Friend of my brother’s, he said, leaving out the part about the water tower. He wants me to apply for some job. At the very last minute, he pasted in the link to Doug’s Instagram page.
He meant to put the car in drive and head out, but instead he sat where he was with his phone in his hand like a moron, waiting for her to text back. And she did, the phone vibrating in his hand a couple of minutes later: This is so cool! You know how to do stuff like this?
A little, Colby typed, hesitating for a moment. The truth was he hadn’t done any kind of fancy work like that since his dad had died—or before that, he guessed, since at the end there his dad hadn’t been doing much of it, either. Been a while.
Are you going to apply?
Colby chewed the inside of his cheek. Probably not, he admitted.
Why not?
Well. Colby stared at the screen, debating. He was still trying to figure out how to answer when the phone buzzed again, more insistently this time: holy shit, she was calling.
“Um,” he said, tapping the button to answer and clearing his throat a little, trying to sound like a person whose heart wasn’t doing a tricky acrobatic thing inside his chest. “Hey.”
“Hi,” she said, casual as anything. “I figured this was easier than texting.”
Colby laughed a little. “Makes sense,” he said, though it didn’t really. Already this was the most he’d ever talked on the phone with someone in his entire life.
Meg seemed unbothered. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m very sensible. So who’s this guy?”
Colby tilted his head back as he told her, the setting sun making patterns on the insides of his eyelids. He wondered again what she looked like, but as soon as he had that thought, he opened his eyes and reminded himself to stop being such a loser.
“So, okay,” she said when he was finished explaining. “What’s the problem, exactly?”
“Huh?” Colby frowned, picking idly at a hole in the worn fabric of the driver’s seat. This car had been Matt’s before it became his, and it had been somebody else’s before that. “I mean, there’s no problem. It just doesn’t seem worth it, that’s all.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he said—looking up suddenly, caught a little short. “Like, in a perfect world, sure.”
“Well, what’s keeping this world from being perfect?” Then she stopped, as if she’d heard herself and realized how absolutely ridiculous she sounded. “Okay, don’t answer that. I just mean, what’s stopping you in this particular situation?”
Colby wondered what it would be like to live in this girl’s universe, where apparently everything followed a logical sequence of events. “This job just probably isn’t a real thing, that’s all. So there’s no point in getting worked up about it, putting all this energy into trying to make it happen when it’s probably not going to happen anyway.”
“Energy being, making a phone call and talking to this guy who might have a cool job for you?”
“Pretty much,” Colby said, though he knew she was probably being sarcastic. “Because there’s obviously going to be a catch somewhere, right? Either he’s going to want somebody with more experience, or the job doesn’t actually pay, or the whole thing is a cover-up and they’re going to sell me into sex slavery as soon as I walk in the door.”
“Oh, that’s your worry?” Meg asked. He could hear rolling her eyes. “Being sold into sex slavery?”
“Well, it sounds stupid when you say it in that tone of voice,” he said, prickling a bit. He’d been kidding, mostly. “But kind of.”
“So, like, nobody can pull the rug out from under you if you decide there’s no rug to begin with?”
Colby blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone put it so succinctly before. He didn’t actually like it very much. Shit, what was he even doing, sitting here like a chump spilling his guts to a total stranger? He thought about telling her he had to go—he meant to tell her he had to go—but in the end he just set the phone on speaker on the dashboard and put the car in reverse. “Uh, yeah,” he admitted, pulling out of the parking lot. “Basically.”
“Is that your entire life philosophy?”
Jesus Christ, this girl. “Who are you, my therapist?”
“Do you have a therapist?”
Colby snorted. “No.”
“Why is that funny?” Meg asked, sounding sincerely curious. “Are you one of those guys who’s, like, too manly for