Page 71 of You Say It First

“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 friends 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!”

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