You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,8
see if you wanted to go.”
“I have school,” Meg reminded her.
“Oh, like he’s suddenly so attuned to your academic calendar.” Meg’s mom rolled her eyes. “And, you know, not for nothing, but if he’s got the cash to be tacking romantic spa getaways onto his work trips, you’d think possibly he could also be bothered to—”
“Mom,” Meg interrupted quietly. “Come on.”
“I’m stopping,” her mom said now, holding her hand up again, waving it back and forth. “I’m sorry. I’m stopping.”
She was as good as her word, thankfully: her lips were zipped for the rest of the episode, not counting a crack about the ugly mosaic tile the designer picked out for the brand-new backsplash. What she didn’t stop doing was drinking. Meg bit the inside of her cheek as her mom poured herself another glass of wine, and then another. The next time she got up, just as the clients were oohing and aahing over their brand-new master bathroom, Meg heard the telltale pop of a cork as her mom opened a whole other bottle.
She dropped her head back against the couch cushions and stared up at the splotchy ceiling, swallowing down a weird wave of something like panic and reminding herself that nothing happening right now was actually an emergency. She was safe in the house she’d lived in since she was a baby, even if it did look a little grubbier than usual. Her mom was the same as she’d always been. Everything was fine.
Right?
All at once, Meg stood up, eyes darting around the room like she was looking for the closest available exit. Like if she didn’t get out of here soon she might die. “Mom,” she called, wiping her suddenly sweaty hands on her jeans and telling herself to stop being so dumb and dramatic. There was no reason to start some huge fight. “I gotta go to work.”
“Computers are down again,” Lillian reported when Meg turned up for her shift at WeCount, handing her a sheaf of papers held together with a plastic paper clip shaped like a Dalmatian. Lillian was twenty-one and Meg’s supervisor; her girlfriend, Maja, worked at a bakery in Philly, and Lillian was forever leaving boxes of palmiers and fruit tarts on the counter of the tiny kitchenette in the office. “So we’re working from call sheets tonight.”
Meg nodded, taking the list and dropping her backpack on the floor beside her wobbly rolling chair. She’d been hoping that going into work would distract her from thinking about Mason, which was stupid—after all, Mason was the one who’d sent her the link for WeCount to begin with, from a list he’d found online of nonprofits that hired students part-time. Meg had been working here since the previous fall, out of a tiny office suite above a high-end home-goods boutique in Montco. The idea was that people were more likely to register to vote if somebody actively talked them through it—even if that person was a total rando—so three times a week Meg sat in a cubicle for two hours and encouraged people in swing states to fill out forms on the internet.
Tonight, her first call was with an elderly woman named Pearl whose registration had lapsed when she’d moved into her retirement community outside of Cleveland. People in retirement communities, Meg had found over the course of her six months of employment, could usually be counted on to answer the phone. “Perfect,” she said once Pearl had successfully navigated to the WeCount home page and clicked the link to register in the state of Ohio. “I can go through the steps with you, if you’d like?”
Meg spent the next ten minutes doodling in the margins of her call sheet while Pearl filled in her information, then another ten listening while she talked about canvassing for Bobby Kennedy back in ’68. “You’re all set,” she concluded finally, once Pearl had completed the registration form. “You should get your confirmation in a few weeks with your polling place. Do you have someone who can bring you to vote on Election Day?”
“Nice work,” Lillian said when she was finished, smiling at Meg over the top of the half wall that separated their cubicles. Meg found herself grinning back. She loved working at WeCount; she’d loved politics basically her whole life, since her mom’s cool cousin Jodie sent her a picture book about Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman in the Senate, for her seventh birthday. She still had that book somewhere, its pages wrinkly and