You Say It First Read online

  Micah shrugged. “It’s a water tower, Jo,” he said, like that should have been obvious. “Let’s go.”

  Jo cut her eyes to Colby, who held his hands up in the dark. “Don’t do it if you don’t want to,” he told her quietly. He felt protective of her all of a sudden, though he told himself it was just because she was the only girl here. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m about to do it, if you want me to be honest with you.”

  “I always want you to be honest with me,” Joanna said, but before Colby could reply one way or the other she was headed across the field, the white pom-pom on top of her hat the only part of her visible in the moonlight. “Come on.”

  It took them a long time to scale the side of the tower. The ancient iron ladder creaked dangerously, the wind stinging Colby’s cheeks as rust on the rungs coated the palms of his hands with a rough orange dust. “Mike,” Colby muttered, glancing down and immediately getting dizzy, his fingers beginning to numb. All at once the magnitude of his own stupidity reared up at him—his dad would have skinned him alive for a stunt like this, had his dad still been around to have opinions on things like what Colby did or didn’t do. “Shit, dude, this is really high.”

  “Don’t look,” Joanna warned from underneath him, her voice surprisingly calm. “If you look it makes it worse.”

  “I’m not looking,” Colby promised, turning his face skyward. If he started thinking about his dad—that day in the garage in the rainstorm, how in May he’d have been gone a full year—he was going to lose the plot for sure, so instead he gritted his teeth and forced himself to think of nothing, hand over cold, clumsy hand on the ladder until finally he swung one leg over the guardrail. He pulled Joanna up after him, the two of them grinning at each other in dumb relief as Micah and Jordan fist-bumped beside them, all of them giggling like a bunch of stoners.

  That was when the cops showed up.

  Two hours later, Colby sat in a brightly lit holding room, a can of ginger ale going warm on the scarred wooden bench beside him. He had no idea why he’d asked for ginger ale, honestly, like he was flying on a fucking airplane and not sitting here waiting to find out if he was going to jail or not.

  He’d never actually been on an airplane, come to think of it. Maybe this was the closest he was going to get.

  Colby sighed, leaning his head back against the painted cinder-block wall behind him. They’d split all of them up into separate rooms; he’d craned his neck for a last worried look at Joanna as a lady guard led her down the pee-smelling hallway and Micah yammered on about his civil rights. Colby’s wrists were a little red from the handcuffs, which seemed like overkill. It wasn’t exactly like the four of them were a quartet of criminal masterminds here.

  This wasn’t Colby’s first encounter with the Ross County Sheriff’s Department, though he’d never been carted down to the station in the back of a squad car until now. He hadn’t actually been in this building at all since his second-grade class trip. His dad had been one of the chaperones, Colby remembered suddenly; they’d all gotten plastic sheriff’s stars from a gallon-sized Ziploc bag at the reception desk up front.

  He should try to stop thinking about his dad.

  “Colby,” Keith said now, coming into the holding room and shutting the windowed door behind him. He was wearing his mustard-colored deputy uniform with Olsen stitched across the pocket, his hair cut short on the sides and slicked back with pomade or gel or something at the top. It was, Colby thought, an extremely try-hard kind of haircut. “How’s it going in here?”

  “Fine,” Colby said, sitting up a little straighter in spite of himself, as if Keith were an actual authority figure and not the same boner he’d been since everyone used to make fun of him for eating his own boogers back in elementary school. “Is Jo okay?”

  Keith raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to make it clear that he’d noticed Colby’s interest and was filing it away for later consideration. “She’s fine, too,” he said with a nod. “Her stepdad came and got her.”

  Colby blew a breath out. Jo wasn’t his girlfriend—they’d never even kissed, though Micah never missed a chance to tell him how nutless he was for not having, in Micah’s words, hit that by now—but that didn’t mean he wanted her spending the night at the sheriff’s department just because the rest of them were a bag of smashed assholes. “Okay,” he said, relaxing a little. “Good.”

  “He left Jordan here to sweat it out a couple more hours, though,” Keith continued, sitting down on the opposite bench and resting his slightly girlish-looking hands on his knees. “Can’t say I blame him. The hat alone should be a capital crime.”

  Colby didn’t smile. “Should you be telling me that?” he asked instead, crossing his arms and frowning. Now that he knew Jo was okay, he was back to being pissed—at Keith, at Jordan, at Micah. At himself most of all. “Don’t you want to play us all off each other or something? Get us to confess?”

  Keith rolled his eyes. “I literally caught you up there, idiot. I don’t need confessions.” He shrugged. “And anyway, we’re not going to charge you.”

  He said it in a voice like he was doing Colby a favor—which, as much as Colby hated to admit it, he probably was. “Really?” he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Why not?”

  Keith scrubbed a hand over his face, a gesture Colby thought he’d probably gotten from Chicago P.D. or one of those other shows about weary but good-hearted law enforcement professionals that were basically just delivery mechanisms for Buick commercials. “You’re too old for this shit, Colby, you know that? You’re what, seventeen?”

  “Eighteen,” Colby corrected, vaguely insulted. Keith had been in Colby’s brother Matt’s year in school, which meant he was only twenty-two himself now, maybe twenty-three depending on his birthday. There was a painful-looking spray of decidedly teenage acne along his chin. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough not be climbing the water tower like a fucking bonehead,” Keith shot back. Then he sighed. “Look,” he said, “I know you guys have had a tough year.”

  Colby felt his whole body stiffen, his bones in their sockets and the teeth in his head. “We’re fine,” he said immediately. “This isn’t—I’m fine.”

  “Are you?” Keith looked unconvinced. “Dude, I know you. I knew your dad. You’re better than this.”

  Colby looked at him for a long moment, even. “Dude,” he said finally—mimicking Keith’s expression exactly, leaning his head back one more time. “I’m really not.”

  In the end, Keith walked him out to the front of the station, handing him a plastic bin that contained his phone and wallet and watching as Colby zipped up his jacket. Outside the smeary Plexiglas windows, rain was coming down in icy-looking sheets. Colby gazed at the downpour for a moment, trying not to let his expression betray him. The walk home would probably take him until dawn.

  Keith sighed. “Come on,” was all he said, pulling a set of keys out of his uniform pocket. Colby followed him wordlessly out to the car.

  Three

  Meg

  As far as Meg was concerned, she and Mason had said everything they needed to say to each other in the parking lot outside Cavelli’s last night, but that afternoon she was in the south hallway putting up fliers for a student council sock drive when she turned around and there he was. “Um, hi,” she said, with a smile so bright and unwavering she might as well have used the freaking stapler to attach it to her face. “What’s up?”

  “Hi yourself,” he said, this hey, stranger look in his eyes like they hadn’t just seen each other in AP Lit Comp, and in Spanish 4 before that. Overbrook Day was tiny, only around fifty people per grade; she and Mason had had basically the exact same schedule their entire lives. “Do you need help with those?”

  Meg shook her head. “I’m all set.” This was going to be a problem about them being broken up, she realized—Mason was a homeroom rep for student council, just like he was one of the other founding members of Progressive Overbrook and on the steering committee
for the spring carnival. It was part of what had made it so easy to date him.

  “So, um,” he said, shifting his weight in his immaculate white Adidas. He’d loosened his uniform tie and was wearing the new glasses he’d gotten over spring break, which made him look annoyingly cute in a reporter-on-deadline sort of way. “I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”

  “Oh God,” Meg said before she could stop herself, then waved her hand, fully aware of how dumb and squeaky her voice sounded. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m good!”

  “Okay,” Mason said, his plush mouth turning down at the edges. “But I guess I just mean, if you’re ever not . . .” He trailed off, the you can always talk to me implicit.

  “We were friends first, weren’t we?”

  Meg grimaced. This was true, at least sort of—in a school as small as Overbrook, everyone was friends, or at the very least everyone knew each other. But the two of them had never really talked until the AP American class they’d had with Emily last year, when what had started as a study group for Ms. Lao’s notoriously impossible tests turned into their twice-weekly huddle at the juice place with Javi and Adrienne.

  Still, she’d been surprised when he wound up at their table at Emily’s sweet sixteen, shined up like a new penny in his suit and fancy shoes; Meg had actually gasped when she’d seen him, at the broadness of his shoulders and the sharp cut of his jaw. “You clean up nice, Mason Lee,” she’d told him, and he’d grinned. They’d argued gamely about Bernie Sanders for half an hour, then gone for a walk outside the country club, where he’d kissed her in front of a fountain lit up pink and blue and green. Emily had almost murdered them both for missing the dancing.

  “Sure,” Meg said now, eighteen months later, more to avoid a confrontation than anything else. “We were friends first.”

  “Okay,” Mason said, looking relieved. He hugged her then, the smell of castile soap and the sustainable detergent his mom used. Meg bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.

  She waved goodbye and headed out into the chilly parking lot, throwing her backpack onto the passenger seat and zipping across town toward home. Her mom was still at work, and Meg pulled up to the curb in front of the house so she wouldn’t be blocked in when she needed to go to WeCount later. It used to be that her mom parked in the garage and her dad parked in the long, skinny driveway, which had led to a lot of shuffling and grumbling about who needed to move whose car when. Sometimes Meg wondered if they’d still be together if both of them had just agreed to park on the street.

  Meg’s first memory was of her parents arguing, a fact she hadn’t realized was unusual until she’d mentioned it offhandedly to Emily at a sleepover in seventh grade and Emily had given her a super weird look, after which point she’d been careful not to mention it to anyone ever again. Still, when she thought of her parents, they were basically always going at it: The time on vacation in California when they’d fought about the rental car all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, the time her mom had thrown an entire thirteen-by-nine casserole dish of stuffing on the kitchen floor and stormed out of Thanksgiving. The time they’d gotten into a rager at Colonial Williamsburg, screaming bloody murder at each other while Meg read a Magic Tree House beside them and a man dressed as Benjamin Franklin pretended not to listen.

  Meg knew it should have been a relief when they finally split up last winter—healthier for everyone, they’d reassured her, and she was pretty sure they were right—but instead it was like some very important part of her just . . . shut down. She’d sleepwalked through the rest of junior year like a zombie, bouncing between school and Em’s and Mason’s while her parents outsourced the worst of their fighting to a pair of slick, sharky lawyers. She’d snapped out of it, finally—she was fine, after all—but the truth was that even now, three months from graduation, sometimes it felt like she was still waiting to wake up.

  Meg wandered through the big, echoey house and got herself a granola bar from the kitchen, chucking a pair of liquefied bananas into the trash. She was just chasing a couple of fruit flies out of the sink when she heard her mom’s key in the door.

  “Hey,” she called, padding through the dark, cluttered dining room and out into the hallway. Meg still couldn’t get used to seeing her mom in the skirts and blouses she wore to work now, like she was dressed up in some kind of costume. Right when she’d first started interviewing, the two of them had gone to the J.Crew Factory Store and she’d bought the same top in four different prints. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, you know,” her mom said, dumping her purse on the wooden bench near the doorway and kicking her sensible pumps to the side. A couple of months after Meg’s dad moved out, she’d gotten a job through a friend of a friend as a receptionist at one of those big old Colonial-era mansions that hosted weddings and reunions and the occasional Revolutionary War reenactment, answering the phone and handing out informational brochures and adding people’s addresses to the mailing list. It sounded totally boring, but Meg knew the truth was that her mom was lucky to get hired at all, since until last year she hadn’t worked an outside job since the ’90s. Her dad’s career was managing Hal Collins, the famous folk singer. Her mom’s career was being his wife. “Not as bad as a chicken in my underwear.”

  Meg smiled. Not as bad as a chicken in your underwear was an old joke in their family, though she didn’t actually know where it came from. That was one thing she missed about her parents being together—it was like the three of them had had a little civilization with a language all their own, and now there were never enough of them around at once to speak it properly.

  They boiled a pot of spaghetti and dumped a jar of tomato sauce on top—neither one of them was going to be winning any cooking competitions any time soon, that was for sure—and carried their bowls past the dust-covered piano in the living room to the sagging couch in the den, her mom stopping by the fridge on the way to pour herself a big glass of white wine. Meg glanced in her direction as she set it down on the coffee table, then looked back at the TV. Both her parents had always been social drinkers, going out to long, boozy dinners in New York with Hal and his band, but lately it felt like her mom was hitting it kind of hard. At least, Meg thought she was. She couldn’t tell if her mom was actually doing it more or if it just seemed that way because she was doing it alone.

  They settled down in front of a home renovation show, a cheerful husband and wife knocking down walls and installing brand-new cabinets. Meg couldn’t help glancing down at the grungy Persian rug in the den. Her dad had always been the more fastidious of her parents, and since he’d moved out a certain amount of chaos had started to creep in around the edges of their big, creaky old house, like vines climbing up over a white picket fence. Tumbleweeds of dust and hair drifted into the upstairs corners. The antique handles on the bathroom faucet had come loose. Water glasses collected on every available surface until they finally ran out altogether and had to wander from room to room rounding them up like wayward cattle. Leaning against the side of the sofa were a bunch of weird abstract paintings her mom had bought at an estate sale right after her dad had moved out, saying she was going to make a gallery wall where their wedding photos had hung, but she’d lost enthusiasm for the project halfway through.

  “Maybe we should paint in here this summer,” Meg ventured now, licking a smear of tomato sauce off the side of her thumb and squinting at a brownish water stain on the ceiling above the window. There’d been a whole thing with ice dams over the winter, and her parents had gotten into a stalemate over whose job it was to pay for it. In the end, Meg wasn’t sure either one of them actually had.

  “Oh, definitely,” her mom agreed now, holding her hand out for Meg’s empty bowl before standing up and heading into the kitchen. “We can go ahead and shiplap the bathroom while we’re at it.”

  Well. So much for that idea, Meg guessed. “Whitewash the fireplace, perhaps.”

  “Exactly.” Meg heard her setting the dishes in the sink, then a long pause a
nd finally the sound of the fridge opening and closing. “Did you know your father and Lisa are in Palm Springs this weekend?” she asked as she came back into the living room, a fresh glass of wine in one hand and her phone in the other.

  “He mentioned it, yeah,” Meg said cautiously. Lisa was her dad’s girlfriend, a lawyer for one of the universities in Philly. She was younger than him—not so young that it was objectively gross, Meg guessed, but young enough that it was her mom’s favorite thing to complain about. “Hal was doing some shows in LA.”

  “Well, good for Hal,” her mom said crisply. “And good for Lisa, apparently. She posted all about her luxurious day at the spa on Facebook.”

  Meg grimaced. “Mom, why are you looking at her Facebook to begin with?”

  “I know,” her mom said immediately, setting her phone on the arm of the sofa and holding her free hand up. “It’s bad of me. It’s toxic behavior.” She took a sip of her wine. “I’m just saying, it would have been nice of him to see if you wanted to go.”

  “I have school,” Meg reminded her.

  “Oh, like he’s suddenly so attuned to your academic calendar.” Meg’s mom rolled her eyes. “And, you know, not for nothing, but if he’s got the cash to be tacking romantic spa getaways onto his work trips, you’d think possibly he could also be bothered to—”

  “Mom,” Meg interrupted quietly. “Come on.”

  “I’m stopping,” her mom said now, holding her hand up again, waving it back and forth. “I’m sorry. I’m stopping.”

  She was as good as her word, thankfully: her lips were zipped for the rest of the episode, not counting a crack about the ugly mosaic tile the designer picked out for the brand-new backsplash. What she didn’t stop doing was drinking. Meg bit the inside of her cheek as her mom poured herself another glass of wine, and then another. The next time she got up, just as the clients were oohing and aahing over their brand-new master bathroom, Meg heard the telltale pop of a cork as her mom opened a whole other bottle.