You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

  I shrug. “I mean, yeah. But I guess after the whole thing with Leo … I dunno. Even if I did like Finn, doesn’t seem worth the risk of humiliating myself again.”

  I don’t know why I’m being so frank. I guess because it was rare for me to get Connie alone when we were back at school, and now it’s only the two of us, so I can say whatever I want. Or maybe I need to do it to prove something to myself. Like if I admit I had feelings for Leo, it means I’ve moved on enough that it can’t embarrass me anymore. Like it’ll lose its power over me, if I take some of it back.

  But there’s muffled movement on the other end, like Connie is holding the phone away from her face. When she’s back, she says in this careful voice, “Abs … do you like Leo?”

  “What? No,” I say, going so red that I stare down at the floor as if she’s in the room with me. “It doesn’t matter. Leo doesn’t like me. You asked him yourself.”

  There’s a beat. “I think I messed up.”

  I press the phone closer to my ear, trying to read her tone, not wanting to believe the thought currently racing through my brain. “Messed up how?”

  “Messed up like—I—I wasn’t entirely honest with you. About … what I said about Leo not liking you. The truth is we never talked about it.”

  My mouth is open for a few seconds before it remembers to form words. “Then why did you say you did?”

  “Because I’m an idiot.”

  She’s trying to be funny, but I’m afraid if I give in and laugh I might never stop. “Do you like Leo?” I ask instead.

  “No. No, it’s not like that,” she says, the words tripping over each other. “I did it because—honestly, Abby, I thought it was a blip. You looked so freaked out, and I wanted to smooth everything over, so I said what I could to get you guys to move on from it.”

  “But I didn’t move on,” I say through my teeth. “I was … oh my god, I’ve been so embarrassed, every single day I’ve looked at him since.”

  “I didn’t realize you—”

  “Why are you only telling me this now?”

  Connie takes a breath like she’s steeling herself. Like she’s wrestled with telling me this for a while.

  “Leo said something before he left about missing out on a lost chance. And I tried to ask him about it, but he kind of shrugged it off. I thought maybe it had to do with the DNA test stuff, but I think—Abby, I think maybe he was talking about you.”

  The conversation has shifted so fast that it feels like whiplash. I’m breathing too hard, as if I’m trying to outrun it, like I’ve been running all this time. It casts new colors on every interaction I’ve had with Leo in the past few months, on every feeling I’ve worked so hard to press back inside myself, on every embarrassment I’ve felt in the moments I failed.

  “I’m sorry, Abby. I really am.”

  This is the part where we’re supposed to talk it out, and I forgive her. The part where I’m supposed to say something to save this awful moment, this swooping feeling in my chest.

  But it feels like this whole summer has seeped rot into the foundations of all the things I thought I could depend on. My parents lied to me. Connie lied to me. And those lies may have been quiet, with the best of intentions, but they’re all imploding the order of my stupid universe.

  “I’ve gotta get back to camp,” I say, barely getting it out without the words choking in my throat.

  “Abby.” She says my name like a plea. I pretend I don’t hear it. My heart’s beating so loud that it’s hard to focus on anything else.

  Click.

  After I hang up, I stand there, listening to the dial tone, trying to wrap my head around what just happened. We’ve had plenty of disagreements in our years of friendship, but nothing like this. There’s never been anything I wasn’t quick to forgive and forget. I wasn’t built any other way, and I really do love Connie like the sister I never had.

  I set the phone back in its cradle, standing perfectly still, trying to ground myself—trying to make it seem less like we started that phone call far away from each other and ended it further than we’ve ever been.

  seventeen

  I’m not crying when I show up for toilet-scrubbing duty with Savvy in the bona fide sewer that is the boys’ bathroom, but I’m not not crying either. Savvy is elbows deep in one of the stalls when I get there, and for once I’m grateful she’s not talking to me. It gives me a chance to hide my sorry face in a stall of my own. And my pee-soaked pity parade is going just fine, at least until Savvy gets up and knocks over the mop water in her stall, spilling it out onto my shoes.

  “Shit,” she says, so surprised at herself that she forgets we aren’t speaking. “Shit, I’m sorry—”

  And that’s when I realize I am crying, because Savvy stops dead with the mop in her hands and the alarm on her face softens into a look a little too close to concern.

  “It’s fine,” I say, reaching up to wipe my eyes. Savvy swiftly grabs my wrist, reminding me that my hands are covered in the primordial ooze of pubescent boys, and I think better of it. Before I know it she’s helping me to my feet and out of the mop puddle, and we’re face-to-face in the cramped stall.

  Savvy blows out a breath, like she’s trying to decide if she’s going to do something about me or not. By then I have minor control over my face. It’s not too late for her to pretend she didn’t notice anything, and for us to get back to the Camp Reynolds version of the Cold War.

  “Did … something happen?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because if it’s camp stuff, I’m kind of obligated to know.”

  It stings, even though it shouldn’t. For a second I thought she cared about me as a person, and not what me being a person meant for her job.

  “It’s just weird drama. From back home.”

  “Oh.” Savvy mulls this over, and her eyebrows lift. “Did your parents find out we—”

  “No,” I say, suppressing a laugh. To be honest, I’ve mostly forgotten there’s anything for our parents to find out. “What, did yours?”

  Savvy shakes her head. Then she lingers, like maybe she’s going to say something else, and I’m so eager for the opening that I end up blurting the words so fast they end up stumbling on one another like mismatched dominoes.

  “I’m—I’m really sorry about the whole pranking thing. I didn’t think…”

  The way she’s been shutting me out, the last thing I’m expecting is what she says next.

  “It was dumb,” she says, the tension leaking out of her shoulders. “But what I did was dumber. I don’t know what came over me.”

  Except we both do, even if neither of us wants to say it. Maybe this Instagram thing started out fun for Savvy, but whatever it is now is so hardwired into her psyche that it made her drive a stick-shift eight-seater van up a hill before the sun was even out, and made her forget that there are at least ten camp rules and some actual laws against it.

  “But you should know, I wasn’t trying to like, punish you, with the SAT thing,” says Savvy, her voice low. “I thought it would be better if Victoria knew sooner than later. If she found out in a few more days she would have had to call all your parents, and—”

  “They might have made me leave.”

  She lowers her gaze. “You did say they were pretty serious about all this tutoring stuff.”

  I shrug, and my weight shifts between my sneakers, making a squelch noise that echoes through the empty bathroom. We look down at my feet. They’re soaked with mop water. We move out of the stall, over to the sinks. When I look in the mirror, my cheeks are an embarrassing shade of red and my eyes are puffy enough that they’re practically screaming for Visine.

  “Is that what it was about?” Savvy asks. “The drama back home?”

  “Oh … uh, no, actually. Just…”

  I’m not planning on telling her, but she’s maybe the only person I can tell. She doesn’t know Connie. The things I say here will never get back to her.

  And maybe I’m imagini
ng it, but it seems like she actually cares.

  “It’s my friend Connie.”

  “What, you made her a fake Twitter?”

  I laugh, surprising myself and Savvy, who seems pleased that she’s capable of making a joke. It loosens me up a bit, and everything spills out.

  “No. Learned my lesson with that.” I take a breath. “But, uh—so—it’s dumb. There was this thing with Leo, a few months ago…”

  “So he did tell you he liked you.”

  My head snaps up fast enough to make Savvy flinch. “No. The thing was that Connie told me Leo didn’t like me.”

  “Oh, he likes you,” says Savvy frankly. “He talked about a girl named Abby all last summer. He might not have come right out and said it, but he clearly had some kind of crush. I just didn’t make the connection until you were here.”

  Somehow getting covered in mop water was less of a shock than this.

  “Oh.”

  My voice sounds mangled, and to be fair, I feel kind of mangled. There’s this swell of—I don’t even know what to call it. Something sneaky, something joyful, the giddy idea that Leo liked me maybe even before it occurred to me to like him, too.

  But if anything, that only makes Connie’s lie worse. Because it doesn’t matter, does it? Leo had a crush on me. Leo had a crush on me, past tense. And if the little scene in the cafeteria before I went to stupid Make Out Rock is any indication, it’s probably too late.

  “And you like him.”

  I don’t bother denying it. “It’s just … Connie lied to me about him. And it kind of complicates everything, because the three of us—well, we’re each other’s best friends. Always have been.” I blow a stray hair out of my face. “I don’t want to mess that up, especially not if Leo doesn’t feel that way anymore.”

  I don’t know why I’m expecting a lecture. Maybe it’s the whole junior counselor power trip, or that she narrates her Instagram stories with the authority of someone twenty years older than she is. But instead she leans against the same disgusting sink and lets out a sigh.

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s true,” she says. “But either way, that really sucks.”

  It feels good to hear someone say this objective truth, even if it’s not particularly helpful. It makes me feel like I didn’t blow up the problem in my head.

  “If you want any advice…”

  When I look over at her there’s nothing smug in her expression. In fact, she almost looks nervous, like I might get offended by the offer. I nod, giving a small smile.

  “I have some mildly useful experience in potentially disrupting a friend group dynamic with feelings,” she says wryly.

  I search her face. “I thought you met Jo through your parents.”

  “Yeah, but before Jo … there was an almost-thing with Mickey.” Savvy rolls her eyes, like she’s exasperated at her younger self, and explains, “I dunno, we were thirteen, and I had this big crush. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to mess up our little group. Me and Mickey and Finn and Leo, I mean.”

  She looks reflective for a moment, far from the mucked-up tiles.

  “So what happened?” I prompt her.

  She blinks, coming back to herself. “What happened is I didn’t say anything, and Mickey got a girlfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  I’m trying to figure out how, exactly, to roll this into meaningful advice, when Savvy leans in. “And I know I’m with Jo now, and it’s all water under the toilet stalls,” she says, gesturing to our mess, “but I regretted not saying anything for, like, years. Because who knows what would have happened if I had? I guess what I’m trying to say is, this thing with Leo—you might be mad at yourself for a while if you don’t at least ask him about it. If you don’t at least try.”

  It’s strange, how little I can know about Savvy’s past and still feel her ache like it’s my own.

  “Anyway, let me know how it goes,” she says. “Given the state of the camp bathrooms it looks like we’ll have plenty of time to chat.”

  “Yeah. Yikes.”

  She hoists herself off the ledge of the sinks, grabbing the mop and holding it there. “And if you want to use some of that time to figure out what happened with our parents…”

  I’ve spent the last week compartmentalizing it so effectively that I could almost convince myself it doesn’t matter. But it will matter. In a few weeks when we reach the end of camp, the unanswered questions won’t be something I can stuff into a box in my brain, but instead two living, breathing human beings who I talk to every day.

  But it’s more than that. I want to know about our parents, but I’d like to get to know Savvy, too. I can feel myself digging a little closer to the Savvy who Leo and the others must know, the one with the braces and the big smiles and wacky suntan lines.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’d like that.”

  We don’t call a truce this time, because something’s been settled deeper than that. Like we don’t have to put an official end to the fight, because we trust it to simmer out on its own. The whole thing is almost … Well. It’s almost sisterly.

  eighteen

  It’s unusually chilly the next morning, when I’m lining up by the shore in my swimsuit with the two dozen other campers who were harebrained enough to sign up for the camp’s weekly Polar Bear Swim. My teeth are chattering, but maybe it’s not the cold—maybe it’s just the expected brand of mortal terror that comes with deciding today is the day you’re going to tell your best friend you have feelings for him, and alter the flow of the resulting space-time-friendship continuum for the rest of your lives.

  I cut a glance at Leo, his eyes bright even with his hair still rumpled from sleep, and feel a cinch in my heart—something gleeful and terrifying, something that chased my dreams all night and woke me with a jolt this morning.

  It’s going to be today. It has to be. I just don’t know when.

  Before I can think about it too much, the whistle goes off, and I take off like a rocket with the first wave.

  The cold is a heart-stopping zap. My legs pump under the frigid water and my arms flap like they’ve forgotten how to be arms, but for a freeing, very long second, it’s like it is happening to someone else. I breathe in and there’s fog in my lungs and ice in my blood, and it pushes out everything in its path—every embarrassment, every confusion, every doubt—frozen and sloughed right off.

  I start running back out of the water before I’m even fully immersed, and straight up to where Leo is prepping the hot chocolate. He stops in the middle of whatever he’s saying to Mickey, his eyes wide with alarm.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I pant. “Um—I just wanted—can I talk to you?”

  “Uh, yeah, of course,” says Leo, scanning me up and down like he’s not quite sure I’m intact. We take a few steps away from Mickey, and he lowers his voice. “Actually, I had something I wanted to talk to you about, too. What’s up?”

  “I…” For once it’s not that I’ve lost my nerve, but my teeth are chattering like one of those wind-up skull toys on Halloween. I need a beat. “You go first.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say, hopping between my feet and shivering with violence.

  Leo glances around us, and something flips in my rib cage. A stupid little hiccup of hope that maybe, just maybe, we are about to tell each other the same thing.

  “The thing is, Abby … last week I got off the waitlist at another culinary school.”

  The words are so unexpected that there’s no room for the disappointment that follows. I blink dumbly at him. “I thought you’d only applied to the one.”

  “Just the one in Seattle,” says Leo quietly. “This one’s in New York. And yesterday, I … I sent the deposit. I leave in September.”

  The ground feels uneven under my feet, like someone suddenly tilted it.

  “Oh.” I try to smile, but it’s wobbly and wrong. “Congratulations, Leo, I … wow.”

  He leans in, t
alking in the too-fast way he does during his legendary information dumps, except now he’s wringing his hands and saying it like an apology. “I didn’t think I’d go, but this past week, cooking with Mickey—it’s been like a dream. Like this whole world opened up. And this school has all these international exchange opportunities, and an instructor whose Filipino dishes are like, world-famous, plus all of the classes come with an academic session for cultural context,” he says. “I think I’m supposed to be there. The opportunities are— Abby, I couldn’t pass it up.”

  “Of course not,” I blurt. It sounds graceless and throaty, but at least it’s genuine. I really am happy for him. I’m proud of him. We’ve all lived in Shoreline our whole lives, so this decision couldn’t have been an easy one. And Leo was so torn between choosing culinary school or an academic track. Now he’ll get to do both.

  But underneath that happiness, that pride, is a hurt so deep that I can’t find the start of it, let alone an end. It’s like sitting down in the place where your chair has always been and falling into nothing.

  “You’ll be so far away,” I say, without realizing I’ve spoken. I catch myself before I say the thing that presses into me like a bruise: And you didn’t think I was important enough to tell.

  The “lost chance” Connie was talking about—it was about this. It was never about me.

  “Yeah. I know.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, and it should steady me, but I’m reeling. “But it’s not going to change anything, right? We’ll always be best friends.”

  He looks so earnestly worried that whatever I should or shouldn’t say loses steam before I can say it. New York. I’ve never even left the West Coast. It might as well be another planet. And here I am, working up the nerve to tell Leo I’m in love with him, when Leo’s been working up the nerve to tell me he’s leaving my life for good.

  “Of course,” I say, but I don’t believe it. Everything’s already changed, enough that I’m not even sure if we can use the words best friend anymore. Best friends don’t lie. Best friends don’t keep secrets this monumental. I thought we told each other everything, Leo told me, only a rock’s throw from this exact spot. But I lied to Leo, and Connie and Leo have both lied to me.