Meg wanted to ask if he liked it; she wanted to ask what he did there, and what kinds of people he worked with. She wanted to know if he wanted to do something else or if he was happy, and she wanted to hear him laugh one more time, but she knew she was only postponing the inevitable. “Have a good night, Colby,” she said quietly. “It was really nice talking to you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was really nice talking to you, too.”
Meg swallowed down a weird surge of panic just then: a feeling like an escape hatch closing in a movie, of being left behind in a dangerous place. Wait, she thought, and take me with you.
“Good night” was all she said.
Once she’d hung up, she turned off the lamp and stared at the moonlight making patterns on the ceiling. She didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Eight
Colby
Colby stopped at Bixby’s for coffee the following morning, plunking a dollar in the tip jar and smiling at the barista without letting himself think about why. He was exhausted—it had been damn near impossible to drag his ass out of bed and into the shower this morning—but it felt like a good kind of tired, like when he used to work with his dad on job sites in the summer and came home at the end of the day filthy and sore.
“You hit the lotto or something?” Moira asked when he got to work, coming up behind him with her backpack slung over one shoulder as he punched his employee code into the time clock. Moira was his shift supervisor, a tall skinny black woman in her thirties with long braids down her back.
“Huh?” Colby asked, blinking distractedly. He entered his number wrong, had to clear it out and start over.
Moira grinned. “You did, didn’t you?”
“What?” Colby shook his head, laughing a little bewilderedly. “No.”
“I don’t know, Colby,” Moira said, shaking her head and nudging him aside to get to the time clock. “I think it’s the first time since I met you that I’ve seen you in here without a scowl on your face that could take the bark off a tree.”
“That’s not—” Colby felt himself blush, though he wasn’t sure if it was because apparently he had a reputation for frowning all the time at work or because she’d noticed he wasn’t doing it on this particular morning. “I didn’t.”
“Sure. Sure. Just try not to forget us little people when you’re collecting all your money.” Moira winked. “Shift assignments in ten, Smiles.”
It was a busy morning, thankfully: a shipment of washing machines to unload that meant a full reorg of appliances, plus a long pick list of items to send to the online distribution facility outside Columbus. Colby was real careful to keep his head down. So fine, he’d had a good time talking to Meg from WeCount on the phone last night. Whatever. He was literally never going to hear from her again, so there was no point in getting worked up about it one way or the other.
When he got into the break room for his thirty, Moira and Jerry were staring at a notice on the bulletin board next to the bank of lockers, where people put up shift-switch requests and ads for roommates and the mandatory OSHA posters about unsafe working conditions. “What’s up?” Colby asked, opening his locker and pulling out his lunch.
“They’re cutting overtime,” Jerry reported.
“Wait.” Colby frowned, coming over to look at the flier. “All overtime?”
Moira nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”
“I love how they didn’t even talk to us about it,” Jerry said with a rueful smirk, his bald white head gleaming in the overhead lights. “Just stuck it up there for us to find.”
“They did it on purpose,” Moira cracked. “They all know you can’t read.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Jerry said, and the whole thing devolved into a pileup of good-natured insults, but Colby was hardly listening. Well, he guessed, so much for moving out by the beginning of the summer. At this rate, he’d probably be living with his mom until he was forty-five.
He ate the ham-and-cheese sandwich he’d packed that morning and got himself a Dr Pepper from the vending machine. Then he got up and went back to work.
Nine
Meg
Seniors could leave campus during their lunch periods, so Meg met up with Emily in the parking lot and they went to the hipster salad place near school. By