now,” Meg chided, “but I don’t even care because it’s going to be super fun. They bring in cheesesteaks from Geno’s and there’s an ice cream sundae bar and everybody plays Sardines in the dark in the middle of the night. Thus, the headlamp.”
“Sounds fun,” Colby said, and he had to admit it kind of did, in an extremely dorky way. He’d skipped his own prom, the theme of which had been A Night in Monte Carlo, and gotten drunk in Micah’s yard instead. He thought maybe he would have gone, though, if he’d known Meg back then.
He thought maybe he would have done a lot of things differently.
It was weird, having a girlfriend. Every time Colby thought about it, he couldn’t help rolling his eyes at himself, like he was performing in some dumb high school play. Still, he thought about it a lot. On one hand, his day-to-day life was exactly the same as it had always been: He went to work at the warehouse. He played video games with Jordan and Micah. He ignored his brother at all costs. But Meg did things like tell him she missed him and add the kiss emoji to the end of her texts and send him senior skip day pictures of her long bare legs on a picnic blanket, her toenails painted a bright screaming pink.
So. His life wasn’t exactly the same as it had always been.
“I have no opinions about headlamps,” he told her now, crumpling up his tinfoil into a ball and squeezing. “Probably you should take pictures of yourself in all of them, though, and send them to me so I can tell you which one looks most durable.”
Meg snorted. “Jerk,” she said, but two minutes after they hung up, his phone dinged with a text and there she was, all ponytail and goofy smile, the stupid headlamp glowing like a beacon calling him home.
The sun was just setting when Colby got home from baseball practice that night, the sky gone orange and juicy-looking and an electric crackle in the air. His mom was at exercise class, so he made himself a roast beef sandwich and ate it standing up at the counter, flipping idly through the Best Buy circular and scratching the back of his knee with the toe of his opposite sneaker. He was just finishing up when Tris gamboled in, whining for a bite of his dinner. Colby glanced in her direction, then did a double take, freezing with the end of the sandwich halfway to his mouth.
She was tracking bloody pawprints across the linoleum.
“What happened?” he demanded, his heart like a missile as he sank to his knees and grabbed her by the collar, running his hands over her bristly fur. “Where are you hurt?”
Tris whined, distracted, still after the sandwich. The blood wasn’t coming from her, Colby realized dumbly, his eyes catching the rusty trail and following it backward: it was seeping out from the mudroom, trickling out from underneath the door that led to the garage.
“Dad?” he yelled, a sick kind of knowing rolling through him.
That was when he woke up.
Colby lay flat on his back in the dark for a moment, his heart slamming away inside his chest and his breath coming in ragged gasps like somebody was smothering him with a wet towel. His sheets were soaked clean through. “Fuck,” he muttered, sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his sweat-damp hair so it stood up in all directions. His head was throbbing wildly. His mouth was totally dry.
He flicked on the bedside light, blinking around at his bedroom: the old wooden dresser and the kid-sized desk he hadn’t been able to comfortably sit at since middle school, the Indians pennant on the wall. Everything was fine, he reminded himself. The worst thing had already happened.
Colby flopped back down onto the mattress, willing his chest to stop feeling like it was going to explode. He thought about calling Meg, but what the fuck was he going to tell her? My dad killed himself and I found him and now I have grisly dreams like some kind of Shakespearean sad sack? Great idea, Moran. What college-bound suburban princess wouldn’t want to hear that from her brand-new boyfriend? Totally sexy. Not pathetic at all.
He thought about changing the sheets, but that seemed like a lot of work for nothing. Instead, he got up and padded downstairs to the mudroom, where Tris was sleeping curled up like a doughnut in her fleecy