sure she’d say yes. Still, the feeling pressed at the inside of his rib cage, buoyant: his girlfriend. Jesus Christ on a cracker. Colby smiled dumbly into the dark.
Twenty-Three
Meg
It was her dad’s turn to plan their next dinner, but instead of sending her a restaurant link like usual, he suggested dinner at Lisa’s house in Penn Wynne. “I think it would be nice for us all to spend some time together,” he said, which Meg felt kind of violated the spirit of their tradition, though it didn’t feel worth it to argue. “Um, sure,” she said. “Sounds great.”
Lisa lived in a tidy Cape Cod at the top of a hill with a swing set in the yard and a We Are All Welcome Here sign staked into the tulip bed. All the furniture was made of pale blond wood. Literally everything, from the glass canister of whole-wheat flour on the kitchen counter to the wire bins of art supplies on the bookshelves in the living room, had been labeled with a white paint pen in Lisa’s immaculate hand.
“So, Meg,” Lisa said, heaping more barley salad onto Meg’s dad’s plate. Lisa was a strict pescatarian, and her kids had a million different food allergies Meg could never keep track of. They all ate a lot of grilled mahi. “Your dad told me about Cornell! Did you send them your acceptance yet?”
Meg nodded. She’d done it the night before, in fact, at basically the absolute last second before the deadline, waiting to feel anything other than numb. “I did,” she said, the words tasting a little bit like sand in her mouth. She glanced at her dad across the table, and then she just blurted it out. “What do you think about me maybe taking a gap year?”
Her dad looked surprised. “A gap year?” he asked. “To do what?”
“I mean, I don’t know, exactly,” Meg lied, already kind of wishing she hadn’t said it out loud. She thought of the thrill that had built in her belly the other night as she’d filled out her application on the Annie Hernandez website, how she’d bumped up against the character limit as she frantically typed out her answer to the question Why do you want to work with Annie? In the end, though, she’d been too chicken to click submit. “An internship, maybe? Or I could probably pick up more hours at WeCount—”
“Don’t they have internships at Cornell?”
Meg hesitated. “No, of course they do, but—”
“Is this about your mother?” Her dad frowned, shooting a glance in Lisa’s direction. “Because if she’s giving you grief about money—”
“No, no, it isn’t that.” Meg shook her head, feeling something inside her deflate a little. Probably she was just being dumb. “Forget it,” she said, mustering a smile. “I’m just being silly. Cold feet about leaving for college, that’s all.”
“I want to look at colleges when we go to New Orleans,” Brent piped up from across the table.
“It’s a little soon for you to be looking at colleges,” Lisa said, even as Meg felt her eyebrows shoot up. It was the first she had heard of a trip to New Orleans, and she glanced across the table at her dad before she could quell the impulse. He looked like he wished the earth would open and swallow him whole.
“Their school year ends a couple of weeks before yours does,” he explained, looking embarrassed. “And Hal’s got a gig in Baton Rouge a couple of days later, so . . .” He trailed off.
“No, it’s fine,” Meg assured him. A trip to New Orleans with Lisa and her kids wasn’t even something she’d want to do. It was just strange to think about, she guessed, the four of them taking family pictures and getting beignets at Café du Monde and trooping through airport security together. She thought of all the vacations they’d taken with her mom, all the nights she’d fallen asleep against her dad’s shoulder in booths at restaurants. Lisa’s kids had extremely strict bedtimes.
After dinner, they all headed into the TV room to watch a movie. Lisa’s kids were eight and ten, and so the four of them had been working their way through every superhero franchise ever made. Meg thought there was something totally bizarre about her dad getting excited about Batman: he and her mom used to be total movie snobs, with a membership to the fine arts theater in Philly, which they talked about more than they actually used. It occurred to her to