“Just dumb college admissions stuff,” she admitted finally, because that seemed like the least personal option. The kind of thing you could tell a stranger on the phone, if you were the type to talk to total strangers on the phone, which apparently she was now. “Which I know you probably think is, like, not a real problem.”
Colby snorted. “Why, because my ma has the black lung from mining coal and the roof of my barn is caving in?”
“No!” Meg said immediately. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked, exactly imitating the tone she’d used earlier.
Meg winced. “No!” she insisted. He didn’t sound particularly put out, which didn’t change how mortified she was. “I just—I mean—”
“Can I ask you a question?” Colby broke in. “Why do you keep doing that? Trying to act like something isn’t what it is, I mean.”
“What?” She bristled. “I don’t. I’m not.”
“You kind of are, though,” he said. “Like, even at the beginning of this conversation, when I said I was calling to apologize for being an asshole, you were like, No, no, you weren’t. But it’s okay. I was an asshole. I don’t like being an asshole in general, which is why I called you back.”
Meg thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I was being nice, I guess. I didn’t want to have a fight.”
“Nice is overrated.”
She rolled her eyes. “In your world, maybe.”
“And what world is that?”
Shit. “I don’t know.”
“No, I’m serious,” Colby said. She thought he might have been smiling, though it was hard to tell over the phone. “When you call us swing state folk to try and persuade us to do our civic duty, what exactly are you picturing?”
“I don’t know!” Meg said again. Ugh, he was flustering her, just like he had the other night at work. The truth was she’d barely spent any time in Ohio, even though it was right next door; her vague impression was one of, like, cornfields and a racist baseball mascot, though somehow she didn’t think mentioning either of those would win her any points with Colby. “Pennsylvania is a swing state, too, PS.”
“Not the part you live in.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, like she was six years old and standing on the playground with her hands on her hips. “And what part is that?”
“The rich part,” Colby said immediately.
“Seriously?” Meg bristled, though it wasn’t like he was wrong, exactly. Her parents fought about money all the time, especially now, but Meg had always gotten the sense it was more for sport—or spite—than because either one of them was really afraid of there not being enough to go around. “How would you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“Well, I’m just saying, if you don’t want me making assumptions about you, then you shouldn’t make assumptions about me, either.”
“You know,” Colby said, “fair enough.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Both of them were quiet for another long minute. Meg looked out the window at the moon. It seemed like a natural place for the conversation to end, though for some reason she was suddenly reluctant to be the one to end it. It was just so unexpected to be talking to him in the first place, she guessed; it was like turning the corner in the upstairs hallway and finding a room she’d never seen before.
“They let you work there in high school?” Colby asked finally, instead of the okay, have a good night she’d been expecting. “We All Count, or whatever?”
“WeCount,” Meg corrected, faintly relieved and not 100 percent sure why. “And I turned eighteen in September. I’m a little old for my grade.” She fussed with the quilt for a moment, dragging the corner of it under her thumbnail. “How old are you?” she asked, even though she already knew.
“Eighteen, too,” he said immediately. Meg felt herself exhale. She knew it was an embarrassingly low bar—and more than that, she knew it didn’t actually matter, considering she was never going to talk to this person again after tonight—but she was glad he hadn’t lied. “But I graduated last year.”
“Are you in college?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“What do you do?”
“What do you think?”
“Uh-uh,” Meg said immediately. “No way.”
“No way, what?”
“No way, I’m not guessing.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Well, that’s not an answer.”
“I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to be complaining about answers, do you?”
Colby laughed at that. “Fair enough,” he said again, but he also didn’t volunteer any more information; she wondered if he did something sketchy, or if maybe he didn’t work at all. “Sorry about the college thing,” he finally said.
“Oh!” For a second, she didn’t know what he was talking about; this entire conversation kept distracting her, the whole world narrowing to the sound of his voice. “It’s okay. It’s not actually even a real problem, like I was saying. It’s just that I got into Cornell, and, like, obviously I’m going to go, but the more I think about it the less I actually want to.”
It was out before she knew she was going to say it, and the sound of it shocked her—she’d never even let herself consider it before—but as soon as she heard it out loud, she knew it was true. She didn’t want to go to Ithaca in September.
She just had no idea what she did want to do.
“Okay,” Colby was saying now, his voice slow and curious. “And why do you have to go, exactly?”
Meg hesitated, trying to figure out how to explain it in a way that didn’t sound completely spoiled and finally deciding it didn’t matter. “Well, it’s the best school I applied to,” she tried, though it didn’t sound particularly convincing even to her own ears. “And my best friend, Emily, and I have always had this plan to go there and room together.” Now that she stopped and thought about it, Meg guessed it was mostly Em’s plan, concocted last year during the divorce, when their guidance counselor was demanding application lists and Meg could barely comb her own hair, let alone plan her future. Still, Meg had definitely agreed to it. “To keep things the same, you know?”
“And you can’t keep things the same from the suburbs of Philadelphia?”
Meg’s mouth dropped open. “Who says I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia?”
“Don’t you?”
She huffed. “Maybe.”
“Lucky guess.”
Again there was a pause, and again Meg waited for him to tell her he had to go, but instead the conversation meandered: to a family trip to Philly his family had taken when he was in middle school, which they’d spent mostly waiting in line for cheesesteaks and a picture in front of the Liberty Bell; to the Mutter Museum, which was full of medical oddities including a small piece of John Wilkes Booth’s thorax and which had an entire room where the walls were covered with mounted human skulls; to Cedar Point, the self-proclaimed roller-coaster capital of the world, which she’d been to on an overnight trip with her debate team freshman year. “I rode, like, eleven different roller coasters,” she confessed, lying back on the mattress. She’d turned all the lights off except for the one beside her bed. “And I was doing fine until I got off number twelve, but then I wasn’t near a garbage can so I just panicked and barfed into the sleeve of my hoodie.”