“I know everyone wants to protect my innocence and stuff, but my sister swallowed poison. It’s kinda too late.”
I sigh. I have a printout of her suicide note in the box under my bed, but I know that’s not what he wants to see. I know he’s seen the note, or read it, or heard about it. But he wants to see its origin. I open up the sent mail file. I show him the note. With squinting eyes, he reads it.
“Did you ever think it was weird that she said that the decision was ‘my own to make’?”
I shake my head. I hadn’t.
“It’s just, when we used to get busted for doing something together and she wanted to keep me out of trouble, that’s what she’d tell Mom and Dad. ‘Scottie had nothing to do with it. It was my own decision.’ It was how she’d protect me.”
I remember all the times Meg dragged Scottie into one of her schemes and then had to extricate him. She was always taking the fall for him. Most of the time, deservedly so. I still don’t quite get what he’s saying, so the ten-year-old has to spell it out for me.
“It’s almost like she’s protecting someone.”
12
After Scottie leaves, I go through Meg’s emails yet again. There’s all that deleted sent mail, which I haven’t been able to understand. Why would she delete only the sent messages but not the inbox? Or did she delete mail from her inbox, too, only I don’t know what to look for? Why those six weeks? And what else did she delete? Is there a way to find the old messages? Are they gone for good? I have no idea. I don’t know anyone who would know this.
But then I remember Harry Kang, Meg’s roommate, who studies computers. I fumble for the scrap of paper Alice wrote her cell phone on, and I call it. She’s not there, so I leave a message, asking her to have Harry call me.
The next morning, at seven forty-five, my phone rings, waking me up.
“Hello.” My voice is groggy.
“This is Harry Kang,” he says.
I sit up in my bed. “Oh, Harry, hi, it’s Cody.”
“I know. I called you.”
“Right. Thank you. Look, I don’t know if you can help me with this, but I have a computer and I’m trying to find deleted emails.”
“You’re calling me because your computer crashed?”
“It’s not my computer. It’s Meg’s. And I’m trying to recover files that I think she tried to delete.”
He pauses now, as if considering. “What kind of files?”
I explain to him about all the missing sent messages and how I’m trying to recover them, and recover any other messages that might’ve been deleted.
“It may be possible to do that using a data recovery program. But if Meg wanted those files deleted, maybe we should respect her privacy.”
“I know. But there was something in her suicide note that makes me think that she might not have acted alone, and then there’s a bunch of missing emails. It doesn’t feel right.”
The line goes quiet for a minute. “You mean someone might’ve coerced her?”
Can you coerce someone to drink poison? “I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I want to find those emails. I wonder if they’re in this folder I found in her trash. It won’t open.”
“What happens when you try?”
“Hang on.”
I turn on the laptop and drag the file from the trash. I open it and get the encryption message. I tell Harry.
“Try this.” He feeds me a bunch of complicated keystrokes. Nothing works. The file remains encrypted.
“Hmm.” He gives me another set of commands to try, but still they don’t work.
“It seems like a pretty sophisticated encryption,” Harry says. “Whoever wrote it knew what they were doing.”
“So it’s locked for good?”
Harry laughs. “No. Nothing ever is. If I had the computer, I could probably decrypt it for you. You can send it down if you want, but you’ll have to hurry because school ends in two weeks.”
x x x
I take the computer to the drugstore, which has a shipping outlet at the back. Troy Boggins, who was a year ahead of me in high school, is working behind the counter. “Hey, Cody. Where you been hiding?” he asks.
“I haven’t been hiding,” I say. “I’ve been working.”
“Oh, yeah,” he drawls. “Where you working these days?”
There’s nothing to be ashamed of about cleaning houses. It’s honest work and I make good money, probably more than Troy. But Troy didn’t spend four years of high school going on about how the minute the ink was dry on his diploma, he was getting the hell out of here. Well, I didn’t either. Meg did, though like most of her plans, it became my plan too. Then Meg left and I stayed.
When I don’t answer, Troy tells me it’ll cost forty dollars each way to mail the computer. “Plus more if you want insurance.”
Eighty bucks? That’s how much a bus ticket costs. The weekend’s coming up, and I have cash from the extra shifts. I decide to take the computer to Tacoma myself. I’ll get the answers faster that way.
I tell Troy I changed my mind.
“No worries,” he says.
I turn to walk away. As I do, Troy says: “Wanna hang out sometime? Go out for a beer?”
Troy Boggins is the kind of guy that, if you added fifteen or twenty years, Tricia would date. He never paid me any attention in high school. His sudden interest should be flattering, but instead it feels ominous. Like without Meg by my side, it’s clear what I am. What I’ve been all along.
x x x
When I tell Tricia I’m going back to Tacoma for the weekend, she gives me a funny look. It’s not like she’ll stop me. I’m eighteen, and even if I weren’t, she’s never been that kind of mother. “Is there a guy?” she asks.
“What? No! It’s for Meg’s stuff. Why would you say that?”
She narrows her eyes and sniffs, like she’s trying to smell something on me. Then she gives me twenty bucks for the trip.
I text Alice that I’m coming and ask if I can crash, and she responds with a bunch of exclamation points, like we’re buddies or something. She says she’ll be gone most of Saturday at her internship, but we can hang out Sunday. I tell Harry I’m coming too, and he says he’ll look at the computer right away, that he’s looking forward to it.