“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.”

“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”?