west on I-76, digging her sunglasses out of the cup holder and turning Janelle Monáe up on the stereo. Her heart thumped with anticipation to the beat of the drums. She peed at a rest stop near Allentown, pulling a bottle of kombucha out of the cooler and smiling at the clerk, a girl about her age who was reading a sci-fi novel at the counter. It occurred to Meg that a rest stop would be a great place to do a voter registration drive, and she made a mental note to mention it to Lillian at work next week.
It was another couple of hours before she crossed into Ohio; she passed power plants and farmland and a giant billboard that just said HELL IS REAL in huge black letters on a white background. She wanted to take a picture and text it to Emily, but then Emily would want to know what she was doing all the way out here.
Also, Emily had stolen her boyfriend.
Meg blew a breath out, making a face at herself even though there was no one to see it. God, she wasn’t Taylor Swift circa 2009. She knew that nobody could steal a boyfriend who didn’t want to be stolen, not to mention the fact that she was literally crossing state lines at this very moment to go see some other guy entirely. Still, the idea of Mason and Emily lying to her—the idea of them strategizing over the best way to let her down easy, like she couldn’t be trusted not to fall apart or make some big public scene—made her want to throw up all over the inside of the Prius. She was an adult. She could handle herself. She was fine.
Colby lived in a small town called Alma an hour or so outside Columbus. Meg pulled off the highway and followed the GPS with her bottom lip clamped between her teeth, passing a post office and a Dollar General and a strip mall with a CVS and a hair salon, her nerves getting thicker and more viscous as the landscape outside the window began to thin. Finally, she turned onto a quiet street in a residential neighborhood full of modest houses that looked like they’d all been built around the same time, pulling to a stop in front of a neat brick split-level with a wrought-iron screen over the front door. “You have arrived at your destination,” chirped the GPS.
Meg turned off the engine and sat in the driveway for a long moment, hands still curled around the wheel. For all the times she’d imagined meeting Colby in real life—and she had imagined it, daydreaming in the middle of calc class and lying alone in her bed late at night—for some reason the idea of marching up the front walk and ringing the bell felt impossible. It occurred to her all at once that there was still enough time to drive away.
Instead, she fished her phone from the cupholder before she could talk herself out of it, scrolling through her recents and pressing her thumb to Colby’s name. “Um,” she said when he answered, swallowing her heart back down into her chest where it belonged, “I think I’m here?”
“Oh!” Colby said. He sounded surprised, as if he hadn’t actually believed she was going to show up. “Okay. Um, hang on.”
The screen door screeched open a moment later, and a brown-and-black pit bull darted out, her stocky body trundling down the steps and across the lawn to where Meg was standing by the open driver’s-side door. “She’s friendly,” a deep voice called, even as the dog skidded to a stop in front of her, howling enthusiastically as it jumped.
Meg looked up and there was Colby: broader in the chest and shoulders than she’d been expecting, with shaggy brown hair and a vaguely suspicious expression. She’d spent the better part of last night trying on basically everything she owned before finally deciding on dark jeans and her very favorite T-shirt—another present from her mom’s cousin Jodie, a V-neck with a picture of a bespectacled fox and the slogan I don’t care for your misogyny—but Colby was barefoot in a pair of knee-length basketball shorts, like possibly she’d woken him up from a nap.
“Tris,” he said, grabbing the dog by the collar and setting her gently back down on all four paws. “Easy.”
“Tris?” Meg repeated, reaching down to scratch behind her velvety ears. “Like the girl from Divergent?”