Read I Was Here for Free Online Page A

some notes
     about upcoming gigs.
    Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in
     another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin
     cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple
     in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down
     the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that
     Meg could flirt in for days.
    But then there’s this abrupt change in tone.
It’s cool. We’re still friends,
he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed.
     I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side
     of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because
     again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February
     is wiped out. Weird.
    I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says,
Don’t worry about it
. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly,
     that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt
     and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the
     last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister
     with ice in my veins:
Meg, you have to leave me alone
.
    Yeah, she left you alone, all right.
    Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t
     recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says MUDHONEY . His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.
    I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben
     from Meg’s account, with the subject line:
Back from the Dead.
    Your precious T-shirt, that is,
I write.
There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.
    I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send.
     It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email.
     When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages
     of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives,
     and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and
     by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter. But then one time, you track down
     an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have
     that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have
     a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing
     comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they
     weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.
    x x x
    Alice and I blanket the part of Tacoma near the college with kitten flyers. Then she
     gets the smart idea of putting them up around this fancy health food store where the
     rich people shop. We take the bus, and on the way she tells me the place isn’t a Whole
     Foods, but they might get a Whole Foods here soon, and when I say, “How thrilling,”
     Alice says, “I know,” not catching the sarcasm at all, so I look out the window, hoping
     she’ll shut up.
    The trip is a bust because the store manager won’t let us hang flyers inside, so we
     hand them out to the well-heeled customers with their recycled bags and they all look
     at us like we’re offering them free crack samples.
    It’s after five by the time we get back, and even perky Alice is flagging. I’m furious
     and frustrated. I can’t believe it is this hard to find homes for kittens, and the
     whole thing seems like some kind of sick joke, with Meg getting the last laugh.
    The house smells of cooking, a weird, unpleasant odor of spices that don’t go together—curry,
     rosemary, too much garlic. Tree