Page 59 of You Say It First

Colby grimaced. “About what?”

“Him being late, I guess? Her being drunk? Does it matter?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I guess not.”

“The two of them just lost it in front of everybody,” Meg told him, shame spreading like a rash all over her body at the memory, hot and itchy. “Yelling, calling each other names, hurling these awful accusations back and forth. And I was begging them to be quiet, and all these little grade school kids were staring at them, and everybody else—my friends, my friends’ parents, every teacher I’ve ever had—was trying to act like they didn’t notice.” She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. “Finally, the principal had to ask them to take it off school grounds.”

“Woof.” Colby rubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“What did Emily say?”

“We never talked about it,” Meg admitted.

“Wait, seriously?” Colby’s eyes were two full moons. “Why not?”

“She never brought it up,” she said with a shrug. “And, like, I definitely wasn’t going to. And then my parents decided to split up over the holidays, and she was really great to me while that was happening.” Meg blew a breath out. “But it was just, like... all of a sudden I realized how I must look to everybody else, you know? How my family must look. That what I thought was normal, all that fighting... wasn’t.”

She lifted her face to look at him. “I told myself that I was going to do everything I could never to be part of another scene like that.” She heard the challenge in her own voice. “And so far I haven’t been.”

Colby raised his eyebrows. “Sounds exhausting.”

“Sometimes.” Meg smiled. “Lucky for me, I get to blow off steam arguing with you.”

“You do, huh?”

“Uh-huh.” She sighed again, then heaved herself up. They’d been gone too long already, and disappearing was almost as noticeable as causing a fuss. “I like Lisa, for the record,” she clarified as they headed back around the corner, tucking her hair behind her ears and fanning her face a little bit so that nobody inside would be able to tell she’d been crying. “I mean, like is the wrong word, maybe. She’s a huge nerd—”

“She’s a huge nerd,” Colby agreed with a grin.

Meg laughed. “But the point is, she’s not a wicked witch or anything. So what’s my problem?”

“She’s not your actual mom,” Colby said with a shrug, no hesitation at all. “And no matter how fine she is, it’s not going to be the same as your family together and whole.”

Meg stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, putting a hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words tripping over one another in their rush to get out of her mouth. “God, I must sound so spoiled to you, complaining about all this stuff when both my parents are—” She broke off.

Colby shrugged. “It’s not a contest,” he said easily, though she thought he might have flinched.

You could talk to me about it, she wanted to tell him. You could tell me the rest of the truth. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she said instead.

Colby grinned at that. “I’m really glad I’m here, too.”

She took his hand as they went back into the restaurant, the zing of the contact all the way up her arm and the skin of her back and stomach prickling inside her clothes. Having him here in person, his actual physical body beside her, was half-pleasurable and half-maddening, like the moment before a sneeze.

“There you are,” her dad said, slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing. Meg only smiled in reply.

They were just finishing dessert when her phone dinged in her purse. So?? Emily said. Is he here???

Meg took a deep breath and looked across the table at Colby. “Okay,” she said, “you want to meet my friends?”

Twenty-Eight

Meg

Em and Mason were hanging out with a bunch of their friends at Liberty Park, a big outdoor mall with a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a million shops and restaurants. “Listen,” Meg said, taking Colby’s hand as they strolled down a fake-cobblestone walkway hung with old-fashioned string lights and crowded with couples on dates and clusters of college kids already home for the summer, “just so you know, Em can be kind of a tough crowd.”

Colby glanced at her sidelong, lips twisting. “You know,” he said, “I kind of got that impression.”

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