by Emma Lord
“You said you had something, too?”
I nod, and the last of my hope goes with it.
“Just, uh, Savvy and I … we’re good.”
Leo’s face eases into the kind of smile that breaks storms. “That’s awesome.”
“Yeah,” I manage.
Just then the first wave of polar bear swimmers makes it back to shore, and Mickey calls to Leo to help with the hot chocolate distribution. Leo reaches out and grabs me by the hand before he goes, pulling me in too fast for me to stop it and holding me close even though I’m soaking wet. I crush my eyes shut into his chest, and I let myself have this. Just for a moment. Whatever it could have been.
“We’ll catch up tonight,” he says, pulling away.
I turn back to the shore as he goes, feeling so separate from the next wave of runners getting ready to jump in that I might as well be a ghost. Someone touches my arm.
“Hey,” Savvy says quietly.
A beat passes, and I’m praying she doesn’t say anything, because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together. Then Savvy—fully clothed, her hair all done up for the day, her eye makeup applied with doll-like precision—grabs my hand and pulls, and we’re both running, matching each other’s strides, smacking the water with the same splash.
I look for Savvy, but find Finn first, his cackling cutting through the mist. Then there’s a hand on the top of my head, pushing me fully into the water. My cheeks immediately go numb and my legs start kicking out from under me, and when I break the surface, I’m gasping right into Finn’s face.
It’s a nice face. And my heart is beating in every nook and cranny of me, angry and confused and too overwhelmed to remember which way it’s supposed to beat. And maybe I should do something about it. Maybe I should break the hold Leo has over me, solve one problem with another, do the thing that is obviously occurring to me and Finn at the same time and kiss him.
Finn licks some of the water off his lips, the smirk sliding off his face. I don’t have to look back to know Leo is watching, and for this fleeting, selfish moment, I’m glad. Finn leans in, and maybe I am, too—and I get an eye full of water instead.
Finn lets out an indignant crow and splashes back in the direction it came from. Savvy lets out a little shriek, backing away. I catch Savvy’s grin, wider than I’ve ever seen it. Full of the little kid freedom of letting yourself get lost in a moment. It’s the Savvy from the old camp pictures, the one everyone else knows, who I’m still filling in the edges of—someone I can actually see myself in.
“You’re supposed to get back out after you jump in, you bunch of masochists,” Mickey calls from the shore.
Someone blows the whistle and we all scramble back out, shivering. Mickey immediately holds out a towel for Savvy, rolling her eyes at us both. I look around for Finn, but he’s nowhere to be found.
“Looks like a cold Day in July,” says Leo, offering me some hot chocolate.
I let out a sharp breath of a laugh, still wheezing from the run in and out of the water, and take the Styrofoam cup from him. Leo wraps an arm around my sopping wet shoulders again, this time with an unfamiliar tightness—briefly I think it’s because he knows I’m upset, but just unsubtly enough, he tilts us, so Finn can get a full view.
I stiffen, and so does Finn, meeting my eye—no, meeting Leo’s. Finn blinks away from him so fast that I almost miss it before he turns on his heels toward another group of campers.
I pull away from Leo.
“You’re gonna get soaked,” I tell him, even though he already is.
Leo reaches out his arm. “I don’t mind.”
I duck out before he can touch me. I feel raw. Different. Like the cold has crystallized everything, made the things I didn’t want to see so clear that there’s no way to avoid them: it’s not just that Leo doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want anyone else to have me either.
I make myself watch the confusion streak across his face, the hurt, but it doesn’t do anything to chip at my resolve. It’s like Leo said when we were watching the lightning. There are some things you gotta own up to yourself.
“Leo,” I start, but he grabs my arm and pulls, pressing me into him right before Mickey and Savvy barrel right into us.
“I regret to inform you that we’re going to have to bury you in this,” says Mickey, trying to wrestle the wet sweater off Savvy’s body, “because it is permanently stuck to your skin.”
The heat of Leo against my freezing cold skin is so inviting that it lulls me, displacing me in time. I’m taken back to two winters ago, when we were sledding on a rare snow day and I went too fast and ended up landing face-first in a pile of someone’s driveway slush. Leo kept rubbing my arms to keep me warm while we were laughing and hightailing it back to my house. Back when things were simple. Back when I had no reason to think they wouldn’t always be.
Savvy lets out a squeal, bent over with her whole face swallowed up with fabric. “My hair is stuck on the tag!”
“Then hold still, you goofball,” says Mickey. “I swear to god, Houdini couldn’t get out of this. What brand sent you this death trap?”
“Jo gave it to me for my birthday!”
I shiver, and Leo pulls me in tighter. I tell myself I’m only letting him because we’re both distracted by Savvy and Mickey’s little show, but the lie is too shallow to take root. The truth is, this might be the last time I let him this close. I want to savor it, stamp it to my heart, and hold the part of him I can have, even when I can’t have him.
“Jesus, what did you do to piss her off?”
Savvy ducks her head down so Mickey can untangle the tag from her wet ponytail, but the two of them are cracking up so hard at how ridiculous Savvy looks with her head upside down and her arms extended out like she’s about to burst into the world’s most aggressive jazz hands that they aren’t making much progress.
“Probably fucked up the Gcal date schedule,” says Savvy, snorting.
Mickey is breathless, cupping Savvy’s head between her hands, trying and failing not to laugh. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
I pull away from Leo with absurd slowness, like maybe he won’t notice if it happens little by little. But I guess we’ve been pulling away from each other a lot longer than that. This time he finally lets me go.
He tries to meet my eye, but I don’t let him. I’m afraid of what he’ll see. Afraid of what he won’t.
Savvy shakes her head just beyond us, somehow tangling the sweater even more. “You know what she said?” she tells Mickey. “Why she’s not coming this weekend? Because apparently I messed up by scheduling it in pink instead of green, and— Oh.”
Whatever is happening, every single person in a ten-foot radius of us catches on before I do, because I have to follow their stricken looks to the source—a girl so tall, pale, and ethereal that I might never stop staring if her eyes didn’t look like they could cook me into charred Abby meat within a second of making contact.
Still, it doesn’t connect. Not the silence, or the way the girl looks laughably out of place in a pair of loafers and a plaid pantsuit, or even how Mickey has put so much distance between herself and Savvy in the time it took for me to blink that she might have teleported next to me.
“Jo?” Savvy manages.
Jo’s eyes narrow, stark and blue and seething. “Surprise,” she says. The sarcasm doesn’t do anything to mask the hurt.
“I’m— Shit.” Savvy straightens up, pulling off the sweater. “Jo, wait.”
“Save it,” Jo mutters, stalking off toward the parking lot in front of the main camp building. Savvy follows her, barefoot and shivering, not saying a word.
Mickey presses a pair of black sneakers into my hands. “She needs these,” she tells me.
I glance over, wondering why she’s given them to me, but she’s staring so determinedly at the shoes and not at any of us that I know better than to ask. I take them and she sets off in the opposite direction, leaving me on the shore with a pit of dread so
low and distinct in my stomach, it seems impossible that Savvy’s problems haven’t always been tangled up in mine.
nineteen
Getting Savvy’s shoes to her ends up being a bust. By the time I reach the parking lot, she and Jo are nowhere to be found, and so is whatever mode of transportation brought Jo here. I end up stashing the shoes at the junior counselors’ cabin and hiding from Leo with the Phoenix Cabin girls, who all heard about Jo—or at least, the part about Jo surprising Savvy, and not the part where it turned into an episode of The Real Housewives of Camp Reynolds.
“It’s so romantic. All my girlfriend’s done is send a postcard from Minnesota,” Izzy grumbles over dinner.
Jemmy sighs. “Still a leg up from texting John Mulaney GIFs, which is my boyfriend’s love language.”
Cam snorts. “Well, my boyfriend, Oscar Isaac but specifically as Poe Dameron, would be showering me with endless affection if he weren’t so busy saving the cosmos.”
We all let out an appreciative laugh, and everyone turns to me, expecting me to chime in with some gripe of my own. My throat goes tight before I can, and I take an unnecessarily large slurp of juice to avoid it.
The next morning I’m out even earlier than usual. I couldn’t sleep anyway, and I want to make sure Savvy’s all right, but she isn’t in any of our usual spots. It’s like the island swallowed her up.
I do find Rufus, though, who nudges me up one of his favorite paths. I oblige, throwing a stick back and forth as we go. I’m taking a picture of Rufus with his tongue flopping out the side of his mouth when Kitty informs me in no uncertain terms that her memory card is full. It’s only eight, so I figure I won’t have to wait too long to get to the shared computer and dump the contents into a Dropbox.
Rufus follows me, still nudging me with the stick, but when I throw it toward the main office he disappears around the corner and doesn’t come back.
“Yo, Rufus,” I call out. “Whatever your little klepto paws are getting into, leave it— Shit.”
For the record, that is not the word I envisioned coming out of my mouth when I clapped eyes on Savvy’s mom for the first time. Also for the record, what the hell.
A week ago I wouldn’t have recognized her without her face tilted toward me, but now I’ve seen so many photos of her on Savvy’s phone that her likeness is basically a tab that is eternally open in my brain. By some small mercy, she and Savvy’s dad are too distracted petting the heck out of Rufus to notice me. At least, they are for a second.
“Oh, good. Are you a counselor?”
I shove my baseball cap so low on my head that I look like a celebrity trying to sneak out of a Pilates class. “Uh,” I manage.
Her dad squints at me as I back away from them, nearly tripping on a rock. “We’ve met before, right? You’re one of Savvy’s friends?”
“I’m not—I’m just—sorry!” I blurt, and before they can say anything else, start sprinting for Savvy’s cabin like our lives depend on it.
I make it halfway there when it happens: I am running at myself. I am running toward a mirror in the middle of the campgrounds, and am about to smash into the glass.
I skid to a stop, wheezing, and realize when my reflection wheezes in a much more graceful manner that it’s not me at all, but Savvy without makeup, her hair unstyled and in its full frizzy-curled, untamed Day woman glory.
We grab each other by the shoulders.
“Your parents,” we both say.
I scowl at her and she scowls right back, and we both say, “No, your parents.”
Simultaneous groans, and again, with matching indignation: “I’m trying to tell you your parents are here!”
My mouth drops open in horror, for once I’m the first to figure it out: I have seen her parents. And somehow, ridiculously, impossibly, she has seen mine.
Savvy catches up a few seconds later, going so still her skin is practically waxen. “Where?” she asks, saying the word under her breath like a curse.
I am the exact opposite of still, whipping around like Rufus in a room full of squirrels. “They’re going to murder me.”
“They’re going to murder us,” Savvy corrects me.
“How the hell did they figure it out?” I ask, way too loudly for someone who should be trying to go incognito. “Did you put something on Instagram?”
Savvy lets out a snort that borders on hysterical, gesturing out so widely that I can’t tell if she’s trying to encapsulate the camp or the entire known universe. “You think I’d put this shit show on Instagram?”
I’d be mad at her for insinuating that my existence constitutes a “shit show,” but honestly, I’m getting a kick out of this. Bed-headed, no-fucks-given, slippers-clad Savvy is ten times more dramatic than Instagram Savvy, and she’s a heck of a lot more fun to watch.
Except Savvy also looks one light breeze away from losing her marbles, so someone has to take control.
“Okay. Don’t worry. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll head them off and explain … as reasonably as possible … that we have gone behind their backs, dug through the last twenty years’ worth of their darkest secrets, and run away to an island to hide.”
Savvy’s eyes are bugged out like one of those rubber squeeze dolls. She wipes at her nose with her oversize shirtsleeve, sounding sniffly underneath the sound of unprecedented panic.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just a stupid cold,” she says, waving her hand at me dismissively. “Where did you see my parents?”
“By the rec room.”
“I saw yours in the parking lot,” says Savvy, “which must mean—”
“They’re headed to the main office,” I finish, glancing in its direction. A gust of wind hits us, and I can’t tell if we both shiver out of excitement or dread. Our parents may be pissed, but on the other side of that conversation are the answers to all the impossible questions we’ve had since we met.
I turn back to Savvy. “Ready?”
She shakes her head at me. “Abby, we don’t have a plan. We have no idea what we’re going to say.”
I grab her hand and squeeze it, the way she did mine yesterday, like I can pulse some of my newfound and probably extremely ill-advised bravery into her.
“We’ll start with ‘sorry’ and go from there.”
Savvy offers me a wary, watery smile, but she squeezes my hand back before letting go, and we head to the main office, for once matching each other’s pace so neither of us is ahead or checking to see if the other is still there.
I’m bracing myself for a hundred different scenarios on the short walk, and about ninety-nine of them start with my parents being astronomical levels of pissed. But maybe they won’t be. Maybe they’ll see Savvy’s parents, and something will just kind of work itself out. They’ll all take each other in, and the shared memories of their bad nineties haircuts and cheap weddings and whatever else it was that must have connected them before Savvy and I were born will all come spilling to the surface. By this time tomorrow we’ll all be laughing about this.
But even accounting for this nonsense scenario, I still don’t manage to account for the one that actually happens: our parents are nowhere to be found. Instead we open the office door to find Mickey, standing next to Rufus and staring out the window looking like she witnessed a crime.
We turn to follow her gaze and in the distance see two cars making their way up the winding hill that leads down to the camp—one a Prius, and behind it, what is unmistakably my parents’ minivan in all its clunky, sticker-clad glory. Within seconds they’re both out of sight.
“What the hell just happened?” Savvy asks.
Mickey only semicommits to looking at her. In the end, she mostly addresses me. “Um—your parents—kind of took one look at each other and … left?”
I manage to find my voice before Savvy. Only because if I don’t push past the lump that is suddenly swelling in my throat and burning the front of my face, I’ll do something stupid and cry instead.
&nb
sp; “Did they say why?”
“No,” says Mickey faintly. “Nobody said anything. But, uh … whatever went down between your parents? I think it’s officially safe to say it was bad.”
twenty
What we eventually realize, after wringing Mickey’s brain out like a sponge, is this: neither of our parents were coming to confront us about Operation Stealth Sister. Savvy’s parents were there because Mickey mentioned Savvy’s cold to her mom, who then mentioned it to Savvy’s mom.
“And that merited both your parents dropping their lives and crossing a large body of water in less than twenty-four hours because…?” I ask.
Savvy scowls, charging ahead and leading us deeper into the woods. “Why were your parents here?”
Ah. That. I wince, opening the protein bar Savvy handed to me before yanking me onto a hiking path and telling me to follow her.
“There’s a medium-to-large-ish chance I failed a class and I’m supposed to be in summer school right now.”
“Summer school?”
And there it is again. The raised eyebrows, the disbelieving tone. Even with literal twigs in her hair and her nose redder than Rudolph’s she manages to ooze the kind of authority that would make my school principal hand Savvy the keys to her office without thinking twice.
“Yeah, yeah, we can’t all be Betty Coopers,” I say.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound … judgy. I was surprised, is all.”
Well, that’s a notch up from her being unsurprised, so I’ll take it. I’m about to circle back to Savvy’s parents crossing the Puget Sound over her sniffles, but Savvy finally comes to a stop.
“Whoa.”
The path has given way to a clearing with a wide view and a sharp, unexpected drop—not quite as high as some of the perches I’ve seen since we got here, but breathtaking. We’re far enough away that we can see the camp below, the cabins and the cafeteria and the tennis courts stretched out beyond us, campers starting to mill about lazily for the less-structured Sunday agenda. I don’t realize how quiet it is up here until Savvy lets out a sneeze and I flinch.