Page 9 of You Say It First

Good, Emily said. The cause of democracy needs you. Meet at Sbux before school? And text me IMMEDIATELY if you hear from admissions!

Meg hesitated, debating—God, what was wrong with her? What was she waiting for, exactly?—before keying in a thumbs-up emoji and setting her phone facedown on the nightstand. She sneaked one more look at Colby’s picture before she turned off the light.

Six

Colby

Colby listened to Meg from WeCount’s message standing in the living room while he ate his second attempt at scrambled eggs, plus two pieces of toast with jelly and then a third piece of bread he just ate plain. He stood there for another minute once the machine beeped, then went back and played the voice mail again—he was waiting for that flood of satisfaction to hit him, like when he came up with the perfect comeback to whatever idiotic thing Matt was saying, but to his surprise he just felt like kind of a dick.

He’d been hard on her, he guessed, holding out his crumby plate for Tris to lick clean before he stuck it in the dishwasher.

She’d definitely deserved it. But still.

He rinsed out the sink and wiped the counter, then went back over to the ancient phone mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator, his finger hovering over the button to delete the message. Then, without knowing quite why, he hit the button to save instead. He told himself to stop thinking about it, and he did, mostly. Then he went upstairs to bed and fell asleep.

His mom had stopped asking him to go to church with her, but she did still like for him to show up at Rick and Alicia’s for lunch periodically, so on Sunday Colby put on an ugly blue dress shirt his mom had bought for him at Costco and drove over. His Uncle Rick lived in Cedarville, in the nicest McMansion in a development of McMansions he’d built himself. Rick and Colby’s dad had been in business together when Colby was small, but they were perpetually fighting about the direction of the company—“Rick wanted to make money, and Dad didn’t” was how Matt had explained it to him once—and after everything happened with the Paradise project when Colby was in high school, Rick had bought his dad out and taken Matt with him. Now Rick’s face was plastered on billboards all over the county alongside ads for model homes now open. Micah kept saying they should climb up there and draw a giant dick on his face.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Alicia said when she opened the door, her thick yellow hair bouncing like something out of a shampoo commercial. Alicia sold essential oils over the internet, lavender and tea tree and something called Thieves that was supposed to keep your house clean of bacteria or evil spirits, Colby wasn’t entirely sure. He thought the name probably said it all. Before this, Alicia used to sell leggings, and before that, she’d sold some system that involved wrapping yourself in Saran for weight loss, which she’d actually convinced his mother to buy. Colby had come home and caught her doing it once and he could tell she was embarrassed, so he’d wrapped himself in it, too. In the end, they’d had a pretty good laugh about the whole thing, the two of them standing in the kitchen all mummified in plastic, passing a bag of sour cream and onion chips back and forth.

Still, he kind of hated Alicia’s guts.

Now he toed off his sneakers per the house rules and headed into the dining room, where his mom and Matt were already sitting at the fake-antique farm table. On the wall was a verse from 1 Corinthians painted in a wedding invitation font on a piece of driftwood, even though they didn’t live anywhere near the water, plus a picture of Rick and Alicia and their kids sitting on the front porch of the house all wearing jeans and white T-shirts, their golden retriever, Lucky, at their side. As far as Colby was concerned, Lucky was the only member of the entire family who wasn’t an idiot, and even he licked his own butt pretty much constantly.

“So, Colby,” Rick said brightly, passing a platter of ham across the table while the twins, Mykala and Mykenzie, dutifully shoveled green beans into their nine-year-old mouths. “How’s big-box life?” He always said it like that when he asked Colby about work, like installing IKEA cabinets was so much better than driving a forklift. Colby was actually the youngest guy in the warehouse trained to handle the thing, which felt like an extremely dumb thing to be proud of but was also the truth.

“Oh, you know,” he said now, taking a heaping mound of potatoes, then another for good measure. “The usual. Hanging around with a bunch of losers. Wasting my bright young mind.”

“Colby,” his mother murmured, taking a sip of her lemonade. Matt snorted an irritated breath. Rick forked some green beans onto his plate, unruffled.

“You know, son,” he said conversationally, “if I’d had the week you had, I don’t know that I’d be joking quite so cavalierly about the company I kept.”

“What?” His mom’s gaze snapped up, darting from Rick to Colby and back again. “Why? What does that mean?”

Colby glared across the table at Matt. “It’s nothing,” he promised, trying to keep his voice even. “Rick’s just kidding around.”

“I am, I am,” Rick said, smiling a megachurch-pastor smile. “And Colby knows I just give him a hard time because I want what’s best for him. Which is why he’s going to come work for me one of these days, right, Colby?”

“One of these days,” Colby lied, feeling a muscle in his jaw twitch.

“Who wants applesauce?” Alicia asked.

They ate in relative peace after that, polite conversation and the sound of forks scraping china. Finally, Lucky whined at the door. “I’ll take him,” Colby said, shoving his chair out too quickly and heading out into the carefully manicured backyard. He looked out at the spindly crabapple tree and the rosebushes still wrapped in burlap for the winter. Everything in this entire neighborhood, plants especially, looked like something out of a little kid’s pop-up book, like it all folded down at night to go to sleep.

He threw a stick down toward the artificial lake, watching as Lucky scooped it up and made absolutely no effort to return it, careening in the opposite direction across the grass. Colby sighed and sat down on the steps of the deck, gazing up at the blue-gray sky and thinking about Meg from WeCount. He hadn’t been able to get that stupid phone call out of his head since the other night, which was ridiculous—after all, who got their panties in a wad over being rude to a telemarketer? She’d probably forgotten about the entire conversation the moment she’d hung up the phone. He should do the same instead of playing it over and over in his mind like some kind of creepy weirdo. What the hell was he supposed to do, call her back?

Not that it mattered, but she’d sounded pretty.

“Come on, buddy,” he said when Lucky finally came trotting back, drool hanging in strings from his furry mouth and the stick nowhere in sight. “You ready?”

Jordan and Micah wanted to hang out that night, so he met them in the parking lot of a three-story office building plunked all by itself like a spaceship on the side of Route 4. It had been built specifically to house the regional sales office of a medical supply company back when Colby was a kid, but the OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE sign had been there ever since, the lot getting more and more overgrown until someone, Colby didn’t know who, periodically came and cut the plants back. One of the plate-glass windows was boarded over. The fountain in front had been drained. Micah said he’d been inside once, that he’d fucked a girl in there back when they were fifteen, but Colby thought he was mostly full of shit—about the breaking in and the fucking both.

Colby sat on the curb with a Bud Light in one hand, shielded from the road by an overgrown thicket of weeds as tall as he was, the rest of them half watching as Micah turned idle backflips in the empty fountain. As a kid, Micah had done gymnastics until way after it was socially acceptable, which meant he’d gotten called gay pretty much constantly until graduation, but it also meant he could do things like that: launch himself into the air and throw his weight around without falling over and bashing his skull open like a cantaloupe. “He only does it because he wants attention,” Colby had complained to Joanna once, and Jo had shrugged and said, “Everybody wants attention,” in a way Colby had thought about for a long time.

“You okay, Colby Moran?” she called now, from her perch in the open hatchback of her vanilla-smelling station wagon, her hair like a blond halo in the light from the trunk. She’d showed up twenty minutes ago with two of her friends, one of whom was currently trying to execute a headstand of her own for Jordan’s benefit. The other one hadn’t looked up from her phone the whole time.

“I’m good,” Colby promised, heaving himself up off the pavement and heading over to sit beside her. She smelled slightly mysterious, like baby powder and girl. Joanna had dated some dude from Ohio State until this past winter, when somebody had sent her a video of him at a party triple kissing two sorority sisters while a bunch of other people cheered him on like he was doing a keg stand, and that had been the end of that. Colby had not been sorry to see him go.

Now they sat in companionable silence for a moment, drinking their beers and listening to Jordan and Micah argue over whether it was possible to eat seven saltines in a minute. “You want to see me do it right now?” Jordan was asking. “Because we can drive to BP and get a box of them.”

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