Fourteen

fourteen

“My first theory is the obvious one: Savvy’s parents used to be Seattle’s most feared crime lords and Abby’s parents owed Savvy’s parents the kind of blood debt that could only be paid with a fresh baby, Rumpelstiltskin-style,” says Finn, who managed to string all those words together through a mouthful of blueberry waffles at breakfast.

“You’re getting closer,” I deadpan into my yogurt. “I can feel it.”

Savvy bonks him on the head with the name tag on her lanyard and goes back to artfully arranging the fruit on her waffle. Jemmy, Cam, and Izzy are less-than-subtly leaning over from a few tables away to watch. I gesture for them to join us, but the blood about drains from their faces and Jemmy lets out a self-conscious squeak that serves as my cue to drop the idea.

It’s for the best. Savvy and I have only been getting along for about three minutes, and as nice as this bantering across the breakfast table has been, we should probably give it more time to gel before throwing more people into the mix.

“Maybe it’s a full Baby Mama.” Finn’s been at this for twenty minutes, and apparently cannot be stopped. “Abby’s mom was supposed to be the surrogate for Savvy’s parents, but whoops! Your dad knocked up your mom with Savvy instead, and—”

“Finn,” I beg. “I’m eating.”

He looks at me soberly over his waffles. “Parents have sex, Abby. Accept it. Internalize it. Because in your case, it’s happened at least five times, if not—”

“One more word and I’ll let Rufus use your pillow as a chew toy,” Savvy warns, getting up to wave at Mickey and Leo across the mess hall.

“I’m being helpful,” Finn protests. “Nobody’s a better expert on fucked-up families than I am.” Before I can look over to Savvy to glean what he means, he adds, “Besides, did you guys come here to figure out your whole secret sister drama or not?”

“Uh, you might want to keep your voice, like … way down,” says Leo, reaching our table, Mickey at his side. He grabs a chair from another table and plants himself next to me, close enough that our knees knock into each other’s. “I’m pretty sure they can hear you on the other side of the Sound.”

Mickey loudly kisses her palm and sets it on Savvy’s forehead. “Good morning, lady. I have not seen you in many moons. How did this morning’s selfie turn out without my expertise?”

Savvy beams up at her, taking Mickey’s hand off her forehead and squeezing it. “Abby took care of it.”

“Did she?” asks Mickey, nudging my chair with her foot. “I hope you got her good side. She’s convinced her left cheek is slightly different than the—”

“Mickey.”

As this is happening Finn holds out his fist for Leo to bump, which devolves into a complicated pattern of nonsense gestures that takes place over my lap and is arguably more of an interpretive dance than a secret handshake. Leo ends it with a flourish, then reaches into his back pocket and passes me a tiny bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos under the table, his eyes gleaming. “Staff room contraband.”

I tuck it into the baggy pocket of my shorts, a crunch in my side and a warmth in my chest.

“Now that’s true friendship,” says Mickey.

She and Savvy head over to the drink station to fill up their water cups, and Leo turns to me with a conspiratorial smile. “Speaking of,” he says, “seems like you and Savvy had a chance to talk things out, sister to sister?”

I brace myself for commentary from Finn, but he’s distracted, watching Victoria talk to the other girls from Phoenix Cabin the table over.

“More like … sister adjacent,” I say, waving it off. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, because it’s a little embarrassing that half the camp knows about our spat in the first place. “And yeah. We’re chill.”

“I’m glad,” says Leo.

He takes one of my hands in both of his, spreading my palm out. Only then do I realize my hand is still kind of wrinkly from all the dishes Finn and I did this morning. I start to pull it back, self-conscious, but then Leo skims the tips of his fingers over my palm, the skin so sensitive that it feels like every nerve is burning for him.

Some vital part of my brain abandons me, and I’m spreading my fingers out and weaving them between his. He doesn’t stop me, the teasing smile faltering on his face, giving way to something that must already be on mine.

Our eyes meet, long enough for me to see something I’m not sure I want to—resignation. He squeezes my hand and lets go, and we try to laugh it off. I scramble for what to say next, anything to absorb the awkwardness of what I just did, but it turns out, I don’t need to bother.

“Abby, hi,” says Victoria, sitting so unexpectedly that I jump in my chair like someone set a firework under it. She doesn’t miss a beat, leaning in and propping her elbows on the table in the chummy way adults do right before they ruin your life. Case in point: “One of the counselors went through parent emails and just informed me that we were able to correct the SAT prep rosters. We’ve enrolled you and the other girls in Phoenix Cabin back in the appropriate session. So sorry for the confusion.”

The disappointment is so immediate that it feels like someone dropped an anchor on my stomach. I don’t even have it in me to be surprised.

“Oh,” I manage.

She pats the table. “Don’t worry. Yesterday’s session was mostly introductory, so there won’t be much to catch up on. You girls can report to the academic building directly after breakfast.”

Victoria leaves as abruptly as she came, and I suck in the resigned, heavy breath of the academically damned. I know I deserve this, after lying to my parents about summer school and dodging the prep classes in the first place. But I cut a glance at Jemmy and Cam and Izzy, who look every bit as bummed as I do, and feel a separate wave of guilt, as if this is somehow my fault.

And it occurs to me. This is my fault.

“Yowza,” says Leo. “Busted.”

He’s smiling sheepishly, trying to come up with something to cheer me up. Usually he can. But usually I am not preoccupied scanning a cafeteria for a bobbing ponytail with laser eyes set to murder.

“Look, the sessions are what, five hours a day? You’ll still have plenty of time to meet up with Savvy and—”

“The only thing I’m doing with Savvy is going back in time and smacking myself in the face before I agreed to come with her in the first place.”

Leo blinks. “Uh, I’m not following.”

I’m seething, looking for a place to channel my rage, but I can’t find her anywhere.

“And besides, that’s not how time travel works,” says Leo, evidently deciding to distract me from said rage with another deep dive into explaining the linearity of time and the possibilities of creating multiverses. I wonder if I can hop into any in which I am marginally less of an idiot. “If you could time travel, future you would have already gone back and—”

“Warned me that Savvy was a backstabber and ratted me and the other girls out to get revenge?”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” I insist. “Remember last night?”

Leo’s face softens. “Yeah?”

I plow on, ignoring the little tweak in my heart. “Savvy was on the phone, saying she was ‘going through parent emails to the camp staff.’”

Plus, Victoria “just” found out. Which can only mean Savvy just told her.

“I’m sure she wasn’t trying to—”

“Shit. That sucks,” says Finn, who ghosted when Victoria showed up, but was apparently close enough to hear the proceedings. He takes a slurp from his juice. “So what are we doing to get back at her?”

Leo pauses in the middle of plucking a banana slice off my plate. I watch his hand linger there, wavering in this moment, Leo on my right and Finn on my left like an angel and a devil on my shoulder.

“I’m fresh out of ideas after last night’s stroke of genius, but we could brainstorm. I know a place where nobody will bother us,” Finn goes on. “You know that trail by the tennis courts?”

I nod slowly, and Leo goes still beside me.

“Go down it a ways. There’s a big old rock there where people meet up sometimes. Great view at the top, too,” Finn says with a wink, nodding down at Kitty, who’s propped in her case on the table. “Told you I could get you the best shots. Have I steered you wrong yet?”

“Uh…”

“So, eight o’clock?”

Before I can say yes or no, Finn ducks under the table and literally rolls across the floor like he’s in the middle of an army drill. I blink down at him, wondering what the hell Leo and Mickey put in the waffles, until it becomes clear that he’s still avoiding Victoria and her piercing gaze. Only then does it occur to me that he was probably supposed to be at kitchen duty last night, too, but never showed.

I jolt when Leo touches my elbow and is suddenly so much closer to me than he was before.

“You’re not actually meeting him, are you?”

Leo’s jaw has gone tight and his eyebrows are furrowed.

“We’re not going to do anything, like, evil,” I say, waving a hand in front of his face. “It’s me, Leo.” I throw a piece of banana in my mouth.

Leo doesn’t shake it off the way I’m expecting. “That’s ‘Make Out Rock.’”

I almost choke, so fully expecting him to pick the “go easy on your secret sister” moral high ground that I don’t know how to respond, the banana taste in my mouth going sour.

“It’s a hookup spot,” Leo iterates.

My heels dig into the legs of my chair. “And what’s the problem with that?”

Leo’s eyes widen.

“You’re into Finn?”

No. But I’m decidedly not into Leo deciding he has an opinion about my budding friendship with Finn, either. Especially after he made it perfectly clear on the ferry how over our almost-kiss he is.

“What do you care?”

It’s a way of asking without asking, the coward’s way out.

And I get exactly what a coward deserves when that tight jaw of his all but unhinges, and he doesn’t make a sound. A quiet, awful confirmation of the thing we’ve been dancing around for way too long—he doesn’t like me the way I like him. And if he did once, he doesn’t anymore.

It shouldn’t be difficult to wrap my head around. In fact, it should be a relief. It means Connie didn’t lie. That my friendship with her, at least, is something I can rely on, something I can trust. But for some unhelpful reason, my face is hotter than a sauna and my eyes are starting to sting. I get up to leave, but Leo touches my elbow.

My heart lifts too fast, like it’s on a carnival ride.

“And honestly, I wish you’d give this thing with Savvy a rest. Let it go.”

It’s the worst thing he could possibly say to me in this moment, even if he’s right. Forget carnival rides. This is a high-speed crash. “So you are on Savvy’s side.”

“I’m on your side,” he emphasizes. “And hers.”

I blow my hair out of my face. “Great. I’m already outnumbered by an entire camp full of people on her side, and now you, too?”

Leo presses on as if I didn’t say anything. “At least let me walk you out there later. People get lost on the path after dark. It’s not safe.”

I don’t let myself blink, mortified that if I do, there’s a very real chance a tear is going to slip out. I’ve never been more mad at my eyeballs than I am right now. As if it isn’t enough of a blow to my ego that Leo doesn’t like me, he’s going to play the big brother card, too?

“I don’t need you to Benvolio me,” I tell him through my teeth.

“To what you?” he asks. He frowns, no doubt remembering my essay. “Are you seriously sucking me into your Benvolio-hatred manifesto right now?”

I take in a breath, trying to focus on my irritation, anything to keep myself from crying or using more Shakespeare character names as verbs. “I don’t need a babysitter. I’ll be fine.”

I grab my tray and start walking it to the sinks, glad I’ll at least have the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to make up for the breakfast I’m about to waste to get away from him.

“Maybe you do need a babysitter, if you’re really going to climb that stupid rock in the pitch dark,” says Leo, hot on my heels. The two of us look so equally irritated that other campers are giving us a wide berth in the mess hall. “You walk around like you’re invincible, but you have to think of the risks—”

“I’m plenty aware of the risks,” I say, just as Leo gets ahead of me and stops so abruptly that I have to stop, too.

We scowl at each other. I sigh, opening my mouth to attempt something conciliatory, but Leo beats me to it.

“Tell that to this,” he says, grazing a scar I’d forgotten was on my elbow with his knuckles. The lingering touch stuns the anger right out of me. “Or this,” he says, gesturing down to my knees, still scraped up from falling off my skateboard. Then Leo looks me right in the face, where the scar digs into my eyebrow. “Or—”

“Would you give it a rest?”

This is new territory for us. I don’t snap at Leo. But it’s too much. I’ve always known he keeps track of these little things, of the times I’ve fallen off skateboards or fences or one unfortunate rooftop straight into a dumpster, but it’s different, hearing it all at once. Like I am suddenly aware of my body in a way I never bother to be. Aware that he knows it so fully and doesn’t want any part of it.

“I’m sorry,” says Leo. He takes a step in, and I have to consciously plant my feet to the sticky mess hall floor to stop myself from moving in, too.

I bite down the hurt, tossing the contents of my tray into the trash, and ask, “What’s your problem with Finn, anyway? Isn’t he your friend?”

“Of course he is.” Leo takes my tray for me, his voice considerably lower. “But Finn … he’s had a rough year. And there’s a bit of an edge to him now. A reckless one. And you’re already pretty reckless on your own.”

He leans in closer, his eyes trained on mine, and I hate myself for feeling it—that electricity from last night, the thick gravity of the storm between us. I’m almost mad at him for bringing the current back. But he has no way of knowing that current means something entirely different to me than it does to him.

“And for what it’s worth, I’m always on your side,” he says. “But part of being on your side is telling you the truth. Which is that you should put a stop to this thing with Savvy before it goes full Lord of the Flies.”

I try and fail to hold in my monumental sigh. He’s right. And as mad as I am at Savvy, I am also stuck on the mystery of the magpies, on the brief connection we had this morning. Something fragile enough that if we bend it any more than we have to, it might break.

“We’ll … do some kind of dumb prank, then,” I relent. “Cut off the Wi-Fi in the counselor lounge so she can’t update her Instagram or something.”

Leo loosens up considerably. “That’s not a bad idea. It might actually get her to hang out with us.”

I wrinkle my nose.

“Just avoid messing with her job here,” says Leo. “It’s important to her.”

I chew the inside of my cheek, biting down the urge to say that being able to take photos in my free time here was important to me, and that sure didn’t stop her from coming for it. “’Course not,” I mumble.

Leo’s face settles back into a smile, albeit an uneasy one. I hesitate, and then so does he, and finally he says, “Be careful tonight.”

I can’t tell if he means to be careful climbing the rock or careful of Finn, but maybe that’s for the best. “I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” I say, trying to ease the tension.

Instead Leo’s mouth forms a tight line, his eyes on the other side of the mess hall like he is considering something. I can see the exact moment he decides on it, his jaw clicking before he turns back to me.

“I was being unfair before. Finn’s a good guy.”

“So … you are into the idea of me and Finn?”

It’s supposed to come out cheeky, but it’s choppy and too loud in my ears.

Leo shakes his head and tilts it like he always does at me, except this time there’s something weary in it. Something that catches in my chest, the push and pull, the knowing and not knowing where we stand.

“I want you to be happy,” he says.

Of all the things he’s ever said to me, this might be the worst. Because I know what would make me happy, and it’s not something he can give. Instead of answering him I step in closer and reach up, rubbing his hair with my closed fist until it goes all floppy, expecting him to laugh the way he did when we were kids. But his eyes just stay heavy on mine, weighted in a way I can still feel after we’ve both turned and gone our separate ways.

I file out of the mess hall with the rest of the breakfast stragglers, trying to shake off my unease, and immediately stumble into all three girls from Phoenix Cabin waiting for me outside. I stop in my tracks.

“Finn told us what happened. That Savvy busted us all, and now we have to spend the whole summer locked up in class,” says Jemmy, her nostrils flared.

“Yeah,” I say miserably.

I’m about to apologize, but Izzy cuts in and says, “He said you’re coming up with a plan to get back at her.”

I brace myself. This is it, then. Savvy stole my summer and took all my new friends with her. If there really are sides to this battle, there’s no doubt whose they’d be on.

But Cam’s mouth puckers into a determined line, and the others fall in behind her. She takes a step forward, looking like the leader of some very angry Powerpuff Girls, and says, “We want in.”