You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  “I mean, that’s technically true,” she admitted. “But that’s no reason not to—”

  “It kind of seems like a great reason not to.” Colby cracked two eggs into the pan and tossed the shells into the garbage, starting to enjoy himself a little bit. “And if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s always government corruption, super PACs, and basically the whole entire history of Congress.”

  “Well, the system isn’t perfect,” Meg allowed, a bit of an edge creeping into her voice, “but it’s our privilege and responsibility as citizens to engage with it. We need to vote like our rights depend on it, Colby—because they do.”

  Ooh, a name drop. Colby wondered if that was in her manual or what. “Can I ask you a question, Meg?” he said. “Like, I’m not trying to be rude, and if you get some kind of bonus for me signing up, then you can go ahead and tell your boss I did it, but do you really think you’re changing the world here? Like, calling people up one by one and trying to sell them on their civic obligation?”

  “Well, I certainly don’t think apathy is going to get us anywhere,” Meg snapped.

  Colby felt his eyes narrow; she’d cut a little close to the bone. “Is that the problem?” he asked. “My apathy?”

  “I’m sorry,” Meg said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Look,” he interrupted. This whole thing was hugely annoying all of a sudden, the idea of some shiny new college grad sitting in a climate-controlled cubicle pestering people at dinnertime. His eggs, he realized, had begun to burn. “If people want to vote, they’ll vote. They don’t need you calling them up trying to save them from themselves.”

  “I’m not trying to save anybody,” Meg protested, “I just—” She broke off. “Okay,” she said, and Colby could hear her taking a deep breath on the other end of the line. “Obviously, we got off on the wrong foot here. But if you could just let David Moran know that I called, then—”

  “Dave Moran hung himself in our garage ten months ago,” Colby said, the words coming out before he’d even had time to think them. “So I don’t think he’ll be calling you back. You have a good night, though. Thanks anyway.”

  He hung up the phone without waiting for her to answer. He dumped the ruined eggs in the trash.

  Five

  Meg

  For a moment, Meg stared down at her handset like she’d never seen it before, like it was an artifact from an alien planet dropped unceremoniously from the sky. She set it carefully back in its cradle, her eyes flicking around the office instinctively to see if anyone had been listening. She could taste her own heart at the back of her throat.

  “Everything okay?” Lillian asked, her head popping up over the half wall that separated their cubicles. The overhead lights reflected off her glossy black bob.

  “Um,” Meg said, her whole body stinging, hot and humiliated. Normally, Lillian was exactly the kind of person she’d tell about something like this; Lillian had trained her to begin with and had foolproof strategies for dealing with all kinds of unsavory phone characters, from yellers to bigots to the occasional perv. “Yep.” She wasn’t sure who she was trying to protect.

  Lillian nodded and went back to her call sheet. Meg tugged on her bottom lip. There were strict rules against calling back if someone hung up on you—technically, it counted as harassment, to the point where if you were working off a computer and not a paper call sheet, the system deleted the numbers as they were dialed, just in case—but the urge to defend herself, just to clarify, was so strong it was nearly unbearable. It was like trying not to think of a purple elephant. It was like trying to hold back a cough.

  She blew out a breath and dialed the next number on her printout, a not-in-service, then left cheery-sounding messages for the following two. She took a bathroom break, staring at herself in the greenish light above the mirror. She ate a churro from the box in the kitchenette.

  Then she sat back down at her station and dialed Colby again.

  This time the call went to voice mail, which wasn’t surprising. Meg didn’t know if she was disappointed or relieved. A man’s voice—not Colby, but someone older, a person Meg thought she was probably imagining sounded just a little bit sad—explained that the Morans weren’t available, but that if she left a message somebody would get back to her as soon as possible.

  “Um, hi,” she said after the beep, glancing furtively in Lillian’s direction. “This message is for Colby?” She cleared her throat. “Colby, this is Meg from WeCount. You and I spoke on the phone a minute ago. I just wanted to apologize for . . .” She trailed off. For what, exactly? Pressuring him about the importance of the electoral process? Growing up in a liberal bubble? Not somehow magically intuiting that his dad had died from suicide? “I just wanted to apologize for our conversation earlier. So. Um. I’m sorry.” They were not, under any circumstances, supposed to give out their private phone numbers, but hers was out of her mouth before she could stop herself. “Just, like, if you want to call me back or anything.” God, she was definitely going to get fired. “Okay. Um. Have a good night.”

  The rest of her shift seemed to last forever. Half a dozen hang-ups, seventeen calls that went to voice mail, and a woman in Elyria who accused her of being sent by the government to try and read her mind through the phone. “I’ll let you go, then,” Meg said, staring up at the drop-ceiling tiles and reminding herself that there was no reason to feel like she was about to burst into tears.

  When nine o’clock finally rolled around, she basically ran for the staircase, bursting out into the damp spring night and hurrying past the marble-tiled pastry shop and middle-aged-lady caftan boutique until she got to her car. As soon as she was buckled in the driver’s seat, she pulled out her phone; she had half a dozen texts from Emily, all Cornell-related. Ughhhh, she typed, ignoring all of them, I had the WORST NIGHT AT WORK.

  Oh nooo what happened?? Em texted back right away. Did you hear??

  No no, it’s not that. Nothing in the spam folder. Meg relayed the highlights of her conversation with Colby, leaving out the part where he’d had a stupidly nice voice. I feel so gross and guilty, she finished, stopped at a red light three-quarters of the way home. Like I was some pushy telemarketer who ruined his entire day because I couldn’t take a hint ABOUT HIS DEAD DAD.

  I mean to be fair you are a pushy telemarketer . . . for FREEDOM, Emily reminded her, adding a bald eagle for good measure. But honestly though, who cares? People make up all kinds of lies on the phone. It was probably some rando bumpkin screwing with you.

  Meg frowned, dropping her phone into the cup holder without answering as the light turned green up above. On one hand, she knew Emily had a point—after all, hadn’t her mom said all kinds of weird stuff to people looking for her dad once he moved out last winter? One time she’d convinced some unsuspecting cable guy he’d gone to jail for mail fraud just to see if she could.

  Still, it certainly hadn’t sounded like Colby was messing with her. At the beginning, maybe—all that stuff about the EC and super PACs. But the part about his dad? Meg didn’t really think the kind of rawness she’d heard in his voice was something a person could fake.

  The lights in the house were all blazing when she finally pulled into the driveway, like her mom had thrown a party and forgotten to tell her about it, though when she got inside it felt even bigger and emptier than usual. Her mom was asleep on the couch in the den, the same smudgy wineglass from earlier still sitting on the coffee table and the TV blaring The Bachelor. Meg hit the power button on the remote and plugged her mom’s phone in to charge beside her, then laid a pilling cashmere throw blanket over her and walked through the downstairs, flipping all the switches off one by one.

  Up in her room, she changed into her pajamas and pulled her laptop into bed, typing every conceivable variation of Colby Moran + Ohio into Google and getting a fat lot of nowhere. He didn’t have any social media that she could find. Maybe Emily was right, then, about the whole thing being a con job. Shoot, maybe Colby wasn’t even his r
eal name.

  Meg stared at the keyboard, wondering exactly how deep she wanted to get in here. David Moran + Ohio, she typed. She gasped quietly, though there was no one to hear her—there it was on the first page of search results, a tersely written obituary in the Ross County Dispatch from the beginning of last June:

  David (Dave) Moran of Alma died suddenly at home on May 25. He is survived by his wife, Jennifer; his two sons, Matthew and Colby; and his dog, Tris, who loved him best of all. Services will be kept private.

  So, Meg thought, squeezing her eyes shut, her skin just a little bit too tight, Emily had been wrong.

  She tried Colby Moran + Alma next, and this time she found an old picture from the paper—a bunch of boys in scout uniforms at a Veteran’s Day parade, Colby holding one of those dinky little flags. He wasn’t facing the camera, but even from the side Meg could see that he was a nice-looking kid: tall and lean and almost feminine, with long eyelashes and pale cheekbones that caught the light. The caption listed him as twelve, which made him eighteen now—the same age as her, not that it mattered.

  He had a serious expression. He had a very nice mouth.

  She was still staring at the photo like a creep when her phone vibrated on the nightstand, insistent. Hellooo, Emily said. Did you die?

  Meg slammed her laptop shut, as if Em could somehow see her. No no, she typed, sorry. Home safe. You’re totally right though, he was probably a total scammer. I’m over it now.

  Good, Emily said. The cause of democracy needs you. Meet at Sbux before school? And text me IMMEDIATELY if you hear from admissions!

  Meg hesitated, debating—God, what was wrong with her? What was she waiting for, exactly?—before keying in a thumbs-up emoji and setting her phone facedown on the nightstand. She sneaked one more look at Colby’s picture before she turned off the light.

  Six

  Colby

  Colby listened to Meg from WeCount’s message standing in the living room while he ate his second attempt at scrambled eggs, plus two pieces of toast with jelly and then a third piece of bread he just ate plain. He stood there for another minute once the machine beeped, then went back and played the voice mail again—he was waiting for that flood of satisfaction to hit him, like when he came up with the perfect comeback to whatever idiotic thing Matt was saying, but to his surprise he just felt like kind of a dick.

  He’d been hard on her, he guessed, holding out his crumby plate for Tris to lick clean before he stuck it in the dishwasher.

  She’d definitely deserved it. But still.

  He rinsed out the sink and wiped the counter, then went back over to the ancient phone mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator, his finger hovering over the button to delete the message. Then, without knowing quite why, he hit the button to save instead. He told himself to stop thinking about it, and he did, mostly. Then he went upstairs to bed and fell asleep.

  His mom had stopped asking him to go to church with her, but she did still like for him to show up at Rick and Alicia’s for lunch periodically, so on Sunday Colby put on an ugly blue dress shirt his mom had bought for him at Costco and drove over. His Uncle Rick lived in Cedarville, in the nicest McMansion in a development of McMansions he’d built himself. Rick and Colby’s dad had been in business together when Colby was small, but they were perpetually fighting about the direction of the company—“Rick wanted to make money, and Dad didn’t” was how Matt had explained it to him once—and after everything happened with the Paradise project when Colby was in high school, Rick had bought his dad out and taken Matt with him. Now Rick’s face was plastered on billboards all over the county alongside ads for model homes now open. Micah kept saying they should climb up there and draw a giant dick on his face.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Alicia said when she opened the door, her thick yellow hair bouncing like something out of a shampoo commercial. Alicia sold essential oils over the internet, lavender and tea tree and something called Thieves that was supposed to keep your house clean of bacteria or evil spirits, Colby wasn’t entirely sure. He thought the name probably said it all. Before this, Alicia used to sell leggings, and before that, she’d sold some system that involved wrapping yourself in Saran for weight loss, which she’d actually convinced his mother to buy. Colby had come home and caught her doing it once and he could tell she was embarrassed, so he’d wrapped himself in it, too. In the end, they’d had a pretty good laugh about the whole thing, the two of them standing in the kitchen all mummified in plastic, passing a bag of sour cream and onion chips back and forth.

  Still, he kind of hated Alicia’s guts.

  Now he toed off his sneakers per the house rules and headed into the dining room, where his mom and Matt were already sitting at the fake-antique farm table. On the wall was a verse from 1 Corinthians painted in a wedding invitation font on a piece of driftwood, even though they didn’t live anywhere near the water, plus a picture of Rick and Alicia and their kids sitting on the front porch of the house all wearing jeans and white T-shirts, their golden retriever, Lucky, at their side. As far as Colby was concerned, Lucky was the only member of the entire family who wasn’t an idiot, and even he licked his own butt pretty much constantly.

  “So, Colby,” Rick said brightly, passing a platter of ham across the table while the twins, Mykala and Mykenzie, dutifully shoveled green beans into their nine-year-old mouths. “How’s big-box life?” He always said it like that when he asked Colby about work, like installing IKEA cabinets was so much better than driving a forklift. Colby was actually the youngest guy in the warehouse trained to handle the thing, which felt like an extremely dumb thing to be proud of but was also the truth.

  “Oh, you know,” he said now, taking a heaping mound of potatoes, then another for good measure. “The usual. Hanging around with a bunch of losers. Wasting my bright young mind.”

  “Colby,” his mother murmured, taking a sip of her lemonade. Matt snorted an irritated breath. Rick forked some green beans onto his plate, unruffled.

  “You know, son,” he said conversationally, “if I’d had the week you had, I don’t know that I’d be joking quite so cavalierly about the company I kept.”

  “What?” His mom’s gaze snapped up, darting from Rick to Colby and back again. “Why? What does that mean?”

  Colby glared across the table at Matt. “It’s nothing,” he promised, trying to keep his voice even. “Rick’s just kidding around.”

  “I am, I am,” Rick said, smiling a megachurch-pastor smile. “And Colby knows I just give him a hard time because I want what’s best for him. Which is why he’s going to come work for me one of these days, right, Colby?”

  “One of these days,” Colby lied, feeling a muscle in his jaw twitch.

  “Who wants applesauce?” Alicia asked.

  They ate in relative peace after that, polite conversation and the sound of forks scraping china. Finally, Lucky whined at the door. “I’ll take him,” Colby said, shoving his chair out too quickly and heading out into the carefully manicured backyard. He looked out at the spindly crabapple tree and the rosebushes still wrapped in burlap for the winter. Everything in this entire neighborhood, plants especially, looked like something out of a little kid’s pop-up book, like it all folded down at night to go to sleep.

  He threw a stick down toward the artificial lake, watching as Lucky scooped it up and made absolutely no effort to return it, careening in the opposite direction across the grass. Colby sighed and sat down on the steps of the deck, gazing up at the blue-gray sky and thinking about Meg from WeCount. He hadn’t been able to get that stupid phone call out of his head since the other night, which was ridiculous—after all, who got their panties in a wad over being rude to a telemarketer? She’d probably forgotten about the entire conversation the moment she’d hung up the phone. He should do the same instead of playing it over and over in his mind like some kind of creepy weirdo. What the hell was he supposed to do, call her back?

  Not that it mattered, but she’d sounded pretty.<
br />
  “Come on, buddy,” he said when Lucky finally came trotting back, drool hanging in strings from his furry mouth and the stick nowhere in sight. “You ready?”

  Jordan and Micah wanted to hang out that night, so he met them in the parking lot of a three-story office building plunked all by itself like a spaceship on the side of Route 4. It had been built specifically to house the regional sales office of a medical supply company back when Colby was a kid, but the OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE sign had been there ever since, the lot getting more and more overgrown until someone, Colby didn’t know who, periodically came and cut the plants back. One of the plate-glass windows was boarded over. The fountain in front had been drained. Micah said he’d been inside once, that he’d fucked a girl in there back when they were fifteen, but Colby thought he was mostly full of shit—about the breaking in and the fucking both.

  Colby sat on the curb with a Bud Light in one hand, shielded from the road by an overgrown thicket of weeds as tall as he was, the rest of them half watching as Micah turned idle backflips in the empty fountain. As a kid, Micah had done gymnastics until way after it was socially acceptable, which meant he’d gotten called gay pretty much constantly until graduation, but it also meant he could do things like that: launch himself into the air and throw his weight around without falling over and bashing his skull open like a cantaloupe. “He only does it because he wants attention,” Colby had complained to Joanna once, and Jo had shrugged and said, “Everybody wants attention,” in a way Colby had thought about for a long time.

  “You okay, Colby Moran?” she called now, from her perch in the open hatchback of her vanilla-smelling station wagon, her hair like a blond halo in the light from the trunk. She’d showed up twenty minutes ago with two of her friends, one of whom was currently trying to execute a headstand of her own for Jordan’s benefit. The other one hadn’t looked up from her phone the whole time.