23
One night I’m sitting at my computer, staring at all of the messages I’ve posted to the Final Solution boards and all the responses I’ve received. There are way too many pages to print out now without arousing Mrs. Banks’s suspicion, so I’ve started saving everything to a file on the hard drive.
The door swings open. I snap the computer shut. “Ever hear of knocking?” I ask Tricia.
“When I’m living in your house, I’ll consider knocking,” she says.
I’m about to mention that I pay rent and therefore it’s my house too, but then I think of the boxful of cash stashed under my bed and decide it’s probably wiser if I don’t bring money up.
She taps on my computer, which is hot. “I read somewhere that the rise in cancer is linked to how much people stare at their computer screens all day,” she says.
“Everything gives you cancer,” I reply. “The sun gives you cancer.”
“I read that computers are really bad. All that radiation. It’s not healthy.”
“Where’d you read that? In one of the many scientific journals you subscribe to?”
She ignores the dig and sits down on the edge of my bed. “What are you reading these days?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. You used to always have your nose in a book, and now I only ever see you on that computer.”
When I returned the latest batch of books Mrs. Banks had borrowed for me, I pretended like I’d read them all when, in fact, I hadn’t finished a single one. I used to read at home at night, but now I can’t seem to stop looking at my growing file on Meg, which I’ve hidden in a dummy folder named college. I’ve still gotten no response from All_BS, and I keep re-reading all the messages, trying to figure out what to do next.
Tricia gestures to the computer. “What’s so interesting in there anyway? Is there some other world?”
“It’s not another world. It’s just ones and zeros—that’s all programming is.” But that’s not true. All_BS is somewhere in there. Meg, too.
Tricia doesn’t say anything. She stares at my room, my walls, the pictures tacked up with Scotch tape of me and Meg at shows, me and the Garcias on a camping trip to Mount Saint Helens, Meg and me on graduation day last year, her beaming, me smirking. There are pictures of me and Tricia, too, but they’re outnumbered by the Garcias.
“You two always were like day and night,” Tricia says, looking at the graduation picture.
“We don’t look that different. Or didn’t.” Meg had dark brown eyes and mine are hazel gray, but that was the biggest distinction. We both had brown hair, and though Meg had Joe’s coffee complexion, in summer my olive skin gets so dark that we used to say that I could pass for Joe’s daughter. Except I wasn’t Joe’s daughter, and now this insistence on our resemblance embarrasses me. Was this just another way of trying to lasso myself to Meg?
“I’m not talking about looks,” Tricia replies. “Personality. You’re nothing like her.”
I don’t answer.
“Thank God,” Tricia adds.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
Tricia continues to stare at the graduation photo. “She had everything. Those big brains. Fancy college scholarship. She even had that expensive computer you can’t seem to get off of.” Then she looks back at me. “You just had me. And you’re smart, don’t get me wrong, but you aren’t Meg-smart. You got stuck at the shitty junior college and now, from what I can tell, you don’t even have that.”
I twist a loose thread from my quilt around my finger until my finger throbs. Thank you, Tricia, for such a precise overview of my inferiority.
“But even with the deck stacked against you, you stuck to your guns,” Tricia continues on her tear. “You didn’t quit that damn dance class that Tawny Phillips let you join for free, even when you sprained your ankle.”
“I couldn’t quit. I had the big solo in the dance show, All That Jazz,” I remind her. I’d forgotten about that. Mindy Thomas had been so pissed when I’d gotten the coveted role. I’m not sure Tricia remembers it either. She couldn’t come to the show. She had to work. The Garcias came.
“Right,” Tricia continues. “And at school, you hated math, but you kept with it all the way through goddamn trignastics.”
“Trigonometry,” I correct.
She waves away the distinction. “You took math all the way through that because you wanted to go to college. My point is, you never quit on dance, on math, on anything, and maybe you had more reason to. You had a pile of rocks, and you cleaned them up pretty and made a necklace. Meg got jewels, and she hung herself with them.”
I know I should defend Meg. This is my best friend. And Tricia has it wrong. She doesn’t know the whole story. And she’s probably jealous of the Garcias for being the family she never was.
But I don’t defend Meg. I may not be Joe’s daughter. But right at this moment, I actually feel like Tricia’s.