Thirteen

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.”

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.

“How is that possible when my boyfriend is literally on top of me right now?”

At this Savvy lets out a sharp laugh, and we push through the tension to a place where we can tease each other, hopefully without worrying about setting each other’s admittedly fragile egos on fire. She pulls Rufus off me and chucks the slobbery badminton racket down the path.

“What does Jo think about this?” I ask, watching Rufus speed off.

“Think about what?”

“Uh … all five feet six inches of surprise sister that popped up in your inbox last week.”

Savvy blinks. “I—shit.” She goes rigid, like it’s only occurring to her. “I didn’t tell her.”

It feels unproductive to get offended, but it’s kind of hard not to be. Especially when she laughs again, this time in disbelief.

“I … wow. I can’t—I mean, seriously—shit.”

“Mood,” I say, because I can only get one syllable out without the hurt slipping through.

Savvy notices, her eyes ticking over to mine. She looks like she’s on the verge of apologizing, but what comes out is: “She’s gonna be so pissed.”

“Why?”

“Because I told Mickey, and she thinks—” Savvy shakes her head, cutting herself off abruptly. “It’s got nothing to do with you.” She shakes her head again, with more intention. “She probably would have said to tell my parents.”

I pick at a stray piece of grass, breaking it apart with my fingers. I should probably think about whether it’s really my place before I ask, but we’re past that, maybe. “Why didn’t you?”

She shrugs. “They had eighteen years to tell me, and didn’t. So.” It doesn’t feel like the full answer, the rest hovering between us. I glance over at her, and it gives way. “Also, I have this weird feeling that … I don’t know. Maybe things were supposed to shake out like this. Maybe we were supposed to find each other.”

“Yeah.”

My throat feels thick. Less from guilt of what we’re doing and more out of this strange obligation I feel to Savvy—this feeling that neither of us set this in motion. Something carried us to this moment, some force that’s been hovering so long in “if” that our meeting was always bound to be a “when.” I’ve never once in my life felt like something was missing, but if I left right now, I’d be leaving a part of me here with her.

Savvy hugs her knees to her chest. “Ugh. It’s been, like, two seconds. But I kind of miss them.”

I know she means her parents, because suddenly I’m thinking of mine, too. About the pancakes Asher probably bullied our dad into making, about the coffee cup I usually steal swigs of from my mom. But it’s deeper than the day-to-day. My brothers will be taller when I get back. They’ll have enough time to make a whole new routine without me. The space I come back to, whether I want it to be or not, won’t be Abby-shaped anymore—or maybe I won’t be the shape of the Abby who left.

I take in a shaky breath and say, “Me too.”

“It gets better,” says Savvy, fiddling with the chain around her neck. “First week of camp is always kind of rough.”

I watch as she pulls the chain out from under her shirt and stares down at the charm. I’ve gotten so used to the things that are the same about us—the color of our hair, the shape of our eyes, the way our voices both get a little high-pitched when we’re mad—it takes a second to register that the charm wasn’t something we were born with in common.

“Is that a magpie?”

“Wow,” says Savvy, “you really are into birds. Most people think it’s a—oh.”

She falls silent, staring at the keychain I fished out of my denim shorts. Thicker, shorter chain. Same magpie charm.

Our eyes connect, both of us already knowing what we’re going to say before we say it: “My mom gave it to me.”

I swallow thickly, holding the charm in my fist. My mom gave it to me on my first day of kindergarten, with the emergency house key attached. I don’t remember much about the conversation, only that even at five I could tell her hands had a different weight to them when she pressed the charm into mine and told me to keep it safe.

“I’m guessing yours never told you why, either.”

“No,” says Savvy. She pulls hers off her neck, and we hold them up to the light. “I’ve had it so long I can’t remember not having it.”

“Well, I guess we’ve got our first clue.”

The two magpie charms dangle, glinting in the sunlight, identical in shape, but made different by time. Mine is nicked from falls, Savvy’s worn at its edges from her rubbing it, the colors uniquely faded—but both still have that iridescent blue glimmering against black on white, two opposite extremes in one body, a bird at odds with itself.

“Maybe we make the truce a little … untemporary?” Savvy ventures. “That way you can stay. At least until we can figure this out.”

I close my fist around my magpie charm, and she sets hers back against her neck. “Yeah,” I agree. “Sounds like a plan.”