You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,2

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