You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,1

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.”

“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