I Was Here(7)
Author: Gayle Forman

After a few okay songs, Stoner Richard finds me. “That’s Ben McCallister,” he says, pointing to the guitar player/growler.

“Uh-huh,” I say. I’ve never heard of him. It takes a while for the Seattle scene to filter all the way down to Shitburg.

“Did Meg mention him to you?”

“No” is all I say. Though I want to scream at people to stop asking me that. Because I don’t know what Meg told me and I ignored, and what Meg didn’t tell me. Although one thing I know for damn certain is that she didn’t tell me that she was in such intense pain that the only way to take it away was to order a batch of industrial poison and drink it down.

Stoner Richard is going on about Meg being obsessed with the guy, and it’s all sort of white noise, because Meg was obsessed with a lot of guitar players in her day and in her way. But then this particular guitar player, this Ben McCallister, he stops to take a pull from his beer, holding the long neck of the bottle between two fingers, his guitar hanging off his lanky hip like it’s a limb. And then he turns out toward the crowd and the lights are on him, bright, and I see that his eyes are impossibly blue and he does this thing, like he’s shielding his eyes from the sun and looking out into the crowd for someone, but the way he does it, it makes something click.

“Oh, that must be Tragic Guitar Hero,” I say.

“Nothing heroic about that guy,” Stoner Richard says.

Tragic Guitar Hero. I do remember her writing about him once or twice, which was notable because she hadn’t written about any guys. At first it seemed she was into his band and she crushed on him the way that she always crushed on the guys—and the girls—she met in bands.

Tragic Guitar Hero. She’d told me about his band, retro Sonic Youth–Velvet Underground sound, infused with some modern sensibilities. Typical Meg stuff. But she’d also written about his eyes, so blue, she’d thought he wore contacts. I look at them now. They are weirdly blue.

And then I remember a line from one of her emails. Meg had asked, “Do you remember the advice that Tricia gave us back when she started working at the bar?”

Tricia loved to dispense advice, especially when she had an audience as attentive as Meg. But somehow I’d known right away which pointer Meg was talking about. Never sleep with the bartender, girls, Tricia had warned us.

“Why? Because everyone does?” Meg had asked. She loved the way Tricia talked to us, as if we were her friends from the bar, as if either of us was sleeping with anyone.

“There’s that,” Tricia had replied. “But mostly because you stop getting free drinks.”

Meg had written that it held true for Tragic Guitar Heroes, too. And I’d been confused because Meg hadn’t mentioned being into this guy or going out with him, let alone sleeping with him, something she had never done, except for that one time that we had both decided didn’t really count. And surely if Meg had done something as momentous as sleeping with a guy, she’d have told me. I was going to ask her about it when she came home. And then she didn’t.

So that’s him. That’s Tragic Guitar Hero. He seemed so mythic, and usually attaching a name to a mythical creature tames it. But knowing his name, Ben McCallister, doesn’t do that.

I watch the band intently now. He does that thing that rockers do, swiping away at his guitar, leaning into it and into the mic and then stopping playing, grasping the mic like he would a lover’s neck. It’s all an act. But it’s a good one. I can imagine his line of groupies. I just can’t believe Meg would be one of them.

“We’re the Scarps. Silverfish is up next,” Ben McCallister says at the end of their short set.

“You about ready to go?” Stoner Richard asks me.

But I’m not ready. I’m wide-awake and furious at Ben McCallister, who, I now understand, screwed my friend, in more ways than one. Did he treat her like some throwaway groupie? Didn’t he realize that this was Meg Garcia he was dealing with? You don’t throw Meg away.

“Not yet,” I tell Richard, and then I’m up out of my seat and over at the bar where Ben McCallister is standing, drinking another beer and talking to a group of people who are telling him what a great set it was. I march up to him, but once I’m standing right behind him, so close I can see the vertebrae in his neck and the tattoo atop his shoulder blade, I have no idea what to say.

But Ben McCallister seems to know what to say to me. Because after a few seconds’ chitchat with the other girls, he turns around and looks at me: “I saw you out there.”

Up close, Ben McCallister is much prettier than any boy has a right to be. He has what I can only assume are Irish good looks: black hair, skin that on a girl would be called alabaster but on a rocker is just perfectly pasty. Full, red lips. And the eyes. Meg was right. They look like contacts.

“You saw me out where?” I ask.

“Out there.” He points to the tables in the club. “I was looking for a friend of mine; he said he’d come, but it’s impossible to see anything with the lights.” He mimics shielding his eyes against the glare, just as I’d seen him do from the stage. “But then I saw you”—he pauses for a beat—“like maybe you were who I was looking for.”

Is this what he does? Use this line? Is it so rehearsed that he even plants the little eye shield squint-into-the-crowd thing during the show? I mean, it’s a great line. Because if I was in the crowd, then it’s like, Wow, you were looking for me. And if I wasn’t, well, then you said that nice thing and what a sensitive rocker you must be to believe in something like fate.

Is this the line he used on Meg? Did this work on Meg? I shudder to think of my friend falling for this crap, but then with Meg far away from home, with glitter dust in her eyes and guitar fumes up her nose, who knows?

He takes my silence for coyness. “What’s your name?”

Will my name ring a bell? Did she mention me to him? “Cody,” I say.

“Cody, Cody, Cody.” He gives my name a test drive. “It’s a cowgirl name,” he drawls on. “Where you from, Cowgirl Cody?”

“Cowgirl country.”

His smile is slow, like he’s intentionally rationing it. “I’d like to visit Cowgirl country. Maybe I can come and you can take me for a ride.” He gives me a meaningful look, in case I haven’t caught the double entendre.

“You’d probably get bucked right off.”