You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  Twenty-Seven

  Meg

  Her dad and Lisa’s rehearsal dinner was that night, at an Italian place downtown with a view of the river and a gluten-free pasta option for Lisa’s kids. Her dad had been a little weird when she’d said she wanted to bring someone—after all, Emily and Mason were already coming to the actual wedding—but to her surprise, Lisa had jumped in. “Of course you can invite a friend, Meg,” she’d said, tucking her hand into Meg’s dad’s and squeezing pointedly. “The more the merrier.”

  Now here Colby was, slipping into her real life with surprisingly little fanfare, pulling her chair out when they’d gotten to the restaurant and teaching Brent how to make a football out of the paper napkin ring. He called her dad sir, which Mason had never done and which Meg could tell her dad was totally liking. And, yeah, he had a vaguely bemused expression on his face the whole time, like he was an actor who’d wandered onto the wrong soundstage by mistake and was waiting for someone to notice, but overall it seemed like it was going okay.

  They were just finishing their spaghetti when her dad stood up at the head of the table, looking shy and almost boyish in his jacket and tie—Meg thought he was dressing more like a prep school bro since he’d been with Lisa, though she couldn’t tell if she was imagining it or not. “I wanted to propose a toast,” he said, lifting his wineglass. “To my beautiful bride, Lisa, the most incredible woman I’ve ever known.” He reached out and took her hand with his free one, gazing at her with a kind of adoration so personal and private Meg nearly looked away. “I’ve never in my entire life been this happy.”

  Meg froze with her fingers wrapped around her glass of ice water, feeling—stupidly, she told herself—like someone had tipped its contents directly down the front of her dress. She thought of the blizzard that had hit Pennsylvania the winter she was in seventh grade, when their house had lost power for two full days and they’d sat in the living room wrapped in blankets playing Scrabble in front of the fire and listening to the news on an ancient battery-powered radio her dad had dug out of the garage. She thought of the trip they’d all taken to France when she was ten, her mom and dad kissing goofily on the banks of the Seine while Meg played photographer with the first cell phone she’d ever had. She thought of the day she was born, which both her parents had always made a big show of saying was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to either one of them.

  But here, in this restaurant with his new wife and his new family, was the happiest her dad had ever been.

  Meg forced herself to wait until he was finished speaking, gamely clinking glasses with her uncle Jim and both of Lisa’s kids. The last thing she wanted to do was make a scene. Once she was sure nobody would notice, she pushed out her chair and slipped away from the table, heading for the ladies’ room before doubling back at an arrangement of flowers almost as tall as she was and escaping out onto the street in front of the restaurant.

  It was humid out here, the air thick and clammy, like summer had already arrived. Graduation was in less than three weeks. She thought of her mom back at the house, probably watching TV with a wineglass on the end table beside her—God, how was Meg ever going to leave her all by herself in their falling-down house? She’d seen the horrified look on Colby’s face this afternoon when he’d walked in, the dirt and clutter suddenly glaring. She’d spent the last few months—the last few years—trying so hard to convince everyone around her that everything was fine that she’d almost convinced herself in the process.

  But it wasn’t.

  She was trying to pull herself together when the door to the restaurant opened behind her; there was Colby with his hands in the pockets of his too-big khakis, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled halfway up his arms. “Waiting for the bus?” he asked with a smile, and that was when Meg started to cry.

  Colby’s eyes widened. “Shoot,” he said, crossing the sidewalk in two big steps and wrapping his arms around her a little awkwardly, like he wasn’t entirely sure of the protocol here. “Meg, hey, hey, hey. What’s wrong?” Then, when she sobbed harder instead of answering: “Okay. Easy.” He glanced back at the restaurant, seeming to intuit her wordless panic. “You want to walk?”

  Meg nodded gratefully. Colby took her hand, and they set off down the busy sidewalk, turning once and then again until finally they found a quiet, tree-lined side street, all bumpy cobblestones and brightly painted brick apartment buildings with decorative iron stars the size of dinner plates affixed to their fronts. “Did you know those are actually holding the houses up?” Colby asked, apropos of nothing.

  Meg sniffled. “Huh?” she managed to say.

  “The stars,” he explained, lifting his chin at a row of them. “People think they’re just there to look nice, but back a million years ago, masons used to use lime mortar on buildings like this, which doesn’t hold up in the long term. So eventually, the front of the building starts to pull away from the rest of it. The stars are actually just decorative bolts to keep the whole face of the thing from crumbling down on some unsuspecting pedestrian.”

  Meg shook her head, momentarily surprised out of her meltdown. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  Colby smirked a little. “I know stuff.”

  “Clearly,” she said. “What else do you know?”

  “What, like, about construction?” He ducked his head and tucked his hands back into his pockets, suddenly shy. “I don’t know. A reasonable amount, I guess.”

  “Tell me?”

  Colby looked at her curiously, but in the end he nodded and did it, keeping up a running monologue as they walked along the darkened sidewalk—about peg-and-beam framing and how to properly organize a workshop and machines that could lift whole houses clear off the ground—until finally Meg lifted a hand to stop him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, taking one last deep, shuddering breath and wiping her face with the back of one hand. She sat down on the steps of a tidy little brownstone, smoothing her dress down over her knees. “This is embarrassing.”

  Colby shook his head. “Hey, what are you apologizing to me for?” he asked, sitting down beside her and running a hand down her backbone.

  “I don’t know.” Meg took a deep breath, exhaling in a shaky sigh. It was still unfamiliar for him to touch her this way. “I’m just sad, is all.”

  “You ever tell your dad that?”

  Right away, Meg shook her head. “What am I supposed to say?” she asked, pulling back to look at him. “Congratulations on being happier than you’ve ever been in your life, Dad—sorry you had to throw the rest of us away to get here?” The words were out before she’d even known she was thinking them; she felt her eyes widen and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she said, between two fingers. “That’s awful. I didn’t mean that.”

  Colby shrugged. “You can mean it,” he said, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “If that’s what you mean.”

  Meg sighed, tilting her head back so her hair pooled on the step behind her, staring up at the dark canopy of new leaves overhead. “I think maybe it’s what I mean, yeah.”

  “Then why not tell him?” Colby asked. “If somebody’s pissing you off, you ought to let them know.”

  Meg laughed; she couldn’t help it. The way he said it made it sound so easy, not at all like the horrifying, humiliating spectacle she knew it would be if she were actually to do it. “Is this how I sound to you when I tell you that you should get involved with the electoral process?” she asked.

  “What, like I have no idea what I’m talking about and should probably mind my own business?” Colby grinned. “Maybe.”

  Meg’s mouth dropped open. “Rude!”

  “I’m kidding. Mostly.” He leaned over a little, bumping their shoulders together. He smelled like Dial soap and medicated face wash and drugstore deodorant, boy smells. “Anyway, it feels like it’s probably a little late for either one of us to be minding our own business, right?”

  “Yeah,” Meg agreed. “It prob
ably is.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Colby looked over at her in the darkness. “Say you did talk to your dad, right? Say you went back into that fancy restaurant right now and told him how you’re feeling. Or say you told your friend Emily the whole, unvarnished truth. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Meg said immediately, though in fact she knew exactly what the worst might look like. She gazed out at the empty street for a moment. Took a deep breath before she spoke again. “So, every year right before Christmas, my school does a potluck.”

  “Okay,” Colby said, leaning back on his elbows. “I’m listening.”

  “It’s this big thing. Everybody in the whole school comes and brings their families, from kindergarten all the way on up, and you all cook or bake something, and they set it up on these tables in the gym and the jazz band plays and there’s all these games—and whatever, I know you probably think it sounds unbearably corny, but—”

  “I don’t think anything,” Colby said. “Keep going.”

  Meg sighed. “So last year, winter of junior year, my parents were still together. And yeah, they fought a lot, I guess, but they’ve always fought a lot. Arguing was just, like, what they did for recreation. It didn’t mean anything; it wasn’t scary. At least, not to me, it wasn’t.” She shook her head. “Anyway, the three of us have been going to this potluck together every year since I was five, but this time my dad had to work late doing something for Hal, so the plan was for my mom and me to go, and he was going to meet us when he got done. And my mom was in this terrible mood about the whole thing. I didn’t know this then, but she thought he was having an affair—which he was, I’m pretty sure, with Lisa—on top of which she’s always hated having to socialize with other parents.”

  “I mean, fair,” Colby joked with a gentle grin. “Other people’s parents are awful.”

  “I mean, sure. Yes.” Meg tucked her hair behind her ears. “So whatever, she and I are at the thing together, but mostly I was actually with my friends, and Mason and I had just started dating, and we were having fun, and I guess I just didn’t notice how much she was drinking.”

  Just like that, Colby wasn’t smiling anymore. “Uh-oh.”

  Meg nodded. “Yeah.” She’d never told anyone this story before; it occurred to her all at once that she hadn’t even thought about it in ages, had in fact kind of forced herself to forget it, and that telling Colby now was a kind of remembering she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to do. Still, she made herself keep going. “Anyway, by the time I finally realized what was going on, she was totally off her ass. And I was trying to keep anybody from noticing, and trying to convince her that we should go home, when my dad showed up.” She tugged at her bottom lip. “And I was super relieved to see him—one, because he’s my dad, and two, because I thought he was going to handle it.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  Meg shook her head. “He and my mom wound up immediately getting into this giant screaming fight.”

  Colby grimaced. “About what?”

  “Him being late, I guess? Her being drunk? Does it matter?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I guess not.”

  “The two of them just lost it in front of everybody,” Meg told him, shame spreading like a rash all over her body at the memory, hot and itchy. “Yelling, calling each other names, hurling these awful accusations back and forth. And I was begging them to be quiet, and all these little grade school kids were staring at them, and everybody else—my friends, my friends’ parents, every teacher I’ve ever had—was trying to act like they didn’t notice.” She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. “Finally, the principal had to ask them to take it off school grounds.”

  “Woof.” Colby rubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What did Emily say?”

  “We never talked about it,” Meg admitted.

  “Wait, seriously?” Colby’s eyes were two full moons. “Why not?”

  “She never brought it up,” she said with a shrug. “And, like, I definitely wasn’t going to. And then my parents decided to split up over the holidays, and she was really great to me while that was happening.” Meg blew a breath out. “But it was just, like . . . all of a sudden I realized how I must look to everybody else, you know? How my family must look. That what I thought was normal, all that fighting . . . wasn’t.”

  She lifted her face to look at him. “I told myself that I was going to do everything I could never to be part of another scene like that.” She heard the challenge in her own voice. “And so far I haven’t been.”

  Colby raised his eyebrows. “Sounds exhausting.”

  “Sometimes.” Meg smiled. “Lucky for me, I get to blow off steam arguing with you.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.” She sighed again, then heaved herself up. They’d been gone too long already, and disappearing was almost as noticeable as causing a fuss. “I like Lisa, for the record,” she clarified as they headed back around the corner, tucking her hair behind her ears and fanning her face a little bit so that nobody inside would be able to tell she’d been crying. “I mean, like is the wrong word, maybe. She’s a huge nerd—”

  “She’s a huge nerd,” Colby agreed with a grin.

  Meg laughed. “But the point is, she’s not a wicked witch or anything. So what’s my problem?”

  “She’s not your actual mom,” Colby said with a shrug, no hesitation at all. “And no matter how fine she is, it’s not going to be the same as your family together and whole.”

  Meg stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, putting a hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words tripping over one another in their rush to get out of her mouth. “God, I must sound so spoiled to you, complaining about all this stuff when both my parents are—” She broke off.

  Colby shrugged. “It’s not a contest,” he said easily, though she thought he might have flinched.

  You could talk to me about it, she wanted to tell him. You could tell me the rest of the truth. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she said instead.

  Colby grinned at that. “I’m really glad I’m here, too.”

  She took his hand as they went back into the restaurant, the zing of the contact all the way up her arm and the skin of her back and stomach prickling inside her clothes. Having him here in person, his actual physical body beside her, was half-pleasurable and half-maddening, like the moment before a sneeze.

  “There you are,” her dad said, slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing. Meg only smiled in reply.

  They were just finishing dessert when her phone dinged in her purse. So?? Emily said. Is he here???

  Meg took a deep breath and looked across the table at Colby. “Okay,” she said, “you want to meet my friends?”

  Twenty-Eight

  Meg

  Em and Mason were hanging out with a bunch of their friends at Liberty Park, a big outdoor mall with a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a million shops and restaurants. “Listen,” Meg said, taking Colby’s hand as they strolled down a fake-cobblestone walkway hung with old-fashioned string lights and crowded with couples on dates and clusters of college kids already home for the summer, “just so you know, Em can be kind of a tough crowd.”

  Colby glanced at her sidelong, lips twisting. “You know,” he said, “I kind of got that impression.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be a bitch to you or anything, but—” She broke off. That wasn’t true, strictly; in fact, she thought there was at least a 50 percent chance Emily would be a bitch to him. “Maybe just don’t take anything she says personally, that’s all.”

  “Noted,” Colby said. He squeezed her hand and bumped their shoulders together, easy, though she could tell from the tone of his voice he was a little bit tense. “It’s fine, Meg.” He grinned. “Anyway, I’m really tough.”

  “Oh, right.” She smiled back at him, she couldn’t help it, his eye
s and his jawline and how tangible he was, here in her town, where she lived. “My mistake.”

  Her friends were sitting on the patio outside the fancy ice cream place, an indie situation with flavors like herbal chai and ginger molasses that Meg normally loved but that seemed faintly ridiculous to her with Colby by her side. “Hey!” she called, her voice just a little too loud.

  Emily looked up from her waffle cone, her eyes widening faintly at the sight of them. Then she tilted her head to the side. “Hi!” she called, hopping up out of her chair and offering a megawatt smile. “You must be Colby.”

  Colby smiled back. “You must be Emily.”

  “My reputation precedes me, I see,” Em said grandly, then motioned him over. “Come here so I can interrogate you at great length about your intentions, please and thanks.”

  Colby shot Meg a sort of helpless look, but he did what Em told him, sitting down in the empty chair beside her and gamely answering her string of cheerful questions. She was trying, Meg realized; both of them were trying, because both of them cared about her. She didn’t actually think she could ask for anything more than that.

  “Cones are on me,” she announced, kicking gently at Colby’s chair on her way into the ice cream shop. She grinned at Emily once before she went.

  Half an hour later, Meg balanced on the patio railing, the warm night air ruffling her ponytail as she listened to Emily tell Colby the story of the time they’d accidentally locked themselves in the student council storage room at Overbrook without their cell phones. She couldn’t believe how well this was going. She’d expected things to be awkward between Colby and her friends, hostile even, but instead it was like they’d all known each other for ages. Maybe she’d been worried for nothing after all.

  Colby wandered back over in her direction once Emily was finished, his cheekbones even sharper than normal in the neon light from the shop. There was a half-moon scab the size of a dime beneath his eye that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him; he’d gotten hit with a stack of boxes at work, he’d explained when she’d pointed it out. “So, what’s your summer looking like?” he asked, leaning against the railing beside her.