Now Colby glanced at the calendar hanging on the door of the mudroom, a stupid promotional thing Uncle Rick had given his mom at Christmas. Eight weeks to go until the anniversary.
God, he really did not want to still be living here in eight weeks.
He listened to Meg’s message again, her voice echoing out into the empty kitchen. He walked around the house for a while. Finally, he picked up the phone and dialed, biting a cuticle on his thumbnail as it rang and trying to figure out what exactly he was going to say into this girl’s voice mail.
“Hello?”
Oh, shit.
Seven
Meg
For a long moment, there was silence on the other end of the line, the faint sound of static crackling somewhere out in the ether. “Hello?” Meg said again. Nobody ever called her on the phone—especially not a number that wasn’t already in her contacts list—which was why she’d picked up to begin with. She blinked, shifting her weight in her desk chair. She’d been listening to Pod Save America and painting her nails, trying with little success not to think about the email from Cornell currently sitting like a stone in her inbox. She still hadn’t told a soul she’d gotten in.
“Um.” Someone cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “Is this Meg?”
Meg frowned. “Yes?”
“This is Colby Moran,” the voice said. “We, uh, talked the other night?”
“Oh my God,” Meg said too loud and too quickly, coming embarrassingly close to spilling the bottle of nail polish and falling out of the chair altogether. She swallowed hard, steadying herself on the edge of the desk. “Um. Hi.”
“Hi. Um.” He cleared his throat again. “I didn’t think you’d answer, honestly.”
“Then why did you call me?” she blurted. Then, feeling her cheeks warm: “I mean, I’m glad you did, I just—”
“I just thought I’d leave you a voice mail, I guess, or—”
“Do you want to hang up and call back and I won’t answer?”
“What?” Colby laughed. “No.” There was a pause, like he was gathering his thoughts, but then it lasted so long that she thought maybe he had hung up after all, and she was about to say hello one more time when he spoke again. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m just calling to say I’m sorry for being such an asshole on the phone the other night. I know you were just doing your job or whatever.”
“You weren’t an asshole,” Meg said automatically.
“Yeah,” Colby said, “I definitely was.”
Meg tugged on her bottom lip. “I mean, okay,” she conceded finally. “A little bit.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle of polish before getting up and closing her bedroom door, not entirely sure why she was doing it except that this felt like a conversation that needed to be contained somehow. She couldn’t believe he’d actually called. She’d kind of forgotten about the whole conversation in the bustle of the last few days—a Spanish test and dinner with her dad and her and Emily getting in a weird thing over whether or not to invite Mason out for poke bowls on Saturday. “He’s still our friend even if you guys aren’t dating anymore, right?” Emily had pointed out gently, which Meg thought was debatable, but she felt so guilty about the whole Cornell situation that she’d just agreed to avoid a fight.
“It was my fault, too, though,” she continued now, sitting down on her bed and leaning her back against the wall. “I shouldn’t have been so pushy. I was just having a bad day and, like, trying to prove something.”
Colby made a quiet sound that wasn’t quite a snicker. “By converting me?”
“I’m not trying to convert you to anything,” she said, huffing a little. “WeCount is totally nonpartisan. We don’t care who you vote for. We just care that you vote.”
“I mean, that’s literally never true,” Colby said.
“It is so!” Meg fired back, crumbs sticking to the bottoms of her feet as she got up again, pacing across the rug. The whole house needed to be vacuumed—and more, probably. She was pretty sure she’d seen mouse poop at the back of the kitchen cabinet the other day. “It’s a nonprofit. We can’t have political affiliation or we’d lose our tax-exempt status.”
Colby made an I don’t know noise, but then instead of arguing he seemed to think for a moment. “Makes sense, I guess,” he finally said.
“I can help you register now if you want,” she offered brightly, sensing an opening. “I meant it the other night; it only takes, like, two seconds.”
“Oh no.” Colby laughed a little, deep and rumbling. “That’s okay.”
Meg frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m all set. I meant what I said the other night, too, you know? I think the whole thing is bullshit.”
She sat down hard on the edge of the mattress. “The whole thing, like democracy?”
“I mean, not democracy,” Colby clarified. “But the way it works in America, yeah, totally. It has nothing to do with actual people or, like, their actual concerns.”
“Says who?”
“Says anyone who’s paid attention at any point in the last fifty years,” Colby shot back. “It’s a power grab, that’s all. Look, I’m not trying to shit on your job—”
“Aren’t you?” Meg asked with a brittle-sounding giggle. God, he was infuriating. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t already hung up.
“No!” Colby insisted. “If you like it, if you feel like you’re making a difference, then more power to you. I just personally think you’re wasting your time.”
Meg opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I mean, wow,” was all she could say. She knew she cared way more about politics than most people, with her job at WeCount and how the bumper of her car was covered in campaign stickers and her dutiful monthly donations to She Should Run, but she’d never encountered anybody—especially not anybody her own age—who just flat-out didn’t think it was worth it. “That’s really cynical.”
“Yeah, well.” She could practically hear the shrug in his voice. “I’m cynical.”
“Clearly.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment, the silence stretching out across the miles and miles between them and the inherent weirdness of this conversation hitting her all at once. She was just about to make an excuse and say goodbye when Colby spoke. “Why did you have a bad day?” he asked.
“Huh?” Meg sat up straighter on the mattress, surprised.
“You said you had a bad day the other day, right? I’m asking why.”
“I mean, do you care?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
Well. She hesitated, trying to decide both how to answer that question and why she felt compelled to in the first place. After all, it wasn’t like one specific thing had happened; it was more like the last few weeks had been a creeping accumulation of not-great stuff, the way that dust gathered slowly on the blades of her ceiling fan until all of a sudden she looked up and noticed they were covered with a thick layer of fur. Still, she wasn’t about to tell this stranger about the wine bottles clanking in the recycling bin, or her Dad and Lisa going to Palm Springs, or—good Lord—about Mason breaking up with her.