by Emma Lord
He’d said the words probably a thousand times. But this time was different, because this time when I looked at him—eyes bright, cheeks flushed, with that knowing smile pressed into his lips—it seemed far more ridiculous not to kiss him than to kiss him. As if it was something that wasn’t just inevitable, but long overdue.
So I leaned in. And I closed my eyes. And then—
And then both of our phones pinged at the same time.
It was the ping we’d set specifically for Connie. I pulled back, my heart hammering. It was maybe the first time in my life I actually managed to stop myself from doing something impulsive. Of all the things in the world I could never compromise, chief among them are my friendships with Connie and Leo.
And with that almost-kiss, I could have torpedoed fourteen years of our trio’s dynamic straight into the sky.
“Sorry.” I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for—initiating it, or stopping it, or all the moments in between.
Leo stared at me like I was a stranger. “Don’t be,” he said.
But we hardly spoke for the half hour left waiting in line, or the drive home. And when I finally called Connie and confessed what almost happened and how bad I felt about it, I found out why.
“So I actually asked Leo a few weeks ago if he thought of you that way, since everyone was asking about it,” she told me. She said it matter-of-factly, the way she had just finished telling me about her cousin clogging the drain with potato skins a few minutes before. “Don’t worry. He doesn’t.”
Don’t worry. I should have asked why “everyone” was talking about us. Should have asked what exactly Leo said, or why Connie brought it up. Anything to give me a point of reference other than Don’t worry, which is all I’ve done since.
“And thank God. Can you even imagine how weird the group text would get?” Connie laughed. And I was grateful, but too gutted to say anything myself, and so stunned to even be gutted that it felt like I was unearthing all these hidden parts of myself, little faults in the crust of me slipping and knocking into each other all at once.
“So weird,” I eventually managed to say.
If that was baseline bad, it was about to get worse. After hearing that I just pretended the almost-kiss never happened, for everyone’s sake. And I shoved as much crap as I could into the cracks of those faults, enough so when Leo asked when we got back to school if I wanted to talk that I was able to say, “What about?” without missing a beat.
Leo nodded. Opened his mouth to say something—apologize, maybe, even though there was nothing for him to be sorry about—and said instead, “I don’t want what happened to change anything.”
I’d never tried to fake a smile before, but I could only guess from the look on Leo’s face that I was pretty bad at it. “’Course not.”
“Friends?”
The word seemed cheap, with or without the BEI. It was never going to fully describe what we were to each other. But that wasn’t what the word was doing right then. It wasn’t a definition; it was a boundary. One I needed to accept.
“Friends.”
It’s been months. Months. And I’ve basically spent every waking moment actively beating my feelings for Leo out of my brain. He must know that. There’s no way he doesn’t.
So why is he one glitter toss away from giddy that I’m here, when really, if it is what he thinks it is, he should be more than a little wigged out?
“I’m going to be in the kitchens most of the day, so we can’t really hang out a ton,” says Leo apologetically. “But the head chef said Mickey and I have full run of the place at night, if you want to come hang.”
“Mickey Reyes?” I blurt, without thinking. I only know her last name because she very enthusiastically friended me on all social media since Savvy and I were holding off so our parents wouldn’t spot it and ask questions. It’s been a week of endless pictures of Rufus with his tongue lolling out and massive saucepans full of food, which seems to be Mickey’s Instagram MO.
“You know Mickey?” asks Leo, bewilderment dimming some of the wattage in his grin.
I’d better mention her now, before we get there and Leo ends up confused as hell when Savvy and I link up. “Yeah—through, uh, Savannah.”
“You know Savvy?”
At that, every thought racing in my head stops at once, stumbling into one another like a car crash: Leo’s been going to this camp his whole life, and Savvy’s been going to this camp her whole life, which means Leo has known my secret sister for their whole lives.
“Not well,” I say. “We—uh—I met her…”
“At those photography meetups, right?” says Leo, finally noticing Kitty in my hands. “She told me she was thinking about starting something in the area.”
It all comes rushing into my brain at once, like there was a bubble where Camp Leo lived separately from Regular Leo and someone just took a knife to it. He’s mentioned a Savvy before. A Mickey, too. I try to reconcile them—these blurry faces he’s been having camp adventures with versus the two girls I met in the park—but it’s all so scrambled that I can’t pull it apart.
“Well…”
I want to tell him. I’m going to tell him. But it’s so rare that I get quality time with him like this that some selfish part of me wants it for the rest of the ferry ride, one last hit of Leo before he realizes I did not, in fact, come here for him, but for my own selfish and incredibly bizarre agenda.
He puts his phone in my face, a picture on the screen. I’ve seen it before. It’s Leo with a cluster of his camp friends, all of them beaming and soaking wet from the pool, an oversize towel wrapped around four pairs of shoulders. Mickey, whose mouth is wide open in a laugh, her arms bare of her signature temporary tattoos and her shoes missing. Some boy with big, wet curls that I don’t know, his cheeks ballooned out as he makes a face, leaning so far into Mickey that she looks precariously close to tipping over. A skinnier, ninth-grade version of Leo, who’s not even looking at the camera, grinning broadly and clearly anticipating the fall. And on his other side is Savvy, or some younger, less composed version of her. Her damp hair is frizzy and curled like mine, and she’s wearing a one-piece with little cartoon fish on it, sticking her tongue out so far it gives Rufus a run for his money.
She looks so genuinely happy that I almost don’t recognize her.
“You know Savvy has this super popular Instagram account, right?” asks Leo. “She’s the reason I started ours. She helped me with all the hashtagging in the beginning, too.”
This discovery doesn’t know how to settle in me. A few days ago I had no idea Savvy existed. Now I feel like she’s been slowly leaking into my life for years, lurking in places I never thought to look—apparently even in places I already did.
Leo’s eyes flit to the front of the ferry, where a few people are clustered outside for the view. He nods toward them and says, “Camp Ever—er, Reynolds, I guess—it’s got tons of awesome views. And all this wildlife. Birds and deer, even orcas, if you’re lucky. I bet we can get at least one good shot of some before the summer’s out.”
I lean against the ferry window, temporarily distracted from my shock. Half of me is here, but half of me already living in that moment—in the adrenaline rush of seeing something magical and knowing you only have a small window to capture that magic, sometimes only a fraction of a second. It’s why I love photographing nature and landscapes most. You never know exactly when the magic is going to happen. There’s nothing quite like the rush of getting to hold that magic still and keep it forever—allowing something so big to feel so intimate and personal because a part of you belongs to it, and a part of it belongs to you.
“It’s a good thing you know Savvy,” he says. “She’s got a really good knack for spotting them.”
I bristle. “We don’t … I mean, I know more of her than actually know her.”
This, at least, is not a lie. Despite spending the whole week texting back and forth with her to square away details—the stuff we were both bring
ing, from photographs to marriage records we found online to actual printouts of our DNA relative lists—I don’t know that much about her. I mean, aside from the stuff that half a million literal other people know about her, courtesy of Instagram.
“Huh. Well, small world,” says Leo. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re looking into the Instagram stuff. I keep telling you there are all kinds of opportunities—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. It smacks way too much of Savvy’s little pseudolecture last week, especially since my existence on Instagram might even be her fault. Leo lowers his head a bit, looking back out over the water at the view of the mountains. “But you … know Savvy pretty well?”
Leo laughs, the kind of ambiguous, open-ended laugh you do when you know someone well but have no idea how to explain them to other people. I feel an unwelcome pang as it tapers off. I’d call it jealousy, but first I’d have to figure out what for: that Leo knows Savvy, or that Savvy knows Leo. Or maybe just the inevitability of those facts, which is that right now, they’re probably both closer to each other than either of them are with me.
“She’s great,” says Leo. He thinks on this, like he’s not having trouble describing her, but describing her specifically to me. “I mean—she’s like, your polar opposite—”
“Hey!”
My tone is teasing, but the hurt is real, hitting fresh and sharp like it does when you didn’t think to ready yourself for it.
“Oof,” says Leo, dodging my attempt to elbow him, anticipating it before my muscles can even twitch. “Bad phrasing, especially if I want to live another Day—”
“Now you’re legit toast.”
“Aw, come on. I just mean—she’s big on rules, and you kind of make your own.” He lowers his gaze to mine. “Truth is, nobody’s like you. There can only be one Abigail Eugenia Day.”
I pivot from him, lowering my arm. It is a true testament to how far gone I am and how impossible it’s going to be to come back that he’s managed to make the name “Eugenia” sound sexy. I can practically hear his smirk behind me.
He bumps the back of my shoulder with his, a gentle, cloying nudge to prompt me to turn around. When I do the smirk is entirely gone, softened into something that makes my ribs feel fluttery.
“I’m really glad you’re doing this.”
I don’t mean to sound like a record scratch in the middle of what is arguably the most normal conversation we’ve had in eons, but I can’t help it. If I don’t ask, I’m going to spend the whole summer waiting for some other shoe to drop.
“You are?”
Leo’s smile flickers. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because…”
Leo’s closer to me than before and I’m not sure whose fault it is, his or mine. He lowers his voice, the words a gentle prod. “Because what, Abby?”
I lose the words as fast as they come, and I’m not even sure who to blame, my brain or my mouth or every synapse in between. Maybe an entire lifetime of avoiding conversations like this—the big scary ones that have power over every conversation that happens after them.
It’s the kind of thing I haven’t had to worry about too much. I may be bad at fighting my own battles, but that’s what I have Connie for. But this isn’t a battle, and Connie’s nowhere in sight.
Leo’s voice is still soft when he speaks again, the rumble of it feeling more like it came from somewhere in me than from him.
“That morning—”
“Thanksgiving break,” I bleat out.
Leo’s mouth opens, surprised. “You remember.”
Even if my knees weren’t threatening to knock into each other, I wouldn’t know how to respond to that. I remember? Every excruciating second of it is tattooed so permanently to my consciousness that I’m pretty sure it’s the last thing I’ll see before I die.
“Uh, yeah.”
“When we almost—”
“When I almost—”
“Sorry,” we both blurt. I try to take a step back and the stupid boat lurches and I stumble forward. Leo reaches out in case he has to catch me, and when he doesn’t my eyes fly up right into his and snap like a key fitting into a lock.
“It’s okay. That was back in the Day,” he says, trying to be cheeky. “I got over it.”
I blink at him, but the spell is already broken. “You … got over it?”
He reaches up and scratches the back of his head, sheepish. “I mean—we both did, right?” he says, the words coming too fast.
“Right,” I whisper.
But nothing feels right, not with the words I got over it pinballing all over my brain. Did he mean the embarrassment? Or could he have meant something else?
I pivot toward the doors that lead to the front of the boat. I turn my head, nodding for him to follow, and when I catch his eye it hitches some part of me and holds me there. The Leo-shaped ache in me I have tried every way I can think of to ignore, humming louder than ever, pushing me to open my mouth and say something.
But even if Leo liked me at one point, he liked me, past tense. As in, not anymore. And if that were true, it would mean Connie deliberately lied to me.
No. Connie wouldn’t lie to me, especially not about something as important as this.
“Did you know there was this baby orca, like years and years ago, that got separated from its pod and just followed the ferries around all day? They named her Springer.”
Leo is starting to talk really fast in that way he does just before what Connie calls one of Leo’s “information dumps,” which is basically when he shakes his brain and an encyclopedia falls out. Except this time, it’s less Leo geeking out and more Leo freaking out, desperate to fill the awkwardness with something else.
So I listen. The wind is whipping at our faces, blowing my curls out in every direction and into my mouth, tousling Leo’s hair over his face. Soon the boat slows to a crawl, and I close my eyes and make a promise to myself. No matter what happens, by the end of this summer, I am going to get over Leo. I am going to learn to be just his friend again, for Leo’s sake, and for Connie’s, but most of all, for mine. What Savvy and I are doing may have us in way over our heads, but this I can manage.
I turn to face him, buoyed with resolve, almost relieved. It’ll be like exposure therapy—Leo on Leo on Leo until I’m so sick of him that it’ll be like that week we ate leftovers of the Number Twelve from Spiro’s every day for two weeks and never wanted to look at a pineapple on a pizza again. By the end of camp, Leo will be pineapples, and I will be free.
“Where’s Springer now?” I ask.
“She has two calves, and she’s chilling with a pod in Vancouver,” says Leo, his cheeks flushed, either from relief or the wind. “You’ll have to settle for a shot of a less famous orca this summer.”
Leo searches my face, an anxious almost-smile on his. I smile back and push the back of my shoulder into his chest. “Unless you tell anyone my middle name is Eugenia. Then I won’t be taking photos, I’ll be feeding you to them.”
Leo tweaks me on the side, hard enough that I yelp and end up stumbling straight back into him. There is this arresting moment of heat, his front against my back, some want that rises up in me faster than the waves lapping against the shore. I turn my head to meet his eye, but he grabs me by both shoulders and whips me around so fast that I gasp out a laugh, one he meets with a smile inches from my face, close enough that it feels like a current shocked us both.
It’s lighting up his eyes, and when he leans in, they are the only thing I see. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
I don’t know what game Leo is trying to play here, but I’d kill for some pineapple right now.
six
Camp Reynolds is a scam.
And for the record, so is Savvy.
It starts out okay, if awkward. After the ferry lets us off, Leo heads into a van with other staff members, and a counselor helps the rest of us smush ourselves onto a bus. It becomes evident in the first ten seconds of being on said bus that of the actual ca
mpers, I might be the oldest one here. While I knew it was going to be rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors, from here it just looks like a bunch of babies.
Like a bunch of painfully smart babies.
Like, “look at this cool thing I just programmed my graphing calculator to do” levels of smart babies, which is a thing happening in the front row of this bus that has attracted so much attention that the driver tells everyone to sit back down before the nerdy mosh pit tilts us into a ditch.
I tell myself to relax. I probably won’t be in sessions with them. There are different tracks in the “Reynolds method”—kids prepping for AP classes next year like these probably are, and kids like me who are prepping for the SATs. With any luck, they’re hiding around here somewhere or ended up on a different, much less math-inclined bus.
Things get marginally better once we get to the camp. The bus starts winding down, down, down to the shore from the main elevation of the island, where we are suddenly surrounded by trees so large that it’ll be a miracle if Leo doesn’t call them Ents by the end of the summer. The air is thick with pine through the bus’s open windows, and rare sunlight is streaming in through the branches, and when I peer out the stretch of trees goes so deep into the ground below the main road that it feels endless in all directions—a bottomless and sideways infinity of green and light.
Eventually we reach the main ground, and it is straight out of a cliché camp dream: wooden cabins all named after constellations, a rocky shore with worn kayaks in bright colors lined up along the edge, a giant signpost with pointers in all directions for the mess hall and firepit and tennis courts. I’ve been so worked up about getting to camp that I didn’t actually let it sink in that I’m going to camp. That for the first time in my life, I’m sort-of-but-not-really, enough-that-it-is-still-embarrassingly-thrilling free.