“Hey, Colby,” Joanna called, reaching back to take a six-pack of hard lemonade from her friend Maureen in the passenger seat. It seemed like a lot longer ago than just last night that they’d gone to Highland Burger Bar, which didn’t keep him from wishing a sinkhole would open in the middle of this parking lot and swallow him. “How’s your mom feeling?”
“What’s wrong with your mom?” Meg asked, frowning a little. Colby shook his head.
“Um,” he said, smiling across the parking lot at Joanna in a way he hoped was friendly but not friendly enough to get himself in trouble. Maureen didn’t bother to hide her stink-eye. “She’s better.”
Joanna nodded, glancing curiously at Meg. “Hi,” she said, holding her hand out. “I’m Joanna.”
“Meg,” Meg said, and they shook.
“How do you guys know each other?” Joanna asked, passing the lemonades off to Micah.
Colby didn’t know why the truth felt weirdly embarrassing to him. “We met dressed as furries at Comic-Con,” he deadpanned before Meg could answer, which made Jordan laugh his honking donkey laugh. Meg, Colby couldn’t help but notice, didn’t smile.
A couple of other cars pulled into the lot just then, thankfully; Jordan and Jo’s cousin Brady with the painful-looking acne and a couple of the girls Micah worked with at Dollar General, the sound level rising until it felt more like an actual party. Maureen dropped her phone into an empty plastic cup to make a speaker, Jay-Z echoing out into the darkness. Somebody else brought a thirty-rack of Bud Light. Meg sat on the bumper of the Prius with her ankles crossed and chatted with some girl Jo knew from the hair salon, both of them animated. Jordan finally got his joint lit while Micah held court in front of the empty fountain.
“You doing okay?” Colby asked Meg, catching her arm as she dug in the back seat of the Prius for her water bottle. She wasn’t drinking, he’d noticed, though to be fair neither was he. He wasn’t exactly dying to add a DUI to his rap sheet, on top of which he had a sneaking suspicion beer actually made his nightmares worse. He’d had another one two nights earlier, blunt and terrifying, his dad screaming his name from inside one of Rick’s stupid model homes. It occurred to Colby to wish his subconscious had a little more finesse.
“I’m fine,” Meg said now, offering him the bland kind of bullshit smile he imagined she usually reserved for her friend Emily. “Are you okay?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, suddenly not sure about her tone. It was weird to have facial expressions to match it with all of a sudden, the delicate arch of her eyebrows and the purse of her heart-shaped mouth. “Why?”
Meg shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, picking idly at one of the stickers on her water bottle—the whole thing was covered with them, Yes We Can and HATE with a red line drawn through it and This Machine Kills Fascists, like maybe she was worried the T-shirt wasn’t working hard enough to announce her personal brand. “Just wondering.” Then, with a raise of her eyebrows so quick he wasn’t even sure if she’d really done it: “Joanna seems nice.”
Colby almost choked on his tongue. “Uh, yeah,” he said, wanting to explain but not knowing how to, wishing briefly for the safety of a telephone line. “Yeah, I mean—”
“Yo, Colby!” Micah called, waving his Bud Light in their general direction. “How many men does it take to open a beer can?”
Oh God, here they went. “How many,” Colby asked dutifully, though in truth he wasn’t altogether mad about the interruption.
“None,” Micah reported. “It should be open when she brings it.”
Jordan guffawed. Colby rolled his eyes. “Hilarious,” Joanna said, shaking her head indulgently.
Only Meg didn’t react. Instead, she got very still for a moment, considering Micah like a prey animal from across the parking lot. “Why is that funny?” she asked, her voice perfectly even. All at once, it occurred to Colby that possibly he’d been wrong about being the only person she was willing to fight with.
Micah looked startled for a moment, like he didn’t understand the question. Jordan was still chuckling to himself, though that might have been the weed. “Relax,” Micah said. “It was a joke.”
“Sure, but why is it funny?”
Micah shook his head. “You know why it’s funny.”
“I don’t, actually.” Meg was looking at him with her head cocked just slightly to the side. “I don’t understand the conceit of the joke, so I’m asking you to explain it to me.”
Colby grimaced. She clearly did understand the conceit of the joke, whatever that meant, but he got what she was doing. It was kind of an epic troll. He might have admired it, except for the part where it was making everything super fucking uncomfortable. Micah could be a boner sometimes, sure, but there was no point in ruining the night every time he said some jackass thing.
“All right, Hillary Clinton,” Micah said. “Didn’t mean to offend your delicate sensibilities.”
“Uh-oh,” Colby said. That was all he needed right now, for the two of them to get into some fucking debate about Benghazi or something and then they’d really be off to the races. God, he’d known bringing Meg around his friends was a bad idea from the very beginning, but still it was weird to see it play out, like watching a car wreck in slow motion when he was also somehow the one behind the wheel. “Let’s not bring politics into this.”
Meg ignored him. “Is that supposed to insult me?” she asked Micah, her voice a click higher than normal. “Calling me that? Like, in your mind, is that something that should make me feel embarrassed or shut me up?”
“It’s not supposed to do anything,” Micah said, shrugging violently. She was rattling him, Colby could tell. He thought of the first night he’d ever talked to Meg on the phone, that feeling of the ground shifting unexpectedly under his feet. He felt sorry for Micah, a little, thought mostly he just felt annoyed. “I’m just saying, you’re kind of a snowfl—”
“Don’t even say it,” Meg interrupted. “Seriously, buddy, I’m going to just go ahead and save you from yourself right—”
“Moran,” Micah said, “control your woman, will you?”
Oh, shit.
“I’m not his woman,” Meg said immediately, her sharp gaze cutting in Colby’s direction for the briefest of seconds. Joanna, who until now had been mostly engaged in a side conversation with her frizzy-haired friend Kylah, whipped around to look at them both. “And he doesn’t think you’re funny, either.”
“He doesn’t?” Micah asked. “’Cause you know him so well, right?”
“I know him better than you do, clearly.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Colby said weakly—trying, and mostly failing, to make a joke of this whole thing. “Don’t get me involved.”
“Dude, you brought her here,” Micah pointed out.
“I brought myself, actually,” Meg told him. “And—”
“Hey, Mike,” Joanna jumped in, kicking Micah lightly in the ankle and flapping her hand so he’d help her up off the yellow curb. “Speaking of beers, I need another. Come on, I’ll open one for you and everything.” And then somehow without even making a show of it she was leading him off across the parking lot like the Mother Teresa of awkward situations, though not before Micah muttered a few choice words under his breath.