I Was Here(12)
Author: Gayle Forman

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 had 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.