Free I Was Here by Gayle Forman

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