Read I Was Here for Free Online

time as I need. I’m about to hang up. Then she says:
    “And, Cody . . .”
    I hate those
And, Cody
s. It’s like a gun being cocked. Like they’re about to tell me they know everything.
     “Yeah?”
    There’s a long pause on the phone. My heart starts to pound.
    “Thank you,” is all Sue says.
    x x x
    Inside, I ask Alice about the best way to find homes for the kittens. Good homes.
     “You could put an ad on Craigslist, but I heard sometimes those animals wind up in
     research labs.”
    “Not helpful.”
    “Well, we could put up flyers. Everyone likes pictures of kittens.”
    I sigh. “Fine. How should we do that?”
    “Easiest to take a picture of the cats, maybe email it to yourself, add some text,
     and print them out. . . .” she begins. “It might be simpler to use Meg’s laptop; it
     has a built-in camera.”
    The eighteen-hundred-dollar computer her parents got her when she left for college.
     They’re still paying off the credit card bill for that.
    I go up to her room and find the computer in one of the boxes. I turn it on. It’s
     password protected, but I put in
Runtmeyer
, and her desktop pops up. I bring the computer downstairs while Alice poses the cats
     together, which is harder than you’d think, and I understand where the expression
     “herding kittens” comes from. Finally, I snap a picture. Alice quickly uses the desktop
     publishing function to make up a flyer, and I take the thing back to Meg’s printer
     to print out a test copy.
    I’m about to shut down her computer when I stop. Her email program is right there,
     right at the toolbar on the bottom, and without even thinking about it, I click it
     open. Immediately, a bunch of new mail downloads—junk, mostly, crap from anonymous
     people who don’t know she’s dead, though there are one or two
Meg, We Miss You
emails and one telling her she’s going to rot in hell because suicide is a sin. I
     delete that one.
    I’m curious to know what the last email Meg sent was. Who was it to? Was it the suicide
     note? As I click over to the sent mail folder, I look around as if someone is watching
     me. But of course, no one is.
    It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we
     now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide
     note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine
     for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library
     fines?
    How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like
     that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you
keep
carrying on?
    I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just
     says:
Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you
.
Always
.
    Was that her good-bye? Did she send
me
a good-bye that I somehow missed?
    I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before
     she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.
    I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a [email protected]
     a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.
    You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
    It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak
     and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.
    I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the
     fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least
     from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because
     his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first
     saw him play, a bunch of
thanks for coming to my show
,
thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad
—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are