Emily nodded, like Fair point. “Listen,” she said, breaking the doughnut in two and handing half of it back so they could share, “will you come find me if you’ve got time to talk later?”
“What, tonight?” Meg felt her eyebrows crawl. “Yeah, why? You sound like Mason.” She grinned. “You’re not going to break up with me, too, are you?”
Emily’s eyes went saucer-wide. “What? No! I just—” She rocked back on her heels a bit, shaking her head. “Of course not. Like—you know you’re literally my favorite person in the entire universe, right?”
Meg frowned. “Of course I do. You’re mine.” She looked at Emily carefully. Did she know somehow? Had she been able to magically intuit that Meg was second-guessing the plan? It was only a matter of time, probably; they knew each other way too well for Meg to have gone on lying to her for this long. “Em,” she said, breathing in the sugar-scented air as she peered across the makeshift counter, thinking again of the stupid email burning a hole in her inbox. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” Emily promised, holding her doughnut half up in a salute and taking a step back toward the fairway. “I’ll see you later.”
Meg watched her go for a moment, uneasy, before busying herself brushing doughnut crumbs off the bright plastic tablecloth and adjusting their marker-on–poster-board sign. She was wrapping a napkin around a bear claw to hand to a guy on the debate team when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out so fast she almost dropped it on the concrete, swallowing hard at the sight of Colby’s name on the screen.
Once, when Meg was four or five, she’d wandered off in the supermarket while her mom was ordering salmon for a dinner party, then been completely unable to find her when she came shuffling back down the aisle clutching a package of Halloween-dyed Oreos for which she’d intended to beg. To this day, she shivered a little when she remembered the quietly apocalyptic moments that followed—the crinkle of the cellophane sleeve in her hand as she dashed frantically down aisle after aisle, the sour tang of panic at the back of her mouth.
It felt like hours, though it was probably only a couple of minutes before she finally found her mother, who had moved on to the cheese counter and not yet noticed Meg was gone in the first place. “What’s wrong?” she’d demanded, catching sight of Meg’s stricken expression. “What happened?”
Meg had shaken her head. The relief was overwhelming and animal, jumbling up any kind of cogent explanation inside her brain: all she’d been able to say was, “I missed you,” before bursting into inconsolable tears.
Meg didn’t know why she was thinking about that right now.
She tucked the phone back into her pocket and did her best to ignore the way her whole chest had loosened, like she’d taken a full breath for the first time all day. Yeah, she was glad he’d texted. Yeah, she’d been worried he might not. But it was also kind of shitty, the way he was totally ignoring the fact that he’d hurt her. And it didn’t change the fact that sometimes it felt utterly pointless for them to try and agree on anything at all.
“Harrison,” she said now, her voice coming out a little more shrilly than she’d necessarily intended. “Let’s get back to work.”
By the time Darcy Ramos came to relieve her at the end of her shift, Meg’s mood had totally blackened, like one of those gruesome warning posters of calcified cigarette lungs or the pot roast her mom had attempted for dinner a couple of weeks ago. She’d been planning to go find Emily, to see what all the mystery was about, but as she looked out at the buzzing midway, she realized there was absolutely no way she had the courage to get into a fight about their future tonight. She didn’t want to get into a fight about anything. She kind of just wanted to go home.
Meg darted past the Fun Slide and the falafel truck, breathing a sigh of relief at the familiar chirp as she unlocked her driver’s side door—she’d gotten her car back this morning, her mom having driven her over to the mechanic’s in irritable silence. She leaned her head back against the seat for a moment before wriggling around and pulling her phone out of her pocket, staring at Colby’s message one more time. What are you even after with me here? she almost texted. Instead, she dropped her phone in the cup holder and headed home.
The following night, Meg’s dad took her to dinner at a steakhouse near UPenn—all dark wood and white tablecloths, votive candles flickering in little glass jars. Since the divorce, the two of them had a standing dinner date every other Friday, and they alternated who got to choose. Meg kind of liked researching new restaurants—reading reviews and scouring menus, deciding exactly what she was going to order ahead of time. Sometimes it was more fun than the actual dinners themselves, although obviously she didn’t want her dad to know that.
Tonight she ate her strip steak and scalloped potatoes, chatting gamely about WeCount and the carnival and the paper she was writing for her independent study about Rebecca Latimer Felton. Sometimes as the two of them sat across from each other in a booth or a corner table, both of them casting around a little bit frantically for topics of conversation, it was hard to believe her dad was the same guy who’d changed her diapers and taught her to ride a two-wheeler and carried her screaming bloody murder out of an IMAX movie about dinosaurs when she was seven. They used to sit in easy silence for hours at a time watching Japanese monster movies on Blu-ray. Now she kind of couldn’t imagine being comfortably quiet with him for five minutes at a stretch.
“So,” he said now, sitting back in his chair as the waiter cleared their plates, “I’ve got some news.”
“Uh-oh,” Meg joked. “The last time you said that, you told me you and mom were getting a divorce.”
Her dad laughed awkwardly. “Well, hopefully this is happier,” he said, then took a deep breath. For a moment, he looked more uncertain than Meg ever thought of him as being—young, somehow. “Lisa and I are getting married.”
Meg was hallucinating—she must be. It was like what he was saying didn’t make sense in the English language, like he’d suddenly switched to Dutch without warning or recited a bit of poetry in Sanskrit. She only just barely caught herself before she laughed out loud.
“Wait, seriously?” she asked, the words coming out before she could think better of them. Then, schooling her expression into something more acceptable as she realized this wasn’t some kind of emphatically un-hilarious joke: “Um. That’s great!” Holy crap, she really had not thought he and Lisa were that serious. They’d only been officially dating for a year.
“Well, thanks,” her dad said, his cheeks pinking up a bit as he fussed with his napkin. “It means a lot to me that you think so, obviously. We’re thinking Memorial Day weekend, somewhere here in town.”
“Wow,” Meg said, blinking about a thousand times. “That’s soon.”
Her dad nodded. “Lisa’s kids leave to be with their dad in Chicago pretty soon after school lets out,” he explained. “And then you’ll be at college . . .”
Lisa’s kids, Meg remembered suddenly. Right. Her future stepsiblings. Lisa’s kids were fine; they were young and kind of boring, but not offensive or anything. She’d only met them once.