You Say It First Read online

  Dedication

  For all the Collerans

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: Meg

  Two: Colby

  Three: Meg

  Four: Colby

  Five: Meg

  Six: Colby

  Seven: Meg

  Eight: Colby

  Nine: Meg

  Ten: Colby

  Eleven: Meg

  Twelve: Meg

  Thirteen: Colby

  Fourteen: Meg

  Fifteen: Colby

  Sixteen: Meg

  Seventeen: Colby

  Eighteen: Meg

  Nineteen: Colby

  Twenty: Colby

  Twenty-One: Meg

  Twenty-Two: Colby

  Twenty-Three: Meg

  Twenty-Four: Colby

  Twenty-Five: Meg

  Twenty-Six: Colby

  Twenty-Seven: Meg

  Twenty-Eight: Meg

  Twenty-Nine: Colby

  Thirty: Meg

  Thirty-One: Colby

  Thirty-Two: Meg

  Thirty-Three: Colby

  Thirty-Four: Meg

  Thirty-Five: Colby

  Thirty-Six: Meg

  Thirty-Seven: Colby

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Katie Cotugno

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Meg

  “In conclusion,” Meg said brightly, standing at the podium under the harsh fluorescent lights of the PTA meeting room on Wednesday evening, “it’s the position of the student council that our school is already sorely behind in doing its part to combat climate change. Adding solar panels to the roof of the main building is not only the fiscally responsible and environmentally sustainable thing to do, but will help ensure we’re living up to the values the Overbrook community has instilled in us all these years.” She smiled her most competent smile, sweating a little bit inside her uniform blazer. “Thank you very much for your time.”

  When the applause had finished and the meeting was adjourned, Meg made her way through the crowd of parents and teachers milling around the room to where her friends were waiting near the table of gluten-free brownies. “That was amazing!” Emily said, blond hair bouncing as she wrapped Meg in a bear hug. Adrienne and Javi saluted her with a pair of black-and-white cookies. “You looked like freakin’ AOC up there.”

  “Nice job, kid,” said Mason, ducking his head to peck her briefly on the cheek. Meg grinned and squeezed his hand. They’d been dating more than a year now, though more often they still hung out in a pack just like this—the five of them perpetually clustered around their usual table at the juice place near school, planning a fund raiser or a protest or world domination. By now they’d all heard her solar-panel speech about a thousand times.

  “Good work, Meg,” added Ms. Clemmey, her AP Government teacher, coming up behind them with a cup of watery-looking coffee, her graying hair frizzing out of its bun. “Now we’ll just have to see if they bite.”

  “They’ll bite,” Javi declared, all confidence, then stuffed another brownie into his mouth.

  Ms. Clemmey quirked an eyebrow. “Anything from Cornell, meanwhile?” she asked quietly.

  Meg shook her head, a little bit startled. “Not yet,” she said, glancing instinctively over at Emily. Rooming together at Cornell had been their plan for as long as they’d been talking about colleges, but ever since she’d submitted her application, Meg kept finding herself forgetting about it altogether for days at a stretch until somebody, usually Em, said something that reminded her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t excited—she was, definitely. She just had a lot of other stuff on her plate right now. “We should be hearing soon, though.”

  Ms. Clemmey nodded. “Well, they’ll be lucky to have you.”

  Meg shook her head, blushing a little. “We’ll see.”

  The five of them went to Cavelli’s to celebrate, ordering a large veggie pie so Adrienne could have some and two pitchers of Coke. “To the Green New Deal of Overbrook Day,” Emily said, holding up her red plastic cup. They laughed and clinked and ate their pizza, Meg sitting back in her chair and listening as the conversation wandered: from Javi’s parents’ new labradoodle puppy, to a bunch of idiot sophomores who’d gotten drunk and thrown up all over the skating rink during spring break, to a New York Times podcast Emily was obsessed with. It made Meg happy to picture what they must look like from outside the wide front window, their faces lit by the fake Tiffany lamp over the table. Most of all she felt normal, like she hadn’t for so much of last year.

  It was almost ten by the time they paid their bill and headed out, Meg following Mason across the parking lot to where his Subaru was parked right next to her Prius. It was still mostly winter in Pennsylvania, with that damp blue-green whiff of spring on the air if you breathed deep enough. Meg tugged her cashmere beanie down over her ears.

  “You were really great tonight,” Mason said, turning to face her as he reached his driver’s-side door.

  “You think so?” she asked, taking a step closer. He looked handsome in the yellow glow of the parking lot light, with his dark eyes and high cheekbones. They’d known each other since kindergarten, back when Meg’s mom put her hair in French-braid pigtails every morning and he was still the only Korean kid in their grade. Twelve years later, flush with victory, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close.

  Mason stiffened. “Meg,” he said, his hands landing gently on her waist, then letting go again.

  “Hm?” she said, tilting her face up so he’d kiss her. Neither of them were into PDA—Meg hated any kind of nonpolitical public spectacle as a general rule—but it was late, and the parking lot was mostly empty. She could make an exception just this once.

  “Meg,” he said again, and she frowned.

  “What?”

  Mason hesitated, glancing over her shoulder instead of looking directly at her. In the second before he spoke, Meg had the sudden feeling of realizing too late that she’d stepped in front of a car: “I think we should break up,” he said.

  She blinked, her arms dropping off his shoulders. “What?”

  “I just, um.” Mason shrugged, visibly embarrassed; he looked eleven instead of seventeen. “I don’t really think this is working.”

  “But like.” Meg stared at him for a moment, running a quick, panicky set of diagnostics inside her head. Sure, lately they’d spent more time studying for the SAT Subject Tests and making fliers for the Philly Bail Fund than, like, goofing around or staring soulfully into each other’s eyes, but that just meant they were in a mature relationship, right? That just meant their priorities were the same. “We never fight.”

  Mason looked surprised, and it occurred to Meg a second too late that that had probably been a weird way to respond on her part. “No, I know we don’t,” he said, tucking his hands into his jacket pockets. The jacket was new, a blue waxed canvas situation his mom had gotten him for his birthday. It made him look, Meg thought snottily, like a postman. “But that doesn’t mean—I mean, not fighting isn’t a reason to stay together, is it?”

  “No, I know that,” Meg said quickly, swallowing down the jagged break in her voice. She thought of the gentle, distracted way he’d trace his fingertips over her wrist as they were reading. She thought of the late-night ice cream runs they’d taken while she worked on her solar-panel speech. “Of course I know that.” She took a step back, her spine bumping roughly against the passenger-side door of her car. Suddenly, she was cold enough to shiver. “Okay,” she said, forcing herself to take a deep, steadying breath. “Well. Okay. I’m going to go, then.”
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  “Meg, wait.” Now Mason looked really confused. “Shouldn’t we, like—don’t you even want to talk about this?”

  “What is there to talk about?” she asked, hating how shrill her voice sounded. “It’s fine, Mason. I get it.” She didn’t get it at all, not really. Actually, she felt blindsided and furious and completely, utterly foolish, but the literal last thing she wanted to do was talk about it, to stand here and fight it out in public like her parents in the last doomed days of their marriage. There was no way she was going to do that. “It’s fine, I hear you. Message received.”

  Mason shook his head. “Meg—”

  “Thanks for coming to support the solar panels,” she managed. “I’ll see you at school, okay?”

  She got into her car and slammed the door a little harder than necessary, squeezing the steering wheel as she waited for him to leave, then realizing with a quiet swear that he was waiting for her to pull out first. Meg did, driving halfway home with her hands at a perfect ten and two, NPR burbling softly away on the radio. It wasn’t until Mason turned off the main road toward his neighborhood and the Subaru was safely out of sight that she pulled over onto the shoulder and let herself cry.

  Emily was waiting by Meg’s locker before homeroom the following morning, her French book in one hand and a massive Frappuccino in the other. “Are you okay?” she asked, holding out the coffee cup. “Here, this is yours. I had them put all the different kinds of drizzles on it. You’re probably going to get diabetes, but, desperate times. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m good,” Meg said cheerfully, sucking a mouthful of whipped cream through the wide green straw. There was no way she was going to be a drama queen about this—even in front of Emily, who’d basically kept her upright through her ridiculous postdivorce depression fog of junior year. People broke up all the time; that was all there was to it. It was fine. She was fine.

  “Are you sure?” Emily looked skeptical.

  “I am sure,” Meg said.

  “Okay,” Emily said, visibly unconvinced. “Because I’m just saying, nobody’s going to blame you if you’re not.”

  “But I am.”

  “I hear you,” Emily said patiently, taking the Frappuccino back for safekeeping as Meg opened her locker, “and that’s great. But it sucks when relationships end, you know? Even relationships like—” She broke off.

  Meg’s eyes narrowed; she closed the locker door again, peering at Em suspiciously. “Even relationships like what?”

  “What? Nothing.” Emily shook her head, eyes wide. “It sucks when relationships end, full stop.”

  “Uh-huh,” Meg said, smirking a little. “Good try. What?”

  Emily wrinkled her nose. “I mean, I don’t know,” she said, leaning back against the locker beside Meg’s and hugging her French book to her chest. “It just always seemed like maybe you weren’t actually that into Mason in the first place, that’s all.”

  “What?” Meg blinked. She had so been into Mason. She’d loved Mason. She’d lost her virginity to Mason, for Pete’s sake. “We were together for more than a year, Em.”

  “I know you were!” Emily shrugged. “And in all that time I never heard you say anything like, Oh man, I love Mason so much, I want to be with him forever and have a hundred million of his babies, he sets my loins on fire like Captain America and Killmonger combined.”

  “Rude!” Meg said, laughing in spite of herself. “First of all, there’s more to relationships than your loins constantly being on fire.” At least, she’d thought there was. Sure, she and Mason hadn’t exactly been generating nuclear power with the sheer force of their physical chemistry, but they’d had fun together. They made a good team. And—most important—they were nothing like her parents, who’d spent what felt like the entire duration of their marriage screaming at each other. Meg had thought that counted for something. “And second of all, who knew belonging to all the same clubs and liking all the same political candidates didn’t guarantee a happily ever after?”

  Emily grinned. “What does that say about you and me?” she pointed out, helping herself to a sip of the Frappuccino before handing it back. “We belong to all the same clubs and like all the same political candidates.”

  “We’re different,” Meg said, zipping up her backpack and looping her arm through Em’s. See? Here she was, joking around and everything. She was totally okay. “We like all the same everything. Our happily ever after is fully assured.”

  “I mean, true,” Emily said as they made their way down the crowded hallway. The two of them had been best friends since second grade, and even back then Meg had been shocked by how much they had in common: They played all the same games at recess. They watched all the same shows on TV. Every year on the first day of class they showed up wearing the exact same pair of shoes, even though they never planned it, and every year they burst out laughing like it hadn’t ever happened before. It was the thesis statement of their friendship—that comforting sameness, the knowledge that by the time a thought occurred to her, Emily was already thinking it, too. Sometimes Meg wondered if maybe they were actually the same person, split into two different bodies by some cosmic mistake.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Em asked now, stopping outside of Meg’s homeroom. “Want to come over and we can watch something stupid?”

  Meg did, and badly, but she shook her head. “I have WeCount tonight,” she said, though honestly that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t want to fall back into the easy comfort of a midweek dinner at Emily’s house. She’d spent any number of borderline-catatonic nights in front of the Hurds’ TV last year when everything was crashing and burning with her parents, Em heaping green beans onto her plate and ghostwriting her Progressive Overbrook agendas and making sure her homework got done. Meg didn’t want to be that person anymore. She wasn’t that person anymore. She was under control.

  She was fine.

  “I’m sure the Cause will understand if you want to take one night off because you broke up with your boyfriend,” Em pressed gently. Then she frowned. “It’s me, okay? You can tell me.”

  But Meg shook her head again. “The Cause waits for no one,” she said brightly, then raised her Frappuccino in a goofy salute and headed off to face the day.

  Two

  Colby

  Colby knew it was a dumb idea to climb the water tower pretty much from the moment Micah said he wanted to do it, but it wasn’t like there was anything more exciting going on, so on Wednesday after midnight they all met at Jordan’s stepdad’s house, zipped their jackets against the skin-splitting rawness of March in Alma, Ohio, and set out for the wide, overgrown field at the edge of town.

  “Tell me again why we couldn’t just drive?” Colby muttered, balling his chapped, chilly hands into fists in his pockets as he trailed the rest of them through the darkened parking lot of the Liquor Mart, Micah in his army-green surplus coat and Jordan in the Jack Skellington hat he always wore, his ears sticking out like bat wings beneath the brim. Jordan’s twin sister, Joanna, had tagged along at the last minute, her blond hair tucked up into a beanie with a furry pom-pom on top of it. Colby had been surprised: Jo, with her key ring full of discount cards and a car that smelled like vanilla cupcakes on the inside, always felt older and less susceptible to half-baked plans than the rest of them, even though Jordan was forever making a big point of telling everyone he’d been born first. But then she’d bumped Colby’s shoulder and smiled hello, her straight white teeth like a slice of winter moonlight, and he thought maybe he wasn’t actually that surprised after all.

  “Stealth, dude,” Micah said now, leading them across the service road with the slightly sketchy confidence of one of those guides who brought people down into the Grand Canyon on donkeys. “Car would be too suspicious.”

  Colby frowned. “More suspicious than the four of us wandering the streets in the middle of the night like a bunch of hobos?”

  Micah snorted. “Moran, if you’re too much of a pussy to do this
, just say so.”

  “Fuck you,” Colby said, glancing instinctively at Joanna before he could quell the impulse. “Let’s go.”

  Alma got a little scruffier as they got closer to the tower, the sidewalk narrowing before it disappeared completely so they had to walk single file along the grassy shoulder, low-slung houses crowding close together like teeth in a mouth that was too small. A broad, stocky pit mix paced the length of a chain link fence, winter-crisped weeds nearly brushing his belly. Colby winced at the casual cruelty of whoever had left him out here, reaching his hand out for the little dude to sniff.

  “Come on,” Micah said, kicking at Colby’s ankle to keep him moving as the dog barked and growled in response, suspicious. “We’re almost there.”

  “I know where we are,” Colby muttered, digging the fuzzy end of a package of peanut butter crackers out of his inside pocket and slipping a couple through the chain link. “I grew up here, same as you.” Alma wasn’t the kind of place people left, as a general rule. Colby didn’t have to try real hard to picture them all in ten years, still living with their parents and working jobs that were mostly bullshit, spending every weekend trying to outrun their own boredom just like they had since they were little kids setting stuff on fire in the parking lot outside their Cub Scout meetings at the Knights of Columbus hall. Probably the idea should have bothered him more than it actually did, Colby thought, jogging across the blacktop to catch up. But there were worse things in life than knowing exactly what to expect.

  Now they shimmied down into a shallow ravine, Joanna swearing under her breath as she almost lost her footing, then wriggled through a hole in a fence and picked their way through an overgrown lot full of empty beer bottles and shredded tires and, inexplicably, a corduroy armchair set to full recline. Colby was seriously considering telling Micah to screw himself and going home to jerk off in the shower when, finally, there it was: the familiar silhouette of it tall and black and imposing, proud against the purple-black sky. “Shit” seemed like the only appropriate thing to say.

  Joanna stopped and gazed at it for a moment, her expression startled in the orange glow of the lone safety light affixed to the rickety-looking catwalk that ringed the water tank. “I didn’t realize it was that big,” she admitted, shivering once inside her jacket.