You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  He meant to put the car in drive and head out, but instead he sat where he was with his phone in his hand like a moron, waiting for her to text back. And she did, the phone vibrating in his hand a couple of minutes later: This is so cool! You know how to do stuff like this?

  A little, Colby typed, hesitating for a moment. The truth was he hadn’t done any kind of fancy work like that since his dad had died—or before that, he guessed, since at the end there his dad hadn’t been doing much of it, either. Been a while.

  Are you going to apply?

  Colby chewed the inside of his cheek. Probably not, he admitted.

  Why not?

  Well. Colby stared at the screen, debating. He was still trying to figure out how to answer when the phone buzzed again, more insistently this time: holy shit, she was calling.

  “Um,” he said, tapping the button to answer and clearing his throat a little, trying to sound like a person whose heart wasn’t doing a tricky acrobatic thing inside his chest. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” she said, casual as anything. “I figured this was easier than texting.”

  Colby laughed a little. “Makes sense,” he said, though it didn’t really. Already this was the most he’d ever talked on the phone with someone in his entire life.

  Meg seemed unbothered. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m very sensible. So who’s this guy?”

  Colby tilted his head back as he told her, the setting sun making patterns on the insides of his eyelids. He wondered again what she looked like, but as soon as he had that thought, he opened his eyes and reminded himself to stop being such a loser.

  “So, okay,” she said when he was finished explaining. “What’s the problem, exactly?”

  “Huh?” Colby frowned, picking idly at a hole in the worn fabric of the driver’s seat. This car had been Matt’s before it became his, and it had been somebody else’s before that. “I mean, there’s no problem. It just doesn’t seem worth it, that’s all.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said—looking up suddenly, caught a little short. “Like, in a perfect world, sure.”

  “Well, what’s keeping this world from being perfect?” Then she stopped, as if she’d heard herself and realized how absolutely ridiculous she sounded. “Okay, don’t answer that. I just mean, what’s stopping you in this particular situation?”

  Colby wondered what it would be like to live in this girl’s universe, where apparently everything followed a logical sequence of events. “This job just probably isn’t a real thing, that’s all. So there’s no point in getting worked up about it, putting all this energy into trying to make it happen when it’s probably not going to happen anyway.”

  “Energy being, making a phone call and talking to this guy who might have a cool job for you?”

  “Pretty much,” Colby said, though he knew she was probably being sarcastic. “Because there’s obviously going to be a catch somewhere, right? Either he’s going to want somebody with more experience, or the job doesn’t actually pay, or the whole thing is a cover-up and they’re going to sell me into sex slavery as soon as I walk in the door.”

  “Oh, that’s your worry?” Meg asked. He could hear rolling her eyes. “Being sold into sex slavery?”

  “Well, it sounds stupid when you say it in that tone of voice,” he said, prickling a bit. He’d been kidding, mostly. “But kind of.”

  “So, like, nobody can pull the rug out from under you if you decide there’s no rug to begin with?”

  Colby blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone put it so succinctly before. He didn’t actually like it very much. Shit, what was he even doing, sitting here like a chump spilling his guts to a total stranger? He thought about telling her he had to go—he meant to tell her he had to go—but in the end he just set the phone on speaker on the dashboard and put the car in reverse. “Uh, yeah,” he admitted, pulling out of the parking lot. “Basically.”

  “Is that your entire life philosophy?”

  Jesus Christ, this girl. “Who are you, my therapist?”

  “Do you have a therapist?”

  Colby snorted. “No.”

  “Why is that funny?” Meg asked, sounding sincerely curious. “Are you one of those guys who’s, like, too manly for therapy?”

  “I’m not too manly for anything,” Colby told her. “I just don’t—”

  “See the point?” Meg supplied, obviously delighted with herself.

  “Very funny.” It was almost totally dark out now, the spring trees spindly outlines against the blue-purple sky; he passed the middle school and the Applebee’s, the park where he and his dad had taken Tris the last time they’d gone anywhere together. Of course, Colby hadn’t known it was the last time when they did it. Hindsight, et cetera. “Do you have a therapist?” he heard himself ask.

  “I used to,” she said easily, like it was nothing out of the ordinary—and it probably wasn’t, as far as she was concerned. Where she lived it was probably like getting a brand-new car for your sixteenth birthday or taking a gap year to dick around in Europe. If she were anyone else, Colby would have found her totally fucking annoying, and he didn’t know what it meant that he didn’t, really. “I went to one after my parents got divorced.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “Because I’m perfect, obviously,” Meg deadpanned. Then she laughed. “Nah, it was more like my mom stopped caring if I went or not, and I was feeling less like I was in a weird sad fog all the time, so I stopped going. But it was good while it lasted.”

  That surprised him a little: she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would admit to feeling foggy—or whose mom would stop caring about anything—ever. “I . . . will keep that in mind,” was all he said.

  “Oh yeah?” Meg asked, the smile still audible in her voice. “Are you lying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jerk,” she said cheerfully. “What are you doing this weekend?”

  Getting drunk in Micah’s basement and lying in bed staring at the ceiling, probably, but he wasn’t about to admit that to her, even if he was enormously relieved by the change of subject. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Working, I guess.”

  “There’s a rally in Columbus for Annie Hernandez,” Meg reported. “The woman who’s running for US Senate in Ohio? You should check it out if you’re around.”

  Colby barked out a laugh. “Holy shit, lady,” he said. “Is that the real reason you called me? To try and sell me on some rally?”

  “No!” Meg protested. “I’m just mentioning it because—”

  “Uh-huh.” Colby shook his head at the windshield, still smirking. He couldn’t decide if his feelings were hurt or not. “I’ll go after my therapy appointment, how about?”

  “Rude,” Meg said, but she was laughing, too; he wasn’t entirely sure if they were joking around or if they weren’t.

  Colby stopped at a red light. “How do you even know what political rallies are happening in a city you don’t even live in?” he asked. “Do you have, like, some kind of nerdy political bat signal you all send each other?”

  “Maybe we do,” Meg retorted. “Anyway, Annie Hernandez is amazing, and worth checking out even if you don’t go to the rally.”

  “She is, huh?” Colby asked. Then, even though he knew he was walking right into it: “What’s so amazing about her?”

  “Well,” Meg said brightly, like she’d been waiting for him to ask the question. He wondered if she had note cards on every politician in the whole freaking country, stored in alphabetical order in one of those plastic boxes from Office Depot for easy reference. “She’s only thirty-one, first of all. And she has this super inclusive platform. Criminal justice reform, universal pre-K, raising the minimum wage—okay, what?” she asked, breaking off at the low sound Colby hadn’t even really meant to make out loud. “Raising the minimum wage? How can you possibly be against raising the minimum wage, of all things?”

  Colby rolled his eyes at the phone on the da
shboard. “Grunt worker that I am, you mean?”

  “That is . . . definitely not what I said.”

  “You didn’t have to.” He pulled into the driveway of his mom’s house, turning off the engine and tipping his head back against the seat. “Raising the minimum wage means it’s harder for companies to employ people, right?”

  “If you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage, you shouldn’t have workers in the first place,” Meg countered. “Full stop.”

  “So it’s better that those jobs just don’t exist at all, then?”

  “I’m saying that if your full-time job doesn’t pay you enough to make your rent and buy food and go to the doctor, it’s not really doing you that much good to begin with.”

  “Oh really?” Colby asked, sitting up a little straighter. Now he was finding her annoying, same as he had the other night when she’d first called him for WeCount, and for the first time all night he heard the edge in his own voice. “Because it sounds like what you’re saying is that you’ve never been in the position of having to work whatever shitty-paying job you can get.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment. Colby thought he could hear her breathing on the other end of the phone. He could see Tris’s spotted snout pressed against the window in the living room, her head turned quizzically to the side like she wanted to know what exactly was keeping him from coming in with her fucking dinner. He told himself one more time that he should probably hang up. “Look, Meg,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt. “I—”

  “I didn’t call you to try and get you to go to the rally,” she interrupted, sounding a little breathless. “Just, like . . . for the record, or whatever.”

  “Oh no?” he asked, reaching for the phone with one hand and opening the car door with the other. “Then why did you call?”

  “I don’t know, Colby.” Then, more quietly: “To talk to you, I guess.”

  That stopped him. Colby looked up at the lights in the windows of his mom’s house. He thought of the milk getting warm in the back seat. He imagined what the rest of the night would be like if he said goodbye to her right this second, and then he shut himself inside the car one more time.

  “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “Then let’s talk.”

  Eleven

  Meg

  Two weeks passed like that, spring blooming pink and green all over the neighborhood: Meg went to school. She hung out with Emily. And every couple of nights she got in bed and called Colby, staying on the phone for two or three hours at a stretch. They talked about all kinds of stuff: his buddy Micah’s fruitless quest to get YouTube famous; Annie Hernandez, who Meg kept trying to convince him to Google; how much he hated orange juice, which was a lot. She told him stuff she didn’t even know she still remembered until she said it out loud, like the late-term miscarriage her mom had when Meg was in first grade or the time she let Anika Cooper take the fall for breaking a vase at Emily’s house even though she’d done it herself.

  “Little sociopath,” Colby teased, the sound of his laugh like a car on the highway.

  “It’s not funny!” Meg protested. “I feel enormously guilty about it to this day. At junior leadership retreat last year, we had to write a letter to someone we’d wronged in our lives, and I picked her, but she moved away in middle school and doesn’t have social media, so I didn’t know where to send it.”

  “You traumatized her,” Colby said gravely. “She’ll definitely never be YouTube famous, and it’s all because of you.”

  “Oh my God, stop.”

  “I’m sorry. I think you can let yourself off the hook now.”

  “I never let myself off the hook for anything,” Meg said immediately.

  “Yeah,” Colby said. “I kind of got that impression.” He paused. “Also. Let’s talk about how apparently you went to something called Junior Leadership Retreat.”

  It was strange, talking to Colby. She didn’t feel like she needed to explain away the ugly parts of stories, or try to tell them in a more normal way to make them seem less weird, like she did when she was talking to Emily or Mason. One night they talked until the sky got light outside her bedroom window. One night they fell asleep on the phone. One night her mom passed out at, like, six thirty, and Colby taught her how to make Egg in a Frame for dinner—her phone on speaker on the counter, Meg using the last clean water glass to cut a careful hole in a slice of whole-wheat bread. It was almost like he was there.

  She liked how his voice got low and raspy when he was tired. She liked how sweetly he talked about his mom. She liked the stories he told about the people he worked with—Janine, who ran the garden department with brutal ferocity, plus Joe and Ali, the guys he played Call of Duty with after his shift sometimes. His boss, Moira, was very into jigsaw puzzles—she called it puzzling, which Colby found hilarious—and was always telling him he needed a hobby of his own for maximum life enjoyment, so for three nights in a row they tried to figure out what kinds of recreational activities he could potentially pick up. “Phonebanking,” Meg suggested immediately, at which point Colby threatened to hang up on her once and for all. “Oil pastels. Camping, maybe.”

  To her surprise, Colby didn’t laugh at that one: “I could do camping,” he said, seeming to consider it.

  “I’d go camping with you,” Meg said.

  “Really?” Colby asked, sounding suddenly interested. “Have you ever been camping?”

  “No,” Meg admitted, even though it probably confirmed some deeply held suspicion about her on his part. “But I would, maybe.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Colby cleared his throat. “How was the monster movie?” he asked, and just like that his voice was back to normal again. It was Friday night, late; she’d been getting into her pajamas when he called, and she’d pulled her T-shirt over her head as she answered, wondering weirdly if he could somehow tell she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Now she hummed, noncommittal. “We didn’t see it, in the end.”

  “What happened?”

  “Emily wanted to see that heist thing instead.” She shrugged, even though he couldn’t see her. “It’s fine, though. I’ll see it when it comes on demand.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Colby said, then didn’t wait for her to answer. “Why are you so terrified of your friend Emily?”

  “What?” Meg frowned, sitting up and picking at some chipping polish on her toenail. “I’m not terrified of Emily.”

  “Okay,” Colby said.

  “I’m not,” she insisted, but it sounded a little too whiny to be convincing. “Why do you think I’m terrified of Emily?”

  Colby made an I don’t know sound. “It’s just, you seem to know your mind about everything else in the world, but whenever you talk about her it’s like, Emily says we should do this, Emily doesn’t like it that way, or whatever.”

  That surprised her, and not in a good way. “She’s my best friend.”

  “I know,” Colby said easily. “I’m not trying to shit-stir.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said, and the truth was, it actually didn’t seem like he was. It hardly ever felt like Colby was deliberately provoking her, actually. It was more like the most annoying possible thing just came naturally out of his mouth at any given moment.

  Meg thought about it. “Her opinion matters to me,” she said finally, although even as the words came out it occurred to her that that wasn’t the only answer. “And I don’t like starting fights, I don’t know.”

  “Oh really, you don’t?” Colby snorted. “Could have fooled me.”

  “Shut up,” Meg shot back. “That’s different.”

  “Starting fights with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Meg’s skin got warm and prickly, like she was wearing itchy wool pajamas instead of boxers and an I’m With Her T-shirt. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Shut up. It just is.”

  “Okay.” To her surprise, Colby actu
ally dropped it. “What are you doing this weekend?” he asked instead.

  “Homework, mostly,” Meg said, glancing at the pile of books stacked on her desk. “I’ve got a couple of projects due next week. And tomorrow I’m going to a postcard-writing party at the library.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colby said, the smile audible in his voice. “A what now?”

  “A postcard-writing party,” Meg said patiently, already knowing where this was headed. “You go and you all write postcards to your representatives encouraging them to take positions on issues that are important to you.”

  “Ah,” Colby said seriously.

  Meg rolled her eyes. “Go ahead,” she told him. “Say it.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “You think it’s stupid, I know.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid. A little naïve, maybe.”

  “Oh, okay,” Meg said, stretching her legs out in front of her on the mattress. “So it’s not that I’m a moron, objectively. It’s just that I don’t know any better.”

  “Easy, tiger,” Colby said easily. “Nobody’s calling you a moron. Least of all me. I just . . . think the prescription on your rose-colored glasses is very strong to think that’s an effective use of your evening, that’s all.” He hesitated for a moment; she tried to picture him at home in his bedroom, wondered if he was lying down. “I know you’re out to change the world here, Meg. But the reality is that most things—and most people, and their lives—stay exactly the same no matter what.”

  Meg sighed. She hated when Colby got like this. She’d go days at a time thinking he was listening to what she was saying, that maybe she was even starting to change his mind, and then something like this would come out of his mouth and it was like they were right back where they started that very first night she called him from WeCount. “So what, then?” she asked. “You just fully don’t believe in, like—”

  “The American Dream?” Colby laughed. “No, Meg, I do not believe in the American Dream.”