annoying, same as he had the other night when she’d first called him for WeCount, and for the first time all night he heard the edge in his own voice. “Because it sounds like what you’re saying is that you’ve never been in the position of having to work whatever shitty-paying job you can get.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Colby thought he could hear her breathing on the other end of the phone. He could see Tris’s spotted snout pressed against the window in the living room, her head turned quizzically to the side like she wanted to know what exactly was keeping him from coming in with her fucking dinner. He told himself one more time that he should probably hang up. “Look, Meg,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt. “I—”
“I didn’t call you to try and get you to go to the rally,” she interrupted, sounding a little breathless. “Just, like . . . for the record, or whatever.”
“Oh no?” he asked, reaching for the phone with one hand and opening the car door with the other. “Then why did you call?”
“I don’t know, Colby.” Then, more quietly: “To talk to you, I guess.”
That stopped him. Colby looked up at the lights in the windows of his mom’s house. He thought of the milk getting warm in the back seat. He imagined what the rest of the night would be like if he said goodbye to her right this second, and then he shut himself inside the car one more time.
“Okay,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “Then let’s talk.”
Eleven
Meg
Two weeks passed like that, spring blooming pink and green all over the neighborhood: Meg went to school. She hung out with Emily. And every couple of nights she got in bed and called Colby, staying on the phone for two or three hours at a stretch. They talked about all kinds of stuff: his buddy Micah’s fruitless quest to get YouTube famous; Annie Hernandez, who Meg kept trying to convince him to Google; how much he hated orange juice, which was a lot. She told him stuff she didn’t even know she still remembered until she said it out loud, like the late-term miscarriage her mom had when Meg was in first grade or the time she let Anika Cooper take the fall for breaking a vase at Emily’s house even though she’d done it herself.
“Little sociopath,” Colby teased, the sound of his laugh like a car on the highway.
“It’s not funny!” Meg protested. “I feel enormously guilty about it to this day. At junior leadership retreat last year, we had to write a letter to someone we’d wronged in our lives, and I picked her, but she moved away in middle school and doesn’t have social media, so I didn’t know where to send it.”
“You traumatized her,” Colby said gravely. “She’ll definitely never be YouTube famous, and it’s all because of you.”
“Oh my God, stop.”
“I’m sorry. I think you can let yourself off the hook now.”
“I never let myself off the hook for anything,” Meg said immediately.
“Yeah,” Colby said. “I kind of got that impression.” He paused. “Also. Let’s talk about how apparently you went to something called Junior Leadership Retreat.”
It was strange, talking to Colby. She didn’t feel like she needed to explain away the ugly parts of stories, or try to tell them in a more normal way to make them seem less weird, like she did when she was talking to Emily or Mason. One night they talked until the sky got light outside her bedroom window. One night they fell asleep on the phone. One night her mom passed out at, like, six thirty, and Colby taught her how to make Egg in a Frame for dinner—her phone on speaker on the counter, Meg using the last clean water glass to cut a careful hole in a slice of whole-wheat bread. It was almost like he was there.
She liked how his voice got low and raspy when he was tired. She liked how sweetly he talked about his mom. She liked the stories he told about the people he worked with—Janine, who ran the garden department with brutal ferocity, plus Joe and Ali, the guys he played Call of Duty with after his shift sometimes. His boss, Moira, was very into jigsaw puzzles—she called it puzzling, which Colby found hilarious—and was always telling him he needed a hobby of his own for maximum life enjoyment, so for three nights