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You Say It First

Page 18

by Katie Cotugno


  Meg thought of that night with her mom outside the WeCount office, wondering again how much Lillian had overheard. Normally, her instinct would have been to play dumb and cheerful, to promise them both that everything was fine, but something about the way Lillian was looking at her had Meg nodding.

  “Thanks,” she said, waving good night before climbing into the Prius. She tapped the horn twice as she went.

  Meg had texted to say she was coming home early, but still she was a little nervous about what might be waiting for her when she went inside the house. To her surprise, though, her mom was sitting on the couch in front of the classic movie channel in the den, a mug of Diet Coke on the coffee table in front of her. “Whatcha watching?” Meg asked, dropping her purse on the chair.

  “Some dopey old thing,” her mom reported. “And extremely sexist, actually. But not as bad as a chicken in my underwear, et cetera.”

  Meg smiled, perching on the edge of the sofa. “Where does that even come from?” she asked. “That expression, I mean.”

  “You don’t know?” Her mom’s eyes widened. “It came from you.”

  Meg blinked. “Really?”

  Her mom nodded. “You were like four, and we were at Nanny Warren’s funeral out on Long Island. And I was crying—I really loved your father’s mother; it’s a shame you didn’t get to know her better—and you petted my arm and said, in this very small, serious voice: Don’t worry, Mommy, it’s not as bad as a chicken in your underwear. Your dad and I were dying. To this day I have no idea where you got it.”

  Meg grinned; she couldn’t help it. “Me either,” she admitted. “It’s a mystery.”

  “It’s a mystery,” her mom echoed, tilting her head back against the sofa. Finally, she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about the little performance I put on the other day,” she said quietly. “It was out of line on my part.”

  Meg didn’t know how to reply to that, not really. “It’s okay,” she finally said. “I appreciate it.”

  Her mom nodded, straightening up and clearing her throat a little. “How was dinner?” she asked.

  Meg hesitated. As much fun as she’d had at the concert, the truth was she felt hugely guilty for the way she’d skipped out on her dad. So much of having divorced parents felt like a balancing act, trying not to hurt anybody’s feelings. Trying to keep everybody fine. “I kind of bailed,” she admitted.

  She was expecting her mom to wave it off as something her dad deserved, but instead she tilted her head to side thoughtfully. “He’s trying, you know,” her mom said finally, which was the most generous thing she’d said about him in a long time. “I know it’s got to be hard, and strange for you to be over there. And I know I probably haven’t made it any easier on you. But I don’t want things between him and me to poison your relationship with him. He’s still your father.”

  Meg nodded. “I know,” she said. “You’re right.”

  Neither of them said anything, the TV screen flickering quietly. Meg looked at the paintings leaning against the wall. “We should hang those this week,” she blurted out before she knew she was going to say it.

  Her mom looked surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” she said without sarcasm or argument. “You’re right.”

  Meg got up and headed to bed not long after that. “Night,” she said, bending down to press her cheek against her mom’s. She smelled like the same perfume she’d worn since Meg was a little kid.

  “You know,” her mom said when Meg was almost to the doorway, hitting mute on the remote and looking thoughtfully around the room, “maybe we should give this whole place a bit of spring cleaning.”

  Meg raised her eyebrows, her heart doing a tricky, hopeful thing inside her chest. “Really?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “Why not?” her mom said, smiling a little bit crookedly. “It’s starting to look like Grey Gardens in here. Next thing you know, both of us will be wearing head scarves and speaking in fake British accents.”

  Meg laughed at that. Her mom was funny, she remembered suddenly; she’d forgotten that at some point in the last couple of months. “That’s a brilliant idea, dahling,” she said with a grin.

  Upstairs, she plugged her phone in and got into bed, then pulled it off the charger again and scrolled down to Emily’s name. I really am sorry, she typed. I should have been honest with you. I knew you thought it was weird, that’s all.

  She was about to set the phone back down when three dots showed up on Emily’s end. Meg breathed in, holding the air in her lungs until the reply came through: It IS weird, Emily had written. But I still wish you’d told me.

  I know. I’ll tell you everything, I promise.

  Hipster salad place on Monday?

  Relief seeped through her. Of course, she texted back.

  We have to be able to talk about these things, you know? Emily wrote. Then, along with the twin girls emoji: Roomie.

  Meg squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. You and me, she promised, then hit send and turned out the light.

  She lay there for a long time, staring at the familiar shadows on her ceiling—thinking of Emily and Lillian and Mason and Colby, of the life she’d always assumed she had ahead of her and the one she was terrified—and exhilarated—to realize she wanted instead. If you want to change the world, go out and change it, Colby had told her. She just didn’t know if it was possible to do that without causing a little bit of a scene.

  Finally, Meg turned the light back on and got out of bed, padding barefoot over to her laptop and pulling up Annie Hernandez’s website one more time. It didn’t take her long to pull up the text she’d written about herself and why she wanted to work on the campaign. She took a deep breath and clicked submit.

  Twenty-Four

  Colby

  “Do you know anything about headlamps?” Meg asked when Colby called her on Saturday. She was in the Flashlights and Lanterns aisle at REI, she’d reported when she picked up, sounding pleased with herself. “I need one for next weekend, but there are, like, a surprising variety of them here.”

  “You need one why, exactly?” Colby asked with a laugh. It was his lunch break at the warehouse, so he was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the door open, eating his usual ham-and-cheese sandwich. A couple of sparrows fought over the remains of a bag of chips across the concrete. “What, is your prom, like, a wilderness survival theme or something?”

  “Overbrook doesn’t do a prom,” Meg replied primly. Her year was winding down, with final projects and senior class open-mic night and all her friends planning their various backpacking trips. Why you’d drop all that money just to spend a perfectly good summer humping all your shit around a place where you didn’t speak the language and probably getting pickpocketed was beyond Colby, but he guessed that’s why it was good he hadn’t been born rich. “Like five years ago, the senior class decided it wasn’t inclusive enough, so now we do a lock-in at the Franklin Institute instead and nobody brings a date.”

  “Of course you do,” Colby said.

  “I think you’re making fun of me right now,” Meg chided, “but I don’t even care because it’s going to be super fun. They bring in cheesesteaks from Geno’s and there’s an ice cream sundae bar and everybody plays Sardines in the dark in the middle of the night. Thus, the headlamp.”

  “Sounds fun,” Colby said, and he had to admit it kind of did, in an extremely dorky way. He’d skipped his own prom, the theme of which had been A Night in Monte Carlo, and gotten drunk in Micah’s yard instead. He thought maybe he would have gone, though, if he’d known Meg back then.

  He thought maybe he would have done a lot of things differently.

  It was weird, having a girlfriend. Every time Colby thought about it, he couldn’t help rolling his eyes at himself, like he was performing in some dumb high school play. Still, he thought about it a lot. On one hand, his day-to-day life was exactly the same as it had always been: He went to work at the warehouse. He played video games with Jord
an and Micah. He ignored his brother at all costs. But Meg did things like tell him she missed him and add the kiss emoji to the end of her texts and send him senior skip day pictures of her long bare legs on a picnic blanket, her toenails painted a bright screaming pink.

  So. His life wasn’t exactly the same as it had always been.

  “I have no opinions about headlamps,” he told her now, crumpling up his tinfoil into a ball and squeezing. “Probably you should take pictures of yourself in all of them, though, and send them to me so I can tell you which one looks most durable.”

  Meg snorted. “Jerk,” she said, but two minutes after they hung up, his phone dinged with a text and there she was, all ponytail and goofy smile, the stupid headlamp glowing like a beacon calling him home.

  The sun was just setting when Colby got home from baseball practice that night, the sky gone orange and juicy-looking and an electric crackle in the air. His mom was at exercise class, so he made himself a roast beef sandwich and ate it standing up at the counter, flipping idly through the Best Buy circular and scratching the back of his knee with the toe of his opposite sneaker. He was just finishing up when Tris gamboled in, whining for a bite of his dinner. Colby glanced in her direction, then did a double take, freezing with the end of the sandwich halfway to his mouth.

  She was tracking bloody pawprints across the linoleum.

  “What happened?” he demanded, his heart like a missile as he sank to his knees and grabbed her by the collar, running his hands over her bristly fur. “Where are you hurt?”

  Tris whined, distracted, still after the sandwich. The blood wasn’t coming from her, Colby realized dumbly, his eyes catching the rusty trail and following it backward: it was seeping out from the mudroom, trickling out from underneath the door that led to the garage.

  “Dad?” he yelled, a sick kind of knowing rolling through him.

  That was when he woke up.

  Colby lay flat on his back in the dark for a moment, his heart slamming away inside his chest and his breath coming in ragged gasps like somebody was smothering him with a wet towel. His sheets were soaked clean through. “Fuck,” he muttered, sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his sweat-damp hair so it stood up in all directions. His head was throbbing wildly. His mouth was totally dry.

  He flicked on the bedside light, blinking around at his bedroom: the old wooden dresser and the kid-sized desk he hadn’t been able to comfortably sit at since middle school, the Indians pennant on the wall. Everything was fine, he reminded himself. The worst thing had already happened.

  Colby flopped back down onto the mattress, willing his chest to stop feeling like it was going to explode. He thought about calling Meg, but what the fuck was he going to tell her? My dad killed himself and I found him and now I have grisly dreams like some kind of Shakespearean sad sack? Great idea, Moran. What college-bound suburban princess wouldn’t want to hear that from her brand-new boyfriend? Totally sexy. Not pathetic at all.

  He thought about changing the sheets, but that seemed like a lot of work for nothing. Instead, he got up and padded downstairs to the mudroom, where Tris was sleeping curled up like a doughnut in her fleecy purple bed.

  “Hey,” he said, nudging her gently with one bare foot until she woke up, cracking one heavy eyelid and looking at him with benign annoyance. Colby kept his back turned to the door to the garage. “Come with me.”

  Tris sighed noisily and went through an elaborate stretching routine, but in the end she followed him just like he’d known she would, trotting up the stairs and burrowing herself under his covers before immediately passing out again. Colby listened to her snore all night long.

  Twenty-Five

  Meg

  The lock-in at the Franklin Institute was the following weekend, all forty-eight members of the Overbrook Day senior class peering through the giant telescope in the observatory and giving themselves crazy hair with the Van de Graaff generator, making out with each other in the darkened corners of the Viking exhibit. “Remember when your mom took us here when we were little?” Emily asked as they wandered down a carpeted hallway lined with photographs of the human brain.

  Meg blinked. She did, actually, though it was hard to imagine her mom had ever been the kind of parent who voluntarily organized educational field trips to science centers over February vacation. “You got the barfs in the planetarium,” she said with a laugh. “She had to buy you a constellations T-shirt to change into, and then I threw a fit, so she bought me a matching one.”

  “That was a great T-shirt,” Emily recalled a little wistfully. “Maybe I should work to incorporate more Day-Glo into my wardrobe at college.”

  Meg laughed. Things seemed better between them lately; she thought Emily had mostly gotten over the whole Ohio thing, though Em hadn’t exactly made a secret of the fact that she still thought it was totally sketchy. She’d shown up to their lunch at the hipster salad place with a pair of matching Cornell baseball caps she’d ordered off the internet and overnighted to her house, presenting them to Meg with a dorky flourish. “Peace offering,” she’d announced grandly, then made them take a selfie right there in front of the organic lemonade dispenser. If Meg’s smile looked a tiny bit hollow when she looked at the picture on Snapchat later, maybe a little panicky, she didn’t think anyone could tell.

  Still, things felt almost normal now as they spent way too long goofing off in the Isaac Newton exhibit with Adrienne and Mason, then wandered around taking selfies inside a two-story replica of the human heart. The four of them puzzled their way out of an intergalactic-themed escape room with seven minutes left to spare, laughing almost too hard to stand upright by the time the door finally opened. It was almost like it had been before she and Mason had broken up, Meg thought—or earlier than that, even. Before her mom and dad had split, back when she was sure of the world and of her place in it.

  “Nicely done,” Mason said when they were finished, holding up his hand for Meg to high-five. Meg grinned.

  “So, okay,” Emily said a little while later, after Mason and Adrienne went off to watch an IMAX movie with Javi and some of his track team friends and the two of them had snaked their way through the make-your-own-sundae line. Technically, all food was supposed to stay in the huge lunchroom reserved for the sticky almond-butter fingers of elementary school kids, but Em led Meg out the door toward a floating staircase overlooking a bank of enormous plateglass windows, the lights of the city glittering outside. “Can we talk about your fifty-five-year-old Ohio boyfriend for a second?”

  “Oh my God!” Meg protested, setting her sundae down so hard she nearly lost her compostable spoon. “He’s not fifty-five!”

  Emily wiggled her eyebrows. “Sure he’s not.”

  Meg blew a breath out. “I’m serious,” she insisted. She wanted to explain that things with Colby felt different than they ever had with Mason, more important maybe, but she didn’t know exactly how. “I like him, okay? Like . . . a lot.”

  That seemed to get Emily’s attention. “Oookay,” she said slowly, plucking a maraschino cherry out of her sundae. “Care to be a little more specific?”

  “I don’t know!” Meg said, squirming a little, self-conscious. “He’s funny. He really loves his ugly dog. He makes me think about stuff differently. When I’m talking to him, it feels like I can kind of imagine the future, you know? And not even a future with him, necessarily—but, like, a future for myself. Does that make sense?”

  Emily looked unconvinced. “I mean, sure,” she said, “as long as you don’t forget there’s nothing wrong with the future you already have picked out.”

  The future you already have picked out, Meg amended silently, then immediately felt like a jerk. After all, Em was just being sweet.

  “Anyway, you’ll get to judge for yourself,” she said finally, picking at her own rapidly melting sundae. “He’s coming here for my dad’s wedding.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Meg said, digging a t
rench in her chocolate ice cream. “Don’t be weird about it.”

  “I’m not!” Emily protested. “I’m not. Did you ever get a dress, by the way?”

  “I ordered two of them,” Meg said, “but I don’t know if either of them are actually winners.”

  Emily nodded. “I was thinking you could borrow the one I wore to junior formal, if you wanted. That one of Piper’s with the twisty straps.”

  “That would be perfect, actually.” Meg grinned.

  Em smiled back. “You’re sure it’s okay that Mason comes?”

  “It’s fine,” Meg assured her, though she kind of couldn’t imagine him and Colby meeting each other. Then again, she couldn’t imagine Colby and Em meeting each other, either. “It would be weird if he wasn’t there, honestly.”

  “Okay,” Emily said. “Thank you. And also, I know I haven’t really said it, but, like, thank you for being so cool about me dating him. I mean, not that I would have expected you not to be, but I know it’s awkward and probably super weird for you, even if you do like somebody else now.” She bumped Meg’s knee with hers, gently. “I’m happy for you, PS. I know I give you a hard time about Colby, but I’m glad you found somebody you feel that way about. I was worried about you for a little while there.”

  Meg felt the back of her neck get warm, chafing a little at the idea that she’d ever been the kind of person anyone—even Emily—had to worry about. “I was okay,” she promised, “but I’m glad I found him, too. And I’m happy for you and Mason, honestly. You guys are a good fit.”

  “I’m so glad he’s going to be at Colgate in the fall,” Emily said, licking the back of her spoon thoughtfully. “He was making all that noise about Berkeley, but I just want us all to stick together, you know? I don’t want us to be one of those friend groups where everything gets weird and fractured after graduation.”

 

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