Page 26 of You Say It First

“What can I get you?” Meg asked a gaggle of sophomores, pulling a square of waxed paper from the box on the folding table and trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt. She was working the doughnut booth tonight, which in reality just meant reselling the two hundred doughnuts Overbrook’s student council had gotten donated from the artisan place in town and trying to convince Harrison Lithwick, who was assigned to the booth with her, not to pick all the sprinkles off the chocolate frosted ones like a disgusting monster.

Normally, the carnival was one of Meg’s favorite days of the year—the optimism of it, maybe, the smell of cotton candy thick in the air, and the parking lot lit up in pinks and greens and purples. It was an Overbrook tradition, with the seniors all taking shifts at the game and concession booths and all the proceeds going to a rec center in Philly. The teachers took turns in the dunk tank. The dance team and a cappella group both did sets.

Tonight, though, Meg felt as sour as the lemonade Emily was selling on the other side of the parking lot. She’d been in a bad mood since she’d gotten here, wincing at the too-loud music blaring over the sound system, scowling at the overdressed freshman girls shuffling along the midway even though she knew it made her a bad feminist—and trying, with limited success, not to check her phone every five minutes to see if Colby had texted.

He hadn’t.

Not that she expected him to, really.

But she’d hoped.

Meg sighed, setting some more doughnuts out on the table and shooting Harrison a look as he swooped in for a sample. She knew Colby thought she was a ridiculous person, some spoiled duchess who sauntered around in a hermetically sealed bubble and had no idea how the world actually worked. And yeah, he was impossible sometimes—infuriating, even, in ways Meg wasn’t entirely sure she’d ever be able to overlook. Still, she’d thought they’d come to some kind of unspoken agreement, all those nights on the telephone. She’d even—God, this was embarrassing—thought maybe they were sort of flirting. It sucked to realize it hadn’t meant anything to him at all.

She was making change for a sophomore on the swim team when Emily trotted up to the side of the line. “How’s it going?” she asked, ponytail swishing cheerfully. Then, frowning across the booth: “Harrison, dude, seriously. That’s so gross.”

Meg snorted, wiping her sticky palms on the back of her jeans. “It’s been going pretty much like that, actually.” Then she grinned, buoyed by the sight of Em in her skinny jeans and student council hoodie, a pair of hearts in Overbrook blue and yellow painted on each of her cheeks. “You’re not working?”

Emily shook her head. “Industry downturn in the lemonade business,” she said solemnly. “They cut me loose. What about you? Done soon?”

Meg glanced at the clock on her phone, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in her stomach when she saw there still wasn’t anything from Colby. God, she needed to get a life. “Another couple of hours,” she reported. “Mason was floating around here somewhere, though, if you’re looking for company. He doesn’t have a shift until tomorrow.”

“Yeah, he said something about that.” Emily nodded, frowning a little. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly. “Like, besides the inherent personal trauma of being stuck in a confined space with sprinkle-snarfer over there?”

Meg laughed. “I’m okay,” she lied.

“Are you sure?” Emily pressed gently. “You look sad.”

“I do?” Meg shook her head, weirdly surprised that Em had noticed, which was dumb—after all, they always knew when stuff was going on with each other. She remembered the weeks after her parents split, when Emily had prowled around her like a lioness protecting a wounded cub, somehow able to magically intuit exactly what Meg needed at any given moment: a cliché and vaguely antifeminist rom-com watched in silence, the gross but admittedly satisfying distraction of a pore strip, a midnight trip to the Sonic drive-thru for cherry limeade and deep-fried mac and cheese balls. Occasionally, she’d needed all three at once. “I’m good,” she promised now, pulling a fresh cider doughnut from one of the boxes and handing it to Em on the sly. “I mean, I’ll be better when I no longer have to stand here and bear direct witness to Harrison breaking every health and safety code in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but generally fine.”

Emily nodded, like Fair point. “Listen,” she said, breaking the doughnut in two and handing half of it back so they could share, “will you come find me if you’ve got time to talk later?”

“What, tonight?” Meg felt her eyebrows crawl. “Yeah, why? You sound like Mason.” She grinned. “You’re not going to break up with me, too, are you?”

Emily’s eyes went saucer-wide. “What? No! I just—” She rocked back on her heels a bit, shaking her head. “Of course not. Like—you know you’re literally my favorite person in the entire universe, right?”

Meg frowned. “Of course I do. You’re mine.” She looked at Emily carefully. Did she know somehow? Had she been able to magically intuit that Meg was second-guessing the plan? It was only a matter of time, probably; they knew each other way too well for Meg to have gone on lying to her for this long. “Em,” she said, breathing in the sugar-scented air as she peered across the makeshift counter, thinking again of the stupid email burning a hole in her inbox. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing!” Emily promised, holding her doughnut half up in a salute and taking a step back toward the fairway. “I’ll see you later.”

Meg watched her go for a moment, uneasy, before busying herself brushing doughnut crumbs off the bright plastic tablecloth and adjusting their marker-on–poster-board sign. She was wrapping a napkin around a bear claw to hand to a guy on the debate team when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out so fast she almost dropped it on the concrete, swallowing hard at the sight of Colby’s name on the screen.

Once, when Meg was four or five, she’d wandered off in the supermarket while her mom was ordering salmon for a dinner party, then been completely unable to find her when she came shuffling back down the aisle clutching a package of Halloween-dyed Oreos for which she’d intended to beg. To this day, she shivered a little when she remembered the quietly apocalyptic moments that followed—the crinkle of the cellophane sleeve in her hand as she dashed frantically down aisle after aisle, the sour tang of panic at the back of her mouth.

It felt like hours, though it was probably only a couple of minutes before she finally found her mother, who had moved on to the cheese counter and not yet noticed Meg was gone in the first place. “What’s wrong?” she’d demanded, catching sight of Meg’s stricken expression. “What happened?”

Meg had shaken her head. The relief was overwhelming and animal, jumbling up any kind of cogent explanation inside her brain: all she’d been able to say was, “I missed you,” before bursting into inconsolable tears.

Meg didn’t know why she was thinking about that right now.

She tucked the phone back into her pocket and did her best to ignore the way her whole chest had loosened, like she’d taken a full breath for the first time all day. Yeah, she was glad he’d texted. Yeah, she’d been worried he might not. But it was also kind of shitty, the way he was totally ignoring the fact that he’d hurt her. And it didn’t change the fact that sometimes it felt utterly pointless for them to try and agree on anything at all.

“Harrison,” she said now, her voice coming out a little more shrilly than she’d necessarily intended. “Let’s get back to work.”

By the time Darcy Ramos came to relieve her at the end of her shift, Meg’s mood had totally blackened, like one of those gruesome warning posters of calcified cigarette lungs or the pot roast her mom had attempted for dinner a couple of weeks ago. She’d been planning to go find Emily, to see what all the mystery was about, but as she looked out at the buzzing midway, she realized there was absolutely no way she had the courage to get into a fight about their future tonight. She didn’t want to get into a fight about anything. She kind of just wanted to go home.

Meg darted past the Fun Slide and the falafel truck, breathing a sigh of relief at the familiar chirp as she unlocked her driver’s side door—she’d gotten her car back this morning, her mom having driven her over to the mechanic’s in irritable silence. She leaned her head back against the seat for a moment before wriggling around and pulling her phone out of her pocket, staring at Colby’s message one more time. What are you even after with me here? she almost texted. Instead, she dropped her phone in the cup holder and headed home.

The following night, Meg’s dad took her to dinner at a steakhouse near UPenn—all dark wood and white tablecloths, votive candles flickering in little glass jars. Since the divorce, the two of them had a standing dinner date every other Friday, and they alternated who got to choose. Meg kind of liked researching new restaurants—reading reviews and scouring menus, deciding exactly what she was going to order ahead of time. Sometimes it was more fun than the actual dinners themselves, although obviously she didn’t want her dad to know that.

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