I Was Here(19)

             “Takes disgusting to know disgusting,” I say, now a third grader.

             He looks at me, shaking his head. And then he leaves, his precious T-shirt a sad forgotten rag on the floor.





7

             It takes about an hour after Ben leaves for me to calm down. And another hour after that to get the nerve to turn Meg’s laptop back on. Ben was right about one thing: I didn’t really know what I was talking about. The way he said that suggested Meg had done something to deserve his assholishness. I know Meg. And I know guys like Ben. I’ve seen enough of them go through Tricia over the years.

             I open Meg’s email program again and go into her sent folder, but all I see are the earlier emails, the ones from November: her side of the flirtation, stuff about which musician wrote the best songs, who was the best drummer, which band was the most overhyped, underhyped. And then, before the holidays, it all abruptly stops. It doesn’t take a genius to see what happened: They slept together. Then he tossed Meg aside.

             But what’s less clear is this hole in Meg’s messages. I know we didn’t correspond much in the winter, but I’m pretty sure she wrote me some emails. I log onto my webmail program just to be sure I didn’t imagine it, and while January is kind of a blank, there are messages from February from her in my inbox. But those messages aren’t showing up in her sent folder.

             That’s weird. Did her computer have some sort of virus that ate several weeks of messages? Or did she move her messages somewhere? I start looking through her other applications, not sure what I’m looking for. I open up her calendar, but it’s empty. I check the trash, thinking maybe the deleted files will be there. There’s a bunch of stuff there, but most of what I open is gibberish. There’s one untitled folder. I try to open it, but the computer says I can’t open it in the trash. I drag the folder to the desktop and try again, but this time, I get a message that the file is encrypted. I’m afraid it might have some virus that’ll fry her computer, so I drag it back to the trash.

             It’s only nine thirty and I have not eaten, yet again, and I’m thirsty but don’t feel like going back downstairs. So I take off my clothes and lie down in Meg’s haunted bed, and right now the sheets smelling like her are kind of what I need. I know that by sleeping here, I’ll mingle my smell with hers, lessen hers, but somehow that doesn’t matter. That’s the way it always was before, anyhow.





8

             I wake the next morning to a gentle rapping at my door. Bright sunlight is coming through the open shade. I sit up in the bed; my head is full of sand.

             There’s more knocking.

             “Come in.” My voice is a croak.

             Alice is standing there, another mug of coffee in her hand, harvested by hand by Nicaraguan dwarves, no doubt.

             I rub my eyes, accept the coffee with a grunt of gratitude. “What time is it?”

             “It’s noon.”

             “Noon? I slept, like, fourteen hours.”

             “I know.” She looks around the room. “Maybe it wasn’t Meg. Maybe this room is like that field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz and has a soporific effect.”

             “What do you mean?”

             “She slept an awful lot. Like, all the time. If she wasn’t hanging out with her ‘cool Seattle friends’”—she makes air quotes here—“then she was sleeping.”

             “Meg likes—liked—to sleep a lot. She ran at such high octane. She needed the sleep to rejuvenate.”

             Alice looks skeptical. “I never met a person who slept as much as that.”