Page 66 of You Say It First

“I’m just telling you what it says, Mom.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Her mom leaned back against the pillows. “Leave that,” she said, closing her eyes briefly. “I’ll do it in a little while.”

Meg frowned. For some reason, it felt important to complete this task as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it wasn’t like she was making any progress, so she set it down on the windowsill and tucked her chilly, clammy hands between her legs. Her mom had a broken ankle, a sprained wrist, and a bruise on her cheekbone that was already starting to blacken; they were watching her for signs of a concussion, though the doctor didn’t think it was severe. The guy they’d seen had been kind of an asshole, brisk and dismissive; he’d barely even looked at her mom, and Meg had felt herself bristle. This is my mother, she’d wanted to say. She hated him. She hated her mom. She hated herself most of all. She should have prevented this somehow, should have taken more precautions. She should have done more to make sure everyone was fine.

“I’m sorry,” her mom said now, opening her eyes again before reaching out and laying her good hand against Meg’s face. “Tonight was a disaster. I never wanted you to see me like this.”

I see you like this all the time, Meg thought reflexively. Tonight was just worse than usual. “I know” was all she said.

Her mom fell asleep not long after that, her breathing deep and even; Meg watched her for a while, wondering what on earth to do next. Every time she thought about what could have happened, her stomach turned over. She had no idea how to make sure it didn’t happen again.

She was looking at her phone to see if Colby had somehow called without her noticing—he had not—when there was a quiet knock at the door. She looked up and there was Lillian in a thin gray hoodie and high-tops, Phillies cap perched rakishly on her head. “Hey,” she said, holding up a Tupperware. “I got your text.”

Meg bit her lip to stop it from trembling. “I’m sorry,” she said, scrambling awkwardly to her feet. “I know it’s the middle of the night. I just kind of didn’t know who else to call.”

“No worries,” Lillian said, tucking the brim of her cap into the back pocket of her jeans. “Like I told you, I stay up late.”

“How’d you get them to let you in?” Meg asked, pulling her bag off the second chair so that Lillian could sit down and taking the Tupperware—lemon bars, she saw—and reaching out to squeeze Lillian’s hand. “It’s gotta be past visiting hours, right?”

Lillian shrugged. “My mom is an RN at Mercy,” she explained. “I speak nurse.”

Meg smiled. “I’m really, really glad you came.”

“Anytime.” She looked over at Meg’s mom, who was snoring quietly. The IV had already started to bruise her arm. She looked older than Meg thought of her as being, a line of silver showing at her roots where her hair dye had begun to grow out. “So what’s the plan?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, blowing a breath out. “I thought I could just keep everything spinning if I worked hard enough, you know? Like if I just convinced everybody that life was normal and okay and, like... proceeding as planned, then it would be.”

“You realize that’s not how life actually works,” Lillian pointed out.

“I mean sure, now,” Meg said, gesturing around at the hospital room, although truthfully, she’d known it wasn’t working for a long, long time now. After all, hadn’t that been the miracle of Colby to begin with? That he was the one person in her life who didn’t believe her sales pitch—and liked her anyway?

Well. At least for a little while.

“You gotta talk to your dad, Meg,” Lillian told her. “And not, like, at some amorphous down-the-road future time. You guys were in the emergency room tonight, you know what I’m saying? That makes this an emergency.”

Meg sighed again, reaching up to run her hands through her greasy, tangled hair. It was still sticky from all the hairspray they’d put in it at the salon, her fingertips catching on bobby pins. “It’s his literal wedding night,” she argued.

“And you’re his literal daughter.”

Meg leaned her head back for a moment, staring at the acoustic tile in the ceiling. Hadn’t Colby been telling her pretty much the same thing this whole time? “Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

“I should go,” Lillian said a little while later, getting to her feet and setting her baseball cap back on her head, artfully crooked. “Maja will be up in a couple of hours, and she needs the car to get to work. But text me if you need me, will you?”

“I will.” Meg hugged Lillian goodbye and got herself a cup of coffee from the vending machine. She watched middle-of-the-night infomercials on mute. She tried, and mostly failed, not to think about Colby, who was probably all the way across Pennsylvania by now, successfully not thinking about her. Even though she knew better, she couldn’t help picking up her phone and scrolling back in their texts: inside jokes and random pictures and good mornings, not to mention a surplus of emojis on her part that made her feel like a total dumbass now.

For what it’s worth, he’d written almost back at the very beginning, in response to some inane worry she’d had about the piddly results of the sock drive she’d been running at school for a homeless shelter in South Philly, I don’t actually think it always has to be your sole responsibility to make sure everything goes perfectly all the time.

Well.

Meg tugged at her bottom lip for a moment, imagining texting like he had that night after their fight in Ohio. Wondering if he’d made it back home. Then she glanced at her mom, sleeping openmouthed in the hospital bed, and knew there was another call she had to make first.

She got up and headed out into the hallway, clutching her phone hard enough to make her knuckles ache and sliding down the wall until she was sitting on the linoleum.

“Hey, Dad?” she said when he answered. “I need help.”

Thirty-Three

Colby

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