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“So, yes,” Meg said. “Okay. Fair enough. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it weird, I just—”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” Colby blurted, finally finding his words. “Or, I mean, I do think it’s weird, I guess, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to meet you.”

“It doesn’t?” Meg asked. “I mean, you do?”

Colby hesitated. He did and he didn’t, he guessed. He knew it was inevitably going to be a disappointment, that logically none of this was ever going to be whatever he’d been making it in his mind in the weeks since they’d started talking. And yet...

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

“Okay.” Meg swallowed. “Where?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, what’s between where you are and where I am?” she asked. “Like, right in the middle? Actually, hang on. I’ll Google it.” He could hear her typing away, the determined clatter of her fingers on the keyboard. Colby’s heart was slamming away inside his chest. “Literally nothing,” she reported after a moment. “Well, there’s a truck-stop diner not too far. But I’m not meeting you at a truck-stop diner. What if I just came to you?”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Why not, right?”

“It’s far.”

“It’s not that far,” Meg countered. “Google says it’s, like, eight hours.”

“You want to drive eight hours to see me?” Colby blurted.

“I mean, why not?”

“Have you ever driven eight hours before?”

“Yes,” Meg said immediately.

“When?”

“To see Harry Styles last summer, and if you say anything about it, this whole thing is off.”

“I’m not saying anything,” Colby promised. He couldn’t stop smiling. He also felt like he was about to throw up. He couldn’t imagine meeting her at all, to be honest, but now that the idea had lodged itself in his mind, he couldn’t stop thinking it, couldn’t stop wanting it. Already wanted it more than he’d wanted anything in a long time.

He thought for a moment. His mom was working a double this weekend. It was conceivable Meg could be in and out without his mom ever knowing she’d been here. “What about tomorrow?” he asked. It was soon—it was too soon—but he also thought it was possible he’d lose his nerve entirely if they waited any longer than that.

“Oh! Um.” Meg sounded surprised, and he wondered for a moment if she’d been counting on him saying it wasn’t a good idea, if possibly they were playing some weird game of chicken he hadn’t copped onto until it was too late. “Yeah,” she said. “Tomorrow could work.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.”

Sixteen

Meg

It was barely light the next morning when Meg filled her Kleen Kanteen and tucked a few packets of trail mix and an apple into her backpack, then tossed it into the back seat of the Prius and cracked the windows to the warm spring air. She’d told her mom she was going to Dorney Park with Emily’s family. She hadn’t told anybody the truth. On one hand, it felt kind of wildly liberating, the idea of not having to answer to anyone but herself for the next thirty-six hours.

On the other, she was extremely worried about getting chainsaw murdered.

Well, Meg reassured herself, she’d packed the portable charger for her cell phone. She had three hundred dollars in cash from her bank account and the Mastercard her dad had cosigned for her when she started her job so she could start building credit. She wasn’t an idiot. Not that you had to be an idiot to get chainsaw murdered, obviously, but—

Anyway, this whole line of thinking was irrelevant, because Colby wasn’t a chainsaw murderer.

Meg was, like, 99 percent sure.