I Was Here(54)

             “I’ve read Huck Finn, too. I am very intellectual.”

             “I don’t know if you’re intellectual, but I know you’re smart. Meg would’ve had no patience for you if you weren’t. No matter how pretty you are.” I feel myself blush a little, and look away.

             “You’re no stranger to pretty, Cody Reynolds,” he replies. “For a dick, that is.”

             I turn back to look at him, and for a second I forget about everything. And then I remember that I can’t forget. “So, I have to tell you something else.”

             Ben’s eyes, they change, like a traffic light going from green to yellow.

             “I found other things from Meg. Things she’d posted on this suicide support group.”

             Ben cocks his head.

             “It’s not that kind of support group.”

             His eyes change again, from yellow to red. Stop. But I can’t stop.

             “You should probably just read it. I brought a printout. It’s up in your room with my stuff.”

             I follow him upstairs in total silence, the warmth of the day replaced with a chill, though the sun is still plenty strong. I pull out the big sheaf of papers. “You should start at the beginning.”

             I watch him read. And it’s like watching an avalanche. First a few drifts of blowing snow, and then a wave of it, and then his entire face is collapsing. The sick feeling comes back, magnified a hundred times over by what’s playing out all over his face.

             When he puts down the last page, he stares up at me, and his expression, it’s awful. It’s fury and guilt, which I can handle because I’m used to them, but also fear and dread, which set off bombs in my gut. “Fuck!” he says.

             “I know, right?” I say. “He had a hand in it. In her dying.”

             But he doesn’t respond. Instead, he goes to his own laptop and brings it to the futon. He opens up his email program and goes to Meg’s emails. He scrolls through them until he finds the one he’s looking for. It was written two weeks before she died.

             “Read,” he says in a ruined voice.

             He points to midway through the screen.

             I haven’t been coming to Seattle as much lately, as you’ve probably noticed, and I have to admit that at first it was because I was feeling kind of low and awkward about what went down between us. I still can’t believe I acted the way I did. But it’s not like that anymore. Remember, a while back you told me to find someone else to talk to? I have. A whole bunch of someones. Some incredibly intelligent people who have a very contrarian way of looking at things, and you know how that’s always appealed to me, going against the grain. I think it’s why I’ve always been drawn to music and to bands and to things like that, but you guys don’t have the lock on rebellion. There are so many avenues. There are so many ways to live, to define what living means for you and you alone. We are so narrow in our thinking, and once you understand that, once you decide to not abide by these artificial constraints, anything is possible and you are so liberated. Anyhow, that is what I’ve been learning from this new community. And they are really helping me. I have no doubt people will be surprised by the direction I take, but that’s life in the punk rock world, right? Anyhow, I gotta run. I’ve got a bus to catch.

             I finish reading and look up. Ben is crouched on the corner of the futon. “She was trying to tell me,” he says. “About her fucked-up suicide group. She was trying to tell me.”

             “You couldn’t have known from that.”