“And a virgin for you, Cody?” Bill asks with a smirk.
I hate this town. I can’t even order a meal without it feeling loaded. “Just a Dr Pepper.”
“Are you twenty-one?” I ask Alice when Bill leaves.
“No, but Priscilla Watkins is.” She hands over her fake ID.
I’m impressed. I didn’t think Alice had it in her.
As we wait for our drinks, the Thomas family comes in. Mrs. Thomas sort of waves; Mindy, who seems to be arguing with her sister over a hair-straightening iron, ignores me. I shake my head.
“What?” Alice asks.
How do you explain Shitburg to someone who describes her hometown as Eden?
Bill returns with the drinks. As soon as he’s gone, I grab Alice’s shot and down it. “Order another one.”
We keep drinking. Alice grows maudlin. She starts talking about Meg. Loudly. How she wishes she could’ve known her better. How glad she is that she knows me. Somewhere it registers that she is saying nice things, but Mindy Thomas is two booths over and I want Alice to shut up.
When the food comes, Alice starts shoveling it into her mouth. “Oh. Yum. This is so good. We have, like, no good Mexican in Eugene!”
“Hmm,” I say, forking a mass of cheese off the enchilada. It peels away like skin after a sunburn. I push it to the side and try the rice.
“So, have you talked to Ben McCallister?” Alice asks out of the blue.
It’s a dark restaurant, so she can’t see my face go red. “No.”
“Not at all?”
“Why would I?”
“I dunno. You two seemed like you had a . . . a spark.”
A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark. When we first started talking, All_BS quoted that to me—Dante, he said it was. I think he was trying to explain how simple musings could lead to big life-changing ideas. His way of encouraging me, and I had to remind myself not to be reassured by it, because the life- changing idea he was selling me on was life-ending.
“No spark,” I say. I push my plate away.
“That’s probably good.”
“Why?” I hear the challenge in my voice.
“For one, Meg was totally gaga over him.”
“I thought you claimed you didn’t know her at all.”
“I didn’t. But she talked about Ben. And invited us to come to his band’s gigs. So she must’ve been.”
“Her inviting you to a gig wasn’t Meg being into Ben; it was Meg being Meg.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while, just slurps to the bottom of her drink. “Oh, that reminds me. Did you ever find the person Meg confided in about taking antidepressants?”
“Nope.”
“I might know who it is.”
“You think?” I don’t care anymore, because the point of finding that person was to find All_BS, and I already did that.
“I’m not positive, but I think it’s Tree.”
“Tree? Right!”