Page 7 of You Say It First

“Think about it,” Matt said, pushing himself off the counter and heading for the doorway. Colby didn’t say anything at all.

“Washing machine is leaking again,” his mom reported when she came downstairs in her work uniform a little while later, her cheeks pink with the blush she kept in the top drawer of the upstairs vanity. Colby’s mom was a waitress at the buffet in the casino thirty miles away, all black restaurant clogs and the smell of cigarette smoke wafting from her shoulder-length brown hair when she got home in the mornings. She used to do the bookkeeping for his dad’s business and a few other clients besides, and she still did some accounting stuff for Uncle Rick, but after everything happened last year, she’d needed something with health insurance. She brought extra pastries from the casino’s coffee shop home at the end of her shift. “Do you mind taking a look?”

Colby nodded. He was good at fixing things, usually; one of his earliest memories was watching his dad take apart a broken ceiling fan and put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle. He’d let Colby screw in the last bolt. “I think it just needs a new seal,” he told her now. “I can get one at work tomorrow.”

“Thanks, baby.” Colby’s mom smiled. “I didn’t have time to make dinner,” she said, “but there’s potpies in the freezer, or if you’re feeling ambitious we’ve got eggs.”

“Eggs sound great,” he said, ducking his head to kiss her on one round cheek. “Have a good shift.”

Once she was gone, Colby opened his laptop at the kitchen table and scrolled to the apartment he’d been looking at before work this morning. It was a few streets over from the place Matt was renting, and not as nice—just a studio with a sleeping alcove, a kitchen sink the size of a shoebox, and a stall shower so narrow he thought his shoulders would barely fit inside. Still, it got good light for a basement unit, and most important, it was cheap—with a few more weekends of overtime he’d be able to put down first month, last month, and security. And then he could be out on his own.

Colby hadn’t been planning to move out, not really—most of his friends still lived at home, so it wasn’t like anybody was dying to be his roommate, and the idea of leaving Tris made him feel a little sick—but the closer it got to the anniversary, the more it was starting to feel like he couldn’t stay here. The more it felt like the walls were closing in. He kept winding up at the door to the garage without remembering exactly how he’d gotten there; he hadn’t slept without a stupid nightmare in weeks. He kind of wanted to tell his mom she should sell the damn house altogether, except that sounded exactly like something Matt would say.

The landline rang as he was heading into the kitchen to see about dinner. They only had a landline to begin with because the bundle made cable cheaper, but his mom still insisted on calling it sometimes if she knew he was home and needed him to do something. He thought maybe she’d forgotten her purse. “Hello?”

“Hi,” said a bright, chipper voice on the other end. “Is this David Moran?”

Colby felt that punch to the gut same as he always did when somebody was looking for his dad. It happened less frequently now than it had in the first few months after he’d died, when all kinds of random people—the mailman, the receptionist at the vet’s office, the rich people whose gutters his dad cleaned every fall for extra Christmas money—had needed to be told. Colby almost missed it, in a messed-up kind of way. Sometimes it felt like everybody but him had forgotten.

“Uh, sorry,” he said now, pulling a scratched-up frying pan out of the cupboard. “He’s not available.”

“That’s okay,” the girl said, sounding completely undeterred. “Is there another adult in the home I could speak with?”

He thought one more time of Keith at the station the other night: you’re eighteen, Colby. “I’m an adult,” he heard himself say.

“Great!” the girl exclaimed. “This is Meg with WeCount. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with this evening?”

Colby made a face at his reflection in the microwave. Who even talked like that? She sounded about eleven years old. “This is Colby,” he said, opening the fridge and pulling out the Styrofoam carton of eggs and a stick of butter.

“Are you a registered voter, Colby?”

“Uh,” Colby said again, “nope.”

“Well, that’s okay!” Meg said, in a voice like possibly he’d just told her he didn’t know how to read or wasn’t toilet-trained. “WeCount is a nonpartisan organization that works to empower Americans through voter registration. Voting is an essential way to defend our democracy and build a nation with liberty and justice for all. I’d love to help you get registered so that you’re ready to make your voice heard on Election Day.”

Colby dug a couple of bread butts out of the bag on the counter, wondering how many times per night she had to read that little speech, or if possibly she’d committed it to memory. “I’ll pass, thanks. Have a good night.”

“Are you sure?” Meg asked quickly. “If you’ve got access to a computer, I can talk you through it right now over the phone. It’ll just take a couple of minutes.”

If he had access to a computer? Jesus Christ. Colby rolled his eyes. He could just picture this girl in New York or Boston or wherever the hell she was, imagining she was calling him at his one-room shack. “What about the electoral college?” Colby asked.

Meg from WeCount hesitated, just for a moment—surprised, probably, that he’d even had time to learn what the electoral college was, considering his busy schedule of chewing toothpicks and shooting beer cans off fence posts. “I’m sorry?” she asked. “What about it?”

“Well,” Colby said, turning the stove on and knocking a spoonful of butter into the pan, not entirely sure why he hadn’t already hung up on her. “I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the loser of the popular vote become president twice in the last two decades?”

“I mean, that’s technically true,” she admitted. “But that’s no reason not to—”

“It kind of seems like a great reason not to.” Colby cracked two eggs into the pan and tossed the shells into the garbage, starting to enjoy himself a little bit. “And if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s always government corruption, super PACs, and basically the whole entire history of Congress.”

“Well, the system isn’t perfect,” Meg allowed, a bit of an edge creeping into her voice, “but it’s our privilege and responsibility as citizens to engage with it. We need to vote like our rights depend on it, Colby—because they do.”

Ooh, a name drop. Colby wondered if that was in her manual or what. “Can I ask you a question, Meg?” he said. “Like, I’m not trying to be rude, and if you get some kind of bonus for me signing up, then you can go ahead and tell your boss I did it, but do you really think you’re changing the world here? Like, calling people up one by one and trying to sell them on their civic obligation?”

“Well, I certainly don’t think apathy is going to get us anywhere,” Meg snapped.

Colby felt his eyes narrow; she’d cut a little close to the bone. “Is that the problem?” he asked. “My apathy?”

“I’m sorry,” Meg said. “I didn’t mean—”

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