Page 6 of You Say It First

Then, her thumb moving seemingly all on its own: I haven’t heard yet!

WHAT! Em’s reply was instant. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE. Then, a second later: Spam filter???

Meg looked at the screen for another moment, then down at the next name on her call sheet: David Moran from Alma, Ohio. She dropped her cell into her bag and got back to work.

Four

Colby

The sun was just starting to set when Colby got done at the warehouse that afternoon, tossing his orange apron into his locker and sliding his card to clock out. He’d finally been at Home Depot long enough that they’d let him switch over to days, which meant he was back on the same schedule as the rest of the world, though there was a part of him that missed being awake when everyone else was sleeping, driving home as the dawn was seeping up in blues and pinks and reds.

He heard the shower running upstairs when he got inside the house: his mom getting ready for her own night shift at the casino. Matt was in the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of orange juice. The fact that he was a person who drank orange juice at all hours of the day was only one of the many reasons his brother was a douchebag.

“What are you doing here?” Colby asked, dropping his backpack on the floor in the tiny, linoleum-tiled mudroom and bending down to scratch Tris behind her velvety ears. Matt lived by himself in an apartment complex near the Giant Eagle, which made Colby desperately jealous even though he’d never in a million years say it out loud.

“Hello to you, too,” Matt said. He was wearing khaki pants and a bright blue golf shirt, like he was a teller at a bank chain on a summer Friday. “I had paperwork for Mom to fill out.”

“What kind of paperwork?”

“Insurance stuff,” Matt said mysteriously. Colby made a face. The insurance company had refused to pay out after their dad died, and Uncle Rick had convinced their mom to contest the decision, and now almost a full year later it had turned into this incredibly long, drawn-out train wreck involving lawyers and depositions and endless, endless paperwork. Mostly, it just made Colby tired. He would have told them all to forget about it, not that anyone had asked him, except it wasn’t like they didn’t need the money.

His mom needed it, anyway. His Uncle Rick was doing just fine.

“Heard about your little adventure,” Matt said now, finishing his orange juice and rinsing his glass before putting it in the dishwasher. Their mom was fucking maniacal about kitchen cleanliness. “The water tower, dude, seriously? What are you, like, twelve years old?”

“Fuck you,” Colby said, though he’d basically been thinking the same exact thing in the moments before Keith showed up. It occurred to him to wonder if maybe there weren’t any forms to fill out at all and Matt had just come here to give him a hard time about getting arrested. “Did you tell Mom?”

“No,” Matt said, and Colby relaxed again. “But you should, before it gets back to her some other way.”

“I’ll take that under consideration,” Colby said, picking up Tris’s metal bowl and heading over to the giant Rubbermaid of kibble by the back door.

“You should.” Matt leaned against the counter. “Look,” he said, “do you want some advice?”

“Nope,” Colby replied pleasantly, dumping a cup of food into the bowl and setting it back down on her place mat, “but that’s never stopped you before.”

“You should stop hanging around with those dudes. Micah and Jordan and whoever else.”

Colby straightened up again, watching as Tris buried her blocky, brindled face in her dinner. “I should, huh?”

“You should. And I know Dad’s not here to talk to you about influences or stuff like that—”

“Oh my God.”

“Can you just forget whatever sullen teenager routine you’re doing for one second and listen to me?” Matt frowned. “Rick keeps asking about you, is the other thing, which—”

Colby snorted. “Good for Rick.”

“Is this really how you want to spend the next twenty years?” Matt demanded, tipping his head back against the ancient cabinets with his arms and ankles crossed. “Working the Home Depot stockroom and hanging out with a bunch of burnouts and getting picked up by the county sheriff?”

Colby’s face warmed. “Well, I don’t want to spend it working for you.”

“You wouldn’t have to work for me,” Matt said—looking almost earnest now, the same way Keith had the other night. I know you guys have had a tough year, Jesus Christ. “You could go get your supervisor’s license, be running your own construction projects inside a year—”

“I’m not going to work for Rick, either. I don’t know how you can, after—”

“Don’t.” Matt’s voice was a warning.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Tris chomped away at her food. For one traitorous second, Colby let himself think about it: The garage full of tools, old ones from the ’90s that his dad had taken perfect care of. A job that was more than just moving boxes all day long. Then he shoved it out of his mind. What was he going to do, help his Uncle Rick put up forty identical town houses with ugly granite countertops and walls so thin you could practically see through them? His dad would roll over in his grave.