by Emma Lord
“How good are you at climbing trees?” Finn asks.
I think of all the things I have scaled in my lifetime, from trees to the electrician’s van to the literal roof of our school, all in pursuit of a good angle for a shot. “Too good. Why?”
“Because we have to climb one if we’re going to talk to the ghost.”
This is probably the part where I should turn around and leave Finn and his minor league delusions to himself.
“Plus, sick view,” he says, making a camera gesture with his fingers and a clicking noise with his tongue. He must have seen me fiddling with Kitty at breakfast. “Bet you haven’t gotten a good shot since you got here.”
Okay, he’s got me on that. Even if we get busted, at least I might get a few good landscapes of the island and the water before they toss us out. I pat my backpack, checking to make sure Kitty’s relatively secure, and let Finn lead the way.
“So basically, some girl bit it at camp in like, the fifties or something. Don’t google it, it definitely happened. She was climbing a tree and fell and broke like, all of her bones.”
“I thought you were going to solve my problems, not make more of them.”
“We’re not going to the tree she fell off of; they chopped it down. We’re going to the one next to where it used to be. The Wishing Tree. You climb it and make a wish and—”
“Fall to your untimely death?”
“Gaby, the ghost who haunts the camp, makes it come true.”
He says this matter-of-factly, leading us through the thick, root-tangled path that spits out to a clearing before I can wonder too much if he’s really a serial killer disguised as an overgrown Labrador. Sure enough, there’s a tree in the middle of it—thick trunked and squat, bursting with solid branches, looking about as climbable as a tree can look. For a second I forget about everything else, itching to get my hands on the rough bark, to see how fast and high I can climb.
“Well, my only wish is to get out of here.”
“Nah. You came here for a reason,” says Finn, touching the tree. “And I brought you here because I’m bored and I want to know the reason.”
“I told you.” Not by any means intentionally, of course.
“Yeah, I’m going to need a heck of a lot more to go on than that.”
Instead of answering I start to climb, reaching out for a thick branch and curling my fingers around the damp bark, losing myself in the satisfaction of pulling myself up and up and up. The tree is so well-traveled that I can almost feel the grooves of where other campers must have climbed. Sure enough, the higher we get, the more we see little carvings faded into the bark: sets of initials, little sentiments, tiny shapes. And at the top, a miniature, paint-chipped signpost nailed to the tree with three fading words: MAKE A WISH.
I settle there and breathe in the view—layers on layers of wilderness, thick trees that give way to rocky beach then the pale blue of the water, the heavy white of the fog. Finn is talking as he works his way up, more cautious than I am, but I can’t hear him over the endless sky.
Eventually he’s close enough that I hear him say, “Told you. Stick with me this summer, Bubbles, and I’ll get you the best views this place has to offer.”
I’m already peering through Kitty when he says it, holding her lens cap between my teeth and using my other arm to brace myself to the tree. I take a few shots that may or may not turn out—I may have about as much regard for my mortality as a Looney Tune, but even I’m not stupid enough to test my luck by scrolling through or trying to adjust the lens.
“Guess the photography thing runs in the family, huh?” he asks.
I hum to acknowledge him, taking a few more shots. “I like to be behind the camera, not in front of it.”
Finn lets out a soft laugh. One that makes me wonder if, for all his goading about this tree, he might not be so great with heights.
“Must be weird to see someone get famous with your own face, huh?”
I wrinkle my nose. “She looks nothing like me.”
“Eh, you might not be clones, but you’re definitely Savvy-esque. And look, I don’t know how long you’ve actually known her, but she’s chill. You know, under the whole compulsive-goody-two-shoes, aggressive-hashtagging, pulling-the-ugly-leaf-out-of-her-salad-so-it-photographs-well bit.”
He waits, like I’m going to talk over him. The truth is, I don’t know enough about her to try.
“But she’s also like, not only the friend you call at midnight when your car tire blows. She’s the friend you call when someone Matt Damons you and leaves you in a war zone or on Mars. She’d do anything for people she cares about.”
It’s not that I don’t believe him. I do. Savvy is as intense as they come, and I can easily see that bleeding into the way she takes care of her friends.
The trouble is, I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them.
“Also, you know her parents are ‘donated a building to the Seattle Center’ level of rich, right? Most of the profits from her Instagram go to charity. She’s out there doing the most because she really wants to help people. Even considering the obscene amount of green juice she has thrust on me, you gotta respect that hustle.”
I have this impulse to defend myself, but I guess Finn is Savvy’s friend, not mine. I swallow it down and say, “So you’ve known her a long time.”
“Since the beginning, basically,” says Finn, leaning farther into the tree trunk to be a little closer to me. “Me, Savvy, Mickey, and Leo.”
It’s weird hearing Leo’s name tacked on to theirs. I try to think of all the times Leo may have casually mentioned Savvy, but it’s too eerie. Our shared DNA aside, there’s this sense Savvy and I have been on parallel paths—living in the same area, dragging our cameras everywhere, sharing Leo—but even now, having met her and knowing what we know, it still feels impossible for our worlds to touch.
“You’re Abby, right? Of Abby-and-Connie lore?”
“What makes you so sure I’m Abby and not Connie?”
“Cuz he tags an ‘Abby’ to credit all those pictures you take for his foodie Instagram.” He glances down at the ground, this little pulse of nervousness, and back at me. “Also he was super upset when—well, you were the one whose grandpa died last summer, right?”
My face is so red I pull my camera away from it like my cheeks might set it on fire. “Yeah?”
“Sorry,” says Finn, forgetting for a second to be terrified of the height. “I mean—it sounded like you were close, the way Leo was talking about it.”
“We were.”
I don’t know what it is about being up this high that makes the ache come back, somehow even fresher than it was in the weeks after he died. Maybe because it was around this time last year that my parents started preparing us to lose him. I’d known he was getting weaker—we spent so much time together that I probably understood how much before my parents did—but last summer it was this blur of visiting hospitals and murmuring about pneumonia and my uncle coming into town. This summer I can look clearly back on it and it’s not a blur, but a definitive line. A world where Poppy was here, and a world where he isn’t.
It’s selfish to think I lost more of him than everyone else, but I had more of him. I had his stories about traveling the world after serving in Vietnam, getting into hijinks across Europe and taking pictures of everything along the way. I had that settled, thoughtful quiet of his, the kind too many people mistook for disinterest, but I knew always had some valuable thought on the other side of it if I only waited long enough. I had full rein of him in a way my brothers, or even, I think, my mom never did—I don’t think I ever asked him a question he didn’t have an answer for.
I wish more than anything I could ask him something now. I was prepared to lose him, maybe. But I wasn’t prepared for what happens after the losing.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
I wave him off. “It’s fine. Really.”
The two of us sit there, breathing in the damp morning air.
“Anyway, that’s my two cents on Sav, take it or leave it,” Finn finally says. He taps the little sign at the top of the tree. “But we came up here for a reason.”
With that, he closes his eyes, abruptly ending the conversation. I stare at him, waiting for the punch line, but he seems like he’s seriously projecting wishes at some dead girl who apparently won’t take receipts unless you’re more than twenty feet above sea level.
I let out a sigh, popping my camera lens back on. I’m all the way up here. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.
I close my eyes, feeling stupid, trying to think of a wish. I wish I hadn’t come here. Unhelpful, but true. I wish Savvy liked me. I open my eyes, mad at myself for even thinking it, and they immediately sting and tear up. Even more unhelpful, but also true. I wish …
My throat aches, and I stare out at the fog, at the place in the distance where I should be able to see the suburbs beyond it. Most of the things I could wish for I can’t have. It’s big stuff, like how I wish Poppy were still here and we weren’t selling Bean Well. Or medium stuff, like I didn’t worry so much about where I stand with Leo and Connie, or I wasn’t one ping in my parents’ inbox away from get busted for skipping out on summer school. Or stuff that wells up in me from some place I can usually keep quiet—I wish I were old enough to do whatever I wanted, to go out and take photographs all over the world instead of the same sleepy suburb over and over and over again.
I wish I didn’t feel like a problem my parents had to solve.
And, reluctantly, something that is maybe less of a wish and more of a confession: I wish I knew why they never told me about Savvy. I wish I knew why they lied. I wish I didn’t care, like I’ve been telling myself I don’t since our spat, because caring will make it that much harder to walk away from.
I hide my face behind the camera’s viewfinder. That’s enough wishing for the day. Otherwise the ghost is going to shove me off the tree for whining and I’ll have to pick my own part of the woods to haunt.
“What are you wishing for?” I ask instead.
Finn cracks an eye open. “Things to be less fucked up, I guess.”
“What things?”
He gestures vaguely with his free hand. “The things.”
Whatever those things are, he doesn’t get a chance to elaborate, because of the particular thing that brings our communion with the camp ghost to a crushing halt: Savvy, yelling at us from the ground.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Finn leans over, popping his head down to look at her. I don’t bother. I already know the exact crease of her scowl, the precise angle of her fists propped on her hips.
“G’morning, Sav,” Finn calls down.
“Seriously? You too? What the hell is the matter with you both?” And in the blink of an eye Finn’s attempt at smoothing things over between me and the sentient spon con is null and void.
“Coming, O grand junior counselor, crown princess of Camp Reynolds, ruler of hashtags—”
“Clam up, Finn,” Savvy calls. “We both know you’re too terrible at climbing trees to multitask.”
“Okay, that was ten years ago. And I only fell, like, five feet.”
“On top of me.”
“But did you die?”
I follow Finn down, albeit slowly. His tree-climbing skills really are lacking at best. Watching him come down, I’m wondering how he got up in the first place. I focus on not tripping him up, which gives me plenty of time to think up something especially biting to say to Savvy—except when I reach the ground, I’ve got nothing.
“Literally the first rule,” says Savvy, pacing like she’s trying to build a moat around the tree. “Like, not even a Camp Reynolds rule, but a legitimate rule. No more climbing this damn thing.”
Finn brushes some dirt off his shoulder, walking over to her like he’s expecting something. A hug or a fist bump or whatever it is they are to each other. But Savvy’s too busy glaring at me to notice, and Finn stops short.
“Nice to see you, Finn,” he says under his breath, in an uncanny imitation of Savvy’s voice. “Been a long year, what’s going on in your life—”
“Is this how it’s going to be?” Savvy interrupts, aiming every word at me. “You’re just going to run around this place and rack up demerits like carnival prizes?”
“Wait, you’re giving us demerits?” Finn asks.
Savvy doesn’t hear him, scowling at my mouth with enough rage to pop a vein. “Spit that out.”
I scowl right back. “It’s a piece of gum, not cocaine—”
“Spit. It. Out.”
I look her right in the eyes and spit it into my open palm, offering her the big saliva-soaked blob as she reels back in disgust.
“Savvy’s got a thing about germs—”
“Not helping, Finn,” Savvy snaps.
Finn’s face goes beet red and he takes a step back, kicking some dirt. “They give you a shiny junior counselor lanyard and you get to be the boss of us all, huh, Sav?”
This rattles her enough that I see something I’d rather not. This moment of recognition reflected back at me in her face. It’s not even something I can see, but something I feel. It’s not my mom or my dad or my brothers. It’s me. My own confusion, my own fear. She could look like a stranger to me, and I’d still feel it as plainly.
She sucks in a breath and says, “You are both getting demerits, and when we get back to camp, you are emptying your suitcases of any more contraband.”
I grind my heel into the dirt. “Fine. Take anything you want. I’m leaving.”
It’s almost satisfying, watching the way her eyebrows fly up. “You’re not going anywhere. You promised—”
“I didn’t promise anything.”
She takes a sharp step toward me, taking the last card in her deck and playing it ruthlessly. “You’re supposed to be my sister.”
I open my mouth to say something I’m going to regret, but Finn beats me to it. “And you’re supposed to be my friend,” he says.
“Finn, what are you—”
“But I guess you’re all too busy to be friends with me now that I’m just a camper and you’re all running the damn place,” he says.
“That’s not true. I didn’t—” An alarm goes off on Savvy’s phone. “Shit. I have to go. I’m leading a yoga class.”
Finn scoffs. “Naturally.”
“We’ll talk,” she tells him, leaning forward to pull him into a quick hug. It happens too fast for him to react, so fast that I’m not expecting the heat of her eyes on me in the next instant. “And you—I’ll be seeing you this afternoon. The gum has to go. Seriously. If another counselor catches you, they’ll be a lot less lenient.”
She takes off down the path without waiting to see if we’ve followed. I stand there, stunned, the gum in my palm and my mouth wide open.
“Lenient?” I repeat, dumbfounded. “Also, did she … not hear the part where I very explicitly said, within one foot of her human ears, that I am leaving?”
Finn shakes his head ruefully. “Guess she’s got more important things to worry about these days than her best friends or blood relations.” He sighs. “We should head back to the camp before she rats us out to Victoria.”
I feel a twinge of sympathy for him, even more pronounced than my annoyance with Savvy. He spent the last ten minutes defending her upside down and backward, and she came here and tore him a new one. He may be the one who dragged me out here, yet I can’t help but feel responsible that it happened.
“Wanna go chew twelve packs of gum in four hours before Savvy comes to collect?” I ask, attempting to perk him up.
Finn looks at me, his eyes bright with mischief. “Actually, yeah. But only if you’re on board with a super gross idea.”
“I think I’ve reached my questionable-Finn-ideas limit for today.”
“Even one that will get you even with Savvy?”
I should not entertain this. She’s already pissed
off enough.
Trouble is, so am I.
“Only if we can do it before I get my parents to take me home tomorrow.”
Finn’s smirk deepens. “Deal.”
eleven
“I need a jaw transplant.”
I shoot Finn a look, or at least as defined of a “look” as a person can give when there are somewhere between seven and ten sticks of gum wedged between their teeth. “Don’t wuss out on me now. This was your idea.”
“You have like, sixteen years of pro gum chewing under your belt, Bubbles,” Finn moans through his gum wad. “I’m a mere mortal. My teeth are going to fall out of my—”
“Less talking, more chewing. We’re running out of time.”
Finn cradles the lower half of his face as if he were clocked with The Rock’s fist instead of subjected to a half hour of nonstop gum chewing. “What time is it, anyway?” he asks, a sliver of drool dribbling down his mouth.
I snort at the sight and almost choke on the virtual planet of Juicy Fruit in my mouth. It sets Finn laughing, until we make enough noise that we actively sabotage our already doomed plan, prompting the door to the junior camp counselors’ cabin to open and reveal Mickey on the other side.
Finn and I freeze midchew. Mickey beams and throws her arms around him. Finn’s cheeks bulge in an effort not to expel the gum as she squeezes him, and I have to lean on the side of the cabin not to double over from laughing.
“Finn! You’re real!”
Finn nods, giving her a mumbled “Mm-hmm” without opening his mouth.
“And I see you’ve met Abby,” says Mickey, reaching out a fist to bump me on the shoulder.
I relax, grateful Mickey doesn’t help hold Savvy’s grudges for her. Finn spits his gum into his hand while Mickey’s back is turned and cracks his jaw.
“Yeah, Bubbles and I are besties,” says Finn. “Since everyone else is too cool for me now.”
Mickey’s smile softens, and she reaches up the absurd height between her and Finn to ruffle his hair. “Yeah,” she says. “I want to catch up. Maybe tonight in the kitchens, after dinner?”