The house smells of cooking, a weird, unpleasant odor of spices that don’t go together—curry, rosemary, too much garlic. Tree is back, sitting on the couch drinking a beer.
“I thought you were leaving,” Tree says coolly.
Alice tacks one of the cat flyers onto the bulletin board by the door, next to a large flyer for tomorrow’s Lifeline vigil. She explains how I’m trying to find homes for Pete and Repeat.
Tree makes a face. “What, you have something against kittens?” I ask her.
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s just Pete and Repeat. Those names. They’re so gay.”
“I’m bisexual, and I don’t appreciate your derogatory use of gay,” Alice says, attempting to sound scolding but still somehow managing to sound chipper.
“Well, sorry. I know they’re the dead girl’s cats, but the names are still gay.”
When she says this, Tree seems less like a hippie than like one of the rednecks in our town. It makes me hate her both more and less.
“What names do you prefer?” I ask.
Without hesitating, she says, “Click and Clack. That’s what I call them in my head.”
“And you think Pete and Repeat are bad?” Stoner Richard asks, appearing with a stained apron and a wooden spoon. “I think we should call them Lenny and Steve.”
“Those aren’t cat names,” Alice says.
“Why not?” Stoner Richard asks, holding up the spoon, the contents of which bear the strange odor of the kitchen. “Who wants a bite?”
“What is it?” Tree asks.
“Everything-in-the-fridge stew.”
“You should add the cats,” Tree says. “Then she wouldn’t have to find homes for them.”
“I thought you were a vegetarian,” Alice says acidly.
Stoner Richard invites me to share his horrible concoction. It smells like the spices got into a rumble and everyone lost, though that’s not the reason I decline. I’m not used to company. I’m not sure when that happened. I used to have friends—not good ones, but friends—from school, from town. I used to be at the Garcias all the time. Used to seems far from where I am now.
I leave the roommates to their meal and go into the kitchen for a drink. I bought a liter of Dr Pepper earlier and stowed it in the fridge, but Stoner Richard, in his zeal to cook, has moved everything, so I have to dig for it. And there, in the back, I find a couple of unopened cans of RC and my stomach drops out because the only person I’ve ever known to drink that is Meg. I fill an old Sonics cup with ice and RC. When I leave here, I don’t want to leave even the smallest part of her behind.
I take my drink to the empty porch. But when I get there, I see the porch isn’t empty and I stop so suddenly, the drink sloshes out of the cup and onto my shirt.
He’s smoking a cigarette, the cherry of it burning menacingly in the dim, gray twilight.
I don’t know what surprises me most: that an email I sent actually had an impact. Or that he looks like he wants to kill me.
I don’t give him the chance. I put my drink down on the porch railing and turn around and go upstairs, trying to take them slowly, trying to act calm. He’s here for the shirt, so I’ll get him the shirt. Throw it in his face and get him the hell out of here.
I hear the sound of crunching gravel and then I hear him on the stairs behind me, and I’m not sure what to do, because if I call out for help then I look weak, but I saw that look in his eyes. It’s like he not only got my email but he got my hatred, too, and now it’s cycling back to me.
I go into Meg’s room. His T-shirt sits on top of one of the piles where I left it. He’s followed me upstairs and is standing in her doorway. I hurl the shirt at him. I want him, every part of him, out of my space. But he just stands there. The shirt bounces off him and falls to the floor.
“What the fuck?” he asks.
“What? You wanted your shirt; there’s your shirt.”
“What kind of person does that?”
“What did I do? You said you wanted your T-shirt—”
“Oh, cut the crap, Cody,” he interrupts. And it’s so startling to hear him say my name. Not Cowgirl Cody in his stupid flirtatious growl. But my name, plain, naked. “You sent me an email from a dead girl. Are you cruel? Or are you also some kind of crazy?”
“You wanted your T-shirt back,” I repeat, but now I’m scared, so it loses some of its conviction.
He glares at me. His eyes are a whole different color here, in the pale light of Meg’s room. And then I remember Meg’s last email. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. And the anger comes back.
“Couldn’t you let her have a souvenir?” I ask. “Maybe you should do that, with the number of girls you probably screw. Hand out a commemorative T-shirt. But asking for it back? Now that’s classy.”
“You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So enlighten me.” There’s an edge of desperation in my voice. Because he’s right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe if I’d known, if I’d been more clued in these last few months, we wouldn’t be standing here.
He stares at me like I am something putrid. And I can’t believe that this is the same smarmy flirt from last night.
“What happened?” I ask. “Did you get bored with her? Is that what happens with you and girls? It’s a failure of imagination, because if you had gotten to know her at all, you would never have gotten tired of her. I mean, she was Meg Garcia, and who the hell are you, Ben McCallister, to tell her to leave you alone?” My voice threatens to crack but I won’t let it. There will be time to lose it later. There’s always time to lose it later.
Ben’s face changes now. Ice crystals form. “How do you know what I told her?”
“I saw your email: Meg, you have to leave me alone.” It sounded cruel before. But now, coming from me, it just sounds pitiful.
His face is pure annihilation. “I don’t know what’s more disgusting: reading a dead girl’s email, or writing from a dead girl’s email.”
“Takes disgusting to know disgusting,” I say, now a third grader.
He looks at me, shaking his head. And then he leaves, his precious T-shirt a sad forgotten rag on the floor.
7
It takes about an hour after Ben leaves for me to calm down. And another hour after that to get the nerve to turn Meg’s laptop back on. Ben was right about one thing: I didn’t really know what I was talking about. The way he said that suggested Meg had done something to deserve his assholishness. I know Meg. And I know guys like Ben. I’ve seen enough of them go through Tricia over the years.