I Was Here(9)
Author: Gayle Forman

The eighteen-hundred-dollar computer her parents got her when she left for college. They’re still paying off the credit card bill for that.

I go up to her room and find the computer in one of the boxes. I turn it on. It’s password protected, but I put in Runtmeyer, and her desktop pops up. I bring the computer downstairs while Alice poses the cats together, which is harder than you’d think, and I understand where the expression “herding kittens” comes from. Finally, I snap a picture. Alice quickly uses the desktop publishing function to make up a flyer, and I take the thing back to Meg’s printer to print out a test copy.

I’m about to shut down her computer when I stop. Her email program is right there, right at the toolbar on the bottom, and without even thinking about it, I click it open. Immediately, a bunch of new mail downloads—junk, mostly, crap from anonymous people who don’t know she’s dead, though there are one or two Meg, We Miss You emails and one telling her she’s going to rot in hell because suicide is a sin. I delete that one.

I’m curious to know what the last email Meg sent was. Who was it to? Was it the suicide note? As I click over to the sent mail folder, I look around as if someone is watching me. But of course, no one is.

It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library fines?

How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you keep carrying on?

I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just says: Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you. Always.

Was that her good-bye? Did she send me a good-bye that I somehow missed?

I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.

I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a [email protected] a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.

You don’t have to worry about me anymore.

It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.

I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first saw him play, a bunch of thanks for coming to my show, thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are some notes about upcoming gigs.

Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that Meg could flirt in for days.

But then there’s this abrupt change in tone. It’s cool. We’re still friends, he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed. I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February is wiped out. Weird.

I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says, Don’t worry about it. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly, that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister with ice in my veins: Meg, you have to leave me alone.

Yeah, she left you alone, all right.

Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says MUDHONEY. His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.

I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben from Meg’s account, with the subject line: Back from the Dead.

Your precious T-shirt, that is, I write. There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.

I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send. It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email. When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives, and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter. But then one time, you track down an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.

x x x

Alice and I blanket the part of Tacoma near the college with kitten flyers. Then she gets the smart idea of putting them up around this fancy health food store where the rich people shop. We take the bus, and on the way she tells me the place isn’t a Whole Foods, but they might get a Whole Foods here soon, and when I say, “How thrilling,” Alice says, “I know,” not catching the sarcasm at all, so I look out the window, hoping she’ll shut up.

The trip is a bust because the store manager won’t let us hang flyers inside, so we hand them out to the well-heeled customers with their recycled bags and they all look at us like we’re offering them free crack samples.

It’s after five by the time we get back, and even perky Alice is flagging. I’m furious and frustrated. I can’t believe it is this hard to find homes for kittens, and the whole thing seems like some kind of sick joke, with Meg getting the last laugh.