their twice-weekly huddle at the juice place with Javi and Adrienne.
Still, she’d been surprised when he wound up at their table at Emily’s sweet sixteen, shined up like a new penny in his suit and fancy shoes; Meg had actually gasped when she’d seen him, at the broadness of his shoulders and the sharp cut of his jaw. “You clean up nice, Mason Lee,” she’d told him, and he’d grinned. They’d argued gamely about Bernie Sanders for half an hour, then gone for a walk outside the country club, where he’d kissed her in front of a fountain lit up pink and blue and green. Emily had almost murdered them both for missing the dancing.
“Sure,” Meg said now, eighteen months later, more to avoid a confrontation than anything else. “We were friends first.”
“Okay,” Mason said, looking relieved. He hugged her then, the smell of castile soap and the sustainable detergent his mom used. Meg bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.
She waved goodbye and headed out into the chilly parking lot, throwing her backpack onto the passenger seat and zipping across town toward home. Her mom was still at work, and Meg pulled up to the curb in front of the house so she wouldn’t be blocked in when she needed to go to WeCount later. It used to be that her mom parked in the garage and her dad parked in the long, skinny driveway, which had led to a lot of shuffling and grumbling about who needed to move whose car when. Sometimes Meg wondered if they’d still be together if both of them had just agreed to park on the street.
Meg’s first memory was of her parents arguing, a fact she hadn’t realized was unusual until she’d mentioned it offhandedly to Emily at a sleepover in seventh grade and Emily had given her a super weird look, after which point she’d been careful not to mention it to anyone ever again. Still, when she thought of her parents, they were basically always going at it: The time on vacation in California when they’d fought about the rental car all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, the time her mom had thrown an entire thirteen-by-nine casserole dish of stuffing on the kitchen floor and stormed out of Thanksgiving. The time they’d gotten into a rager at Colonial Williamsburg, screaming bloody murder at each other while Meg read a Magic Tree House beside them and a man dressed as Benjamin Franklin pretended not to listen.
Meg knew it should have been a relief when they finally split up last winter—healthier for everyone, they’d reassured her, and she was pretty sure they were right—but instead it was like some very important part of her just . . . shut down. She’d sleepwalked through the rest of junior year like a zombie, bouncing between school and Em’s and Mason’s while her parents outsourced the worst of their fighting to a pair of slick, sharky lawyers. She’d snapped out of it, finally—she was fine, after all—but the truth was that even now, three months from graduation, sometimes it felt like she was still waiting to wake up.
Meg wandered through the big, echoey house and got herself a granola bar from the kitchen, chucking a pair of liquefied bananas into the trash. She was just chasing a couple of fruit flies out of the sink when she heard her mom’s key in the door.
“Hey,” she called, padding through the dark, cluttered dining room and out into the hallway. Meg still couldn’t get used to seeing her mom in the skirts and blouses she wore to work now, like she was dressed up in some kind of costume. Right when she’d first started interviewing, the two of them had gone to the J.Crew Factory Store and she’d bought the same top in four different prints. “How was your day?”
“Oh, you know,” her mom said, dumping her purse on the wooden bench near the doorway and kicking her sensible pumps to the side. A couple of months after Meg’s dad moved out, she’d gotten a job through a friend of a friend as a receptionist at one of those big old Colonial-era mansions that hosted weddings and reunions and the occasional Revolutionary War reenactment, answering the phone and handing out informational brochures and adding people’s addresses to the mailing list. It sounded totally boring, but Meg knew the truth was that her mom was lucky to get hired at all, since until last year