“You did not,” Colby said immediately.
“I know,” she said, feeling weirdly pleased with herself. “I can tell by your voice that you think I’m too prissy to have done something so unladylike, but: desperate times.”
“Clearly,” Colby said. “I think I underestimated you, Meg from WeCount.”
“Well,” she said, “you shouldn’t.”
“I’m starting to see that, yeah,” he said with a laugh. There was something about that sound, the low, warm grumble of it, that Meg felt in her hands and spine and stomach. A very small voice inside her said: Oh no.
“It’s late,” she said finally, catching sight of the vintage clock on her nightstand. The alarm part didn’t work anymore, and Mason had tried to get her to toss it last year when his mom had been on a big Marie Kondo kick, but she wouldn’t let him. It sparks joy, she’d insisted, setting it back on the nightstand. It occurred to her with a jolt that this conversation was the longest she’d gone without thinking about Mason in days. It made her feel a tiny bit disloyal, even though he was the one who’d broken up with her and anyway it wasn’t like this phone call was romantic or anything like that. “I should probably try to sleep.”
“Sure thing,” Colby said. “I’ve got work in the morning, too.” He cleared his throat. “I work at Home Depot, PS,” he said. “In the warehouse.”
“Oh!” Meg said, then snapped her jaws shut before she said anything accidentally offensive. The idea of spending your days moving refrigerators and table saws and, like, paint cans from place to place was enormously bleak to her, and she knew it made her an unforgiveable snob. “See?” she said instead. “Was that so hard?”
“No,” Colby said after a moment. “I guess not.”
Meg wanted to ask if he liked it; she wanted to ask what he did there, and what kinds of people he worked with. She wanted to know if he wanted to do something else or if he was happy, and she wanted to hear him laugh one more time, but she knew she was only postponing the inevitable. “Have a good night, Colby,” she said quietly. “It was really nice talking to you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was really nice talking to you, too.”
Meg swallowed down a weird surge of panic just then: a feeling like an escape hatch closing in a movie, of being left behind in a dangerous place. Wait, she thought, and take me with you.
“Good night” was all she said.
Once she’d hung up, she turned off the lamp and stared at the moonlight making patterns on the ceiling. She didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Eight
Colby
Colby stopped at Bixby’s for coffee the following morning, plunking a dollar in the tip jar and smiling at the barista without letting himself think about why. He was exhausted—it had been damn near impossible to drag his ass out of bed and into the shower this morning—but it felt like a good kind of tired, like when he used to work with his dad on job sites in the summer and came home at the end of the day filthy and sore.
“You hit the lotto or something?” Moira asked when he got to work, coming up behind him with her backpack slung over one shoulder as he punched his employee code into the time clock. Moira was his shift supervisor, a tall skinny black woman in her thirties with long braids down her back.
“Huh?” Colby asked, blinking distractedly. He entered his number wrong, had to clear it out and start over.
Moira grinned. “You did, didn’t you?”
“What?” Colby shook his head, laughing a little bewilderedly. “No.”
“I don’t know, Colby,” Moira said, shaking her head and nudging him aside to get to the time clock. “I think it’s the first time since I met you that I’ve seen you in here without a scowl on your face that could take the bark off a tree.”
“That’s not—” Colby felt himself blush, though he wasn’t sure if it was because apparently he had a reputation for frowning all the time at work or because she’d noticed he wasn’t doing it on this particular morning. “I didn’t.”
“Sure. Sure. Just try not to forget us little people when you’re collecting all your money.” Moira winked. “Shift assignments in ten, Smiles.”
It was a busy morning, thankfully: a shipment of washing machines to unload that meant a full reorg of appliances, plus a long pick list of items to send to the online distribution facility outside Columbus. Colby was real careful to keep his head down. So fine, he’d had a good time talking to Meg from WeCount on the phone last night. Whatever. He was literally never going to hear from her again, so there was no point in getting worked up about it one way or the other.
When he got into the break room for his thirty, Moira and Jerry were staring at a notice on the bulletin board next to the bank of lockers, where people put up shift-switch requests and ads for roommates and the mandatory OSHA posters about unsafe working conditions. “What’s up?” Colby asked, opening his locker and pulling out his lunch.
“They’re cutting overtime,” Jerry reported.
“Wait.” Colby frowned, coming over to look at the flier. “All overtime?”
Moira nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”
“I love how they didn’t even talk to us about it,” Jerry said with a rueful smirk, his bald white head gleaming in the overhead lights. “Just stuck it up there for us to find.”
“They did it on purpose,” Moira cracked. “They all know you can’t read.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Jerry said, and the whole thing devolved into a pileup of good-natured insults, but Colby was hardly listening. Well, he guessed, so much for moving out by the beginning of the summer. At this rate, he’d probably be living with his mom until he was forty-five.
He ate the ham-and-cheese sandwich he’d packed that morning and got himself a Dr Pepper from the vending machine. Then he got up and went back to work.
Nine
Meg
Seniors could leave campus during their lunch periods, so Meg met up with Emily in the parking lot and they went to the hipster salad place near school. By the time they got there and waited in line, they usually only had ten minutes to shovel their salads into their mouths, but they went anyway because Emily couldn’t get enough of the lime-cilantro dressing and it didn’t seem like something worth arguing about, even though Meg was always a tiny bit stressed about getting back before the bell.
“Did you see that new bookstore in Montco is doing Friday open-mic nights?” she asked now. “You want to go this week maybe?”
Emily glanced up from whoever she was texting, raised an eyebrow. “Why?” she asked. “You hoping to find an audience for your political slam poetry?”
“Rude.” Meg pelted her with a cherry tomato, laughing. “I don’t write political slam poetry.”
“Sure, sure.” Emily shook her head. “I can’t,” she said, setting her phone down and shivering a little inside her Patagonia. It was warm enough to eat outside on the patio, but barely. “I have to help my mom with something.”