“When are you coming?”

“Day after tomorrow. Give me your address.”

And so I don’t have a choice. That night, I casually tell Tricia that someone is staying over.

“Your boyfriend?” she accuses.

“There is no boyfriend,” I say. Then I think of Ben and then I get mad at myself for thinking of Ben and then I justify thinking of Ben because he was the object of her interrogation the last time this subject came up.

“Then who is it you’re talking on the computer with?”

“I’m not talking to anyone. I can’t, because we don’t have Internet access.”

“Ha! But you want it. And now you’re blushing. You’re hiding something.”

This time, she’s right. But not about a boyfriend. All_BS and I recently moved our conversation off the message boards and onto an anonymous communication software, and now we “talk” frequently. Our conversations, however, are frustratingly limited by library hours.

They are also frustratingly not about suicide. At least not specifically. We speak in generalities, and sometimes I forget who I’m chatting with. Last week, I mentioned that I had a cold coming on, and he sent a recipe for a tea made of ginger and apple juice. When it worked, I made a crack about the irony of him curing my cold. “Nice to know someone cares,” I wrote. When he asked me what I meant by that, I started typing a message about Tricia, until I realized what I was doing and deleted it.

I had to be more careful, not answer his messages spontaneously, or I’d screw up. So now when I’m at the library, I save his messages to my Meg file and when I’m at home, I write my responses, sending them the next time I’m online. It’s a frustrating and clunky system, but the delay forces caution.

“The person staying over is Alice,” I tell Tricia. “I met her in Tacoma. She needs a place to crash on her way to Montana.” There. The truth, or a sliver of it. One of the things I’ve learned from dealing with All_BS is that if you hew close to the truth, it’s much easier to lie.

“Hasn’t she ever heard of a motel?” Tricia asks.

“I’ll take the couch; she can have my room.”

Tricia sighs. “No. You can take my bed. I’ll stay at Raymond’s.”

I nod, as if the idea never occurred to me.

x x x

The next night, at precisely six o’clock, Alice arrives, tooting her horn as she comes down the street like she’s the marshal of a July Fourth parade. Some of the neighbors come out to see what the commotion is, and Alice waves to them, grinning.

“So this is where you live?” she says.

I nod.

“It’s not what I expected. It’s so . . . small.” She stops. “Not your house. Your house is big. I mean, the town.”

My house is a cinder-block cell with two tiny bedrooms. Small would be a step up.

Now she’s flustered. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you seem so streetwise. I’d have thought you grew up somewhere else.”

“Nope. This is me.”

We go inside. I show Alice to my room. I’ve put clean sheets on the bed for her. She flops back onto it, taking in the band flyers on my wall, all the pictures of me and Meg.

“So this is where Meg grew up too?”

I nod again.

“How long did you guys know each other?”

“A long time.”

There’s a picture of the two of us at a rodeo, maybe from fifth grade. The bucktoothed phase. “Is that you?” Alice asks, leaning in.

I should take all this down. “Yep.”

“You must have a lot of history here.”

I think of the Dairy Queen. The rocket ship. The Garcias’ house. “Not really,” I say.

We’re silent for a while. Then Alice announces she’s taking me out to dinner. “No arguments!”

“All right. Where do you want to go?”

“What are our options?”

“Your usual fast food. A bar and grill where my mother works, but trust me, you don’t want to go there. A diner. A couple of Mexican places.”

“Is the Mexican any good?”

Joe always said that Sue’s cooking was better than his mother’s, and much better than any of the places in town. We almost never went to them. “Not particularly.”

“I passed a Dairy Queen on the way in. We could go there.”

I picture the DQ, Tammy Henthoff, the usual suspects hanging out. “Let’s do Mexican,” I say.

We head over to Casa Mexicana, full of red booths and velvet paintings of bullfighters. Our waiter is this guy Bill, whom Tricia used to hang out with, which is how it always is in Shitburg. We order our food, and then Alice asks for a strawberry margarita with a shot of tequila. Bill cards her, and she hands over an ID.

“And a virgin for you, Cody?” Bill asks with a smirk.

I hate this town. I can’t even order a meal without it feeling loaded. “Just a Dr Pepper.”

“Are you twenty-one?” I ask Alice when Bill leaves.

“No, but Priscilla Watkins is.” She hands over her fake ID.

I’m impressed. I didn’t think Alice had it in her.

As we wait for our drinks, the Thomas family comes in. Mrs. Thomas sort of waves; Mindy, who seems to be arguing with her sister over a hair-straightening iron, ignores me. I shake my head.

“What?” Alice asks.

How do you explain Shitburg to someone who describes her hometown as Eden?

Bill returns with the drinks. As soon as he’s gone, I grab Alice’s shot and down it. “Order another one.”

We keep drinking. Alice grows maudlin. She starts talking about Meg. Loudly. How she wishes she could’ve known her better. How glad she is that she knows me. Somewhere it registers that she is saying nice things, but Mindy Thomas is two booths over and I want Alice to shut up.

When the food comes, Alice starts shoveling it into her mouth. “Oh. Yum. This is so good. We have, like, no good Mexican in Eugene!”

“Hmm,” I say, forking a mass of cheese off the enchilada. It peels away like skin after a sunburn. I push it to the side and try the rice.

“So, have you talked to Ben McCallister?” Alice asks out of the blue.

It’s a dark restaurant, so she can’t see my face go red. “No.”

“Not at all?”

“Why would I?”

“I dunno. You two seemed like you had a . . . a spark.”

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark. When we first started talking, All_BS quoted that to me—Dante, he said it was. I think he was trying to explain how simple musings could lead to big life-changing ideas. His way of encouraging me, and I had to remind myself not to be reassured by it, because the life- changing idea he was selling me on was life-ending.