You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  “I’m good,” Colby promised, heaving himself up off the pavement and heading over to sit beside her. She smelled slightly mysterious, like baby powder and girl. Joanna had dated some dude from Ohio State until this past winter, when somebody had sent her a video of him at a party triple kissing two sorority sisters while a bunch of other people cheered him on like he was doing a keg stand, and that had been the end of that. Colby had not been sorry to see him go.

  Now they sat in companionable silence for a moment, drinking their beers and listening to Jordan and Micah argue over whether it was possible to eat seven saltines in a minute. “You want to see me do it right now?” Jordan was asking. “Because we can drive to BP and get a box of them.”

  Colby sighed. He kept getting this itchy feeling lately, like his clothes were a full size too small—at the house, yeah, but now sometimes outside of it, too. The anniversary was coming, trundling straight at him like a cross-country train, but he didn’t think that was the only reason. “I gotta go,” he heard himself say.

  “Already?” Joanna asked, reaching out and nudging him in the shin with the toe of her ankle boot. “What do you got, a date?”

  Colby shook his head, rolling his eyes a little. “Yeah, right,” he said with a smile. “Just tired, I guess.”

  “Well,” Joanna said, running one delicate thumb around the mouth of her beer bottle. Colby thought there was a not-insignificant chance he was the stupidest guy ever born. “Rest up, then.”

  He didn’t want to go home, so he drove around for a while, past the Burger King and the post office and the service road that led to Paradise, but he didn’t exactly have the money to be cruising around wasting gas, either, so finally he gave up and headed back toward the house, flicking on the lights in the dark, empty living room. His mom was at work tonight, but back when his dad was alive she used to go to exercise once a week and he and his dad used to wait for her to leave so they could eat second dinner, the two of them going through a leftover pan of lasagna or a whole box of frozen waffles while they watched old movies on cable. His dad had liked dad movies—Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington—but he also had a thing for romantic weepers that everybody else in the family was always making fun of. If the movie poster had two white people almost-kissing on it, chances were his dad was a fan.

  Now Colby glanced at the calendar hanging on the door of the mudroom, a stupid promotional thing Uncle Rick had given his mom at Christmas. Eight weeks to go until the anniversary.

  God, he really did not want to still be living here in eight weeks.

  He listened to Meg’s message again, her voice echoing out into the empty kitchen. He walked around the house for a while. Finally, he picked up the phone and dialed, biting a cuticle on his thumbnail as it rang and trying to figure out what exactly he was going to say into this girl’s voice mail.

  “Hello?”

  Oh, shit.

  Seven

  Meg

  For a long moment, there was silence on the other end of the line, the faint sound of static crackling somewhere out in the ether. “Hello?” Meg said again. Nobody ever called her on the phone—especially not a number that wasn’t already in her contacts list—which was why she’d picked up to begin with. She blinked, shifting her weight in her desk chair. She’d been listening to Pod Save America and painting her nails, trying with little success not to think about the email from Cornell currently sitting like a stone in her inbox. She still hadn’t told a soul she’d gotten in.

  “Um.” Someone cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “Is this Meg?”

  Meg frowned. “Yes?”

  “This is Colby Moran,” the voice said. “We, uh, talked the other night?”

  “Oh my God,” Meg said too loud and too quickly, coming embarrassingly close to spilling the bottle of nail polish and falling out of the chair altogether. She swallowed hard, steadying herself on the edge of the desk. “Um. Hi.”

  “Hi. Um.” He cleared his throat again. “I didn’t think you’d answer, honestly.”

  “Then why did you call me?” she blurted. Then, feeling her cheeks warm: “I mean, I’m glad you did, I just—”

  “I just thought I’d leave you a voice mail, I guess, or—”

  “Do you want to hang up and call back and I won’t answer?”

  “What?” Colby laughed. “No.” There was a pause, like he was gathering his thoughts, but then it lasted so long that she thought maybe he had hung up after all, and she was about to say hello one more time when he spoke again. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m just calling to say I’m sorry for being such an asshole on the phone the other night. I know you were just doing your job or whatever.”

  “You weren’t an asshole,” Meg said automatically.

  “Yeah,” Colby said, “I definitely was.”

  Meg tugged on her bottom lip. “I mean, okay,” she conceded finally. “A little bit.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle of polish before getting up and closing her bedroom door, not entirely sure why she was doing it except that this felt like a conversation that needed to be contained somehow. She couldn’t believe he’d actually called. She’d kind of forgotten about the whole conversation in the bustle of the last few days—a Spanish test and dinner with her dad and her and Emily getting in a weird thing over whether or not to invite Mason out for poke bowls on Saturday. “He’s still our friend even if you guys aren’t dating anymore, right?” Emily had pointed out gently, which Meg thought was debatable, but she felt so guilty about the whole Cornell situation that she’d just agreed to avoid a fight.

  “It was my fault, too, though,” she continued now, sitting down on her bed and leaning her back against the wall. “I shouldn’t have been so pushy. I was just having a bad day and, like, trying to prove something.”

  Colby made a quiet sound that wasn’t quite a snicker. “By converting me?”

  “I’m not trying to convert you to anything,” she said, huffing a little. “WeCount is totally nonpartisan. We don’t care who you vote for. We just care that you vote.”

  “I mean, that’s literally never true,” Colby said.

  “It is so!” Meg fired back, crumbs sticking to the bottoms of her feet as she got up again, pacing across the rug. The whole house needed to be vacuumed—and more, probably. She was pretty sure she’d seen mouse poop at the back of the kitchen cabinet the other day. “It’s a nonprofit. We can’t have political affiliation or we’d lose our tax-exempt status.”

  Colby made an I don’t know noise, but then instead of arguing he seemed to think for a moment. “Makes sense, I guess,” he finally said.

  “I can help you register now if you want,” she offered brightly, sensing an opening. “I meant it the other night; it only takes, like, two seconds.”

  “Oh no.” Colby laughed a little, deep and rumbling. “That’s okay.”

  Meg frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m all set. I meant what I said the other night, too, you know? I think the whole thing is bullshit.”

  She sat down hard on the edge of the mattress. “The whole thing, like democracy?”

  “I mean, not democracy,” Colby clarified. “But the way it works in America, yeah, totally. It has nothing to do with actual people or, like, their actual concerns.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says anyone who’s paid attention at any point in the last fifty years,” Colby shot back. “It’s a power grab, that’s all. Look, I’m not trying to shit on your job—”

  “Aren’t you?” Meg asked with a brittle-sounding giggle. God, he was infuriating. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t already hung up.

  “No!” Colby insisted. “If you like it, if you feel like you’re making a difference, then more power to you. I just personally think you’re wasting your time.”

  Meg opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I mean, wow,” was all she could say. She knew she cared way more about politics than most people, with her job at WeCount and how the
bumper of her car was covered in campaign stickers and her dutiful monthly donations to She Should Run, but she’d never encountered anybody—especially not anybody her own age—who just flat-out didn’t think it was worth it. “That’s really cynical.”

  “Yeah, well.” She could practically hear the shrug in his voice. “I’m cynical.”

  “Clearly.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, the silence stretching out across the miles and miles between them and the inherent weirdness of this conversation hitting her all at once. She was just about to make an excuse and say goodbye when Colby spoke. “Why did you have a bad day?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Meg sat up straighter on the mattress, surprised.

  “You said you had a bad day the other day, right? I’m asking why.”

  “I mean, do you care?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

  Well. She hesitated, trying to decide both how to answer that question and why she felt compelled to in the first place. After all, it wasn’t like one specific thing had happened; it was more like the last few weeks had been a creeping accumulation of not-great stuff, the way that dust gathered slowly on the blades of her ceiling fan until all of a sudden she looked up and noticed they were covered with a thick layer of fur. Still, she wasn’t about to tell this stranger about the wine bottles clanking in the recycling bin, or her Dad and Lisa going to Palm Springs, or—good Lord—about Mason breaking up with her.

  “Just dumb college admissions stuff,” she admitted finally, because that seemed like the least personal option. The kind of thing you could tell a stranger on the phone, if you were the type to talk to total strangers on the phone, which apparently she was now. “Which I know you probably think is, like, not a real problem.”

  Colby snorted. “Why, because my ma has the black lung from mining coal and the roof of my barn is caving in?”

  “No!” Meg said immediately. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asked, exactly imitating the tone she’d used earlier.

  Meg winced. “No!” she insisted. He didn’t sound particularly put out, which didn’t change how mortified she was. “I just—I mean—”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Colby broke in. “Why do you keep doing that? Trying to act like something isn’t what it is, I mean.”

  “What?” She bristled. “I don’t. I’m not.”

  “You kind of are, though,” he said. “Like, even at the beginning of this conversation, when I said I was calling to apologize for being an asshole, you were like, No, no, you weren’t. But it’s okay. I was an asshole. I don’t like being an asshole in general, which is why I called you back.”

  Meg thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I was being nice, I guess. I didn’t want to have a fight.”

  “Nice is overrated.”

  She rolled her eyes. “In your world, maybe.”

  “And what world is that?”

  Shit. “I don’t know.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Colby said. She thought he might have been smiling, though it was hard to tell over the phone. “When you call us swing state folk to try and persuade us to do our civic duty, what exactly are you picturing?”

  “I don’t know!” Meg said again. Ugh, he was flustering her, just like he had the other night at work. The truth was she’d barely spent any time in Ohio, even though it was right next door; her vague impression was one of, like, cornfields and a racist baseball mascot, though somehow she didn’t think mentioning either of those would win her any points with Colby. “Pennsylvania is a swing state, too, PS.”

  “Not the part you live in.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, like she was six years old and standing on the playground with her hands on her hips. “And what part is that?”

  “The rich part,” Colby said immediately.

  “Seriously?” Meg bristled, though it wasn’t like he was wrong, exactly. Her parents fought about money all the time, especially now, but Meg had always gotten the sense it was more for sport—or spite—than because either one of them was really afraid of there not being enough to go around. “How would you know?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Well, I’m just saying, if you don’t want me making assumptions about you, then you shouldn’t make assumptions about me, either.”

  “You know,” Colby said, “fair enough.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Both of them were quiet for another long minute. Meg looked out the window at the moon. It seemed like a natural place for the conversation to end, though for some reason she was suddenly reluctant to be the one to end it. It was just so unexpected to be talking to him in the first place, she guessed; it was like turning the corner in the upstairs hallway and finding a room she’d never seen before.

  “They let you work there in high school?” Colby asked finally, instead of the okay, have a good night she’d been expecting. “We All Count, or whatever?”

  “WeCount,” Meg corrected, faintly relieved and not 100 percent sure why. “And I turned eighteen in September. I’m a little old for my grade.” She fussed with the quilt for a moment, dragging the corner of it under her thumbnail. “How old are you?” she asked, even though she already knew.

  “Eighteen, too,” he said immediately. Meg felt herself exhale. She knew it was an embarrassingly low bar—and more than that, she knew it didn’t actually matter, considering she was never going to talk to this person again after tonight—but she was glad he hadn’t lied. “But I graduated last year.”

  “Are you in college?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Uh-uh,” Meg said immediately. “No way.”

  “No way, what?”

  “No way, I’m not guessing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Well, that’s not an answer.”

  “I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to be complaining about answers, do you?”

  Colby laughed at that. “Fair enough,” he said again, but he also didn’t volunteer any more information; she wondered if he did something sketchy, or if maybe he didn’t work at all. “Sorry about the college thing,” he finally said.

  “Oh!” For a second, she didn’t know what he was talking about; this entire conversation kept distracting her, the whole world narrowing to the sound of his voice. “It’s okay. It’s not actually even a real problem, like I was saying. It’s just that I got into Cornell, and, like, obviously I’m going to go, but the more I think about it the less I actually want to.”

  It was out before she knew she was going to say it, and the sound of it shocked her—she’d never even let herself consider it before—but as soon as she heard it out loud, she knew it was true. She didn’t want to go to Ithaca in September.

  She just had no idea what she did want to do.

  “Okay,” Colby was saying now, his voice slow and curious. “And why do you have to go, exactly?”

  Meg hesitated, trying to figure out how to explain it in a way that didn’t sound completely spoiled and finally deciding it didn’t matter. “Well, it’s the best school I applied to,” she tried, though it didn’t sound particularly convincing even to her own ears. “And my best friend, Emily, and I have always had this plan to go there and room together.” Now that she stopped and thought about it, Meg guessed it was mostly Em’s plan, concocted last year during the divorce, when their guidance counselor was demanding application lists and Meg could barely comb her own hair, let alone plan her future. Still, Meg had definitely agreed to it. “To keep things the same, you know?”

  “And you can’t keep things the same from the suburbs of Philadelphia?”

  Meg’s mouth dropped open. “Who says I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She huffed. “Maybe.”
/>
  “Lucky guess.”

  Again there was a pause, and again Meg waited for him to tell her he had to go, but instead the conversation meandered: to a family trip to Philly his family had taken when he was in middle school, which they’d spent mostly waiting in line for cheesesteaks and a picture in front of the Liberty Bell; to the Mutter Museum, which was full of medical oddities including a small piece of John Wilkes Booth’s thorax and which had an entire room where the walls were covered with mounted human skulls; to Cedar Point, the self-proclaimed roller-coaster capital of the world, which she’d been to on an overnight trip with her debate team freshman year. “I rode, like, eleven different roller coasters,” she confessed, lying back on the mattress. She’d turned all the lights off except for the one beside her bed. “And I was doing fine until I got off number twelve, but then I wasn’t near a garbage can so I just panicked and barfed into the sleeve of my hoodie.”

  “You did not,” Colby said immediately.

  “I know,” she said, feeling weirdly pleased with herself. “I can tell by your voice that you think I’m too prissy to have done something so unladylike, but: desperate times.”

  “Clearly,” Colby said. “I think I underestimated you, Meg from WeCount.”

  “Well,” she said, “you shouldn’t.”

  “I’m starting to see that, yeah,” he said with a laugh. There was something about that sound, the low, warm grumble of it, that Meg felt in her hands and spine and stomach. A very small voice inside her said: Oh no.

  “It’s late,” she said finally, catching sight of the vintage clock on her nightstand. The alarm part didn’t work anymore, and Mason had tried to get her to toss it last year when his mom had been on a big Marie Kondo kick, but she wouldn’t let him. It sparks joy, she’d insisted, setting it back on the nightstand. It occurred to her with a jolt that this conversation was the longest she’d gone without thinking about Mason in days. It made her feel a tiny bit disloyal, even though he was the one who’d broken up with her and anyway it wasn’t like this phone call was romantic or anything like that. “I should probably try to sleep.”