Two

two

When you find out your parents have harbored a secret older sibling from you for all the sixteen years you’ve inhabited the Earth, the last thing you should probably do is suck in a mouthful of air and yell, “Mom!”

But I walk through the front door and do exactly that.

It takes her approximately ten seconds to reach me, and they are simultaneously the longest and shortest ten seconds of my life. Long enough to understand that what happened is going to fundamentally change me forever; short enough to decide I don’t want it to just yet.

“What happened?” she asks, her eyes widening at my knees. I look down and only then notice the matching bloodstains around the holes in my jeans, which have now ripped so wide they look like I’m trying to send my legs to another dimension.

I open my mouth. “I…”

Her arm is streaked with green paint from one of my brothers’ art projects, her wild brown hair yanked into a high bun, and she’s balancing a laundry basket on one hip and a large folder of depositions on the other. She stands there in all her my mom–ness, her brow furrowed and her teeth biting her lower lip, and suddenly the whole thing is absurd.

This is a person who tells me grisly, ridiculously personal details about her cases, knowing I won’t make a peep. This is a person who very frankly explained sex to me in the third grade when I interrupted one of her and my dad’s movie nights during the fogged-up car window scene in Titanic. This is a person who cried when she told me about Santa Claus, because she felt so bad for lying.

This is not a person who keeps secrets, and especially not from me.

“I—fell on my skateboard.”

“Are you okay?” Her eyes are already edging toward the first aid kit, which, between me and my three brothers, is stocked more regularly than any of our lunch boxes.

I wave her off, not looking her in the eye. “Fine. Great!” Which may have had a chance of sounding believable if I didn’t follow it up by nearly tripping over the mountain of Velcro and light-up boy shoes haphazardly piled at the door as I attempt to sprint toward my room.

“You sure?”

“Yup!”

A beat passes, one of those stretched-out ones like she’s going to call me out on something. I hover at the door of my room, bracing myself for it: I know you know the thing I didn’t want you to know! Like she saw it on my face as soon as I walked in, and only just put the pieces together with her uncanny psychic mom powers.

Instead she says, “Well, I left some of those flyers on your bed, if you get a chance to—”

“Thanks!” I cut her off, and close my door swiftly behind me.

I beeline for my laptop, as if opening a new screen will make the thing I saw on the other one go away. But to get to it I have to shove off the pile of aforementioned glossy, painfully colorful flyers propped on top of it, along with a Post-it Note that says “Looks fun!!” stuck on top.

They’re all for Camp Reynolds, this new summer program the school guidance counselor told my parents about. He tried to sell me on it too, cheerfully telling me over the human-head-size candy bowl he keeps in his office that it’s perfect for “kids like me”—a.k.a. kids whose college prospects are dwindling with every lost decimal of their GPA. It’s supposed to get students up to speed with the SATs and college application prep and all the other stuff that I’m going to be shoved into the cross fire of next year.

Until two hours ago, my life’s mission was getting out of it. But whatever sense of linear order my life has just got blown to pieces.

I shove the flyers onto the mattress, drumming my fingers on the keyboard as I wait for the laptop to wake up. Whoever this Savannah is, she can’t really be my sister. They swapped my spit out for someone else’s, or sent me the wrong results. I mean, the thing said I’m more likely than others to match musical pitches, and I’m so tone-deaf my brother Brandon—arguably the most agreeable kid to ever live—screamed bloody murder when I tried to sing to him as a baby. These are some other slightly Irish, unibrow-prone girl’s DNA results that got bungled with mine, and in a few hours we’ll all sit at the dinner table and laugh about the whole thing.

But I glance at the “Relations” page anyway so I can do my due diligence when I make a customer complaint. Savannah Tully, says the name on the top of the list.

And then my heart wrings like a sponge in my chest. Georgia Day, it reads. We predict Georgia Day is your first cousin.

And the next one: Lisa McGinnis. We predict Lisa McGinnis is your second to third cousin.

The names below it—second, third, even fifth cousins—are unfamiliar. But Georgia and I were born in the same month, and even though she lives in San Francisco, we’re in loose touch, tagging each other in the occasional Tumblr meme and texting whenever the body count gets a little preposterous on Riverdale. And Lisa definitely friended me on Facebook within an hour of Poppy’s funeral last summer.

Which can only mean …

“Oh my god.”

I don’t realize I’ve yelled it until I hear a knock and my dad’s head pops in. “What is it?”

I slam the laptop shut. “I thought I saw a spider.”

My voice is just loud enough to carry to the boys’ room, where an instant commotion is set off.

“Spider? Where?” pipes Brandon, who is notoriously afraid of them.

“Spider? Where?” demands Mason, who is going through an aggressive Spider-Man phase.

Before anyone can get a word in edgewise, a pan clatters from the kitchen, which can only be Asher trying to take macaroni-related matters into his own hands again. Dad winces, and Mom yells, “I got it!” in the same exasperated way she always does, and so begins an extremely familiar number in the soundtrack of Day family chaos.

“You got that draft ready to rumble?”

I can hear how tired his voice is before he’s even fully in the room, the kind that’s way past “parent of three boys and one very stubborn teenager” levels of tired. Ever since Poppy died, it sort of seems like he and my mom are never not in motion. My dad gets to his office at the crack of dawn and my mom gets home at about a bajillion o’clock at night, the two of them desperately trying to make sure someone’s always home or home adjacent to keep track of us now that my grandpa can’t.

Which is why I feel extra bad that I am teetering the line between a solid C and high D in English, and extra extra bad that he’s not even mad about it the way a normal parent would be, and is instead reading the umpteenth draft on this essay I have written about why Benvolio from Romeo and Juliet is a total buzzkill for constantly nagging his friends.

Okay, the thesis is slightly more academic than that, but the point stands. English isn’t exactly my strong suit. It’s not that I don’t like reading, or that I’m a bad student—actually, up until this year, I was doing okay in the land of academia—but my vendetta against English in particular is that I hate arguing, and arguing is like 90 percent of any English class you take. Sure, it’s organized, nerdy arguing, but arguing nonetheless—about a thesis statement, or some character’s motivation, or what some author did or didn’t mean to say.

And I’m about as Type B as they come. I have no interest in arguing, or confrontation in general. Give me the wrong scoop of ice cream? I’ll eat it. Sneak into my room and cut the sleeves off my red sweater for your Spider-Man costume? Shit happens.

Lie to my face about a sister who lives a few suburbs away for sixteen years?

Well.

“Yeah,” I say, like the cowardly coward that I am. I pull it off the printer and hand it to him.

My dad frowns. “What’s got your gourd?”

“Nothing.”

My phone buzzes, and a picture of Connie pretending to lick the display case at Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. pops up on my screen. Nobody in their right mind calls on a phone anymore, but Connie’s so busy with her chronic overachieving that she claims she doesn’t have the time to type.

“I know it’s a drag, but it gets a little better each time, right?” says my dad, holding the essay up.

Not in the slightest. I pick up the phone and my dad waves himself out with a flourish, taking the fifth draft of my godforsaken essay with him.

“Yo. Put Leo on. I’ve got a pep talk ready.”

“I’m not at Leo’s.”

“You’re not?”

There’s something almost accusatory in the way she asks, and I think maybe she’ll bring it up—the weirdness we’ve all been semidancing around since the BEI. But she cuts through the tension before I can even decide if it’s real or not, saying, “In that case, 31.8 percent, sucker.”

I am so far removed from reality that I genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about.

“You owe me soda bread. And no cheating, you can’t have Leo do the whole thing for you,” she tells me.

“Uh…”

“Anyway, I’ll just call Leo’s phone, is he still around?”

“Yeah.”

Connie pauses. “Why do you sound weird?”

My mouth is open, but the airflow between my lungs and the outside world seems to have stopped, like I’m breathing into a plastic bag.

Savannah Tully.

“Um.”

I can’t seem to get past monosyllables. It’s like my tongue is too thick for my mouth, as if I’ve become some whole other person since my ill-fated skateboard ride back from Leo’s, and I’m not sure how she’s supposed to act, what she’s supposed to say.

“Oh shit. Are you more Irish than I am after all? You’re like, Saoirse Ronan’s secret twin—”

“No. I mean, I am more Irish, but—”

“Is it one of the health things? Oh man, I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? If it makes you feel better, I totally got flagged on the celiac gene—”

“It’s not that.”

The words come out a snap, which stuns both of us into silence. I’m never short with Connie, or anybody, really. I get riled, sure, and impatient, but never with anyone but myself.

I’m not even sure what I am right now, though.

“Abs?”

I can’t. If I tell her, it’ll be real. And I’ll have to do something about it. Okay, I won’t have to, but that’s the thing with me—it’s the “latch” factor. If I let myself get in too deep on this, I won’t be able to let it go, even if I wish more than anything that I could.

I won’t let myself latch on to this. I can’t.

“It’s not—I mean, yeah, I’m more Irish than you.” Even in the midst of what might be my First Ever Existential Crisis, I can’t help but rub it in. “But I…”

Maybe I’ll regret saying it, but it feels like there is some kind of pressure building up in me that might explode if I don’t let it out.

I spring out of my chair and shut the door to my room again as slowly as I can, muffling the click. That’s twice now I’ve shut my door in a span of ten minutes. I almost never close it—my brothers are in and out so often that it’s basically a second living room—so I’ll have to make this fast.

“It says I have a sister.”

Connie is dead silent, and then: “Huh?”

“Like, a full-blooded sister. Some girl named Savannah Tully who lives a half hour from us, in Medina.”

“Whoa, like rich-person Medina?”

She is missing the point here. “Like, full-blooded as in we have the same parents. Like, the parents that I have made some other person before me who I don’t know about. And get this—it says she’s eighteen.”

Another silence, and then: “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“Abby … she looks like you.”

“She what? How did you—how are you—”

“She’s got like, half a million followers on Instagram.”

“Okay, how do you even know it’s—”

“Because she legit looks like you. I’m sending you a link.”

Don’t,I almost tell her, but it’s too late. I’ve latched. I’ve freaking latched, and I have to know.

I pull the phone away from my ear and tap the link, landing on an Instagram account with the handle @howtostaysavvy. The bio reads, “wellness dweeb, nutrition nerd, wannabe mermaid. all about staying savvy.”

Connie wasn’t exaggerating—her follower count is obscene.

I scroll down and see the first few images. A beaming girl jumping on a rocky beach, her limbs splayed out in a strappy bikini, the water of the Puget Sound gleaming in the background. Another of her at a white table outside of some restaurant, chestnut brown hair blowing in the wind and tongue stuck out playfully, her fork poised above a colorful salad. A selfie with a Labrador retriever, close enough to see the dusting of freckles on her scrunched nose, the white of her teeth in her open, midlaugh smile, the poreless perfection of her skin.

I close the app, my hands shaking.

“She doesn’t look anything like me.”

“Bullshit.” And then: “So what are you going to do? Can you message her?”

“She already messaged me.”

“Way to bury the lede,” Connie exclaims. “Saying what?”

I pull it back up and tell her, pacing across the room as if I can get farther away from the words on the screen even though the phone is still in my hand.

“Are you gonna message her back?”

No. Yes. “I don’t know.” I end up doing what I usually do when faced with a difficult choice: pull a Carrie Underwood and let Connie take the wheel. “What would you do?”

Thirteen-year-old Connie would have told me, along with a twelve-step action plan in a shared Excel sheet so aggressively color-coded that the Lucky Charms leprechaun would have shuddered at the sight. Seventeen-year-old Connie is, unfortunately, too wise for that.

“Let’s make a pros and Connies list,” she offers instead.

I groan, both at the pun that Connie will never let die and the prospect of making said list. A “pros and Connies” list is different from a typical pros and cons list, not just because it makes everyone’s eyes roll into the backs of their heads, but because instead of framing the question as, “What would happen if I did this?” Connie insists on writing the list as, “What would happen if I didn’t do this?” That way, she insists, the cons aren’t negatives, but cold truths. Connies, if you will. Fitting, I guess, because Connie is nothing if not brutally honest.

The first pro is so immediate that there’s no point in writing it down: I wouldn’t make my parents mad. I’m assuming they’d be mad. Right? Like, whatever this is, it’s not only super weird, but they must have gone to some pretty extreme lengths to hide it from me.

And I’m not exactly in a great position to go around upsetting my parents. Between shuffling me to tutors, constantly replacing my broken phone screens, and fielding calls from concerned neighbors every other day saying they saw me climb something I wasn’t supposed to, having me for a kid seems baseline exhausting.

Yet something else knocks all that guilt aside: the idea of an ally. Someone I could talk to about things I can’t share with my parents or even Connie—things like the BEI. Or how I am sometimes so overwhelmed by all the scrutiny on my grades that if anything, it makes the situation worse. Or how I have no idea how I’m supposed to fit into the world after high school, if there’s even a proper place for me to fit at all.

Someone who might be to me what Poppy was, before he died. Someone who understood me well enough that I never felt self-conscious telling him about the embarrassing stuff, or even sharing my photos. I come from a family of worrywarts and planners, but he was the one who was always like me—he loved a good adventure, was every bit as impulsive, had embarrassing stories to tell that rivaled mine. I could tell him the truthiest truths of me—the good, the bad, and the “I’m pretty sure I threw away my retainer and it’s somewhere in the sixty bags of garbage behind the school gym” levels of ugly—without ever getting the sense that I might disappoint him.

There it is. The “Connie.” Maybe I can find a person who understands me the way nobody else can. If I don’t do this, I’ll never have the chance.

“Hey, Abby? I’ve got some notes!” my dad calls.

I close my eyes. “I gotta go. But—don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

“’Course not.” Before I can hang up, Connie asks, “Wait, not even Leo?”

“I’ll tell him, I just want to…”

Scream into my pillow? Bust into my parents’ bedroom and yell “I KNOW THE TRUTH!” like I live in a comic and there’s a speech bubble over my head? Run away, join the circus, and never think about any of this ever again?

“Got it. Godspeed.” There’s a beat. “Also, is it weird if I follow her?”

“Connie.”

“What? She’s goals. She can do those crazy handstand yoga poses. And I’m obsessed with Rufus.”

“Who?”

“Her dog.”

“Goodbye.”

I hang up and take the kind of breath that is less of a breath and more of a decision. One that, pros and Connies aside, I couldn’t unmake if I tried.

I open up the app and type back: Are you free tomorrow?