by Emma Lord
We both know, in the split second after he says it, he doesn’t mean me lying about Savvy.
But this weirdness between me and Leo—I’m not avoiding it for my sake. I’m avoiding it for his. Because he’s right, the way he was right to say it just after the BEI. We are best friends. And being someone’s best friend comes with a responsibility, a lifetime of secrets and promises and shared moments, that were made with a certain understanding. A contract of sorts. This is the person you are to me; these are the things I feel safe to tell you because of it.
There are too many of them now, all scored into my heart. All these fragile, precious things shared between the three of us, years that have built themselves into something more concrete than time, but so precarious that it could all get knocked to the ground in the time it takes me to look over at Leo and tell him, I think I’m in love with you.
The thought is so loud that I flinch like someone screamed it in my ear. Leo watches it happen, and my heart’s in my throat again, irrationally scared that he heard it. That it’s as plain on my face as it is in my head.
“Abby…”
He’s doing it again. Fighting my battles for me. Giving me an opening to say whatever needs to be said.
I take a breath. My chest feels swollen with the things this air might change if I use it to tell the truth. Because there are two possibilities here: Either Leo doesn’t like me, and I’ll humiliate myself. Or Leo does like me, which means Connie lied.
Either way, I lose. The only way to keep everything from falling to pieces is not to say anything at all.
I let the breath go.
Then the sky erupts, a flash of lightning streaking across the water, branched and forked in so many pieces that it looks like the earth shattered. It’s far from us, and the rumble follows after a few long seconds, hungry in the ground, but deep and resonant, crackling in our bones.
“Holy shit,” Leo marvels.
I let out a low hum of agreement. I can count on one hand the number of times I remember it thunderstorming in Seattle. Another streak of lightning makes the sky pink, divides it into infinite pieces, and I know I could live another hundred years and never witness something as breathtaking as this.
We both settle back into the bench, my heart still thudding like a drum, as if it’s connected to the rumble in the ground beneath us. Leo moves closer to me, and I wait for him to start another one of his information dumps—something about storms and pressurization, or why Seattle gets them so rarely—but instead he wraps a steady arm around me, pulling me in. I relax into the warmth of him before I can second-guess myself, sinking into this stolen moment, into this strange, otherworldly sensation that makes the rest of them feel like they don’t count.
“You should get your camera,” he says lowly, into my hair.
I shake my head into his shoulder. We sit together, watching the lights pierce the dark and travel across the water, the two of us safe and dry in this twilight while the storm is far beyond us. I breathe in the sticky warmth of the air, the pine and the electricity and the ache of something deeper than I can name, knowing that no view I can capture will ever compare to this feeling—seeing it through my eyes while seeing it through his, letting us both bleed into a world where those two things can be the same.
thirteen
The next day I’m awake before dawn and tiptoeing out of Phoenix Cabin to get a shot of the sunrise, Poppy’s old camera in hand. I end up picking the trail closest to our cabin, a short, steep one with a brutal five-minute uphill climb that leads to a minicliff looking out over the water. I’m so enamored with the hatched pattern of the endless clouds that it takes me a beat to realize I’m very much not alone.
“What are you doing here?” Savvy blurts.
I take a step back. “What are you doing here?”
Her whole face goes crimson, and only then do I see the tripod and a camera that must be set up on a self-timer. In fact, she looks way more put-together than anyone has any business being at an hour this unholy and was probably in the middle of posing in some Instagrammy way when I interrupted.
Another rustle comes up from behind me, and there’s Rufus, wheezing excitedly with someone’s badminton racket crushed in his jaw. He wags his tail and rubs his head all over my knees in hello.
“I … was taking a picture for Instagram,” Savvy mutters to the grass.
I assess the situation, staring from the tripod to the skyline and back to where she won’t quite meet my eye. We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before the sun starts to peek out. I may hate her a little bit, but I hate the idea of a missed photo op even more.
“Yoga pose?” I ask.
She cuts a wary glance at me and doesn’t answer, which is to say Yes.
I walk over to her camera. I recognize the model—a pricey DSLR, but not nearly as expensive as the one she and Mickey were using out on Green Lake. I don’t have a ton of experience with this one, but I remember reading on some woman’s travel photography blog that the image stabilization goes to shit once it’s on a tripod.
“I don’t mind taking it.”
Savvy narrows her eyes. “I don’t think the gears will work if they’re clogged with your gum.”
I wince. Somehow in all my spinning post-thunderstorm thoughts about Leo, I’d forgotten about my antics with Finn entirely.
“Temporary truce?” I ask.
At first I think she’ll blow me off, but something gives way in her body, some stiffness in her bones.
“Well,” she says wryly, “seeing as we are on the edge of a very steep ledge right now, it seems unwise to say no.”
I let out a laugh and pluck her camera off the tripod. I’m momentarily thrown off by the lack of viewfinder—I’ve been using Poppy’s older model more often this past week.
“Say ‘spon con.’”
Savvy looks a little miserable about it but turns and sees we’re in the endgame of prime sunrise and doesn’t waste any more time. In the second it takes for me to blink she’s kicked up one graceful leg behind her, pulled it up with one arm, and extended her other out to the sky, like a lithe Fabletics-clad sky dancer. She’s intentionally framed it so the sun will peek out in the circle she’s made with the arm holding on to her leg, and so I lean a fraction of an inch down to get it dead center.
“That oughta do it,” I say after a few shots.
“Thanks,” she says sheepishly. I brace myself for her to go through the shots when I hand the camera back, but she doesn’t. Like she trusts my ability. It feels nice—or at least it does until she turns and says, “Just so you know, this whole thing … being a junior counselor. I didn’t think it would be this weird, or I would have said something.”
I pause, holding my camera to my face, finger resting on the shutter. “Maybe you wouldn’t have invited me, you mean?”
She clears her throat, taking a step back. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m not—I don’t like bossing people around.”
I pull my camera away from my face to raise my eyebrows at her, somewhat at my own peril. It earns me a slight smirk.
“Okay, that much,” she amends. She shuffles her feet in the grass, still barefoot from the pose. Rufus is rolling around a few feet away with the black sneakers of Savanatics lore. “Look—I only want to do a good job. This place is important to me, and I … I want to do it justice.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
She accepts it with a nod, and we fall into an uneasy quiet. Now that we’re actually talking we can’t justify putting off what we came here to do—talk about our parents. I brace myself, and we stare at each other, playing a game of chicken over who will bring it up first. In the end, we both swerve.
“Your camera,” she says. “I’ve never seen one like that before.”
“It’s old as hell, is probably why.” I offer it to her, and she takes it, peering into the viewfinder. She seems so genuinely interested that before I can think the better of it, I add, “It was my grandpa’s.”
&nb
sp; It’s the first time it has crossed my mind that my grandparents were also biologically hers. Poppy probably knew about her. It wasn’t just my parents lying to me—Poppy must have, too.
It hits me in an unexpected place, one I didn’t even think could be hit. I almost wish I hadn’t said anything. Or at least that I hadn’t said it in the past tense.
She hands the camera back more carefully than she took it. “Is he the one who got you into photography?”
“Yeah,” I say, relieved that she didn’t bring it up. It’s not that I don’t want to share Poppy with her. I just don’t know if I’d be able to do him justice. It’s hard to describe someone when you feel less of what they were and more of what they aren’t anymore. “We used to take little road trips. Go on hikes. Nothing too far from home.” Nothing like this, I almost say, and feel like a traitor.
“That must have been nice.”
She doesn’t say it in that throwaway way you do to be polite, but like she means it. It makes me feel bold enough to ask a question of my own.
“How about you? How’d you get into…” I gesture at the sunrise, to the spot where her limbs went full Play-Doh in the name of social media influencing.
“Instagram?” she asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always—I mean, my parents, they’re pretty into, like, health stuff. Like, borderline paranoid.”
I hold myself back from blurting, You don’t say.
“So I guess I’ve just always been a part of the whole wellness world.”
“Wellness?” I don’t mean it to sound doubtful. I’m actually curious.
“You know. Nutrition. Yoga. Meditation,” says Savvy, moving to sit in the grass next to Rufus. “Stuff I hated as a kid, but like, I get now. I think of it as a toolkit for dealing with stress, you know? And it’s easier to understand, maybe—or at least a little more accessible to people—with Instagram making it pretty, breaking it down into easier steps. It doesn’t seem as isolating or hard.”
It’s what Finn was trying to tell me. Savvy is legitimately into this whole scene to help people. And it’s one thing to believe him, but it’s another to see the proof in the way she talks about it—her words coming out a little faster, unintentional and unplanned.
“Anyway, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Savvy adds. “Make it fun. Me and Mickey, I mean. It was her idea to turn it into an Instagram account in the first place. We started it here a few summers back.”
She says it with this kind of wistfulness, like Mickey’s far away instead of right down the trail, no doubt arguing with Leo over which fruit they’re going to put into this morning’s muffins. I think about the conversation we accidentally dropped a ton of eaves on last night—Mickey literally has nothing to do with this.
Maybe I’m not the only one with unresolved friend drama. Maybe Savvy and I really are more alike in the things that we can’t see than the big, obvious one that we can.
“Helps that you both have an eye for photography.”
“Well, Mickey’s mom is an artist—she has a shop where she makes all those temporary tattoo designs and sells her other work—and my parents are big into art, too. Making it, but also, like, collecting.”
“Ah, right. You didn’t mention your parents are like … Tony Stark levels of rich.”
Savvy doesn’t blush or try to downplay it. “Yeah. Well, we live in Medina,” she says, as if that explains the whole thing.
I freeze, realizing I accidentally walked into the topic of our parents like a bird flying into a glass window. But even I, the crown princess of putting things off, can’t justify avoiding it any longer. I steel myself, walking over and sitting on Rufus’s other side. He lolls his head over at me in acknowledgment, and Savvy watches me, expectant.
“The thing I can’t figure out is how our parents knew each other in the first place,” I say. “Like, they don’t seem like people whose paths would cross, let alone be friends.”
It isn’t lost on me that the same thing could be said for us, sitting here in the muddy grass, the Instagram star and the English class flunkie. Briefly I worry she might take it the wrong way, but if there is one thing I can appreciate about Savvy, it’s that she doesn’t waste time beating around the bush.
“I’ve been wondering that, too,” she says. “It seems to be the key. Like if we can just figure that part out, maybe the rest of it will make sense.”
“Maybe they were in some kind of secret society. Something mega embarrassing. It was the nineties, right? What was embarrassing in the nineties?”
“Uh. Everything?”
“Maybe they were in one of those competitive Pokémon card game leagues.”
So far I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard Savvy intentionally make a joke, so I almost don’t know what to make of it when she adds, “Underground Beanie Baby fight club?”
I try not to let a beat pass, before whatever this is wears off her. “Honestly, maybe they were part of an emotional support group for people who watched too many movies about dogs where the dog dies. Is it just me or is it anytime your parents are like, ‘Hey, let’s watch this old movie from the nineties,’ the dog totally bites it?”
“You know Mickey found a site that screens for that.” Savvy shakes her head with a rueful grin, as if to say, Only Mickey. “It’s legitimately called ‘doesthedogdie.com.’”
I snap my fingers. “That was it! Their life’s work. Their big contribution to society, and then…”
It’s about as far as the joke can go, because what’s on the other side of it isn’t one. What’s on the other side of it is Savvy and Abby, born one after the other but into entirely different worlds.
“And then,” Savvy echoes, with a sigh.
We settle back into the damp grass, Rufus splayed out on both of us now, his butt on my legs and his head in Savvy’s lap.
“Real talk, though. I went back down to our basement a few days ago, to look for photos,” I tell her. “I didn’t find any others of your parents.”
“Same,” says Savvy. “I even checked your parents’ Facebooks from my parents’ joint account. Not a single mutual friend. And my parents friend every breathing person they meet.”
“So something definitely happened.”
“You think so?” Savvy asks. “You don’t think it was … I don’t know. Something about the adoption? Like, the terms of it? Some birth parents aren’t supposed to have access to the kid.”
I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that I doubt my parents would have given up a child to a friend of theirs if they weren’t planning on having access.
“Let’s go back. See if we can find something in common.” Even as I’m saying it, I know it might be a total dead end. I can list the things I have in common with Connie on one hand, and most of them are Leo. If someone tried to dissect our friendship it would only raise more questions than answers, and the deeper we dive into this the more their story seems the same. “Tell me about your parents.”
Savvy blows out a breath, leaning back to stare at the horizon. “They’re … normal.”
“How’d they meet?”
“Rich parents with rich kids who met each other at a rich people thing, I’m guessing.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’m making them sound like snobs. They’re not. They’re both kind of a little kooky, actually, which is probably how they found each other in rich people world.”
The more Savvy talks about them, the more weirdly fascinated I am. Savvy’s known about my parents her whole life, but to me, this is its own level of strange—seeing what happens when someone with my exact same DNA ends up raised by someone else. The fact that Connie looked them up on Spokeo and found out they live in the kind of waterfront mansion that’s basically porn for HGTV Dream Home nerds only adds fuel to my curiosity’s fire.
“When did they get married?”
“Eighty-seven.”
“So your parents are older than mine.” Another thing that makes their friendship that much more unlikely.
“My parents always told me my bios were in their early twenties when they had me, so yeah. Probably by about ten years or so.”
“Huh. What do they do for fun?”
“Aside from every wellness thing short of having an on-call astrologist?” Savvy gives a self-deprecating smile, like she hasn’t just come to terms with her parents’ little quirks, but owned them as a part of her. “They’re really into the art scene. They’re always sponsoring artists and own a bunch of galleries—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. It’s actually how I met Jo.”
“Your girlfriend.”
“Yeah. Her dad’s an art dealer. They’re friends with my parents, and I guess they talked about us so often they thought we might hit it off.”
I frown down at the water. “Wait. Your parents set you up?”
Savvy sits up a little straighter. “What? I mean—no. It wasn’t like that.”
“It was, though.” I don’t know why this is so funny to me. No, I know exactly why—it’s because she’s turned a shade of red violent enough that cars might hit their brakes mistaking her for a stop sign. “Are you really so busy you let your parents pick your girlfriend?”
“Jo and I are both busy,” Savvy defends herself. “It’s one of the many things we have in common, and one of the many reasons why we’re dating of our own free will, thank you very much. Our parents being friends is just convenient.”
The sun has partially popped up through the clouds, filtering in streams of light across the water. The sky is opening up right as Savvy starts to close off, going quiet. I can practically hear her thinking up a graceful way to end the conversation. But suddenly I don’t want to talk parents. I’ve scratched the surface of something, and I want to dig.
“Convenient,” I repeat. She goes rigid, and I almost don’t say it: “Now there’s a sexy word.”
Savvy pushes a palm to my shoulder, indignant. I pretend to topple over in the grass, and Rufus immediately takes the opportunity to pounce, and I fall over, taking him down in the mud with me.
“I don’t see you dating anyone,” Savvy points out, letting her dog clobber me.