“Um,” she said, realizing abruptly that she was yanking her bottom lip so hard she was starting to hurt herself. She dropped her hands into her lap. “Does Mom know?”
“Not yet,” her dad admitted. “I was thinking maybe you might want to be the one to—”
“What? No,” Meg interrupted, suddenly panicked. “You have to tell her. And you can’t tell her that I knew first.”
“I—okay.” Her dad looked at her closely. “Meg, honey,” he said, and his voice was very quiet. “Is everything okay? With your mom, I mean?”
“Of course,” she said too quickly. “Everything’s fine.”
Her dad frowned. “You could tell me if it wasn’t.”
Meg shook her head. She knew what the right response was here—she didn’t want to be some stereotypical teenager who was an asshole about her dad’s remarriage—but there was something about it that felt so profoundly unfair to her, that her dad got this new life while her mom got a huge old house that needed renovating and a recycling bin full of empty wine bottles. And sure, they’d both made their choices, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that somehow the options weren’t the same for them both.
“Um,” she said, pushing her chair back too quickly. Suddenly, she was absolutely, horrifyingly sure that she was going to cry. “Excuse me.”
She stared at herself in the mirror in the cavernous, marble-tiled bathroom, her hair frizzing a little around her temples and the beginnings of a pimple on her chin. She sat down on a green velvet couch and dug her phone out of her pocket, scrolling through her messages until she got to Colby’s name. She hadn’t texted him back last night, trying to teach him some kind of lesson she wasn’t entirely sure how to articulate and that felt vaguely embarrassing now, twenty-four hours later, when it turned out he was the only person on Earth she actually had any interest in talking to.
She paused for a moment, thumb hovering, then changed her mind and flicked up to Emily’s name instead. She’d said something about going out with Adrienne and Mason and Javi tonight, Meg thought—she hadn’t really listened to the details, since she knew she had plans, but suddenly it felt imperative that she get out of this restaurant as soon as she possibly could. What are you guys doing? she keyed in.
Emily texted back almost right away: We’re at Cavelli’s, she said. How’s dad dinner?
Meg texted back a row of upside-down smiley emojis. I’m going to come meet you, okay?
A pause, longer this time, the three dots appearing and then disappearing twice before Emily responded. Yup, she said. See you soon!
Normally, their dorky dad/daughter schtick was to order whatever two desserts were biggest, then split them, but now that she’d located an escape route, even a giant slab of chocolate cake wasn’t enough to entice her to stay one minute longer than she had to. “I actually told some friends I’d meet them,” she explained when the waiter came by with the menu. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” her dad said, and she could tell he was a tiny bit hurt; no other commitments on dad dinner nights was one of their implicit rules, though she was pretty sure he wouldn’t say anything about it, and she was right. “Okay. We’ll celebrate another time, then.”
“Absolutely,” Meg said. “Another time.”
She pulled into the parking lot outside of Cavelli’s twenty minutes later. There was something reassuring about the sight of it: the neon beer signs glowing in the windows, the rickety benches lined up along the sidewalk for people waiting to pick up takeout orders. Inside it smelled like fry oil and garlic. She took a deep breath and smiled at the surly middle-aged hostess, as glad to see her as if she were Meg’s own grandmother. This much, at least, was the same as it had always been.
She hadn’t bothered to ask who we was, but as she scanned the restaurant she realized it was just Emily and Mason sitting across from each other in a duct-taped booth by the window, a pair of Cokes in red plastic cups and a mostly picked-over plate of toasted ravioli on the table between them. “My dad is getting married again,” she announced, flopping herself onto the bench seat beside Emily. “Also, hi.”
“What?” Emily’s eyes widened, her gaze cutting quickly to Mason and then back again. “Holy crap. To the lawyer?”
Meg nodded miserably, launching into the whole long story as she dragged a toasted ravioli through the little bowl of marinara. “It’s not even that I’m not happy for him,” she finished, although in fact she wasn’t. “It just feels . . . I don’t know.” She shrugged, glancing from Mason to Emily and back again. It wasn’t until then that it even occurred to her to ask, “So, um. Where’s everybody else?”
Emily and Mason were both silent for a moment. Something about the look they exchanged then had her sitting up in her seat. Suddenly, everything—Emily at the carnival, Mason in his car the other day, the faint whiff of not-rightness of things among the three of them like a skunk shuffling through the bushes on a summer night—started to make a horrifying kind of sense.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you guys . . .” She couldn’t make herself say it. “Did I just, like, crash your date right now?”
Even as the question came out of her mouth she was fully expecting them to deny it, but Emily only winced. “This definitely isn’t how we wanted to tell you,” she said quietly. “But then we figured if you were coming here anyway—”
“It’s the first time,” Mason jumped in. “We don’t want you to think—it’s not like we’ve been sneaking around behind your back, or—”
“No, it’s fine,” Meg said, holding her hands up like an instinct and barely holding back a hysterical giggle; she could feel it lodged behind her breastbone like a bubble of gas. Well, she thought meanly, apparently she and Emily still had more in common than she’d thought. “I just. Huh. Is that why you . . .” She looked at Mason in his glasses and Yosemite hoodie, the rest of the question dangling between them like a hanged thing. “You know what, don’t answer that. It’s okay.”
“Nothing happened while you guys were together,” Emily said urgently. “You know that, right? I would never, ever—”
“Me either,” Mason said, solemn as a Boy Scout. Meg could not believe this was happening. They were probably telling the truth, for what it was worth—both of them put too much stock in their own moral codes for them to be lying. But that didn’t actually make it any better. If anything, Meg thought it possibly made things worse.
The waitress appeared just then, yanking a pen out of her messy bun and flipping to a fresh page in her notepad. “What can I get you?” she asked Meg.
“Oh!” Meg said, curling her hands around the edge of the laminate table. “I. Um. I think I was just leaving, actually.”
“No, no, no,” Emily said, “wait.” She turned to the waitress. “She isn’t leaving.”
“Look,” Mason chimed in reasonably. “Why don’t you stay and hang out, and we can talk about this? We were thinking about ordering a brownie sundae.”