Outside, it was warm and rainy, that steamy smell coming off the concrete in the mostly empty parking lot of Rise & Grind. “So,” Meg began once they’d gotten their lattes, sitting down at a wobbly, slightly sticky table by the window, “I’m not coming to Cornell.”
“Uh, yup,” Emily said crisply. “So I gathered.” She sighed and took a deep breath. “Like, I’ll be honest: I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”
Meg nodded. “I think maybe you kind of don’t.”
Emily’s eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?” she asked, like she’d been expecting Meg to protest, and normally Meg would have. Even now she felt the urge to do it like a physical thing—to smooth everything over, to do what she could to make it okay. Instead, she took a deep breath and set her cup down on the table.
“My mom broke her ankle on Saturday night falling down the stairs because she’s an alcoholic and she was drunk,” she blurted, counting off on her fingers. “I’m, like, ninety-nine percent sure I’m in love with Colby, which probably doesn’t even matter at this point because I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again. And I don’t actually like the hipster salad place.”
Emily just stared at her for a second. Meg watched as she synthesized the new information, like a plant making food from the sun. “What’s wrong with the hipster salad place?” she asked.
Meg barked a laugh. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Everything I just said, and that’s what you’re choosing to focus on right now?”
“No, no, no,” Emily said, holding her hands up. “I just meant—” But Meg shook her head.
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry I don’t like the hipster salad place, okay? I’m sorry we’re not exactly the same anymore. Maybe we’re not actually brain twins, but that’s no reason for you to be so mean and judgy and, like—and, like—”
“Meg!” Emily broke in. “I’m sorry, okay? I just—I didn’t know any of that stuff. About your mom, or Colby, or—”
“You don’t know those things because you made it so I couldn’t tell you.”
“Of course you could have told me!” Emily’s eyes widened. “What did I do that made you think you couldn’t tell me?”
“I—all of it!” Meg said. “The way you were about the first time I talked to him on the phone or, like, when you found out I went there—”
“Going there without telling anyone was not a good idea, Meg!”
“I know that,” Meg protested. “Don’t you think I know that? And I get why you reacted the way you did, but then you never even asked what happened once I got there, like you weren’t even curious about it because it wasn’t something you would have done yourself. And then you were so fixated on both of us being at Cornell—”
“I thought you wanted to go to Cornell!”
“I did, Emily!” The words came out like a reflex—but no, even that wasn’t exactly true. Meg blew a breath out, tried again. “Or at least, I didn’t have a better plan. I was such a mess last year, and you were so into the idea that it just made sense. But then once I actually got in and started trying to picture myself there . . .” She gazed down at the table for a moment, trying to organize her thoughts into something more coherent. Lifted her face again. “So much of our friendship has always been about being the same, you know? And it just felt like maybe that was all going to fall apart if I didn’t want the same stuff we had always wanted, or I liked someone who was different from the people we’d always liked, or I admitted I was mad about something you did, or—”
“Wait a second.” Emily raised her eyebrows. “Mad about something I did?”
Meg sighed. “Come on,” she said, embarrassed. “Seriously? Are you really going to make me—”
“What, me and Mason?” Emily looked surprised, then sad. “You said you were okay with me and Mason.”
“Of course I wasn’t okay with you and Mason!” Meg threw up her hands, nearly upending her coffee cup in the process. A mom with her toddler two tables over shot her a dirty look. Well, too bad! Meg thought wildly. Here I am, making a scene! “We had been broken up for like a week, Em! Who does that? What kind of best friend—”
“What kind of best friend starts dating him in the first place when you knew I liked him?” Emily demanded.
Meg blinked. “Wait,” she said, thinking for a moment that she’d misheard. Surely, Emily hadn’t just said . . . “What?”
“I liked him, Meg!” It was almost a wail. “Before you guys ever—I liked him. And it was like you didn’t even notice.”
“I didn’t,” Meg said immediately. “I never would have—”
“Well, I did,” Emily said. “I liked him so much at the beginning of junior year—or before that, even. Way back when he still had those bad glasses.”
Meg shook her head, the whole story reshuffling itself in her head like a deck of cards. Emily couldn’t have—of course she would have known if—
“Those were terrible glasses,” she said absently.
Both of them were quiet for a moment, just the sound of an old Norah Jones song piping in over the speakers. Now that she stopped to actually think about it, it felt obvious: the way Emily had been the one to pull Mason into their friend group to begin with, the way she’d sat him at their table at her sweet sixteen and been so angry when he and Meg snuck off together. Meg wondered if she really hadn’t registered those signs, or if she just hadn’t wanted to. It was weird and kind of crummy to realize she’d been thinking of herself as totally in the right this whole time when possibly there was a whole other perspective she’d never stopped to consider. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking across the table. “I didn’t realize.”
“I’m not saying you stole him or anything like that,” Emily said, sitting back in her wobbly coffee shop chair. “I never actually came out and told you I liked him. And, like, I know nobody can steal a boy who doesn’t want to be stolen. I’m not Taylor Swift from ten years ago.”
Meg snorted. “I had literally that exact same thought about you,” she admitted. “The Taylor Swift thing.”
“Yeah, well.” Emily smiled, just a little. “Brain twins, et cetera.” For a long time, she didn’t say anything, running her thumbnail back and forth along the edge of her plastic cup. Then she looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it was messed up, how we handled it. And even if we handled it perfectly, it probably still would have been messed up, and we can talk about it, or not talk about it if you don’t want, but—”
“It’s okay,” Meg said. “I mean, it’s not really, but it’s not like I want you guys to break up, or I want him back or anything like that.” She shrugged, thinking again of Colby and wishing she weren’t.
“I’m sorry I was a bitch about Colby,” Emily said, as if she were reading Meg’s mind. “And I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t tell me the truth about things. I think maybe when everything was happening with your mom and dad, I got kind of used to being, like, the boss? I felt like I was doing the right thing—like that was what you needed from me. But I can see how eventually that would translate into just being overbearing and, like, hard to talk to.”
“I did need a boss for a while,” Meg admitted, remembering how effortlessly Emily had cruise-directed their lives back then, casually reminding her about student council meetings and curating their plans for the weekend and deflecting friends who asked too many nosy questions. She thought of how Mason had been back then, too—how he’d kept their routine going, but carefully. How he’d never pushed. He’d been trying his best, even if it hadn’t ultimately been enough for either one of them. It occurred to her that possibly she owed him an actual conversation about that. “I get what you were doing, and I really appreciate it. But now . . .”
“Yeah,” Emily said, nodding. “I get it, too. And I know it probably felt like I was putting all this pressure on you about Cornell. But I never wanted you to feel like you had to hide who you were or what was going on with you or how you felt about something just to keep being best friend
s with me.” She stopped, and all at once Meg realized she was on the verge of tears. “And I really want to keep being your best friend.”
Meg nodded, her own throat closing up a little. “I want that, too.”
“That totally sucks about your mom,” Emily continued—wiping her face with the back of her hand, businesslike. Meg hadn’t seen her cry in years. “And I feel like crap that you thought I would give you a hard time about it or think less of you or something, because it must have been really miserable to have to handle it by yourself. God, Meg, I am so, so sorry.”
“I wasn’t totally by myself,” Meg promised, thinking of Lillian in her baseball cap and Maja’s lemon bars—thinking of Colby, even if he wasn’t around anymore. “But I missed you.”
“I’m here now, if you want to talk about it,” Emily said, wrapping her fingers around her coffee cup. “I mean, I get if you still don’t feel comfortable, or—” She broke off, waving her hand vaguely. “But I’m here.”
Meg smiled at her across the table with relief and exhaustion and gratitude. “I’m here, too,” she said.
“Why did you break up with me?” Meg asked, standing unannounced on Mason’s front porch later that afternoon.
Mason blanched. He was barefoot in a pair of khaki shorts, a can of LaCroix in one hand and his glossy dark hair sticking up all over his head. “Meg—”
“Like, was it honestly just that you wanted to date Em instead?” she asked. “You can say if it was. I’m not here to give you a hard time about it. I’m just curious.”
Mason looked totally gobsmacked, and Meg guessed she couldn’t blame him—after all, it wasn’t like she’d ever confronted him about anything before. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m not trying to make a scene.”
Mason smiled then, just faintly. “A scene in front of who?” he asked, gesturing out the front door at the empty cul-de-sac.
“Oh.” Meg’s cheeks colored. “Good point.”
He came out onto the porch and shut the front door behind him, sitting down on the top step; after a moment Meg sat down beside him, the warm afternoon sunlight prickling her bare legs. Back when they first started dating they used to sit out here at night and wait for her dad to come pick her up.
“It wasn’t because of Emily,” he said finally. “I get why it seems like that, and I get it if you don’t believe me. But it wasn’t.”
“Okay,” Meg said slowly. “Then what?”
Mason shrugged. “You just kind of became a different person while we were together. Does that make sense?” he asked. “Like, when we first started hanging out, you were never afraid to say what you wanted, or what you thought about something, even if it meant making other people a little uncomfortable.”
Meg blinked. “I wasn’t?”
“Meg.” Mason smiled. “You tried to fight me over Elon Musk sending his car to space the first time we went out.”
“Oh.” Meg frowned. She’d forgotten about that. “Well, Elon Musk is the actual worst.”
“So you told me!” Mason laughed. “But then, when everything started happening with your mom and dad, it was like you just . . . went away, sort of.”
Meg huffed, stung by the unfairness of it. “I mean, my parents were getting a divorce, Mason!”
“No, I know that,” he amended quickly. “Come on, of course I know that. I knew that, which is why I never wanted to give you a hard time about it. But even once all the dust settled, it just kind of felt like you never really came back.”
“Came back how?” she asked, although truthfully it wasn’t like she didn’t already sort of know what he was getting at. Still, she wanted to hear it from him.
Mason shrugged. “You started agreeing with everything I said all the time, for one thing,” he said, pulling some crabgrass out from between the flagstones. “Like about big stuff, but also just stupid shit like what we should do on the weekend or what movie you wanted to see. Like, I couldn’t tell if you really didn’t have an opinion all of a sudden or if maybe you just didn’t care enough to argue.” He twisted a blade of grass between two long fingers. “One of the things I liked about you to begin with was how much you cared about things, you know? How willing you were to fight about them. And after the divorce, it was like you just stopped.”
Meg bristled, even as she knew Mason probably had a point: After all, hadn’t she told basically the same story to Colby the night of her dad’s rehearsal dinner? She’d never wanted to be a part of anything like the scene at the potluck ever again, and she’d done everything she could not to be. Still, it had never occurred to her that maybe her big opinions were one of the things that had attracted Mason to her to begin with. It hadn’t occurred to her that maybe the two of them never arguing wasn’t a thing Mason wanted, too.
“And, like, obviously, you eventually started caring about some stuff again,” he said, drawing his knees up and resting his tawny forearms there, “like getting the solar panels on top of Overbrook and stuff like that. But it just seemed like you didn’t really care about . . . me, I guess? Like, even when we broke up, it was like you didn’t even give a crap.”
“I gave a crap!” Meg protested, thinking back to how carefully she’d swallowed down her anger and her hurt that night in the parking lot outside Cavelli’s, how she’d waited until his car was out of sight to let herself cry. She’d wanted to be agreeable, and it had come out like apathy: the thing she hated most of all. “You could have talked to me about it.”
“I tried,” he said with a shrug. “Like, even when we were broken up, I kept trying. But you always said everything was okay. Once I even tried picking an argument with you on purpose, just to see what would happen.”
“At the party at Adrienne’s?” she asked, and Mason nodded. “God, I thought you were being such a dick that night.”
“So you did notice!”
“Of course I noticed,” Meg said, laughing in spite of herself. “I just didn’t want to—cause a problem, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not all your fault,” Mason said. “I mean, I’m sorry I was an asshole who picked a fight just to see what would happen. And I’m sorry I wasn’t the kind of person you could feel safe causing a problem in front of.”
They were quiet for a moment, looking out at the cul-de-sac. An old man shuffled along the sidewalk alongside a scrappy little terrier; two little kids ran through the sprinkler across the street. “That dude Colby,” Mason said finally, glancing at her sidelong. “Can you cause problems in front of each other?”
Meg snorted; she couldn’t help it. “That’s about the only thing we could do, actually.” Still, she thought, it wasn’t that simple. Her parents’ arguments had turned them into the worst versions of themselves, mean and vindictive. But she kind of thought the arguments she and Colby had made them better. She hadn’t known arguments could do that until she met him—or she had, maybe, but she’d forgotten, same as she’d forgotten how to be herself.
“Past tense, huh?” Mason asked. “So it’s done?”
“Yeah,” Meg said, clearing her throat a little; she kept waiting for it to hurt less, although so far it kind of didn’t. “It’s done.”
“That’s too bad,” Mason said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he seemed like kind of a douche at your dad’s wedding. But from what Emily said, you really liked him.”
“Yeah,” Meg said again, tilting her head back. “I really did.”
Thirty-Five
Colby
The following morning, Colby got up early and drove to a neat-looking craftsman near the high school, with a wide front porch with a swing at one end of it and a row of tomato plants along the fence at the side. He climbed out of the car and rang the bell, then wiped his sweaty hands on his thighs and told himself to stop being such a loser. God, this whole thing was fucking dumb.
A guy he didn’t recognize answered the door—pleasant-looking, with round glasses and a short-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned over a paunchy belly. A terri
er danced manically around his feet. “Hi there,” he said, looking at Colby curiously. “Can I help you?”
“Um,” Colby said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “Is Doug here?”
The guy nodded. “Sure thing,” he said, then turned and called down the wide, paneled hallway. “Hey, love? There’s a kid here to see you.”
Doug appeared at the front door a moment later, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Colby,” he said, a brief twitch of his eyebrows the only outward sign he was surprised at the sight of Colby in a collar on his doorstep. “Good to see you.”
“I messed up,” Colby blurted, not bothering to say hello or show any manners whatsoever. His mother would have been ashamed. “By not calling you back in time. I think I was scared that the job would turn out to be a letdown, or, like, that I would be a letdown to you and you’d decide you were wrong to offer it to me, or just that, like, the rug would get pulled out somehow, you know? But, like—whatever, none of that is your problem. That’s my problem, and I’m trying to fix it, but—” He broke off, realizing abruptly that he was rambling. He’d never admitted this stuff out loud before. He hadn’t even really known he was thinking it. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “I really want this job, is my point. And if I made you think I didn’t, or that I didn’t care one way or the other, then that was a fu—a mess-up on my part. So if you can give me another chance, I think you might figure out that I can add value to what you’re doing here.”
Doug looked at him for a long time, not saying anything. Then he bent down and picked up the dog. “Why don’t you come in?” he said.
Colby nodded and followed them into the kitchen, eyes darting as he tried to take in all the details of the house without looking like he was casing it for a robbery. It was the closest thing he’d ever seen to what he’d imagined in his head when he thought about building something in Paradise: Built-in shelves with photos and books on them. A stained-glass window at the foot of the stairs. A kitchen with butcher-block counters and a breakfast nook with benches on either side, sun streaming in through a skylight above the island. Colby sat at the table and took the cup of coffee Doug put in front of him, waiting silently while he got half a crumb cake out of the fridge.
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