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.