the way; she’d put a thick layer of her mom’s concealer on it in the bathroom this morning, but it must have rubbed off as she was trying on clothes.
Emily frowned, popping up on her tiptoes to get a better look at it. “Are you sure?”
“Who would I have gotten a hickey from?” Meg asked, cringing as her voice echoed through the dressing room, swatting Emily gently away. “I burned myself with the curling iron the other day.”
“Ugh, Piper did that,” Emily said. Piper was Emily’s older sister, who was in a sorority at Penn State. “She got this gnarly scab that filled with pus; it was totally disgusting.”
Meg grimaced. “Here,” she said, frowning at herself in the mirror and motioning down at the dress, a satiny sleeveless number that made her look like she was going to a seventh-grade formal. “Help me get out of this.”
Emily unhooked the tiny clasp in the back, pulling the finicky zipper down and stepping back so that Meg could wriggle out of it. “Hey, have you called Cornell yet to check on your application?” she asked as Meg pulled her jeans back on.
“Um,” Meg said, turning away as she reached for her T-shirt. Just say it, she ordered herself. Just tell her you don’t want to—
“I’m just getting really worried now, you know?” Emily continued, clipping the dress back onto its hanger. “It just feels so weird that you wouldn’t have—”
“I got in!” Meg blurted, yanking her T-shirt over her head with more force than was really necessary; she blinked in the light of the dressing room, shocking herself.
Emily whipped around to stare at her. “What? Oh my God, you did? When? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I—” Meg broke off. Oh, this was bad. This was not how she had wanted to do this. “Things were a little weird between us, so—”
“Meg! Oh my God!” Emily flung her arms around Meg’s shoulders, wrapping her in a Sephora-scented hug. “This is the best news I’ve ever heard.”
“I know,” Meg said, squeezing her eyes shut. “Me too.”
“You want to come over for dinner?” Emily asked as they headed out to the parking lot a little while later, the sun just starting to sag. “My mom’s making stuffed shells.”
“Sure,” Meg said, cheered by the thought of it. “I have to be at WeCount at seven, but I can just go straight there.” Emily’s house was nothing like hers—a midcentury ranch in a neighborhood full of midcentury ranches, always bustling, full of various people’s winter coats and sheet music and soccer cleats, but never actually messy. Meg loved it there: the lemon-scented hand soap and the detailed dry-erase calendar on the fridge and the fact that there was always some kind of homemade baked good in the big glass canister on the counter. Most of all she loved Emily’s mom, who was as sweet and predictable as the raspberry-lime seltzer she drank every night with dinner. You never had to worry about which version of her you were going to get.
They stopped for coffee on the way home, Emily insisting they needed iced campfire mochas to celebrate Meg’s acceptance letter. “Let me get it,” Emily argued, waving her wallet in protest as they cruised through the drive-thru lane. Meg shook her head and Emily grumbled good-naturedly, clearing a handful of junk out of the cup holder in order to set her coffee inside. “When were you in Ohio?” she asked.
Meg froze, whipping her head around to stare at the passenger seat. Emily was holding the receipt from her lunch with Colby, the address of the Subway franchise stamped in huge letters at the top.
“Meg? What were you doing in Ohio last weekend?” Her eyes narrowed. “Why were you—did you go see that guy? Oh my God, is the guy the one who gave you the hickey?”
Even through her panic, there was a part of Meg that was impressed Emily had figured it out so quickly. She hadn’t thought their friendship still had the mind-meld quality it used to, like back in middle school when their other friends hadn’t let them be on the same team for Celebrity because it wasn’t fair to everyone else.
“Em,” she began as she pulled out of the parking lot, trying to figure out how she was possibly going to explain this in a way that didn’t sound completely demented. “Look, I was going to talk to you about it—”
“Oh my God, are you kidding? That’s actually where you were?” Emily looked at