You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,40
a divorce.”
Her dad laughed awkwardly. “Well, hopefully this is happier,” he said, then took a deep breath. For a moment, he looked more uncertain than Meg ever thought of him as being—young, somehow. “Lisa and I are getting married.”
Meg was hallucinating—she must be. It was like what he was saying didn’t make sense in the English language, like he’d suddenly switched to Dutch without warning or recited a bit of poetry in Sanskrit. She only just barely caught herself before she laughed out loud.
“Wait, seriously?” she asked, the words coming out before she could think better of them. Then, schooling her expression into something more acceptable as she realized this wasn’t some kind of emphatically un-hilarious joke: “Um. That’s great!” Holy crap, she really had not thought he and Lisa were that serious. They’d only been officially dating for a year.
“Well, thanks,” her dad said, his cheeks pinking up a bit as he fussed with his napkin. “It means a lot to me that you think so, obviously. We’re thinking Memorial Day weekend, somewhere here in town.”
“Wow,” Meg said, blinking about a thousand times. “That’s soon.”
Her dad nodded. “Lisa’s kids leave to be with their dad in Chicago pretty soon after school lets out,” he explained. “And then you’ll be at college . . .”
Lisa’s kids, Meg remembered suddenly. Right. Her future stepsiblings. Lisa’s kids were fine; they were young and kind of boring, but not offensive or anything. She’d only met them once.
“Um,” she said, realizing abruptly that she was yanking her bottom lip so hard she was starting to hurt herself. She dropped her hands into her lap. “Does Mom know?”
“Not yet,” her dad admitted. “I was thinking maybe you might want to be the one to—”
“What? No,” Meg interrupted, suddenly panicked. “You have to tell her. And you can’t tell her that I knew first.”
“I—okay.” Her dad looked at her closely. “Meg, honey,” he said, and his voice was very quiet. “Is everything okay? With your mom, I mean?”
“Of course,” she said too quickly. “Everything’s fine.”
Her dad frowned. “You could tell me if it wasn’t.”
Meg shook her head. She knew what the right response was here—she didn’t want to be some stereotypical teenager who was an asshole about her dad’s remarriage—but there was something about it that felt so profoundly unfair to her, that her dad got this new life while her mom got a huge old house that needed renovating and a recycling bin full of empty wine bottles. And sure, they’d both made their choices, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that somehow the options weren’t the same for them both.
“Um,” she said, pushing her chair back too quickly. Suddenly, she was absolutely, horrifyingly sure that she was going to cry. “Excuse me.”
She stared at herself in the mirror in the cavernous, marble-tiled bathroom, her hair frizzing a little around her temples and the beginnings of a pimple on her chin. She sat down on a green velvet couch and dug her phone out of her pocket, scrolling through her messages until she got to Colby’s name. She hadn’t texted him back last night, trying to teach him some kind of lesson she wasn’t entirely sure how to articulate and that felt vaguely embarrassing now, twenty-four hours later, when it turned out he was the only person on Earth she actually had any interest in talking to.
She paused for a moment, thumb hovering, then changed her mind and flicked up to Emily’s name instead. She’d said something about going out with Adrienne and Mason and Javi tonight, Meg thought—she hadn’t really listened to the details, since she knew she had plans, but suddenly it felt imperative that she get out of this restaurant as soon as she possibly could. What are you guys doing? she keyed in.
Emily texted back almost right away: We’re at Cavelli’s, she said. How’s dad dinner?
Meg texted back a row of upside-down smiley emojis. I’m going to come meet you, okay?
A pause, longer this time, the three dots appearing and then disappearing twice before Emily responded. Yup, she said. See you soon!
Normally, their dorky dad/daughter schtick was to order whatever two desserts were biggest, then split them, but now that she’d located an escape route, even a giant slab of chocolate cake wasn’t enough to entice her to stay one minute longer than she had to. “I actually told some friends I’d meet them,” she explained when the waiter came by with the menu. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” her dad said, and she