the time they got there and waited in line, they usually only had ten minutes to shovel their salads into their mouths, but they went anyway because Emily couldn’t get enough of the lime-cilantro dressing and it didn’t seem like something worth arguing about, even though Meg was always a tiny bit stressed about getting back before the bell.
“Did you see that new bookstore in Montco is doing Friday open-mic nights?” she asked now. “You want to go this week maybe?”
Emily glanced up from whoever she was texting, raised an eyebrow. “Why?” she asked. “You hoping to find an audience for your political slam poetry?”
“Rude.” Meg pelted her with a cherry tomato, laughing. “I don’t write political slam poetry.”
“Sure, sure.” Emily shook her head. “I can’t,” she said, setting her phone down and shivering a little inside her Patagonia. It was warm enough to eat outside on the patio, but barely. “I have to help my mom with something.”
“Mysterious,” Meg teased.
“It’s not,” Emily said—a little sharply, which was weird. “It was just a computer thing for one of her classes.”
“Oh.” Meg nodded. “Okay.” Emily’s mom was getting her master’s in social work at Temple, driving into the city two nights a week for seminars and working on research projects at the kitchen table. Meg had asked her own mom if she’d ever thought about going back to school—Mrs. Hurd really liked it, and she’d made all these other middle-aged lady friends and some younger ones besides—but Meg’s mom had said she hadn’t even liked college the first time, and that had been the end of that. “That’s cool.”
She poked at her kale Caesar for a moment, pushing the Parmesan crisps to the side for very last and knowing that the only person actually acting strange here was her. It felt like she’d betrayed Emily somehow by telling Colby about Cornell, even though she knew that was silly. She was going to tell Emily about Cornell. She was going to go to Cornell.
She just needed a little bit of time to get her head in the game first.
“So, okay,” she blurted before she could talk herself out of it, sitting back in her wobbly metal patio chair—wanting to offer Emily something, even if it wasn’t the thing she knew Em was waiting to hear. “Do you remember the other night when I texted you about that guy who hung up on me at work?”
“Huh?” Emily glanced at her phone one more time before turning it facedown on the table. “Oh. Yeah.”
“He called me back.”
“He did what?” Emily’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh my God, how did he get your number? That’s so creepy.”
“No, no,” Meg said, holding her hands up and shaking her head quickly. “I mean, I gave him my number.”
“What?” Emily repeated. “Why?”
“Because I felt so bad? I don’t know.” Meg felt her cheeks getting warm. “It just kind of came out. But what I’m trying to tell you is we wound up talking for, like, a million hours.”
“Seriously?” Emily raised her eyebrows. “About what?”
Meg shrugged. “All kinds of stuff. I don’t know.” Suddenly, she felt embarrassed about it, like telling the story out loud had broken some kind of spell. “Our jobs. Vacations. What we watch on TV.”
“What does he watch on TV?”
“That’s not the point!” Meg blew a breath out. “It was just, like, this super long, intense phone conversation, that’s all. I’ve definitely never talked that way to a stranger before.” She thought about it for a moment, the back of her neck getting dumbly warm as she remembered the sound of his laugh. “I guess it felt like I could talk to him that way because he was a stranger, you know? Like: judgment-free zone, or something.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” Emily snapped the lid back on her empty salad bowl. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, man. I mean, I love you, obviously. But that’s, like . . . kind of super sketchy, no?”
Meg blinked. “Thanks a lot,” she said, holding her hand out for Emily’s container and getting up to toss them both in the bin. She knew it was silly to feel protective of a person she’d had two conversations with—to feel protective of the person she’d been on the phone—but she couldn’t help it. She wished she hadn’t said anything to begin with.
“I’m sorry!” Emily said, rattling the ice in her straw-free cup of raspberry lemonade. “I’m not trying to yuck your yum, I just—who even is this