wonder if this was what her dad had wished he’d been watching the whole entire time.
“You want ice cream?” Lisa asked as Meg’s dad settled onto the couch and scrolled through the Netflix menu with the casual comfort of someone who’d obviously spent a lot of time in this exact position. Miley, the little one, curled up beside him. “I’ve got vanilla and mango.”
Meg shook her head, knowing that by ice cream, Lisa meant some kind of hippie coconut concoction that cost twelve dollars a pint and would have been deeply appalling to Colby. Still, she smiled. “No thanks.” She liked Lisa fine, actually—she could tell Lisa was trying from the way she asked questions and saved magazine articles about voter registration and emailed links so Meg could pick out a new sheet set and comforter for the guest room in her house. I want you to feel at home here, she’d said the first time Meg had come over. Meg didn’t know how to tell her she hadn’t felt totally at home anywhere in a long, long time.
Now she wriggled around in the armchair she was perching in and dug her phone out of her pocket. What are you up to? she texted Emily. They’d hardly spoken at all since their fight the week before, though Meg had apologized about a hundred times. She didn’t actually regret not telling her about Colby, was the secret truth of it. Mostly what she regretted was getting caught.
Emily didn’t answer, predictably. Meg was trying to figure out if she should text again when her phone buzzed in her hand. Hey! Lillian had written. What are you doing right now?
Meg raised her eyebrows, surprised: Lillian had never texted about something that wasn’t WeCount-related. Watching Ben Affleck being emo in tights and wishing I could bail out of my future stepmom’s house, she typed. What about you?
Oh noooo, Lillian said. Is she awful?
Not at all, Meg reported. Which kind of makes it worse.
Lillian texted back an emoji with her hand over her face. Maja’s sister was supposed to come with us to a show at Union Transfer, but she has period cramps and doesn’t want to go. Any interest?
Meg looked across the room at her dad and Lisa holding hands on the sofa, at the kids and their coconut dessert. Give me twenty minutes.
She made it downtown in half an hour, parking her car in a spot she hoped was legal and hurrying around the corner to where Lillian and Maja were waiting outside the theater. “You made it!” Lillian said, looking sincerely happy Meg had shown. “What’d you tell your dad?”
Meg grinned guiltily. “Period cramps.”
“Nice.” Maja laughed, her bleached-white hair swishing. “I think my sister was probably faking, too.”
Meg had never heard of the band that was playing—she hadn’t even asked who it was before she’d agreed to come—but they turned out to be an all-female bluegrass ensemble, with fiddles and a standing bass and a tiny redhead wailing away on a washboard. Meg couldn’t wipe the grin off her face. It wasn’t the kind of thing she and Emily would have ever done—Emily hated city driving; she got stressed out by big crowds—but for the first time it occurred to her that she didn’t actually care what Emily would have thought.
“Can I ask you something?” she said to Lillian, filling a cup at the water station as Maja fought the crowd at the bar. “Where did you go to college?”
Lillian shook her head, looking surprised by the question. “I didn’t.”
“I—really?” Meg couldn’t quite keep the alarm out of her voice.
Lillian laughed. “Really,” she said, reaching out to take the can of craft cider Maja was proffering. “Thanks, babe.” She turned back to Meg. “I had a partial scholarship to Penn, actually. But even with the help, my loans would have been insane, and then I met this organizer at a rally in Rittenhouse Square, and it all just kind of . . .” She waved a hand. “I still might go at some point,” she finished, with the unconcerned smile of a person who really liked her life. “Or maybe not. Who knows?”
Meg took a deep breath, suddenly anxious, like even saying the words out loud was somehow disloyal to Emily, or to the future she’d assumed she would have. “Do you think it would be totally bonkers for me to take a year off and try to get a job on a campaign?”
“What?” Lillian shook her head, smiling curiously. “Why would