easier on you. But I don’t want things between him and me to poison your relationship with him. He’s still your father.”
Meg nodded. “I know,” she said. “You’re right.”
Neither of them said anything, the TV screen flickering quietly. Meg looked at the paintings leaning against the wall. “We should hang those this week,” she blurted out before she knew she was going to say it.
Her mom looked surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” she said without sarcasm or argument. “You’re right.”
Meg got up and headed to bed not long after that. “Night,” she said, bending down to press her cheek against her mom’s. She smelled like the same perfume she’d worn since Meg was a little kid.
“You know,” her mom said when Meg was almost to the doorway, hitting mute on the remote and looking thoughtfully around the room, “maybe we should give this whole place a bit of spring cleaning.”
Meg raised her eyebrows, her heart doing a tricky, hopeful thing inside her chest. “Really?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“Why not?” her mom said, smiling a little bit crookedly. “It’s starting to look like Grey Gardens in here. Next thing you know, both of us will be wearing head scarves and speaking in fake British accents.”
Meg laughed at that. Her mom was funny, she remembered suddenly; she’d forgotten that at some point in the last couple of months. “That’s a brilliant idea, dahling,” she said with a grin.
Upstairs, she plugged her phone in and got into bed, then pulled it off the charger again and scrolled down to Emily’s name. I really am sorry, she typed. I should have been honest with you. I knew you thought it was weird, that’s all.
She was about to set the phone back down when three dots showed up on Emily’s end. Meg breathed in, holding the air in her lungs until the reply came through: It IS weird, Emily had written. But I still wish you’d told me.
I know. I’ll tell you everything, I promise.
Hipster salad place on Monday?
Relief seeped through her. Of course, she texted back.
We have to be able to talk about these things, you know? Emily wrote. Then, along with the twin girls emoji: Roomie.
Meg squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. You and me, she promised, then hit send and turned out the light.
She lay there for a long time, staring at the familiar shadows on her ceiling—thinking of Emily and Lillian and Mason and Colby, of the life she’d always assumed she had ahead of her and the one she was terrified—and exhilarated—to realize she wanted instead. If you want to change the world, go out and change it, Colby had told her. She just didn’t know if it was possible to do that without causing a little bit of a scene.
Finally, Meg turned the light back on and got out of bed, padding barefoot over to her laptop and pulling up Annie Hernandez’s website one more time. It didn’t take her long to pull up the text she’d written about herself and why she wanted to work on the campaign. She took a deep breath and clicked submit.
Twenty-Four
Colby
“Do you know anything about headlamps?” Meg asked when Colby called her on Saturday. She was in the Flashlights and Lanterns aisle at REI, she’d reported when she picked up, sounding pleased with herself. “I need one for next weekend, but there are, like, a surprising variety of them here.”
“You need one why, exactly?” Colby asked with a laugh. It was his lunch break at the warehouse, so he was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the door open, eating his usual ham-and-cheese sandwich. A couple of sparrows fought over the remains of a bag of chips across the concrete. “What, is your prom, like, a wilderness survival theme or something?”
“Overbrook doesn’t do a prom,” Meg replied primly. Her year was winding down, with final projects and senior class open-mic night and all her friends planning their various backpacking trips. Why you’d drop all that money just to spend a perfectly good summer humping all your shit around a place where you didn’t speak the language and probably getting pickpocketed was beyond Colby, but he guessed that’s why it was good he hadn’t been born rich. “Like five years ago, the senior class decided it wasn’t inclusive enough, so now we do a lock-in at the Franklin Institute instead and nobody brings a date.”