You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,5

he knew Jo was okay, he was back to being pissed—at Keith, at Jordan, at Micah. At himself most of all. “Don’t you want to play us all off each other or something? Get us to confess?”

Keith rolled his eyes. “I literally caught you up there, idiot. I don’t need confessions.” He shrugged. “And anyway, we’re not going to charge you.”

He said it in a voice like he was doing Colby a favor—which, as much as Colby hated to admit it, he probably was. “Really?” he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Why not?”

Keith scrubbed a hand over his face, a gesture Colby thought he’d probably gotten from Chicago P.D. or one of those other shows about weary but good-hearted law enforcement professionals that were basically just delivery mechanisms for Buick commercials. “You’re too old for this shit, Colby, you know that? You’re what, seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” Colby corrected, vaguely insulted. Keith had been in Colby’s brother Matt’s year in school, which meant he was only twenty-two himself now, maybe twenty-three depending on his birthday. There was a painful-looking spray of decidedly teenage acne along his chin. “How old are you?”

“Old enough not be climbing the water tower like a fucking bonehead,” Keith shot back. Then he sighed. “Look,” he said, “I know you guys have had a tough year.”

Colby felt his whole body stiffen, his bones in their sockets and the teeth in his head. “We’re fine,” he said immediately. “This isn’t—I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Keith looked unconvinced. “Dude, I know you. I knew your dad. You’re better than this.”

Colby looked at him for a long moment, even. “Dude,” he said finally—mimicking Keith’s expression exactly, leaning his head back one more time. “I’m really not.”

In the end, Keith walked him out to the front of the station, handing him a plastic bin that contained his phone and wallet and watching as Colby zipped up his jacket. Outside the smeary Plexiglas windows, rain was coming down in icy-looking sheets. Colby gazed at the downpour for a moment, trying not to let his expression betray him. The walk home would probably take him until dawn.

Keith sighed. “Come on,” was all he said, pulling a set of keys out of his uniform pocket. Colby followed him wordlessly out to the car.

Three

Meg

As far as Meg was concerned, she and Mason had said everything they needed to say to each other in the parking lot outside Cavelli’s last night, but that afternoon she was in the south hallway putting up fliers for a student council sock drive when she turned around and there he was. “Um, hi,” she said, with a smile so bright and unwavering she might as well have used the freaking stapler to attach it to her face. “What’s up?”

“Hi yourself,” he said, this hey, stranger look in his eyes like they hadn’t just seen each other in AP Lit Comp, and in Spanish 4 before that. Overbrook Day was tiny, only around fifty people per grade; she and Mason had had basically the exact same schedule their entire lives. “Do you need help with those?”

Meg shook her head. “I’m all set.” This was going to be a problem about them being broken up, she realized—Mason was a homeroom rep for student council, just like he was one of the other founding members of Progressive Overbrook and on the steering committee for the spring carnival. It was part of what had made it so easy to date him.

“So, um,” he said, shifting his weight in his immaculate white Adidas. He’d loosened his uniform tie and was wearing the new glasses he’d gotten over spring break, which made him look annoyingly cute in a reporter-on-deadline sort of way. “I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”

“Oh God,” Meg said before she could stop herself, then waved her hand, fully aware of how dumb and squeaky her voice sounded. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m good!”

“Okay,” Mason said, his plush mouth turning down at the edges. “But I guess I just mean, if you’re ever not . . .” He trailed off, the you can always talk to me implicit.

“We were friends first, weren’t we?”

Meg grimaced. This was true, at least sort of—in a school as small as Overbrook, everyone was friends, or at the very least everyone knew each other. But the two of them had never really talked until the AP American class they’d had with Emily last year, when what had started as a study group for Ms. Lao’s notoriously impossible tests turned into