Kat and Meg Conquer the World by Anna Priemaza (8)

KAT

THE SNOW NEVER LEAVES HERE. THE SKY’S BEEN CLEAR FOR A WEEK, BUT the ground is still covered in white. It doesn’t melt away, then snow again, then melt again like it did back home. I study a shoveled mound of it through my frosted window as Meg assures me that we have nothing to worry about. I twist the end of my ponytail around my finger as I grip my phone between my shoulder and chin. “It’s just—we’re already almost halfway through November. We should start doing some testing soon, shouldn’t we?” I bite my lip.

“Dude. Kat. You remember I called to talk about my date tonight, right?” Her voice fades in and out as she speaks; she’s pacing back and forth around her room, with the phone set to speaker on the bed.

Grayson asked her on a date a couple of weeks ago, and it’s pretty much all she’s talked about since, as their plans have jumped about in typical Meg fashion from coffee to a movie to a Friday-night dinner date. To be fair, it is a big deal. A big deal that’s happening today. I let go of my ponytail. “You’re right. Sorry. Are you nervous?”

She laughs. “You have got to stop asking me that. It’s a first date. I’m excited. Oh, that’s the doorbell! That’ll be Grayson. Better get to him before Mom and the halflings do. Bye. Love you.” And then she’s gone.

My stomach twists at the thought of her meeting him at the front door, awkwardly trying to figure out what to say. Except Meg never has a problem figuring out what to say. She’ll be fine. I hope.

I stare out over my binders and textbooks spread across the table. In front of me is a pathetic first draft of the questionnaire for all our test subjects to fill out. And beside that is my list of potential candidates. Which currently looks like this:

At least there’s a bonus to Meg going out with Grayson. I write his name in slot three. Of course, slots one and two assume we can even test ourselves, which we probably shouldn’t because of bias and stuff. I shove the papers into a binder and slam it shut. The test results aren’t due until February anyway. It’s only November.

Still, we’re going to need to come up with a plan. Soon.

We can’t do that while Meg’s on a date, though. So I neatly stack my binder and textbooks, and then go watch a Legs video instead.

MEG

I DON’T BEAT MOM, KENZIE, OR EVEN NOLAN TO THE DOOR. BY THE TIME I get there, Grayson stands in the front hallway, practically mobbed by the three of them. Well, Nolan hovers back near the kitchen, peering at him from afar, but Kenzie makes up for that by literally sitting on his snow-covered boot. He keeps glancing down at her, hair flopping forward adorably with each uncertain tilt of his head, as Mom asks him where we’re going for the evening.

“Out. We’re going out,” I say as I grab my coat off the floor and slide on my boots. “We’ll be back by ten.”

I grab Grayson’s arm, but he resists my pull and stares down at the Kenzie-monster still on his foot. Mom steps forward and scoops her up, and Kenzie decides it would be hilarious or fun or who knows what goes on in her brain to go limp like a rag doll, and I take advantage of their distracted moment of struggle to slip out the door, dragging Grayson behind me.

“You’re going somewhere public, though, right?” Mom shouts after us once we’re already halfway down the walk.

I spin around so I’m walking backward. “Yes, Mom, don’t worry! We’re going to go make out somewhere super public!” I shout back at her.

She shakes her head at me, and I whirl back around to look at Grayson, whose cheeks are flushed so adorably pink, I could kiss them. When I showed my cousin Charlotte a picture of him online, she gave me pretend crap for dating another white guy, but if I only dated black guys, my pool of options would just be a puddle. There are two other black guys in my whole grade, and just sharing a skin color doesn’t make us magically fall in love.

“So, where are we going?” I ask, as I hear the door click shut behind us.

“It’s a surprise.”

My stomach grumbles with either excitement or hunger or both. “It’s somewhere to eat, though, right? I haven’t eaten supper.”

He laughs. “Yes. Do you need me to tell you where? I can tell—”

“No! No. Surprises are good.” I love surprises.

We’ve made it to the bus stop, and Grayson leans against the signpost, all cool and nonchalant. Tonight’s going to be epically awesome; I can already tell.

“So that was your mom?” Grayson asks, tilting his head toward our street.

“Yeah, sorry, she’s usually buried in a spreadsheet. Not sure what made her decide to surface tonight.”

“What does she do?”

I glance up at the bus sign, wondering which of the three listed buses we’re taking. “Marketing consultant. Runs her own business. She’s been working like twelve-hour days.”

“And your dad?”

I kick at the ground. “He . . . died when I was four.”

Grayson straightens so he’s no longer leaning against the signpost. “Oh, I’m sorry. That sucks.” Then he starts telling me about his grandpa who died a couple of years ago, and it must not occur to him that my siblings are too young to have been born before my bio dad died, because he doesn’t ask about them, so I don’t tell him about Stephen-the-Leaver at all.

Which is good, because Stephen-the-Leaver deserves to be left out of the story. He doesn’t belong in my story. Not anymore.

A bus pulls up, and it must be the right one because Grayson marches toward it, and I follow, and the strangeness of not mentioning stupid Stephen-the-Leaver follows both of us right onto the bus and settles onto the seat beside me. I shove it away and try to focus in on Grayson’s story, but the white couple seated across from us on the bus is fighting, and even though they’re doing it quietly, with looks and gestures instead of shouts and names, it’s super distracting.

No one else seems to notice. Grayson certainly doesn’t. He’s chattering away to me about—to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what. I thought he was talking about archery. That’s definitely where this story started, I’m sure of it. But he just mentioned his grandma’s house, and I can’t think how that relates.

“That’s so cool,” I say.

“I know, right?” he says, then we’re both quiet for a minute or two as the bus turns onto a main street.

The guy—across the aisle, not Grayson—shifts his body away from the girl. His black toque is pulled so low it covers his eyebrows, which almost makes him look angrier, as if his entire toque is one big, furrowed eyebrow. The girl thrusts the blanketed bundle in her arms at him, then drops a bottle unceremoniously into his lap.

“You feed him,” she says loudly.

Mom and Stephen-the-Leaver used to fight like that. Back when he was a person I mentioned when people asked me about my parents and not just a stupid nobody. If this couple splits up, maybe the guy won’t even seek custody of that baby. Then he won’t have to worry about feeding it.

Except it’s probably his real kid. So probably he will.

Worrying about this random couple when I’m on my very first date with Grayson is ridiculous.

I leap to my feet. “Let’s get off here.” I skip toward the door, where an elderly man has just disembarked. It’s already dark outside, but the glimmering streetlights call to me the same way the warring couple pushes me away.

“But wait—we’re not—” Grayson calls after me, but I’m already off the bus.

It’s been almost a week without fresh snow, and the snowbanks lining the street outside the bus are already grimy with dirt. I stand on the snowy, gray, business-lined sidewalk, and for one long heartbeat, I’m afraid that Grayson won’t follow me.

But then his adorable Boxer Boy self pops out the open bus door and onto the sidewalk beside me. His crinkled forehead is confused, not angry, which is a sudden relief even though it didn’t occur to me until precisely this minute that he might get mad.

“So,” he says, raising one eyebrow in a perfect arch, “you really needed a payday loan?”

I laugh as the bus pulls away with a groan and reveals all four corners of the intersection. Payday loans. Payday loans. Payday loans. Pawnshop.

“Come on, Boxer Boy,” I say, setting off down the street, “let’s have some fun.”

“Meg,” he calls after me, “your mittens!” He holds them out to me—my favorite fluffy white ones, with embroidered eyes and noses and a little flap of pink above the thumb for a tongue—and I suddenly realize how cold my hands are. I must have left them on the bus. I lose a lot of mittens.

“Oh my gosh, thank you! My hero,” I say as I pluck them out of his hand and slide them on.

Kat would probably smack me if she were here. She hates the idea of guys as superheroes and girls as helpless princesses. But Grayson did once call me “Flash,” so he obviously doesn’t think I’m a helpless princess. I spin around, imagining a superhero cape whipping out behind me—does the Flash even wear a cape? Who knows—as I march down the street and Grayson scurries to catch up to me.

We stop at the next light. Grayson looks at me with a sort of bewildered happiness in his wide eyes and half grin, and I hook my arm through his. Which brings us awfully close.

“So, um, where are we going?” he asks. I might be imagining it, but I swear I can feel the warmth of his breath on my face with each word.

“You talk as if I have a plan. Where do you want to go?”

His stomach rumbles with an answer loud enough for both of us to hear, and though his face blooms with red again, we both laugh.

“Clearly we’re both hungry,” I say.

“Well, I did make dinner reservations. But I don’t think we’re going to make it.” He gestures in the direction of the faraway restaurant district.

We stand awkwardly at the light for a moment, and then I grab his hand.

“I have an idea.” I pull him toward the other crosswalk, perpendicular or parallel or whatever to the way we were going. The orange hand is in its final seconds of blinking down, and we have to dart across the road. We make it not quite before the light changes, but before any cars start honking.

I guide Grayson inside the 7-Eleven across the street and ask the guy behind the counter for two hot dogs. They spin round and round at the back of their glass cage, shiny with sweat. The guy grunts as he fishes them out and tucks them inside their buns, on little cardboard serving trays.

“I’ve got this,” Grayson says, and he pays while I take the dogs over to the machine on the counter that boasts “Free Chili and Cheese” and load both of them up. The chili stutters out of the machine in gross regurgitated globs, but when I close my eyes, the smell is heavenly. I wonder if angels eat chili dogs. Might be dangerous in those white robes. Though in heaven, dry cleaning is probably free.

“You ready?” Grayson asks as he sidles up beside me, and I nod and hand him one of the heaping hot-dog mounds.

We eat outside, on a bench inside a bus shelter. The wall behind us is advertising some new tablet or phone, but the side walls are plain glass, giving us a clear view of the street. Snow has started trickling down—flickering down? Sprinkling down? Whatever it’s doing, it’s turning the trampled ground fresh and sparkling again.

“You know, I had this whole evening worked out,” Grayson says as he swallows down the last bite of his dog. “And for the record, sitting at a bus stop eating chili dogs wasn’t part of my grand romantic plan.”

“Is that bad?” I don’t really want to know the answer, but I can’t help but ask.

Thankfully, he laughs. “Are chili cheese dogs bad?” he says as if it’s an answer, not a question, then moves his hand from his lap to my knee and looks up at me as if to check that it’s okay. The chili dog turns over in my stomach.

“Grayson, do you like me?” I ask, because he still hasn’t actually answered my question.

His eyebrows rise and his forehead crinkles in that way that I love so much. His hand is still on my knee. Its warmth seeps through the fabric of my jeans. “I didn’t think you worried about things like that.”

“What, you think I go out with boys whether they like me or not?”

“No, that’s not what I . . . I just mean that you seem so confident.”

I don’t feel confident, but I like that he sees me that way. So I lean in and kiss him. His mouth is a flicker of heat escaping through a wall of ice. His breath swirls with my breath as our lips move in unison.

When I pull away, the air that rushes in to take the place of his breath is frigid.

“For the record,” he says as he touches my cheek with his slightly sticky hand, “I do like you. A lot.”

So I lean in and kiss him again.