I Was Here(20)
Author: Gayle Forman

“Where were you yesterday?” she asks.

“No one was here. I went to Seattle with the guys.”

“I waited for you and then you didn’t come back so I went to the movies. Never mind. You’re here now. I’m going to make us French toast!” she declares. “With homemade bread.”

I follow her into the kitchen. She goes to slice the loaf of bread but can’t get a knife through it. I suggest we go out instead.

We go back to the diner I spent the night in a few weeks ago. Alice doesn’t like it because the eggs aren’t free-range, but I like it because the breakfast special is two ninety-nine. Alice gabs on about her term, her upcoming finals, summer back in Eugene, which she says, if the weather is nice, is like living in Eden, including the nakedness in some circles. She invites me to come down before she goes to Montana for her summer job. I put on a tight smile. I’m not sure what else to do, because she’s acting like we’re friends, and we’re not friends, we are mutual acquaintances, only the person we’re mutually acquainted with is no longer.

“Why’d you go to Seattle yesterday?” she asks after a bit.

“To see the kittens.”

“And Ben McCallister?”

“Yeah, he was there too.”

Her eyes flicker up. “He’s pretty hot, right?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so? He and Meg had a thing, right?”

I think of Ben’s tawdry description of it. I fucked her, he’d said, so full of distaste, for Meg, for the act, for himself, I wondered why he even bothered. “I wouldn’t classify it as ‘a thing.’”

“I wouldn’t mind a piece of that thing.”

Alice seems so sweet, so young, so innocent. What would happen to her after she’d been used and abused by Ben? It’s not a pretty picture. “Yes, you would.”

When we’re finishing up breakfast, Harry texts me. Cracked it.

I pay for both breakfasts, and we hustle back to the house. Harry is waiting for us on the porch, Meg’s computer in his lap. “Look,” he says.

I look.

There’s a document open. It has a professional letterhead reading Hi-Watt Industrial Cleaning Company and some numbers.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a business license.”

“Why would she have that on her computer?”

“You need a license to buy this.” He clicks over to another window. It has a list of lethal chemical agents, where to procure them, how to procure them, expected physical effect, and “success rates.” The poison Meg used is listed. It has one of the highest success rates.

I start to feel sick to my stomach.

“There’s more,” Harry says. He opens another document, this one a sort of checklist, the kind of thing you’d get in a class. But when I peer closer, I see the items in the left-hand column are a sort of syllabus for death. Order poison. Pick day. Write note. Clear email/browser cache. Email note on time-delay delivery.

“Oh God . . .” I begin.

“Cody,” Harry says, with an edge of warning in his voice. “There’s more.”

He opens a simple text document. In an almost breezy tone, it congratulates whoever’s reading this on making the brave and ultimate step toward self-determination. It goes on to say: We have no say in our births, and generally little say in our deaths. Suicide is the one exception. It takes a brave soul to choose this path. Suicide can be a sacred rite of passage. The note continues, listing sickening specific details on the best places and times to do it, how to conceal plans from loved ones. It even offers tips for what to write in the suicide note. Portions of the sample note are Meg’s, verbatim.

I lean over the porch banister and throw up into the wild tangle of lavender hydrangea. Alice is crying, and Harry is looking mildly panicked, like he has no idea what to do with either of us.

“Who would do such a thing?” I gasp.

Harry shrugs. “I did a little more digging, Googling some of the advice from the notes, and it turns out there are a lot of ‘suicide support groups.’”

“Support groups?” Alice asks, confused.

“To encourage suicide, not prevent it,” I say.

Harry nods. “They used to be more active online, but now there are only a few left. Which might explain all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy. This literature seems to come from one group in particular. The Final Solution. Nice name.” He shakes his head in mild disgust. “Whoever originated these files clearly didn’t want to get found out.” Harry smiles, then seems to remember he shouldn’t. “The irony is, if she’d kept the files unencrypted and thrown them away, they wouldn’t be on her hard drive anymore.”

“How do you know for sure it’s this Final Solution group?” Alice asks.

“Meg cleared her browser history, but didn’t empty her cache.” He looks at me, then at the computer. “The Final Solution was in there.”

14

Tricia, the town-crier, has alerted about half of Shitburg that I’ve gone to Tacoma again, which means that Joe and Sue have found out, only I don’t realize that until they call me up and invite me over for dinner, and when I get there, they blindside me with the simple question of why I went back.

“I left in a rush last time and I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

“Oh, Cody, you didn’t have to do that,” Sue says. She shakes her head and dumps some boiled-in-a-bag pasta onto my plate; it looks like something Tricia would make. “You’re so good to us.”

My secret—Meg’s secret—feels caustic. I hadn’t intended for it to be a secret. The entire bus ride home, I’d debated whether or not to tell them—would it make any difference? Would it bring them more grief?—never coming to a decision, but avoiding the Garcias when I got back. And then three days had gone by, and the decision seemed to have made itself.

Sue clears the dishes. She eyes my plate but doesn’t mention how little I’ve eaten. I notice that she just pushed her food around too. “Will you stay?” she asks. “Joe finally went into her room.”

Meg’s room, which, according to Scottie, no one had really gone into since her death. Scottie said he’d peeked in a few times because it looked the same as always, like Meg was about to come home. I could picture it so clearly: the messy desk full of wires and soldering guns. The corkboard with its collage of old record albums, charcoal drawings, and photos. The graffiti wall, as we called the one opposite the windows that had this ugly floral wallpaper. Until Meg got inspired and tore it down and Sharpied all over the underlying plaster with favorite quotes and lyrics. Sue had been so mad about that, first because it was defacing property and then because members of their church, who’d been over for a potluck, thought that some of Meg’s writing was sacrilegious. “You know how people are, Joe,” Meg had overheard Sue saying. But Joe had come to Meg’s defense. Who cared about those gossips? If the wall was a good outlet for Meg, leave it be. They could paint over it when she moved out. They never did, though. Now I doubt they ever will.