Page 54 of You Say It First

Colby lay flat on his back in the dark for a moment, his heart slamming away inside his chest and his breath coming in ragged gasps like somebody was smothering him with a wet towel. His sheets were soaked clean through. “Fuck,” he muttered, sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his sweat-damp hair so it stood up in all directions. His head was throbbing wildly. His mouth was totally dry.

He flicked on the bedside light, blinking around at his bedroom: the old wooden dresser and the kid-sized desk he hadn’t been able to comfortably sit at since middle school, the Indians pennant on the wall. Everything was fine, he reminded himself. The worst thing had already happened.

Colby flopped back down onto the mattress, willing his chest to stop feeling like it was going to explode. He thought about calling Meg, but what the fuck was he going to tell her? My dad killed himself and I found him and now I have grisly dreams like some kind of Shakespearean sad sack? Great idea, Moran. What college-bound suburban princess wouldn’t want to hear that from her brand-new boyfriend? Totally sexy. Not pathetic at all.

He thought about changing the sheets, but that seemed like a lot of work for nothing. Instead, he got up and padded downstairs to the mudroom, where Tris was sleeping curled up like a doughnut in her fleecy purple bed.

“Hey,” he said, nudging her gently with one bare foot until she woke up, cracking one heavy eyelid and looking at him with benign annoyance. Colby kept his back turned to the door to the garage. “Come with me.”

Tris sighed noisily and went through an elaborate stretching routine, but in the end she followed him just like he’d known she would, trotting up the stairs and burrowing herself under his covers before immediately passing out again. Colby listened to her snore all night long.

Twenty-Five

Meg

The lock-in at the Franklin Institute was the following weekend, all forty-eight members of the Overbrook Day senior class peering through the giant telescope in the observatory and giving themselves crazy hair with the Van de Graaff generator, making out with each other in the darkened corners of the Viking exhibit. “Remember when your mom took us here when we were little?” Emily asked as they wandered down a carpeted hallway lined with photographs of the human brain.

Meg blinked. She did, actually, though it was hard to imagine her mom had ever been the kind of parent who voluntarily organized educational field trips to science centers over February vacation. “You got the barfs in the planetarium,” she said with a laugh. “She had to buy you a constellations T-shirt to change into, and then I threw a fit, so she bought me a matching one.”

“That was a great T-shirt,” Emily recalled a little wistfully. “Maybe I should work to incorporate more Day-Glo into my wardrobe at college.”

Meg laughed. Things seemed better between them lately; she thought Emily had mostly gotten over the whole Ohio thing, though Em hadn’t exactly made a secret of the fact that she still thought it was totally sketchy. She’d shown up to their lunch at the hipster salad place with a pair of matching Cornell baseball caps she’d ordered off the internet and overnighted to her house, presenting them to Meg with a dorky flourish. “Peace offering,” she’d announced grandly, then made them take a selfie right there in front of the organic lemonade dispenser. If Meg’s smile looked a tiny bit hollow when she looked at the picture on Snapchat later, maybe a little panicky, she didn’t think anyone could tell.

Still, things felt almost normal now as they spent way too long goofing off in the Isaac Newton exhibit with Adrienne and Mason, then wandered around taking selfies inside a two-story replica of the human heart. The four of them puzzled their way out of an intergalactic-themed escape room with seven minutes left to spare, laughing almost too hard to stand upright by the time the door finally opened. It was almost like it had been before she and Mason had broken up, Meg thought—or earlier than that, even. Before her mom and dad had split, back when she was sure of the world and of her place in it.

“Nicely done,” Mason said when they were finished, holding up his hand for Meg to high-five. Meg grinned.

“So, okay,” Emily said a little while later, after Mason and Adrienne went off to watch an IMAX movie with Javi and some of his track team friends and the two of them had snaked their way through the make-your-own-sundae line. Technically, all food was supposed to stay in the huge lunchroom reserved for the sticky almond-butter fingers of elementary school kids, but Em led Meg out the door toward a floating staircase overlooking a bank of enormous plateglass windows, the lights of the city glittering outside. “Can we talk about your fifty-five-year-old Ohio boyfriend for a second?”

“Oh my God!” Meg protested, setting her sundae down so hard she nearly lost her compostable spoon. “He’s not fifty-five!”

Emily wiggled her eyebrows. “Sure he’s not.”

Meg blew a breath out. “I’m serious,” she insisted. She wanted to explain that things with Colby felt different than they ever had with Mason, more important maybe, but she didn’t know exactly how. “I like him, okay? Like... a lot.”

That seemed to get Emily’s attention. “Oookay,” she said slowly, plucking a maraschino cherry out of her sundae. “Care to be a little more specific?”

“I don’t know!” Meg said, squirming a little, self-conscious. “He’s funny. He really loves his ugly dog. He makes me think about stuff differently. When I’m talking to him, it feels like I can kind of imagine the future, you know? And not even a future with him, necessarily—but, like, a future for myself. Does that make sense?”

Emily looked unconvinced. “I mean, sure,” she said, “as long as you don’t forget there’s nothing wrong with the future you already have picked out.”

The future you already have picked out, Meg amended silently, then immediately felt like a jerk. After all, Em was just being sweet.

“Anyway, you’ll get to judge for yourself,” she said finally, picking at her own rapidly melting sundae. “He’s coming here for my dad’s wedding.”

Emily’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Meg said, digging a trench in her chocolate ice cream. “Don’t be weird about it.”

“I’m not!” Emily protested. “I’m not. Did you ever get a dress, by the way?”

“I ordered two of them,” Meg said, “but I don’t know if either of them are actually winners.”

Emily nodded. “I was thinking you could borrow the one I wore to junior formal, if you wanted. That one of Piper’s with the twisty straps.”

“That would be perfect, actually.” Meg grinned.

Em smiled back. “You’re sure it’s okay that Mason comes?”

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