I Was Here(24)
Author: Gayle Forman

And again, I wonder: Why didn’t she come to me? Why wasn’t I the one she asked for help?

Did I miss something in her emails? I open my webmail, checking to see what messages she might have sent me in January, which is when she posted this one to the boards. But there are no emails between us from January.

It wasn’t a fight, exactly. It was too quiet to be a fight. Meg was staying in Tacoma for part of the winter break because of her work-study job, so she was only coming home for the ten days around Christmas and New Year’s. I was so excited to see her, but then at the last minute she said she had to go to southern Oregon to visit Joe’s family, so she wouldn’t even be coming home. Normally, I would’ve been invited to join them in Oregon. But I wasn’t. Well, not until the day before New Year’s Eve, when Meg called and begged me to come down. “Rescue me from the holidays,” she said, sounding frazzled. “My parents are driving me crazy.”

“Really?” I replied. “Because I spent Christmas Day eating an eight-dollar turkey plate at the diner with Tricia, and that was magical.” Before, we might have laughed about this—as if the patheticness of my life with Tricia belonged to someone else—but it didn’t and so it wasn’t funny.

“Oh,” Meg said. “I’m sorry.”

I’d been angling for pity, but now that I had it, it only made me angrier. I told her I had to work, and we hung up. And when New Year’s came, we didn’t even call each other. We didn’t communicate for a while after that. I wasn’t sure how to break the ice because we hadn’t fought, exactly. When Mr. Purdue grabbed my ass—a piece of news, at last—it gave me the opening, and I emailed her as if nothing had happened.

I scroll back to September, when she left for school. I read Meg’s initial emails, the Meg-like rambling descriptions of her housemates, complete with scanned drawings. I remember how I read those messages over and over, even though it physically hurt to do so. I missed her so much, and wished I could’ve been there, could’ve gone through with our plans. But I never told her that.

There’s a lot that I didn’t tell her. And even more that she didn’t tell me.

Firefly1021
Guilt

I keep thinking about my family, not so much my parents as my little brother. What would this do to him?

All_BS: James Baldwin wrote that “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” You have to decide if you’re willing to grab your freedom, and if in doing so, you might inadvertently set others free. Who knows what path your decision will lead your brother down? Perhaps freed of your shadow, perhaps freed to be his own person, he will be able to fulfill a potential he might not otherwise reach.

Firefly1021: All_BS, You’re bizarrely insightful. I always feel like my brother is limited, by me, by my mother. He’d be a different person if we weren’t around. But you can’t say such things.

All_BS: Except here we are saying them.

Firefly1021: Here we are. It’s why I love this forum. Anything goes. Everything is said. Even the things that are unspeakable.

All_BS: Yes. So many taboos in our culture, starting with death. It’s not so in other cultures that see it as part of a seamless cycle: birth, life, death. Similarly, other cultures view suicide as a brave and honorable path to life. The samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo wrote: “The way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved.” I think you have the warrior in you, Firefly.

Firefly1021: Warrior? Not so sure I can handle a sword.

All_BS: It’s not about the sword. It’s about the spirit. You have to tap in to your strength.

Firefly1021: How? How do I tap into it? How do you do something that brave?

All_BS: You screw your courage to the sticking place.

Firefly1021: Screw your courage to the sticking place. I like that! You always say the most inspiring things. I could talk to you all day.

All_BS: I can’t take credit for that. It’s Shakespeare. But there is a way for us to communicate more immediately, and privately. Set up a new email account and post the address. I’ll email you instructions and we can take it from there.

I taste the sour tang of envy again. I’m not sure if it’s because I can sense the closeness between Meg and All_BS. Or if it’s because in her litany of people she worried about leaving behind, she mentioned her parents, her brother, but she didn’t mention me.

18

I get a new client. Mrs. Driggs. She takes me through the house and we both act like I’ve never been here before. It’s funny how once you start pretending, you realize how much everyone else is too.

The house isn’t big—it’s a three-bedroom ranch style—and it already seems pretty clean because she lives there alone. Her husband is gone, dead or divorced or maybe never there. When I was here last, it was just her and her son, Jeremy, and, as everyone in town knows, he is doing three years at Coyote Ridge on drug charges. He got sent away a year ago, but Mrs. Driggs shows me his room, asks me to change the sheets on his bed each week, vacuum the rug.

Jeremy’s room looks a lot like it did the one time I came here with Meg in high school: the reggae posters, the psychedelic wall tapestries. Meg had heard that Jeremy had a snake and was fascinated by seeing it eat. So even though he was a senior and Meg and I were freshmen, she got him to invite us over.

The big terrarium with its lush rainforest inside is now gone. As is the snake, Hendrix. What happened to it? Did it die, or did Mrs. Driggs get rid of it when Jeremy was convicted?

When Mrs. Driggs shows me to Jeremy’s room, my stomach lurches, just as it had done four years ago when Jeremy had taken that mouse out of a bag and dumped it into Hendrix’s cage. I hadn’t expected the mouse to be so petlike—so pink and white that it was almost translucent. The way it stood so still, except for its little quivering nose, you could tell it knew what fate was in store for it. The snake, coiled in the corner, didn’t move either, didn’t let on that it noticed lunch had arrived. For a while, they both just stayed like that. And then Hendrix sprang into action and, in one fluid motion, strangled the mouse. Once it was dead, Hendrix lazily unhinged its jaws and began to swallow it whole. I couldn’t watch anymore, so I went to wait in the kitchen. Mrs. Driggs was there, paying the bills. “Dreadful business, isn’t it?” she asked. At first I thought she was talking about the bills, but then I realized she meant the snake.