nded.

  “You obviously don’t know shit about Meg.”

  “I believe we’ve established that,” Alice says defensively. “I still think it’s her.”

  No. Meg would’ve hated Tree, and Tree didn’t seem that charmed by Meg. “Not her,” I mumble. I am suddenly tired, and my limbs no longer feel as if they are totally in my control. I remember, belatedly, why I don’t like to be drunk.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Alice says, waving her hands. “But she said something that made me think it. I can’t remember now. But you should call her.”

  x x x

  The next morning, Alice gets ready to leave for her wonderful summer of adventure, and I get ready to clean toilets. I am hungover in a way that has less to do with the tequila I drank than with what it brought out in me. Why wasn’t I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she’s tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.

  I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn’t nicer.

  x x x

  The Purdues are on vacation, so the day after Alice leaves, I have a day off. I head straight to the library, earlier than usual. The comforting hush of the place has been overtaken by the laughter and yelps of little kids. It’s story time.

  On my way to the tables in the back, I spot Alexis Bray in the story circle, holding hands with her little daughter. I can’t remember the girl’s name, even though she came with Alexis to almost all of Meg’s services, sitting quietly on her mother’s lap. At one of the receptions, Alexis asked me if I wanted to go for coffee. I said I’d call her but I never did. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to meet in the first place. She was four years ahead of Meg and me, and I didn’t know much about her except that she used to go out with Jeremy Driggs, though he wasn’t the father of her little girl. Apparently, it was some guy in the Army.

  She waves at me now. As does Mrs. Banks, who gestures for me to sit in one of the carrels off to the side, where it’s quieter. Although not much. Story time is a pretty raucous affair. The assistant librarian is reading some story about a bunny that keeps telling its mother all the ways it’s going to run away, even though, obviously, if the rabbit meant business, it would not be telling its mother. When you’re serious, you keep quiet.

  One of the little kids shambles away from the circle over to where I’m sitting. His diaper sags halfway down to his knees and there’s a big stain of what looks like peas, but could be something grosser, down the front of his Cars shirt. I’m disgusted. Kids are like parasites. I suspect Tricia has had the same thought about me. I wonder if Meg did too.

  The librarian moves on to a different book, something about disappearing balloons, which sounds even more stupid. Which is maybe why my little foul-diapered friend shows no interest in returning to story time; he just stares at me with soupy eyes.

  I try to look away, but it’s not easy when someone is staring at you. The effort not to look makes my stomach churn like the agitator of a washing machine. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Alice in the mountains of Montana, surrounded by a bunch of other similarly chirpy people. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Hendrix swallowing that mouse. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Meg at her computer, typing her time-delayed suicide note. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see me, at this very library, clicking open her suicide note: I regret to inform you . . .

  The little kid is still at my side, his grubby, sticky hands inches away from the keyboard. “You really don’t want to get any closer,” I say, giving him my most menacing look, in case the threat in my voice wasn’t clear enough.

  His chin crumples before he starts to cry. His mom hustles over, apologizing to me, which means she probably doesn’t know what I said, but Alexis gives me a weird look, which means she probably does.

  So this is who I’ve become, someone who picks fights with toddlers.

  I return my attention to the computer, scrolling through All_BS’s words: the tiny spark, the mighty flame. Screw your courage to the sticking place. The little kid is now sobbing from the safety of his mother’s lap. I feel ashamed, but the shame has forced some clarity upon me: I can keep picking small fights, or brave the big one.

  Time to screw my courage. Or go down trying.

  In quick succession, I send two messages. The first is to Harry Kang, asking him what kind of information I’d need to track someone down, because all this becoming All_BS’s buddy does me no good unless I can find out who he is.

  The second is to All_BS:

  I’m ready. I want to take the next steps. Will you help me?

  As soon as I hit send on the second message, my anger, my angst, my self-pity disappears, leaving only a calm and steely resolve. I wonder if this was how Meg felt.

  The little kid has stopped crying and is now staring at me resentfully with his tearstained face. I look back at him and smile.

  26

  It doesn’t take All_BS long to reply to my message, though he doesn’t respond in the way I expected him to: by sending me the same files I believe he sent Meg. Instead, what I get is a message quoting Martin Luther King Jr. “Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.” To it he adds: You’ve already taken the first step in deciding. After that comes a link leading to a sort of directory with all these options: pills, poisoning, gunshot, asphyxiation, strangulation, drowning, carbon monoxide, jumping, hanging. When you click on each one, there is a detailed—and I mean detailed—list of pros and cons, as well as statistics listing success rates of each method. This is similar to the document I first found encrypted in Meg’s trash, but not the same.

  Over the next week, more messages come:

  “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.”—Lao-Tzu.

  Do you know what that means? Letting go of the fear? Dying is not about ending something; it’s about beginning something. I keep thinking of the moniker you use: Repeat. It’s not accidental, I assume. But you realize, repeating is precisely what you’re doing. The same thing. It’s only when you’re willing to do something bold, different, that your life will truly change.

  He’s proud of me. I can tell. Which makes me proud of myself. I know it shouldn’t. But it still does.

  I keep waiting for him to ask for specifics. I’ve spent hours looking at the suicide shopping list, so, without intending to, I sort of planned how I might do it—or rather, I planned myself doing it as Meg did. Getting the fake business license. Ordering the poison. Having it delivered to one of those mailbox places. Writing a will. Packing up my room. Going to the bank to get a fifty-dollar bill for the maid’s tip. Composing an email. Setting it for delivery. Checking into a motel.

  The information on the sites All_BS referred me to is so thorough that I know how it would feel to take the poison. The burning sensation in my throat, then my stomach; the tingling in my feet that would tell me it was starting to work; then the cramps, followed by coldness as the cyanosis kicked in.

  I’ve imagined it so many times now, first with Meg, then with me, and it’s like how it always used to be, when I couldn’t tell one of us from the other—when I didn’t want to.

  So I want him to ask me if I’ve thought of a method because if he did, I’d be able to tell him, and I think he’d be pleased.

  But he doesn’t ask.

  So I just keep planning.

  x x x

  One afternoon I’m getting ready to shower after work. I’m rooting through the medicine cabinet for a new razor when I see one of those massive bottles of Tylenol that Tricia buys from the warehouse store. I know from my research that Tylenol is a terrible, horribly painful, but inexpensive way to
do it. I turn off the shower. I go into my room. I pour the white tablets onto my bedspread. How many would I take? How many could I swallow at once? How would I keep from throwing them up?

  Staring at the pills, it seems so easy. Like something I could do. Right now. Swallow pills. Jump off a freeway overpass. Find someone’s loaded gun. You don’t want to die, I have to remind myself. But if you did, a little voice answers, imagine how simple it would be. . . .

  The doorbell rings and I’m startled and red-faced with instant shame. I hastily put the pills back in the bottle and shove it into the medicine cabinet. The doorbell rings again.

  It’s Scottie, holding Samson on a leash and kicking at some dried leaves that have bunched up under the mat. He looks at me in my rumpled, sour-smelling T-shirt.

  “Were you sleeping?” he asks.

  “No.” I haven’t been sleeping much lately, which makes me look as if I’ve always just been woken up. I’m still a little shaken by the Tylenol, so when Scottie asks me if I want to go for a walk with him and Samson, I almost leap out the door.

  We set off into the dusky late afternoon. I’m hyper now, a one-woman small-talk machine. I ask Scottie about school, only to have him remind me it’s summer break. I ask him what he’s doing this summer, and he reminds me that he’s at the Y camp. I should know this because it’s what he does every summer, as did Meg when she was younger. I used to beg Tricia to sign me up too, but she said she refused to spend money on camp when she was free during the day, so summers meant me counting the hours until the Garcias got home.

  Scottie keeps walking and I keep asking inane questions and when I run out of those, I’m about ask if he’s got any good knock-knock jokes. He and Meg used to make up the most absurd nonsensical ones—Knock, knock. Who’s there? Lie. Lie who? Lions lie—and they’d laugh and laugh until someone cried or farted. When I’d shake my head and call them gross, they’d say I lacked their stupid-humor gene, which I knew was them being silly but made me feel bad somehow.

  So I don’t ask for jokes, and then I run out of small talk. By this point, we’ve looped through town and Samson has taken two shits, which Scottie has stoically scooped into plastic bags. “Are you looking?” he asks.