Page 53 of You Say It First

“Why not?” her mom said, smiling a little bit crookedly. “It’s starting to look like Grey Gardens in here. Next thing you know, both of us will be wearing head scarves and speaking in fake British accents.”

Meg laughed at that. Her mom was funny, she remembered suddenly; she’d forgotten that at some point in the last couple of months. “That’s a brilliant idea, dahling,” she said with a grin.

Upstairs, she plugged her phone in and got into bed, then pulled it off the charger again and scrolled down to Emily’s name. I really am sorry, she typed. I should have been honest with you. I knew you thought it was weird, that’s all.

She was about to set the phone back down when three dots showed up on Emily’s end. Meg breathed in, holding the air in her lungs until the reply came through: It IS weird, Emily had written. But I still wish you’d told me.

I know. I’ll tell you everything, I promise.

Hipster salad place on Monday?

Relief seeped through her. Of course, she texted back.

We have to be able to talk about these things, you know? Emily wrote. Then, along with the twin girls emoji: Roomie.

Meg squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. You and me, she promised, then hit send and turned out the light.

She lay there for a long time, staring at the familiar shadows on her ceiling—thinking of Emily and Lillian and Mason and Colby, of the life she’d always assumed she had ahead of her and the one she was terrified—and exhilarated—to realize she wanted instead. If you want to change the world, go out and change it, Colby had told her. She just didn’t know if it was possible to do that without causing a little bit of a scene.

Finally, Meg turned the light back on and got out of bed, padding barefoot over to her laptop and pulling up Annie Hernandez’s website one more time. It didn’t take her long to pull up the text she’d written about herself and why she wanted to work on the campaign. She took a deep breath and clicked submit.

Twenty-Four

Colby

“Do you know anything about headlamps?” Meg asked when Colby called her on Saturday. She was in the Flashlights and Lanterns aisle at REI, she’d reported when she picked up, sounding pleased with herself. “I need one for next weekend, but there are, like, a surprising variety of them here.”

“You need one why, exactly?” Colby asked with a laugh. It was his lunch break at the warehouse, so he was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the door open, eating his usual ham-and-cheese sandwich. A couple of sparrows fought over the remains of a bag of chips across the concrete. “What, is your prom, like, a wilderness survival theme or something?”

“Overbrook doesn’t do a prom,” Meg replied primly. Her year was winding down, with final projects and senior class open-mic night and all her friends planning their various backpacking trips. Why you’d drop all that money just to spend a perfectly good summer humping all your shit around a place where you didn’t speak the language and probably getting pickpocketed was beyond Colby, but he guessed that’s why it was good he hadn’t been born rich. “Like five years ago, the senior class decided it wasn’t inclusive enough, so now we do a lock-in at the Franklin Institute instead and nobody brings a date.”

“Of course you do,” Colby said.

“I think you’re making fun of me right now,” Meg chided, “but I don’t even care because it’s going to be super fun. They bring in cheesesteaks from Geno’s and there’s an ice cream sundae bar and everybody plays Sardines in the dark in the middle of the night. Thus, the headlamp.”

“Sounds fun,” Colby said, and he had to admit it kind of did, in an extremely dorky way. He’d skipped his own prom, the theme of which had been A Night in Monte Carlo, and gotten drunk in Micah’s yard instead. He thought maybe he would have gone, though, if he’d known Meg back then.

He thought maybe he would have done a lot of things differently.

It was weird, having a girlfriend. Every time Colby thought about it, he couldn’t help rolling his eyes at himself, like he was performing in some dumb high school play. Still, he thought about it a lot. On one hand, his day-to-day life was exactly the same as it had always been: He went to work at the warehouse. He played video games with Jordan and Micah. He ignored his brother at all costs. But Meg did things like tell him she missed him and add the kiss emoji to the end of her texts and send him senior skip day pictures of her long bare legs on a picnic blanket, her toenails painted a bright screaming pink.

So. His life wasn’t exactly the same as it had always been.

“I have no opinions about headlamps,” he told her now, crumpling up his tinfoil into a ball and squeezing. “Probably you should take pictures of yourself in all of them, though, and send them to me so I can tell you which one looks most durable.”

Meg snorted. “Jerk,” she said, but two minutes after they hung up, his phone dinged with a text and there she was, all ponytail and goofy smile, the stupid headlamp glowing like a beacon calling him home.

The sun was just setting when Colby got home from baseball practice that night, the sky gone orange and juicy-looking and an electric crackle in the air. His mom was at exercise class, so he made himself a roast beef sandwich and ate it standing up at the counter, flipping idly through the Best Buy circular and scratching the back of his knee with the toe of his opposite sneaker. He was just finishing up when Tris gamboled in, whining for a bite of his dinner. Colby glanced in her direction, then did a double take, freezing with the end of the sandwich halfway to his mouth.

She was tracking bloody pawprints across the linoleum.

“What happened?” he demanded, his heart like a missile as he sank to his knees and grabbed her by the collar, running his hands over her bristly fur. “Where are you hurt?”

Tris whined, distracted, still after the sandwich. The blood wasn’t coming from her, Colby realized dumbly, his eyes catching the rusty trail and following it backward: it was seeping out from the mudroom, trickling out from underneath the door that led to the garage.

“Dad?” he yelled, a sick kind of knowing rolling through him.

That was when he woke up.

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