You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  “Hey,” he said. “You got any of that Coke left?”

  “Sure do,” Micah said, offering it to him with a flourish; Colby took a long gulp, wincing at the sweet chemical burn.

  “Geez, dude,” Jordan said. “Easy.”

  Colby ignored him, raising his eyebrows at Micah for permission before finishing off the bottle.

  By the top of the ninth, he was in a truly terrible fucking mood. What the hell was he thinking to begin with, texting this girl a picture of the fucking sunset like he thought he was some kind of twenty-first-century Walt Whitman? They hardly knew each other. She didn’t owe him anything. She was probably out having a life.

  Just like he should be.

  Colby picked his phone up again, scrolled through his contacts until he got to Joanna’s name. Her text from this morning was still waiting there, calm and familiar as Joanna herself.

  We *should* run into each other on purpose, he typed, then gnawed his thumbnail for one second longer before nutting up and hitting send. What are you up to tomorrow night?

  Fourteen

  Meg

  “What can I get you?” Meg asked a gaggle of sophomores, pulling a square of waxed paper from the box on the folding table and trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt. She was working the doughnut booth tonight, which in reality just meant reselling the two hundred doughnuts Overbrook’s student council had gotten donated from the artisan place in town and trying to convince Harrison Lithwick, who was assigned to the booth with her, not to pick all the sprinkles off the chocolate frosted ones like a disgusting monster.

  Normally, the carnival was one of Meg’s favorite days of the year—the optimism of it, maybe, the smell of cotton candy thick in the air, and the parking lot lit up in pinks and greens and purples. It was an Overbrook tradition, with the seniors all taking shifts at the game and concession booths and all the proceeds going to a rec center in Philly. The teachers took turns in the dunk tank. The dance team and a cappella group both did sets.

  Tonight, though, Meg felt as sour as the lemonade Emily was selling on the other side of the parking lot. She’d been in a bad mood since she’d gotten here, wincing at the too-loud music blaring over the sound system, scowling at the overdressed freshman girls shuffling along the midway even though she knew it made her a bad feminist—and trying, with limited success, not to check her phone every five minutes to see if Colby had texted.

  He hadn’t.

  Not that she expected him to, really.

  But she’d hoped.

  Meg sighed, setting some more doughnuts out on the table and shooting Harrison a look as he swooped in for a sample. She knew Colby thought she was a ridiculous person, some spoiled duchess who sauntered around in a hermetically sealed bubble and had no idea how the world actually worked. And yeah, he was impossible sometimes—infuriating, even, in ways Meg wasn’t entirely sure she’d ever be able to overlook. Still, she’d thought they’d come to some kind of unspoken agreement, all those nights on the telephone. She’d even—God, this was embarrassing—thought maybe they were sort of flirting. It sucked to realize it hadn’t meant anything to him at all.

  She was making change for a sophomore on the swim team when Emily trotted up to the side of the line. “How’s it going?” she asked, ponytail swishing cheerfully. Then, frowning across the booth: “Harrison, dude, seriously. That’s so gross.”

  Meg snorted, wiping her sticky palms on the back of her jeans. “It’s been going pretty much like that, actually.” Then she grinned, buoyed by the sight of Em in her skinny jeans and student council hoodie, a pair of hearts in Overbrook blue and yellow painted on each of her cheeks. “You’re not working?”

  Emily shook her head. “Industry downturn in the lemonade business,” she said solemnly. “They cut me loose. What about you? Done soon?”

  Meg glanced at the clock on her phone, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in her stomach when she saw there still wasn’t anything from Colby. God, she needed to get a life. “Another couple of hours,” she reported. “Mason was floating around here somewhere, though, if you’re looking for company. He doesn’t have a shift until tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, he said something about that.” Emily nodded, frowning a little. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly. “Like, besides the inherent personal trauma of being stuck in a confined space with sprinkle-snarfer over there?”

  Meg laughed. “I’m okay,” she lied.

  “Are you sure?” Emily pressed gently. “You look sad.”

  “I do?” Meg shook her head, weirdly surprised that Em had noticed, which was dumb—after all, they always knew when stuff was going on with each other. She remembered the weeks after her parents split, when Emily had prowled around her like a lioness protecting a wounded cub, somehow able to magically intuit exactly what Meg needed at any given moment: a cliché and vaguely antifeminist rom-com watched in silence, the gross but admittedly satisfying distraction of a pore strip, a midnight trip to the Sonic drive-thru for cherry limeade and deep-fried mac and cheese balls. Occasionally, she’d needed all three at once. “I’m good,” she promised now, pulling a fresh cider doughnut from one of the boxes and handing it to Em on the sly. “I mean, I’ll be better when I no longer have to stand here and bear direct witness to Harrison breaking every health and safety code in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but generally fine.”

  Emily nodded, like Fair point. “Listen,” she said, breaking the doughnut in two and handing half of it back so they could share, “will you come find me if you’ve got time to talk later?”

  “What, tonight?” Meg felt her eyebrows crawl. “Yeah, why? You sound like Mason.” She grinned. “You’re not going to break up with me, too, are you?”

  Emily’s eyes went saucer-wide. “What? No! I just—” She rocked back on her heels a bit, shaking her head. “Of course not. Like—you know you’re literally my favorite person in the entire universe, right?”

  Meg frowned. “Of course I do. You’re mine.” She looked at Emily carefully. Did she know somehow? Had she been able to magically intuit that Meg was second-guessing the plan? It was only a matter of time, probably; they knew each other way too well for Meg to have gone on lying to her for this long. “Em,” she said, breathing in the sugar-scented air as she peered across the makeshift counter, thinking again of the stupid email burning a hole in her inbox. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing!” Emily promised, holding her doughnut half up in a salute and taking a step back toward the fairway. “I’ll see you later.”

  Meg watched her go for a moment, uneasy, before busying herself brushing doughnut crumbs off the bright plastic tablecloth and adjusting their marker-on–poster-board sign. She was wrapping a napkin around a bear claw to hand to a guy on the debate team when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out so fast she almost dropped it on the concrete, swallowing hard at the sight of Colby’s name on the screen.

  Once, when Meg was four or five, she’d wandered off in the supermarket while her mom was ordering salmon for a dinner party, then been completely unable to find her when she came shuffling back down the aisle clutching a package of Halloween-dyed Oreos for which she’d intended to beg. To this day, she shivered a little when she remembered the quietly apocalyptic moments that followed—the crinkle of the cellophane sleeve in her hand as she dashed frantically down aisle after aisle, the sour tang of panic at the back of her mouth.

  It felt like hours, though it was probably only a couple of minutes before she finally found her mother, who had moved on to the cheese counter and not yet noticed Meg was gone in the first place. “What’s wrong?” she’d demanded, catching sight of Meg’s stricken expression. “What happened?”

  Meg had shaken her head. The relief was overwhelming and animal, jumbling up any kind of cogent explanation inside her brain: all she’d been able to say was, “I missed you,” before bursting into inconsolable tears.

  Meg didn’t know why she was thinking about that right now.<
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  She tucked the phone back into her pocket and did her best to ignore the way her whole chest had loosened, like she’d taken a full breath for the first time all day. Yeah, she was glad he’d texted. Yeah, she’d been worried he might not. But it was also kind of shitty, the way he was totally ignoring the fact that he’d hurt her. And it didn’t change the fact that sometimes it felt utterly pointless for them to try and agree on anything at all.

  “Harrison,” she said now, her voice coming out a little more shrilly than she’d necessarily intended. “Let’s get back to work.”

  By the time Darcy Ramos came to relieve her at the end of her shift, Meg’s mood had totally blackened, like one of those gruesome warning posters of calcified cigarette lungs or the pot roast her mom had attempted for dinner a couple of weeks ago. She’d been planning to go find Emily, to see what all the mystery was about, but as she looked out at the buzzing midway, she realized there was absolutely no way she had the courage to get into a fight about their future tonight. She didn’t want to get into a fight about anything. She kind of just wanted to go home.

  Meg darted past the Fun Slide and the falafel truck, breathing a sigh of relief at the familiar chirp as she unlocked her driver’s side door—she’d gotten her car back this morning, her mom having driven her over to the mechanic’s in irritable silence. She leaned her head back against the seat for a moment before wriggling around and pulling her phone out of her pocket, staring at Colby’s message one more time. What are you even after with me here? she almost texted. Instead, she dropped her phone in the cup holder and headed home.

  The following night, Meg’s dad took her to dinner at a steakhouse near UPenn—all dark wood and white tablecloths, votive candles flickering in little glass jars. Since the divorce, the two of them had a standing dinner date every other Friday, and they alternated who got to choose. Meg kind of liked researching new restaurants—reading reviews and scouring menus, deciding exactly what she was going to order ahead of time. Sometimes it was more fun than the actual dinners themselves, although obviously she didn’t want her dad to know that.

  Tonight she ate her strip steak and scalloped potatoes, chatting gamely about WeCount and the carnival and the paper she was writing for her independent study about Rebecca Latimer Felton. Sometimes as the two of them sat across from each other in a booth or a corner table, both of them casting around a little bit frantically for topics of conversation, it was hard to believe her dad was the same guy who’d changed her diapers and taught her to ride a two-wheeler and carried her screaming bloody murder out of an IMAX movie about dinosaurs when she was seven. They used to sit in easy silence for hours at a time watching Japanese monster movies on Blu-ray. Now she kind of couldn’t imagine being comfortably quiet with him for five minutes at a stretch.

  “So,” he said now, sitting back in his chair as the waiter cleared their plates, “I’ve got some news.”

  “Uh-oh,” Meg joked. “The last time you said that, you told me you and mom were getting a divorce.”

  Her dad laughed awkwardly. “Well, hopefully this is happier,” he said, then took a deep breath. For a moment, he looked more uncertain than Meg ever thought of him as being—young, somehow. “Lisa and I are getting married.”

  Meg was hallucinating—she must be. It was like what he was saying didn’t make sense in the English language, like he’d suddenly switched to Dutch without warning or recited a bit of poetry in Sanskrit. She only just barely caught herself before she laughed out loud.

  “Wait, seriously?” she asked, the words coming out before she could think better of them. Then, schooling her expression into something more acceptable as she realized this wasn’t some kind of emphatically un-hilarious joke: “Um. That’s great!” Holy crap, she really had not thought he and Lisa were that serious. They’d only been officially dating for a year.

  “Well, thanks,” her dad said, his cheeks pinking up a bit as he fussed with his napkin. “It means a lot to me that you think so, obviously. We’re thinking Memorial Day weekend, somewhere here in town.”

  “Wow,” Meg said, blinking about a thousand times. “That’s soon.”

  Her dad nodded. “Lisa’s kids leave to be with their dad in Chicago pretty soon after school lets out,” he explained. “And then you’ll be at college . . .”

  Lisa’s kids, Meg remembered suddenly. Right. Her future stepsiblings. Lisa’s kids were fine; they were young and kind of boring, but not offensive or anything. She’d only met them once.

  “Um,” she said, realizing abruptly that she was yanking her bottom lip so hard she was starting to hurt herself. She dropped her hands into her lap. “Does Mom know?”

  “Not yet,” her dad admitted. “I was thinking maybe you might want to be the one to—”

  “What? No,” Meg interrupted, suddenly panicked. “You have to tell her. And you can’t tell her that I knew first.”

  “I—okay.” Her dad looked at her closely. “Meg, honey,” he said, and his voice was very quiet. “Is everything okay? With your mom, I mean?”

  “Of course,” she said too quickly. “Everything’s fine.”

  Her dad frowned. “You could tell me if it wasn’t.”

  Meg shook her head. She knew what the right response was here—she didn’t want to be some stereotypical teenager who was an asshole about her dad’s remarriage—but there was something about it that felt so profoundly unfair to her, that her dad got this new life while her mom got a huge old house that needed renovating and a recycling bin full of empty wine bottles. And sure, they’d both made their choices, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that somehow the options weren’t the same for them both.

  “Um,” she said, pushing her chair back too quickly. Suddenly, she was absolutely, horrifyingly sure that she was going to cry. “Excuse me.”

  She stared at herself in the mirror in the cavernous, marble-tiled bathroom, her hair frizzing a little around her temples and the beginnings of a pimple on her chin. She sat down on a green velvet couch and dug her phone out of her pocket, scrolling through her messages until she got to Colby’s name. She hadn’t texted him back last night, trying to teach him some kind of lesson she wasn’t entirely sure how to articulate and that felt vaguely embarrassing now, twenty-four hours later, when it turned out he was the only person on Earth she actually had any interest in talking to.

  She paused for a moment, thumb hovering, then changed her mind and flicked up to Emily’s name instead. She’d said something about going out with Adrienne and Mason and Javi tonight, Meg thought—she hadn’t really listened to the details, since she knew she had plans, but suddenly it felt imperative that she get out of this restaurant as soon as she possibly could. What are you guys doing? she keyed in.

  Emily texted back almost right away: We’re at Cavelli’s, she said. How’s dad dinner?

  Meg texted back a row of upside-down smiley emojis. I’m going to come meet you, okay?

  A pause, longer this time, the three dots appearing and then disappearing twice before Emily responded. Yup, she said. See you soon!

  Normally, their dorky dad/daughter schtick was to order whatever two desserts were biggest, then split them, but now that she’d located an escape route, even a giant slab of chocolate cake wasn’t enough to entice her to stay one minute longer than she had to. “I actually told some friends I’d meet them,” she explained when the waiter came by with the menu. “Sorry.”

  “Oh,” her dad said, and she could tell he was a tiny bit hurt; no other commitments on dad dinner nights was one of their implicit rules, though she was pretty sure he wouldn’t say anything about it, and she was right. “Okay. We’ll celebrate another time, then.”

  “Absolutely,” Meg said. “Another time.”

  She pulled into the parking lot outside of Cavelli’s twenty minutes later. There was something reassuring about the sight of it: the neon beer signs glowing in the windows, the rickety benches lined up along the sidewalk for people waiting to pick up tak
eout orders. Inside it smelled like fry oil and garlic. She took a deep breath and smiled at the surly middle-aged hostess, as glad to see her as if she were Meg’s own grandmother. This much, at least, was the same as it had always been.

  She hadn’t bothered to ask who we was, but as she scanned the restaurant she realized it was just Emily and Mason sitting across from each other in a duct-taped booth by the window, a pair of Cokes in red plastic cups and a mostly picked-over plate of toasted ravioli on the table between them. “My dad is getting married again,” she announced, flopping herself onto the bench seat beside Emily. “Also, hi.”

  “What?” Emily’s eyes widened, her gaze cutting quickly to Mason and then back again. “Holy crap. To the lawyer?”

  Meg nodded miserably, launching into the whole long story as she dragged a toasted ravioli through the little bowl of marinara. “It’s not even that I’m not happy for him,” she finished, although in fact she wasn’t. “It just feels . . . I don’t know.” She shrugged, glancing from Mason to Emily and back again. It wasn’t until then that it even occurred to her to ask, “So, um. Where’s everybody else?”

  Emily and Mason were both silent for a moment. Something about the look they exchanged then had her sitting up in her seat. Suddenly, everything—Emily at the carnival, Mason in his car the other day, the faint whiff of not-rightness of things among the three of them like a skunk shuffling through the bushes on a summer night—started to make a horrifying kind of sense.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you guys . . .” She couldn’t make herself say it. “Did I just, like, crash your date right now?”

  Even as the question came out of her mouth she was fully expecting them to deny it, but Emily only winced. “This definitely isn’t how we wanted to tell you,” she said quietly. “But then we figured if you were coming here anyway—”

  “It’s the first time,” Mason jumped in. “We don’t want you to think—it’s not like we’ve been sneaking around behind your back, or—”