Fifteen

fifteen

Make Out Rock, as it turns out, may officially be the least sexy place in the entire Pacific Northwest—unless the five of us all competing over who can make the most believable bear noises while chugging an entire liter of smuggled Sprite qualifies as “sexy.”

“Finn, you’re banned unless you stop the uncontrollable burping,” says Izzy, a phrase that may be the cherry on our unsexy sundae. “Also, last check on the final draft of this before we go over Operation Wack.”

We shuffle around in the darkness, our faces lit by the glow of Izzy’s phone. On the screen is a dummy Instagram account we built that looks almost identical to Savvy’s, with all her recent uploaded photos and the bio exactly the same. Except where it should say “How To Stay Savvy” it reads “How To Stay Wacky,” and we also uploaded some old adorkable pictures of her at camp so it would look like her account was hacked by a nostalgic ghost.

The idea was mine, but the execution was all Finn. While we were stuck in SAT prep, he snuck onto the Wi-Fi to upload his old camp pictures—Savvy and Mickey hamming it up in matching braces and handmade One Direction T-shirts, Savvy sleeping on top of Leo and Finn with drool dribbling out of her mouth, and all of them with two Pringles shoved into their mouths, flinging out their elbows like ducks down by the shore.

Photos I realized I’d seen before, when Leo had shown them to me and Connie after getting back home from camp. But even if I’d memorized their faces, I’d have no way to make the connection between the Savvy she was then and the Savvy she is now, all polished at the edges, every inch of her contained and poised.

The account is private, so nobody will see it except us and Savvy. She’ll probably see the lock icon on the profile and figure out it’s a prank before she even sees the goofy pictures. But scrolling through them all, I’m glad I took Leo’s advice and went for a good clean prank instead of actual revenge. I’ve seen flashes of this more lighthearted Savvy, but it’s something else to see the evidence of it.

The more I look at younger Savvy, the closer I get to understanding the older one. It reminds me that I made her laugh this morning. And for a moment, we were okay.

“These are precious,” says Cam, laughing at one where Finn and Savvy are posing with their tennis rackets like lightsabers. She tweaks Finn on the nose. “Look at baby you.”

Izzy nods in agreement. “She should post these in real life. To her stories, at least.”

“Less admiring how precious twelve-year-old me is, more going over the plan,” says Finn, but not with enough conviction for anyone to miss that he’s blushing. “Jemmy?”

Jemmy, who is apparently the Dungeon Master of a very large all-girl Dungeons & Dragons group, decided to put herself in charge of this heist. Ultimately she decided the only way to get the junior counselors out of bed without grabbing their phones was to pretend someone had seen a bear—hence our bear noise rehearsal—prompting them to head through their cabin’s back exit, which opens into a hallway that goes to the camp office.

At that point, Cam—who, as it turns out, is always clad in neon leggings and shirts because she’s a competitive runner—will sprint in and grab Savvy’s phone. She’ll hand it off to Izzy, who will use some possibly shady but undeniably convenient hacking skills to get into Savvy’s phone, log her out of her Instagram, and log on to the How To Stay Wacky one. Cam will then sprint it back in, the five of us will make a mad dash back to the camper cabins, and Savvy will be none the wiser until tomorrow morning’s ritual Instagram scroll.

The plan is far from foolproof (I blame the SAT prep for somehow, against all odds, making us all a bit stupider), but none of us really cares. Class was every bit as bone-crushingly tedious as we expected, but all this ridiculous plotting has bonded us enough that I fessed up and told them the whole Savvy and Abby soap opera subplot drama that is our lives.

It took a few minutes for everyone to get up to speed—“I thought this shit only happened in Disney Channel movies,” said Jemmy, approximately five times—but it was a relief once we all were. They’re not mad at Savvy anymore, but their hero worship went down a few healthy pegs. They see her as a human being instead of an untouchable Instagram god. Which puts us all on the same page, even if that page involves us hiding in different parts of the woods like a junior SWAT team with walkie-talkies we borrowed from the middle school boys’ cabin across camp.

“Okay, Abby,” says Jemmy, cueing me from the tree she’s hiding behind. “Go for the Oscar. Three … two … one.”

I wince, sucking in a lungful of air, and recite the words that Jemmy made me memorize and subsequently rehearse by yelling them into a pillow. “Bear! I saw a bear. There’s a bear in the camp!”

My voice carries over the camp from the woods. Rufus immediately starts howling and the lights flicker on in the junior counselor cabin. Even from this distance, I can hear Savvy: “Wait, guys, there aren’t any bears here!”

Jemmy nudges me in the ribs, hard, and I obligingly yell, “Oh no! A bear! Ahhhhh!”

She raises an eyebrow at me like she is director Patty Jenkins of Wonder Woman in the flesh and I just destroyed her cinematic masterpiece, but it does the trick. Through their window we have a full view of the junior counselors booking it out of the cabin, Savvy nudging Rufus out along with them.

The door shuts, and Jemmy flicks on the walkie-talkie. “Okay, girls. It’s showtime.”