“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!”
“I think it was,” Alice says, sounding wounded.
“You obviously don’t know shit about Meg.”
“I believe we’ve established that,” Alice says defensively. “I still think it’s her.”
No. Meg would’ve hated Tree, and Tree didn’t seem that charmed by Meg. “Not her,” I mumble. I am suddenly tired, and my limbs no longer feel as if they are totally in my control. I remember, belatedly, why I don’t like to be drunk.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Alice says, waving her hands. “But she said something that made me think it. I can’t remember now. But you should call her.”
x x x
The next morning, Alice gets ready to leave for her wonderful summer of adventure, and I get ready to clean toilets. I am hungover in a way that has less to do with the tequila I drank than with what it brought out in me. Why wasn’t I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she’s tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.
I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn’t nicer.
x x x
The Purdues are on vacation, so the day after Alice leaves, I have a day off. I head straight to the library, earlier than usual. The comforting hush of the place has been overtaken by the laughter and yelps of little kids. It’s story time.
On my way to the tables in the back, I spot Alexis Bray in the story circle, holding hands with her little daughter. I can’t remember the girl’s name, even though she came with Alexis to almost all of Meg’s services, sitting quietly on her mother’s lap. At one of the receptions, Alexis asked me if I wanted to go for coffee. I said I’d call her but I never did. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to meet in the first place. She was four years ahead of Meg and me, and I didn’t know much about her except that she used to go out with Jeremy Driggs, though he wasn’t the father of her little girl. Apparently, it was some guy in the Army.
She waves at me now. As does Mrs. Banks, who gestures for me to sit in one of the carrels off to the side, where it’s quieter. Although not much. Story time is a pretty raucous affair. The assistant librarian is reading some story about a bunny that keeps telling its mother all the ways it’s going to run away, even though, obviously, if the rabbit meant business, it would not be telling its mother. When you’re serious, you keep quiet.
One of the little kids shambles away from the circle over to where I’m sitting. His diaper sags halfway down to his knees and there’s a big stain of what looks like peas, but could be something grosser, down the front of his Cars shirt. I’m disgusted. Kids are like parasites. I suspect Tricia has had the same thought about me. I wonder if Meg did too.
The librarian moves on to a different book, something about disappearing balloons, which sounds even more stupid. Which is maybe why my little foul-diapered friend shows no interest in returning to story time; he just stares at me with soupy eyes.
I try to look away, but it’s not easy when someone is staring at you. The effort not to look makes my stomach churn like the agitator of a washing machine. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Alice in the mountains of Montana, surrounded by a bunch of other similarly chirpy people. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Hendrix swallowing that mouse. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see Meg at her computer, typing her time-delayed suicide note. Churn. Churn. Churn. I see me, at this very library, clicking open her suicide note: I regret to inform you . . .
The little kid is still at my side, his grubby, sticky hands inches away from the keyboard. “You really don’t want to get any closer,” I say, giving him my most menacing look, in case the threat in my voice wasn’t clear enough.
His chin crumples before he starts to cry. His mom hustles over, apologizing to me, which means she probably doesn’t know what I said, but Alexis gives me a weird look, which means she probably does.
So this is who I’ve become, someone who picks fights with toddlers.
I return my attention to the computer, scrolling through All_BS’s words: the tiny spark, the mighty flame. Screw your courage to the sticking place. The little kid is now sobbing from the safety of his mother’s lap. I feel ashamed, but the shame has forced some clarity upon me: I can keep picking small fights, or brave the big one.
Time to screw my courage. Or go down trying.
In quick succession, I send two messages. The first is to Harry Kang, asking him what kind of information I’d need to track someone down, because all this becoming All_BS’s buddy does me no good unless I can find out who he is.
The second is to All_BS:
I’m ready. I want to take the next steps. Will you help me?
As soon as I hit send on the second message, my anger, my angst, my self-pity disappears, leaving only a calm and steely resolve. I wonder if this was how Meg felt.
The little kid has stopped crying and is now staring at me resentfully with his tearstained face. I look back at him and smile.
26
It doesn’t take All_BS long to reply to my message, though he doesn’t respond in the way I expected him to: by sending me the same files I believe he sent Meg. Instead, what I get is a message quoting Martin Luther King Jr. “Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.” To it he adds: You’ve already taken the first step in deciding. After that comes a link leading to a sort of directory with all these options: pills, poisoning, gunshot, asphyxiation, strangulation, drowning, carbon monoxide, jumping, hanging. When you click on each one, there is a detailed—and I mean detailed—list of pros and cons, as well as statistics listing success rates of each method. This is similar to the document I first found encrypted in Meg’s trash, but not the same.