I blink a few times and push the picnic out of my mind.
The source of the voice is a girl with short, brown hair that is juuust long enough to fall in her eyes, skin a shade or two lighter than her hair, earrings stuck in weird places in her ears, and tie-dyed overalls over a black tank top. She looks like she works in a Whole Foods.
“Uh, yeah. Sure,” I say. I turn back to Shoshanna and Dave, glad to have an excuse to bail on this happy little reunion. The cantaloupe juice can wait. “Gotta go.”
“Bye, Ryden!” Shoshanna’s voice travels down the aisle after me.
“Yeah, see ya tomorrow, Ry.”
I shake my head to myself as I follow tie-dye girl to dairy. Good thing that wasn’t awkward or anything.
Once we’re out of sight of the Mexican and Asian aisle, tie-dye girl stops walking and spins on her heel. “Right, so…” she says as I screech to a halt behind her. “There’s no cleanup in dairy.”
“Huh?” That’s all I got. I’m so tired.
“Sorry, it just looked like you were having a moment there. Thought you might need a little help with your getaway.”
I lean back against a shelf of recycled paper towels. They’re soft. I could totally curl up right here on the floor and use one of the rolls as a pillow.
“Thanks,” I say. “How did you know my name?”
She points to my name tag.
“Right,” I say. “Where’s yours? Or do you not even work here?”
She pulls the top of her overalls to the side to reveal a name tag pinned to her tank top. Joni. “I’m new. Started the day before yesterday and already blew my first week’s paycheck on ungodly amounts of pomegranate-flavored soda. That stuff is like crack.”
I smile for the first time in centuries. “Nice to meet you, Joni,” I say.
“I saw you catch that kid,” she says.
“Oh.”
“That was cool.”
I shrug. “I guess.” There’s an awkward pause, like she’s waiting for me to say something else. “Well, see ya,” I say and book it out of there as fast as I can.
“Nice to meet you too, Ryden,” Joni calls after me.
Chapter 2
In the break room, I pull Meg’s journal out of my bag. It’s the only thing I have left of her—the old her, the person she was before I destroyed her life by getting her pregnant. She was constantly writing in these things. The first time we met, she was scrawling away in this very notebook, though I didn’t know it was a journal until I got to know her better. Turned out she had hundreds of these books—single-subject, college-ruled, all different colors—filled with her thoughts and experiences and observations of the world. She wrote about almost every single thing that happened to her, every single conversation she had.
She once told me she started keeping the journals because they helped her cope with everything that was going on.
“I remembered what Mom was like after she got the call that Granddad had died,” she said. “Instead of breaking down and crying, she went straight into practical mode—making funeral arrangements, calling relatives, packing up his house. When I was diagnosed, I realized that was what I needed to do too—keep myself busy. Make lists, keep a journal, dive into schoolwork. It turns out it’s a lot easier to deal with stuff when you have a plan.”
I didn’t say her mom probably did that because she wasn’t exactly the “breaking down and crying” type. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that writing everything down helped Meg make sense of what was happening to her.
But I think she wrote for the joy of it too. Her entries are more like little stories than memories. Perfect moments preserved forever.
Not that things with us were always perfect. There was a big chunk of time in the middle that was pretty rough, actually. When she found out she was pregnant, and I realized what that meant not only for us, but for her, we, shall we say, disagreed on what course of action to take. But things happened the way they happened, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. Apparently there was nothing I could do about it then either.
Last August, we sat in her massive living room with her parents, her sister, and my mother. Everyone was well aware of the pregnancy. Meg had been scheduled to go back for her second round of chemo at the end of June, but that obviously hadn’t happened. Meg’s parents were disappointed, outraged, embarrassed—all the things a couple of uptight robots are programmed to feel when their perfect daughter doesn’t follow their perfect plans. My mom was just sad.
But it wasn’t a done deal yet. Meg could’ve still gotten an abortion. She could’ve still gone back on chemo. If we acted fast, her treatment plan would’ve barely been interrupted at all. To me, it was a no-brainer. Her parents agreed. It was probably the only thing we ever agreed on.