I Was Here(20)

             “Also, she had mono in tenth grade,” I explain, and as soon as I say it, I remember how awful that year was. Meg was out of school as much as she was in it; whole months she had to do independent study because she was so laid flat.

             “Mono?” Alice asks. “Why would that make her tired still?”

             “She had a really bad case of it,” I reply, remembering how the Garcias wouldn’t let me come over and see her, in case I caught it too.

             “Sounds more like Epstein-Barr or something.” She sits down on the edge of her bed. “I didn’t know that about her. I didn’t get to know her very well.”

             “You only moved in a few months ago.”

             She shrugs. “I know the others. And I don’t think they got to know her either. She was a little standoffish.”

             If Meg loved you, she loved you, and if she didn’t . . .The girl didn’t suffer fools. “You just have to try to get to know her.”

             “I did,” Alice insists.

             “You can’t have tried that hard. I mean, there couldn’t have been a wellspring of love to have put that album cover up on the door.”

             Alice’s Bambi eyes fill with tears. “We didn’t put that up. She did. And we were told not to take anything down.”

             Meg put the cover up. I’m sure the suicide experts would call that a warning sign, a call for help, but it’s hard not to see Meg’s twisted sense of humor in it somehow. A final calling card. “Oh,” I say. “That actually makes sense.”

             “It does?” Alice asks. “It seemed so morbid to me. But like I said, I didn’t know much about her. I’ve probably spent more time with you than I did with her,” she says wistfully.

             “I wish I could say you weren’t missing much, but you were.”

             “Tell me about her. What was she like?”

             “What was she like?”

             Alice nods.

             “She was like . . .” I open my arms to show bigness, the possibilities being endless. I’m not sure if this describes Meg, or how I always felt when I was around her.

             Alice looks so beseeching. So I tell her more. I tell her about the time Meg and I got seasonal jobs as telemarketers—the most boring job in the world—and to keep us entertained, Meg did all these different voices for the calls. She wound up doing so well with her voices and selling so much of the crap that she surpassed her daily quota and kept getting sent home early.

             I tell her about the time our local library’s budget got slashed so badly that it could only open three days a week, which was a major drag for me because when I wasn’t at the Garcias’, I practically lived at the place. Meg didn’t use the library nearly as much as me, but that didn’t stop her from going on a mission to stop the closures. She finagled one of those moderately known, now hugely famous, bands she’d become friendly with from her blog to play a Kill Rock Stars, Not Books benefit concert, which brought people from all over the place to our town and raised some twelve thousand dollars, which was great. But because the band was already well known, and Meg was such an attractive poster child, we wound up getting all this national press, and the library was shamed into extending its hours.

             I tell her about when Scottie, always a picky eater, got so bad that he became anemic. The doctors said he had to eat more iron-rich food, and Sue was beside herself because the kid would not eat healthy, no matter what. But Meg knew Scottie was obsessed with tractors, so she went on eBay and found these tractor-shaped food molds and mashed up potatoes and meat and spinach and put it all in a tractor mold and Scottie gobbled it up.