Nineteen

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.

“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.”