“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he said—looking up suddenly, caught a little short. “Like, in a perfect world, sure.”
“Well, what’s keeping this world from being perfect?” Then she stopped, as if she’d heard herself and realized how absolutely ridiculous she sounded. “Okay, don’t answer that. I just mean, what’s stopping you in this particular situation?”
Colby wondered what it would be like to live in this girl’s universe, where apparently everything followed a logical sequence of events. “This job just probably isn’t a real thing, that’s all. So there’s no point in getting worked up about it, putting all this energy into trying to make it happen when it’s probably not going to happen anyway.”
“Energy being, making a phone call and talking to this guy who might have a cool job for you?”
“Pretty much,” Colby said, though he knew she was probably being sarcastic. “Because there’s obviously going to be a catch somewhere, right? Either he’s going to want somebody with more experience, or the job doesn’t actually pay, or the whole thing is a cover-up and they’re going to sell me into sex slavery as soon as I walk in the door.”
“Oh, that’s your worry?” Meg asked. He could hear rolling her eyes. “Being sold into sex slavery?”
“Well, it sounds stupid when you say it in that tone of voice,” he said, prickling a bit. He’d been kidding, mostly. “But kind of.”
“So, like, nobody can pull the rug out from under you if you decide there’s no rug to begin with?”
Colby blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone put it so succinctly before. He didn’t actually like it very much. Shit, what was he even doing, sitting here like a chump spilling his guts to a total stranger? He thought about telling her he had to go—he meant to tell her he had to go—but in the end he just set the phone on speaker on the dashboard and put the car in reverse. “Uh, yeah,” he admitted, pulling out of the parking lot. “Basically.”
“Is that your entire life philosophy?”
Jesus Christ, this girl. “Who are you, my therapist?”
“Do you have a therapist?”
Colby snorted. “No.”
“Why is that funny?” Meg asked, sounding sincerely curious. “Are you one of those guys who’s, like, too manly for therapy?”
“I’m not too manly for anything,” Colby told her. “I just don’t—”
“See the point?” Meg supplied, obviously delighted with herself.
“Very funny.” It was almost totally dark out now, the spring trees spindly outlines against the blue-purple sky; he passed the middle school and the Applebee’s, the park where he and his dad had taken Tris the last time they’d gone anywhere together. Of course, Colby hadn’t known it was the last time when they did it. Hindsight, et cetera. “Do you have a therapist?” he heard himself ask.
“I used to,” she said easily, like it was nothing out of the ordinary—and it probably wasn’t, as far as she was concerned. Where she lived it was probably like getting a brand-new car for your sixteenth birthday or taking a gap year to dick around in Europe. If she were anyone else, Colby would have found her totally fucking annoying, and he didn’t know what it meant that he didn’t, really. “I went to one after my parents got divorced.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because I’m perfect, obviously,” Meg deadpanned. Then she laughed. “Nah, it was more like my mom stopped caring if I went or not, and I was feeling less like I was in a weird sad fog all the time, so I stopped going. But it was good while it lasted.”
That surprised him a little: she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would admit to feeling foggy—or whose mom would stop caring about anything—ever. “I . . . will keep that in mind,” was all he said.
“Oh yeah?” Meg asked, the smile still audible in her voice. “Are you lying?”
“Yes.”
“Jerk,” she said cheerfully. “What are you doing this weekend?”
Getting drunk in Micah’s basement and lying in bed staring at the ceiling, probably, but he wasn’t about to admit that to her, even if he was enormously relieved by the change of subject. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Working, I guess.”
“There’s a rally in Columbus for Annie Hernandez,” Meg reported. “The woman who’s running for US Senate in Ohio? You should check it out if you’re around.”
Colby barked out a laugh. “Holy shit, lady,” he said. “Is that the real reason you called me? To try and sell me on some rally?”
“No!” Meg protested. “I’m just mentioning it because—”
“Uh-huh.” Colby shook his head at the windshield, still smirking. He couldn’t decide if his feelings were hurt or not. “I’ll go after my therapy appointment, how about?”
“Rude,” Meg said, but she was laughing, too; he wasn’t entirely sure if they were joking around or if they weren’t.
Colby stopped at a red light. “How do you even know what political rallies are happening in a city you don’t even live in?” he asked. “Do you have, like, some kind of nerdy political bat signal you all send each other?”
“Maybe we do,” Meg retorted. “Anyway, Annie Hernandez is amazing, and worth checking out even if you don’t go to the rally.”
“She is, huh?” Colby asked. Then, even though he knew he was walking right into it: “What’s so amazing about her?”
“Well,” Meg said brightly, like she’d been waiting for him to ask the question. He wondered if she had note cards on every politician in the whole freaking country, stored in alphabetical order in one of those plastic boxes from Office Depot for easy reference. “She’s only thirty-one, first of all. And she has this super inclusive platform. Criminal justice reform, universal pre-K, raising the minimum wage—okay, what?” she asked, breaking off at the low sound Colby hadn’t even really meant to make out loud. “Raising the minimum wage? How can you possibly be against raising the minimum wage, of all things?”
Colby rolled his eyes at the phone on the dashboard. “Grunt worker that I am, you mean?”
“That is . . . definitely not what I said.”
“You didn’t have to.” He pulled into the driveway of his mom’s house, turning off the engine and tipping his head back against the seat. “Raising the minimum wage means it’s harder for companies to employ people, right?”
“If you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage, you shouldn’t have workers in the first place,” Meg countered. “Full stop.”
“So it’s better that those jobs just don’t exist at all, then?”
“I’m saying that if your full-time job doesn’t pay you enough to make your rent and buy food and go to the doctor, it’s not really doing you that much good to begin with.”
“Oh really?” Colby asked, sitting up a little straighter. Now he was finding her annoying, same as he had the other night when she’d first called him for WeCount, and for the first time all night he heard the edge in his own voice. “Because it sounds like what you’re saying is that you’ve never been in the position of having to work whatever shitty-paying job you can get.”