Page 10 of You Say It First

Colby sighed. He kept getting this itchy feeling lately, like his clothes were a full size too small—at the house, yeah, but now sometimes outside of it, too. The anniversary was coming, trundling straight at him like a cross-country train, but he didn’t think that was the only reason. “I gotta go,” he heard himself say.

“Already?” Joanna asked, reaching out and nudging him in the shin with the toe of her ankle boot. “What do you got, a date?”

Colby shook his head, rolling his eyes a little. “Yeah, right,” he said with a smile. “Just tired, I guess.”

“Well,” Joanna said, running one delicate thumb around the mouth of her beer bottle. Colby thought there was a not-insignificant chance he was the stupidest guy ever born. “Rest up, then.”

He didn’t want to go home, so he drove around for a while, past the Burger King and the post office and the service road that led to Paradise, but he didn’t exactly have the money to be cruising around wasting gas, either, so finally he gave up and headed back toward the house, flicking on the lights in the dark, empty living room. His mom was at work tonight, but back when his dad was alive she used to go to exercise once a week and he and his dad used to wait for her to leave so they could eat second dinner, the two of them going through a leftover pan of lasagna or a whole box of frozen waffles while they watched old movies on cable. His dad had liked dad movies—Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington—but he also had a thing for romantic weepers that everybody else in the family was always making fun of. If the movie poster had two white people almost-kissing on it, chances were his dad was a fan.

Now Colby glanced at the calendar hanging on the door of the mudroom, a stupid promotional thing Uncle Rick had given his mom at Christmas. Eight weeks to go until the anniversary.

God, he really did not want to still be living here in eight weeks.

He listened to Meg’s message again, her voice echoing out into the empty kitchen. He walked around the house for a while. Finally, he picked up the phone and dialed, biting a cuticle on his thumbnail as it rang and trying to figure out what exactly he was going to say into this girl’s voice mail.

“Hello?”

Oh, shit.

Seven

Meg

For a long moment, there was silence on the other end of the line, the faint sound of static crackling somewhere out in the ether. “Hello?” Meg said again. Nobody ever called her on the phone—especially not a number that wasn’t already in her contacts list—which was why she’d picked up to begin with. She blinked, shifting her weight in her desk chair. She’d been listening to Pod Save America and painting her nails, trying with little success not to think about the email from Cornell currently sitting like a stone in her inbox. She still hadn’t told a soul she’d gotten in.

“Um.” Someone cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “Is this Meg?”

Meg frowned. “Yes?”

“This is Colby Moran,” the voice said. “We, uh, talked the other night?”

“Oh my God,” Meg said too loud and too quickly, coming embarrassingly close to spilling the bottle of nail polish and falling out of the chair altogether. She swallowed hard, steadying herself on the edge of the desk. “Um. Hi.”

“Hi. Um.” He cleared his throat again. “I didn’t think you’d answer, honestly.”

“Then why did you call me?” she blurted. Then, feeling her cheeks warm: “I mean, I’m glad you did, I just—”

“I just thought I’d leave you a voice mail, I guess, or—”

“Do you want to hang up and call back and I won’t answer?”

“What?” Colby laughed. “No.” There was a pause, like he was gathering his thoughts, but then it lasted so long that she thought maybe he had hung up after all, and she was about to say hello one more time when he spoke again. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m just calling to say I’m sorry for being such an asshole on the phone the other night. I know you were just doing your job or whatever.”

“You weren’t an asshole,” Meg said automatically.

“Yeah,” Colby said, “I definitely was.”

Meg tugged on her bottom lip. “I mean, okay,” she conceded finally. “A little bit.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle of polish before getting up and closing her bedroom door, not entirely sure why she was doing it except that this felt like a conversation that needed to be contained somehow. She couldn’t believe he’d actually called. She’d kind of forgotten about the whole conversation in the bustle of the last few days—a Spanish test and dinner with her dad and her and Emily getting in a weird thing over whether or not to invite Mason out for poke bowls on Saturday. “He’s still our friend even if you guys aren’t dating anymore, right?” Emily had pointed out gently, which Meg thought was debatable, but she felt so guilty about the whole Cornell situation that she’d just agreed to avoid a fight.

“It was my fault, too, though,” she continued now, sitting down on her bed and leaning her back against the wall. “I shouldn’t have been so pushy. I was just having a bad day and, like, trying to prove something.”

Colby made a quiet sound that wasn’t quite a snicker. “By converting me?”

“I’m not trying to convert you to anything,” she said, huffing a little. “WeCount is totally nonpartisan. We don’t care who you vote for. We just care that you vote.”

“I mean, that’s literally never true,” Colby said.

“It is so!” Meg fired back, crumbs sticking to the bottoms of her feet as she got up again, pacing across the rug. The whole house needed to be vacuumed—and more, probably. She was pretty sure she’d seen mouse poop at the back of the kitchen cabinet the other day. “It’s a nonprofit. We can’t have political affiliation or we’d lose our tax-exempt status.”

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