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“Oh!” For a second, she didn’t know what he was talking about; this entire conversation kept distracting her, the whole world narrowing to the sound of his voice. “It’s okay. It’s not actually even a real problem, like I was saying. It’s just that I got into Cornell, and, like, obviously I’m going to go, but the more I think about it the less I actually want to.”

It was out before she knew she was going to say it, and the sound of it shocked her—she’d never even let herself consider it before—but as soon as she heard it out loud, she knew it was true. She didn’t want to go to Ithaca in September.

She just had no idea what she did want to do.

“Okay,” Colby was saying now, his voice slow and curious. “And why do you have to go, exactly?”

Meg hesitated, trying to figure out how to explain it in a way that didn’t sound completely spoiled and finally deciding it didn’t matter. “Well, it’s the best school I applied to,” she tried, though it didn’t sound particularly convincing even to her own ears. “And my best friend, Emily, and I have always had this plan to go there and room together.” Now that she stopped and thought about it, Meg guessed it was mostly Em’s plan, concocted last year during the divorce, when their guidance counselor was demanding application lists and Meg could barely comb her own hair, let alone plan her future. Still, Meg had definitely agreed to it. “To keep things the same, you know?”

“And you can’t keep things the same from the suburbs of Philadelphia?”

Meg’s mouth dropped open. “Who says I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia?”

“Don’t you?”

She huffed. “Maybe.”

“Lucky guess.”

Again there was a pause, and again Meg waited for him to tell her he had to go, but instead the conversation meandered: to a family trip to Philly his family had taken when he was in middle school, which they’d spent mostly waiting in line for cheesesteaks and a picture in front of the Liberty Bell; to the Mutter Museum, which was full of medical oddities including a small piece of John Wilkes Booth’s thorax and which had an entire room where the walls were covered with mounted human skulls; to Cedar Point, the self-proclaimed roller-coaster capital of the world, which she’d been to on an overnight trip with her debate team freshman year. “I rode, like, eleven different roller coasters,” she confessed, lying back on the mattress. She’d turned all the lights off except for the one beside her bed. “And I was doing fine until I got off number twelve, but then I wasn’t near a garbage can so I just panicked and barfed into the sleeve of my hoodie.”

“You did not,” Colby said immediately.

“I know,” she said, feeling weirdly pleased with herself. “I can tell by your voice that you think I’m too prissy to have done something so unladylike, but: desperate times.”

“Clearly,” Colby said. “I think I underestimated you, Meg from WeCount.”

“Well,” she said, “you shouldn’t.”

“I’m starting to see that, yeah,” he said with a laugh. There was something about that sound, the low, warm grumble of it, that Meg felt in her hands and spine and stomach. A very small voice inside her said: Oh no.

“It’s late,” she said finally, catching sight of the vintage clock on her nightstand. The alarm part didn’t work anymore, and Mason had tried to get her to toss it last year when his mom had been on a big Marie Kondo kick, but she wouldn’t let him. It sparks joy, she’d insisted, setting it back on the nightstand. It occurred to her with a jolt that this conversation was the longest she’d gone without thinking about Mason in days. It made her feel a tiny bit disloyal, even though he was the one who’d broken up with her and anyway it wasn’t like this phone call was romantic or anything like that. “I should probably try to sleep.”

“Sure thing,” Colby said. “I’ve got work in the morning, too.” He cleared his throat. “I work at Home Depot, PS,” he said. “In the warehouse.”

“Oh!” Meg said, then snapped her jaws shut before she said anything accidentally offensive. The idea of spending your days moving refrigerators and table saws and, like, paint cans from place to place was enormously bleak to her, and she knew it made her an unforgiveable snob. “See?” she said instead. “Was that so hard?”

“No,” Colby said after a moment. “I guess not.”

Meg wanted to ask if he liked it; she wanted to ask what he did there, and what kinds of people he worked with. She wanted to know if he wanted to do something else or if he was happy, and she wanted to hear him laugh one more time, but she knew she was only postponing the inevitable. “Have a good night, Colby,” she said quietly. “It was really nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was really nice talking to you, too.”

Meg swallowed down a weird surge of panic just then: a feeling like an escape hatch closing in a movie, of being left behind in a dangerous place. Wait, she thought, and take me with you.

“Good night” was all she said.

Once she’d hung up, she turned off the lamp and stared at the moonlight making patterns on the ceiling. She didn’t fall asleep for a long time.

Eight

Colby

Colby stopped at Bixby’s for coffee the following morning, plunking a dollar in the tip jar and smiling at the barista without letting himself think about why. He was exhausted—it had been damn near impossible to drag his ass out of bed and into the shower this morning—but it felt like a good kind of tired, like when he used to work with his dad on job sites in the summer and came home at the end of the day filthy and sore.

“You hit the lotto or something?” Moira asked when he got to work, coming up behind him with her backpack slung over one shoulder as he punched his employee code into the time clock. Moira was his shift supervisor, a tall skinny black woman in her thirties with long braids down her back.

“Huh?” Colby asked, blinking distractedly. He entered his number wrong, had to clear it out and start over.