I Was Here(55)

             “She was trying to tell me,” Ben repeats. “In all those emails. She was trying to tell me. And I told her to leave me alone.” He slams his fist into the wall. The plaster cracks. And then he does it again, and his knuckles start to bleed.

             “Ben. Stop it!” I leap over to his corner of the bed and grab his fists before he can punch the wall a third time. “Stop it! It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”

             I repeat the words that I wish someone would say to me, and then suddenly we are kissing. I taste his grief and his need and his tears and my tears.

             “Cody.” He whispers my name. And it’s the tenderness of it that shocks me back to reality.

             I leap off the bed. Cover my lips. Tuck in my shirt. “I have to go,” I say.

             “Cody,” he repeats.

             “I have to get home now. I have to work tomorrow morning.”

             “Cody,” he implores.

             But I’m out of the room, the door slamming behind me before he has a chance to say my name again.





21

             Tricia’s in a good mood. The weekend I lost big in Seattle, she won big at the Indian casino, so even after paying for the expenses of food, hotel, and gas, she comes home two hundred dollars richer. She fans out the twenties that night at dinner and says we should splurge on something. For Tricia, this usually means something expensive and useless that she sees on the Home Shopping Network, like an ice-cream maker that she’ll use twice and then turn into a receptacle for more junk.

             “What do you think we should get?” she asks me.

             “A year’s worth of Internet.”

             “Why do you keep going on about that?”

             I don’t say anything.

             “There is a guy.” She smirks at me. “I knew it all along. You’d better not get pregnant!”

             If there is one thing Tricia has pounded into me over the years, it’s not to make the same mistake she did.

             “You’ve been to Tacoma, what, three times now? And you want an Internet connection so you can go into chat rooms and do what you do. Don’t tell me it’s not a guy.”

             After the kiss, Ben tried to get me to calm down, but I grabbed my stuff and started walking toward the bus station, and he was forced to give me a ride. In the car he said, “It’s okay, Cody.” And I said, “How can you say that? I don’t know if she can see us. If she’s up there or down there, watching us. But if she is, she’s disgusted. You know that, right?”

             He shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows?”

             “I know. And it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m disgusted.”

             He didn’t say anything else after that. At the station, I asked him to forward me all those long emails Meg had sent him and, after that, never to contact me again.

             “It’s not a guy,” I tell Tricia now.

             “If you say so.”

             In the end, she buys a decorative fire pit.

                          x x x

             I have read every post I can find written by All_BS. He doesn’t post that much. But he posts enough that it’s clear he’s there, paying attention. And the name? All_BS? What’s that all about? Is it short for “All Bullshit”? As in, “These boards are all bullshit”? Or as in, “Life is”?