Meg laughed, but then the laugh turned into something else halfway out and suddenly she was terrified she was going to start crying and never, ever stop. She sucked in a quick breath, but it was ragged as torn denim, and Colby heard. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said automatically, but the stupidity of lying to Colby was obvious as soon as she opened her mouth. “No,” she amended, and just like that the whole story was spilling out of her like wine from a knocked-over glass. He listened without saying anything, so quiet on the other end of the line that twice Meg interrupted herself to ask if he was still there.
“That sucks,” he said, when she was finally finished. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah,” she said, crawling under the covers with her phone jammed between her ear and her shoulder. “It totally sucks.”
“Is she an alcoholic, you think?”
“I—no,” Meg said immediately, startled by the word in the same way she’d been surprised to hear herself say drunk earlier tonight. Alcoholics were red-faced and strawberry-nosed, weren’t they? They snuck vodka out of plastic bottles they kept hidden in their coat pockets and slumped over stools in dive bars at ten o’clock in the morning.
They show up drunk to get their kids from work, a nasty voice in Meg’s head added.
She pushed it away. “She’s just still sad about my dad, that’s all,” she insisted. “And she hates her boring job, and she and my dad never really had a ton of friends. I think she just doesn’t know what to do with herself, that’s all.” Then, in a feeble attempt to muster a joke: “Maybe she needs a hobby, too.”
Colby didn’t laugh. “Okay,” he said. “You’d know better than I would.” He didn’t sound convinced, really, but the nice thing was how she didn’t actually feel like she needed to convince him. He wasn’t going to judge her either way. “Can you talk to your dad?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Meg tucked one arm behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. “I feel so protective of her. I don’t want him to find out.”
“I mean, sure,” Colby said. “But somebody’s got to be protective of you, right?”
The way he said it made Meg’s stomach do a thing, sharp and sudden; just for a second, she let herself wonder what he looked like when he slept. “Yeah,” she said finally, gazing out at the dark nothingness of her bedroom. “I guess you’re right.” Ugh, she didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Dealing with her mom lately felt like walking down a long hallway with a door at the end, like a scene from a low-budget horror movie; somewhere in the back of her most secret mind she knew that eventually she was going to have to open it, but whatever was back there was going to be bad and scary and she didn’t want to do it just yet. “Tell me about your night,” she said instead.
“My night?” Colby yawned a little bit, just quiet; Meg wondered if he was in bed, too. “It was low-key. Hung out with some friends. Gotta work early tomorrow.”
Meg glanced at the moon outside the window. Colby’s friends were a mystery to her. Most times he talked about them, they sounded like a bunch of boneheads—and like he thought they were a bunch of boneheads—but she wasn’t entirely sure if he was describing them that way on purpose or not, and she didn’t want to say the wrong thing and accidentally sound like a snob. “I was thinking about what you said about them cutting your overtime, actually,” she said. “I was listening to this thing on NPR—”
“Something new and different for you,” Colby interrupted.
Meg frowned into the dark. She knew he was just joking around—that she was tired, and keyed up, and probably extra sensitive—but something about the way he said it, maybe a little snidely, bothered her. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” Colby said. “Easy. It’s just that most of your news-related anecdotes start that way, that’s all. I was kidding.”
“So what?” Meg sat up in bed. “What’s wrong with NPR?”
“So nothing,” Colby said. “It’s just . . .” He trailed off.
“If you say fake news, I’m going to hang up on you right now.”
“I’m not saying fake anything!” Colby laughed, though it sounded slightly strangled. “Can you let me talk? I’m just saying that NPR has an agenda, just like every other news outlet in America.”
“The agenda is reporting the actual news.”
“You say that because you agree with what they’re saying.”
“I say that because it’s verifiably true.”
“Maybe,” Colby said easily, “but when was the last time you actually verified? I’m not saying I disagree with their reporting, even. I’m just saying that if you’re accepting whatever you hear on there without checking for yourself, then I don’t see how you have more of a leg to stand on than my mom when she talks about something she saw on Fox News.”
“Your mom watches Fox News?”
Colby blew a breath out. “What if she does, Meg? Who gives a shit?”
Meg cringed—she couldn’t help it—swallowing down a dozen different equally nasty responses. God, sometimes she could go whole conversations without thinking about what ridiculously different universes she and Colby lived in, but every time she remembered, she couldn’t help but wonder where either one of them thought this was going. Meg didn’t know if that made her silly or realistic. “I mean, I give a shit,” she said finally. “And if she does, I might encourage her to verify her facts, just like you oh-so-helpfully reminded me to do tonight.”
“Don’t be mad,” Colby said, softening. “I know you had a sucky night; I’m not trying to fight with you. I’m just playing devil’s advocate; you know that.”
“Oh, come on.” Meg hated that expression. “The devil can advocate for himself, don’t you think?”
“Clever,” Colby said, in a voice like he didn’t think it was, really. He was quiet for a moment; she could hear his getting-ready-for-bed noises in the background, water running and a door clicking shut. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked finally, bedsprings creaking—he definitely was in bed, then. “Like, obviously you don’t fight like this with your friend Emily. But do you do it with anybody else besides me?”
“Nope,” Meg said, no hesitation.
“Not even Mason?”
It surprised her that he was asking—she’d only mentioned Mason in passing a couple of times—and she tugged at her lip for a moment before she answered, even though she didn’t have to think about it. She and Mason had bickered some when they’d first started dating—the kind of good-natured debates that felt natural as breathing back before everything exploded with her parents—but after that the waters had been perfectly, mercifully calm. In fact, the closest they’d ever come was at a party Adrienne had thrown over February break a few weeks before they’d broken up: Mason had been a total grouch for no discernable reason, complaining about everything from the music on Javi’s playlist to the burritos they’d picked up at Chipotle on the way over, which had been his idea to begin with. Meg remembered how uneasy she’d been all night at the prospect of a looming fight, how she’d done her best to ignore the fact that it was happening, and her relief when it had blown over without ever coming to a head. She still had no idea what his problem had been. “No, actually,” she said at last. “You’re the only one.”