“Mase!” Meg grinned. “Yeah, you did!” She hugged him before she could think better of it, both of them breaking apart a little awkwardly. Still, she was happy for him, she realized, in a way she probably wouldn’t have been able to muster up even a couple of weeks ago. “Seriously, that’s great.”
“You’re going to be right down the road from us,” Emily said, breaking a KIND bar in half and taking a delicate bite. “We can all meet up on the weekends, drive home together at Thanksgiving.” She leaned back and flicked at Adrienne’s coffee cup, the ice rattling. “Ade, you can come up from Skidmore all the time.”
“You realize I still haven’t heard from Cornell,” Meg lied, shifting her weight on the terrazzo. Even as she said it, she felt like a cowardly idiot—after all, she wasn’t exactly going to be able to kick this can down the road forever—but still she couldn’t make herself tell them the truth. “It’s entirely possible I won’t get in and you guys will have to go have your western New York state liberal arts adventures without me.”
“Are you kidding me?” Emily shook her curly head, all confidence. “You worry too much.” She nudged Mason in the shoulder. “Tell her she worries too much.”
“You worry too much,” Mason parroted obediently.
Meg huffed a laugh. “Thanks.” She had assumed it would make things weird in their friend group, her and Mason breaking up, but if anything, Emily and Mason seemed to be getting along better lately. Meg wasn’t actually sure if she was okay with that or not.
“So are you definitely going to go?” Adrienne asked Mason, boosting herself up off the arm of the sofa and tossing her cup into the recycling bin in the corner. Adrienne had transferred in from St. Catherine’s two years ago after all that creepy stuff had come out about their monsignor. She spoke three languages, wore her white-blond hair in an immaculate French braid every single day, and had the dirtiest sense of humor Meg had ever heard.
“I still have to hear from Fairfield,” Mason said, “but yeah, probably. Honestly, I’m just glad to be getting in anywhere. When Colgate first put me on the wait list, I started to get worried I’d get rejected from all the schools I applied to and have to, like, go work as a picker in one of those Amazon facilities where they don’t give you any breaks, so you have to pee in a soda bottle and leave it in a corner.”
Meg winced. She knew what Mason meant—of course she knew what Mason meant, even if in reality there had never been even the tiniest possibility of him not getting into college, on top of which his parents had the kind of money that pretty much guaranteed he was never going to have to work any job he didn’t like—but she couldn’t help thinking of Colby. What would he say if he heard that the most horrifying future Meg’s friends could imagine didn’t look that different from his? Not the peeing-in-a-bottle part—she hoped not, in any case—but still. “There are worse things than working in an Amazon warehouse,” she chided gently.
“Working in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, for instance,” Emily joked. “Now, what are we going to do to celebrate?”
Meg tugged at her lip, wanting to contradict them. She thought she would have contradicted them, once upon a time: back before her parents split up, before fighting—of any kind, but especially the public variety—started to feel so deeply dangerous. She didn’t like this version of herself, the one who was too afraid to tell her friends when they were being sort of dickish for fear of starting an argument. The one who held a little bit of herself back all the time.
Except, of course, with Colby.
Who she couldn’t even properly defend.
“I’ve gotta go to my locker,” she said, slinging her backpack up over her shoulder and feeling like the worst kind of coward. “Congrats again, Mase.”
“Thanks, dude!” he called back, all boy-king smiles. Meg closed her eyes.
Her car was six weeks overdue for its inspection—her dad always used to take care of that stuff, back when her parents were together, and she and her mom weren’t great about remembering—and the following week Meg finally got her act together and dropped it off at the mechanic, which meant she had to walk home from school after seventh period. Normally, she would have gotten a ride with Emily, but Emily had a dentist appointment and had taken off early that afternoon, on top of which Meg had gotten an acceptance letter and scholarship offer from Temple the other day, which meant Emily had been on her all week to call Cornell and find out why she hadn’t heard from them yet. “How are you not freaking out about this?” she’d asked Meg today, over lunch at the hipster salad place. Meg had shoved a forkful of arugula into her mouth and mumbled something about rolling admissions.
The whole thing was ridiculous; it was beyond ridiculous, really.
But that didn’t mean Meg had any idea what to do about it.
She was only about half a block from school when a car pulled up beside her, its driver honking the horn a little obnoxiously. When she turned, she saw it was Mason in his bright orange Forester. “Hey,” he said, rolling down the passenger-side window. “You need a ride?”
Meg blinked at him for a second, remembering all at once why she’d fallen for him in the first place, with his messy black hair and his million different podcast subscriptions and his one crooked canine tooth because he hadn’t worn his retainer after he got his braces off. Still, as she stood there in the afternoon sunlight she was surprised to realize she could remember the not-so-good things now, too: how annoyingly competitive the two of them got about grades in the classes they shared with each other, and how he could be a little bit of a snob. Maybe Emily was right: maybe it hadn’t actually been a love connection to begin with. If given the choice, Meg thought for the first time since he’d broken up with her outside Cavelli’s, she didn’t actually think she’d want Mason back.
Still, it wasn’t exactly like she was looking forward to hoofing it all the way home, so she opened the door and settled herself in the passenger seat. “Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
“So what’s up with you, hm?” Mason asked as he pulled out into traffic. The car smelled the same: like the inside of a Starbucks. On the stereo was Fleet Foxes, who they’d seen last year downtown. A half-eaten PowerBar she’d bought and forgotten about before spring break still nestled in the door niche on the passenger side. It was weird to think that PowerBar had outlasted their relationship. “I feel like we haven’t talked in a while.”
That’s kind of the point of breaking up with someone, right? Meg thought but didn’t say. “Just been busy, I guess.”
Mason nodded. “Avery keeps asking about you,” he confessed. Avery was Mason’s little sister, a viola player with a mouth full of braces who, improbably, had become one of the most popular girls in her grade by writing excessively overwrought fanfiction about a series of fantasy books that none of her classmates could get enough of.
“Aww,” Meg said. “Tell her I miss her, too.”
Outside her house the lawn was still winter scrubby, last fall’s dead leaves clogging up the gutters. One shutter on the upstairs window was coming loose. The garbage cans had blown over in the driveway, rolling back and forth a bit like a pair of athletes injured on the field. Meg glanced over at Mason, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “Thanks for the ride,” she said.