I Was Here(29)

             “I know. But there was something in her suicide note that makes me think that she might not have acted alone, and then there’s a bunch of missing emails. It doesn’t feel right.”

             The line goes quiet for a minute. “You mean someone might’ve coerced her?”

             Can you coerce someone to drink poison? “I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I want to find those emails. I wonder if they’re in this folder I found in her trash. It won’t open.”

             “What happens when you try?”

             “Hang on.”

             I turn on the laptop and drag the file from the trash. I open it and get the encryption message. I tell Harry.

             “Try this.” He feeds me a bunch of complicated keystrokes. Nothing works. The file remains encrypted.

             “Hmm.” He gives me another set of commands to try, but still they don’t work.

             “It seems like a pretty sophisticated encryption,” Harry says. “Whoever wrote it knew what they were doing.”

             “So it’s locked for good?”

             Harry laughs. “No. Nothing ever is. If I had the computer, I could probably decrypt it for you. You can send it down if you want, but you’ll have to hurry because school ends in two weeks.”

                          x x x

             I take the computer to the drugstore, which has a shipping outlet at the back. Troy Boggins, who was a year ahead of me in high school, is working behind the counter. “Hey, Cody. Where you been hiding?” he asks.

             “I haven’t been hiding,” I say. “I’ve been working.”

             “Oh, yeah,” he drawls. “Where you working these days?”

             There’s nothing to be ashamed of about cleaning houses. It’s honest work and I make good money, probably more than Troy. But Troy didn’t spend four years of high school going on about how the minute the ink was dry on his diploma, he was getting the hell out of here. Well, I didn’t either. Meg did, though like most of her plans, it became my plan too. Then Meg left and I stayed.

             When I don’t answer, Troy tells me it’ll cost forty dollars each way to mail the computer. “Plus more if you want insurance.”

             Eighty bucks? That’s how much a bus ticket costs. The weekend’s coming up, and I have cash from the extra shifts. I decide to take the computer to Tacoma myself. I’ll get the answers faster that way.

             I tell Troy I changed my mind.

             “No worries,” he says.

             I turn to walk away. As I do, Troy says: “Wanna hang out sometime? Go out for a beer?”

             Troy Boggins is the kind of guy that, if you added fifteen or twenty years, Tricia would date. He never paid me any attention in high school. His sudden interest should be flattering, but instead it feels ominous. Like without Meg by my side, it’s clear what I am. What I’ve been all along.

                          x x x

             When I tell Tricia I’m going back to Tacoma for the weekend, she gives me a funny look. It’s not like she’ll stop me. I’m eighteen, and even if I weren’t, she’s never been that kind of mother. “Is there a guy?” she asks.

             “What? No! It’s for Meg’s stuff. Why would you say that?”