Page 4 of You Say It First
Colby looked at him for a long moment, even. “Dude,” he said finally—mimicking Keith’s expression exactly, leaning his head back one more time. “I’m really not.”
In the end, Keith walked him out to the front of the station, handing him a plastic bin that contained his phone and wallet and watching as Colby zipped up his jacket. Outside the smeary Plexiglas windows, rain was coming down in icy-looking sheets. Colby gazed at the downpour for a moment, trying not to let his expression betray him. The walk home would probably take him until dawn.
Keith sighed. “Come on,” was all he said, pulling a set of keys out of his uniform pocket. Colby followed him wordlessly out to the car.
Three
Meg
As far as Meg was concerned, she and Mason had said everything they needed to say to each other in the parking lot outside Cavelli’s last night, but that afternoon she was in the south hallway putting up fliers for a student council sock drive when she turned around and there he was. “Um, hi,” she said, with a smile so bright and unwavering she might as well have used the freaking stapler to attach it to her face. “What’s up?”
“Hi yourself,” he said, this hey, stranger look in his eyes like they hadn’t just seen each other in AP Lit Comp, and in Spanish 4 before that. Overbrook Day was tiny, only around fifty people per grade; she and Mason had had basically the exact same schedule their entire lives. “Do you need help with those?”
Meg shook her head. “I’m all set.” This was going to be a problem about them being broken up, she realized—Mason was a homeroom rep for student council, just like he was one of the other founding members of Progressive Overbrook and on the steering committee for the spring carnival. It was part of what had made it so easy to date him.
“So, um,” he said, shifting his weight in his immaculate white Adidas. He’d loosened his uniform tie and was wearing the new glasses he’d gotten over spring break, which made him look annoyingly cute in a reporter-on-deadline sort of way. “I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”
“Oh God,” Meg said before she could stop herself, then waved her hand, fully aware of how dumb and squeaky her voice sounded. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m good!”
“Okay,” Mason said, his plush mouth turning down at the edges. “But I guess I just mean, if you’re ever not...” He trailed off, the you can always talk to me implicit.
“We were friends first, weren’t we?”
Meg grimaced. This was true, at least sort of—in a school as small as Overbrook, everyone was friends, or at the very least everyone knew each other. But the two of them had never really talked until the AP American class they’d had with Emily last year, when what had started as a study group for Ms. Lao’s notoriously impossible tests turned into their twice-weekly huddle at the juice place with Javi and Adrienne.
Still, she’d been surprised when he wound up at their table at Emily’s sweet sixteen, shined up like a new penny in his suit and fancy shoes; Meg had actually gasped when she’d seen him, at the broadness of his shoulders and the sharp cut of his jaw. “You clean up nice, Mason Lee,” she’d told him, and he’d grinned. They’d argued gamely about Bernie Sanders for half an hour, then gone for a walk outside the country club, where he’d kissed her in front of a fountain lit up pink and blue and green. Emily had almost murdered them both for missing the dancing.
“Sure,” Meg said now, eighteen months later, more to avoid a confrontation than anything else. “We were friends first.”
“Okay,” Mason said, looking relieved. He hugged her then, the smell of castile soap and the sustainable detergent his mom used. Meg bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.
She waved goodbye and headed out into the chilly parking lot, throwing her backpack onto the passenger seat and zipping across town toward home. Her mom was still at work, and Meg pulled up to the curb in front of the house so she wouldn’t be blocked in when she needed to go to WeCount later. It used to be that her mom parked in the garage and her dad parked in the long, skinny driveway, which had led to a lot of shuffling and grumbling about who needed to move whose car when. Sometimes Meg wondered if they’d still be together if both of them had just agreed to park on the street.
Meg’s first memory was of her parents arguing, a fact she hadn’t realized was unusual until she’d mentioned it offhandedly to Emily at a sleepover in seventh grade and Emily had given her a super weird look, after which point she’d been careful not to mention it to anyone ever again. Still, when she thought of her parents, they were basically always going at it: The time on vacation in California when they’d fought about the rental car all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, the time her mom had thrown an entire thirteen-by-nine casserole dish of stuffing on the kitchen floor and stormed out of Thanksgiving. The time they’d gotten into a rager at Colonial Williamsburg, screaming bloody murder at each other while Meg read a Magic Tree House beside them and a man dressed as Benjamin Franklin pretended not to listen.
Meg knew it should have been a relief when they finally split up last winter—healthier for everyone, they’d reassured her, and she was pretty sure they were right—but instead it was like some very important part of her just... shut down. She’d sleepwalked through the rest of junior year like a zombie, bouncing between school and Em’s and Mason’s while her parents outsourced the worst of their fighting to a pair of slick, sharky lawyers. She’d snapped out of it, finally—she was fine, after all—but the truth was that even now, three months from graduation, sometimes it felt like she was still waiting to wake up.
Meg wandered through the big, echoey house and got herself a granola bar from the kitchen, chucking a pair of liquefied bananas into the trash. She was just chasing a couple of fruit flies out of the sink when she heard her mom’s key in the door.
“Hey,” she called, padding through the dark, cluttered dining room and out into the hallway. Meg still couldn’t get used to seeing her mom in the skirts and blouses she wore to work now, like she was dressed up in some kind of costume. Right when she’d first started interviewing, the two of them had gone to the J.Crew Factory Store and she’d bought the same top in four different prints. “How was your day?”
“Oh, you know,” her mom said, dumping her purse on the wooden bench near the doorway and kicking her sensible pumps to the side. A couple of months after Meg’s dad moved out, she’d gotten a job through a friend of a friend as a receptionist at one of those big old Colonial-era mansions that hosted weddings and reunions and the occasional Revolutionary War reenactment, answering the phone and handing out informational brochures and adding people’s addresses to the mailing list. It sounded totally boring, but Meg knew the truth was that her mom was lucky to get hired at all, since until last year she hadn’t worked an outside job since the ’90s. Her dad’s career was managing Hal Collins, the famous folk singer. Her mom’s career was being his wife. “Not as bad as a chicken in my underwear.”
Meg smiled. Not as bad as a chicken in your underwear was an old joke in their family, though she didn’t actually know where it came from. That was one thing she missed about her parents being together—it was like the three of them had had a little civilization with a language all their own, and now there were never enough of them around at once to speak it properly.
They boiled a pot of spaghetti and dumped a jar of tomato sauce on top—neither one of them was going to be winning any cooking competitions any time soon, that was for sure—and carried their bowls past the dust-covered piano in the living room to the sagging couch in the den, her mom stopping by the fridge on the way to pour herself a big glass of white wine. Meg glanced in her direction as she set it down on the coffee table, then looked back at the TV. Both her parents had always been social drinkers, going out to long, boozy dinners in New York with Hal and his band, but lately it felt like her mom was hitting it kind of hard. At least, Meg thought she was. She couldn’t tell if her mom was actually doing it more or if it just seemed that way because she was doing it alone.
They settled down in front of a home renovation show, a cheerful husband and wife knocking down walls and installing brand-new cabinets. Meg couldn’t help glancing down at the grungy Persian rug in the den. Her dad had always been the more fastidious of her parents, and since he’d moved out a certain amount of chaos had started to creep in around the edges of their big, creaky old house, like vines climbing up over a white picket fence. Tumbleweeds of dust and hair drifted into the upstairs corners. The antique handles on the bathroom faucet had come loose. Water glasses collected on every available surface until they finally ran out altogether and had to wander from room to room rounding them up like wayward cattle. Leaning against the side of the sofa were a bunch of weird abstract paintings her mom had bought at an estate sale right after her dad had moved out, saying she was going to make a gallery wall where their wedding photos had hung, but she’d lost enthusiasm for the project halfway through.
“Maybe we should paint in here this summer,” Meg ventured now, licking a smear of tomato sauce off the side of her thumb and squinting at a brownish water stain on the ceiling above the window. There’d been a whole thing with ice dams over the winter, and her parents had gotten into a stalemate over whose job it was to pay for it. In the end, Meg wasn’t sure either one of them actually had.
“Oh, definitely,” her mom agreed now, holding her hand out for Meg’s empty bowl before standing up and heading into the kitchen. “We can go ahead and shiplap the bathroom while we’re at it.”
Well. So much for that idea, Meg guessed. “Whitewash the fireplace, perhaps.”
“Exactly.” Meg heard her setting the dishes in the sink, then a long pause and finally the sound of the fridge opening and closing. “Did you know your father and Lisa are in Palm Springs this weekend?” she asked as she came back into the living room, a fresh glass of wine in one hand and her phone in the other.
“He mentioned it, yeah,” Meg said cautiously. Lisa was her dad’s girlfriend, a lawyer for one of the universities in Philly. She was younger than him—not so young that it was objectively gross, Meg guessed, but young enough that it was her mom’s favorite thing to complain about. “Hal was doing some shows in LA.”