Page 18 of You Say It First

“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 dashboard. “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.”

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