Twenty-Five

twenty-five

I’m not even sure, in the end, what gets said. Mostly it’s a lot of yelling. Pietra yelling at my mom, Savvy yelling at Pietra, my dad yelling at me, Dale yelling at Rufus to stop barking his head off, which is mostly why we are having to yell to be heard in the first place. Once Finn and Mickey come sprinting around the corner, we go quiet at once, six people clearly unfamiliar with making a scene.

Mickey yanks Finn by the elbow, and he lets himself get led away, and then we’re all panting in the parking lot like we were in an hour-long battle royale instead of a minute of slightly raising our voices.

Pietra’s hand is firmly wrapped around Savvy’s arm. “We’re contacting our lawyer the minute we get off this island.”

Savvy and I both blink at her. “Lawyer?” we ask in unison.

I’m surprised how firm my mom’s voice is, how much resolve is back since yesterday. “That won’t be necessary. The girls won’t be—”

“I’ll decide what’s necessary. Especially when I see you blatantly breaking the terms of our settlement by coming anywhere near my daughter, let alone coercing her somewhere without other witnesses present.”

The words lawyer and settlement rattle loud in my ears. It’s not that I didn’t believe my parents when they said it was bigger than we were. I just didn’t think it was bad enough to say things like that.

“Oh please,” says Savvy, too fired up to notice. “You all know that Abby and I did this.”

I try not to shrink. My parents’ eyes snap to me, and even though I avoid them, I can feel the heat of them coming at me like a flamethrower.

Dale sucks in a breath, and I think, dumbly, that he is saying something to de-escalate the situation. Instead, he says, “We can’t take legal action. Savvy is eighteen. She’d have to put a restraining order on them herself.”

Pietra firms her resolve. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“In what universe do you think I’d agree to that?”

“Nobody has to take any legal action,” says my mom. “The girls won’t be allowed to see each other anymore. That should settle the matter.”

The words jolt me back into my body in an instant. “You can’t do that.”

My dad’s voice is quiet and grim. “We can for the next year.”

“This is—are you shitting me?” I exclaim. “She practically lives down the block. You can’t just lock me up in a tower, like some kind of prisoner—”

“Maybe it’s time we have more rules for you anyway,” says my mom, in that “quit while you’re ahead” voice I usually only ever hear her use when my brothers are at one another’s throats.

The rage is white-hot and entirely inconvenient, given I am supposed to be focusing on the very urgent, Abby-made disaster at hand, but I can’t help myself. “More rules?” I demand. “You have me scheduled within an inch of my life and you want more rules?”

My dad’s lips are a thin line. “Pack your bags, Abby. We’re leaving in the morning, and you’re coming with us.”

I am not a person who lets herself cry in public, but the idea of them taking this place away is gutting. This place where I can learn and still have enough room to breathe, so I actually enjoy it. This place where I have friends on all sides—old ones, new ones, ones who I happen to be related to and didn’t know about for sixteen years. This place where I can stumble into a new corner of the universe every day and take photos of things I’ve never seen, drink up the world and feel like a part of it, instead of like it’s passing me by.

I’ve been waiting for this feeling ever since Poppy died. Now it’s gone, too.

Savvy sees that she’s going to have to rein me in, and jumps in before I can spiral further. “Or the four of you can get over yourselves, and whatever happened, so we can all see each other. Like normal people.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? What’s so unforgivable that—”

“Savannah,” my mom starts, “it’s not—”

“No. Tell her,” says Pietra.

My mom takes a step back as if Pietra has slapped her. “Pet,” she says. A nickname. A white flag. It hovers between them for a second, but Pietra lets it go with the breeze.

“Tell her what you did,” says Pietra. Her face is splotched with tears, but her voice is eerily firm. “Tell her how you gave her to us, and then you changed your mind. Handed her to us, then scooped her up from the nursery and left the goddamn hospital with her.”

My mom isn’t crying this time. “I … Pietra, you know I—”

“Tell her how you said it was a mistake. Just ‘postpartum brain.’ Tell her how you told me everything was fine, and let us take her home, and how a week later we were served papers from some lawyer, trying to take our baby back, because after everything we’d been through, you’d changed your fucking mind.”

“If we could go back,” says my dad. “If we’d known—”

Pietra shakes her head, unwilling to hear it. “I knew I couldn’t have kids. I waited my whole life for her. And she was mine—the moment you asked me to take her. Before she was born. She was mine.” Pietra is sobbing now. Dale is tearing up too, his hands on her shoulders, like they are used to absorbing this specific pain from each other. “The terror of losing her. That you would win, and get her back. You can’t imagine what it was like.”

The words may be an excuse, but my mom says them like an apology. “You can’t imagine what it was like, giving her up.”

Savvy and I stare at each other as if we’re on opposite sides of a hole we’ve blown into the earth. We’ve wanted the truth for so long, but this feels less like a truth and more like a grenade.

“But you could have other kids,” says Pietra.

“Oh my god.”

All four adults’ heads swivel to me, which is how I realize I’ve said the words out loud.

“I wasn’t an accident.” I’m just repeating what my mom said last night; it’s the final twist of a key that just got shoved into a lock. The last bit of information I need to confirm an ugly truth. I look over at them to ask, but the answer is already in their faces, was already tense in the air between us back in the hotel. “You had me so fast because you were sad about Savvy, and needed a replacement baby.”

Everybody goes quiet, the battle temporarily forgotten. I wish I hadn’t said anything. It’s worse than their anger, than the lies, than everything else that’s built up to this: it’s pity.

My parents stare at me, ashen, and then at each other. They’re trying to do that freaky thing where they come up with a solution without saying a word. Trouble is, they can’t think of one fast enough.

I swipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Nice.” I mean for it to sound scathing. Instead it sounds pathetic.

My mom shifts toward me, and so does Pietra, like they both want to soothe me but don’t know how. And suddenly the whole thing is excruciating. My dumb eyes all watery, them staring at me, even Rufus coming over to cuddle himself against me like my self-pity is so thick that he can smell it in the air.

“Let’s…”

I don’t let my mom finish. “Fuck off,” I bite out, stunning us all. The words make me feel solid again, rock-hard and unforgiving. I don’t even mean them. They’re just better than crying. “Fuck you.”

I need to get out of here, now.

“Abby, wait!”

It’s Savvy who calls me back when I take off, and unfortunately there’s no way to outrun the queen of cardio and HIIT. Sure enough, she’s reached me before I’m even halfway to my cabin, and I go skidding to a halt to avoid crashing into her.

“Savvy—”

“Abby, wait. Just listen. We’re making progress, I know it. Come back.”

My mouth drops open. I was going for indignant, but I am sabotaged by the fact that I am openmouthed wheezing and Savvy basically glided over here on wings.

“Progress?” I repeat. “I’m sorry, were we watching the same car crash?”

Savvy shakes her head. “It’s gotta get worse before it gets better. Get all the poison out. And it’s finally getting out, and—”

“And we should have just left them alone.”

My voice sounds wretched. I don’t want to be mad. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding this feeling, and now it’s itching under my skin, swelling in my ribs, I know exactly why—but right now mad is all I have. If don’t stay mad it’s going to turn into something much worse.

“And then what?” Savvy asks, lowering her voice and pulling me off the main path. Yet again we have piqued other campers’ interest—not as two sisters, but as a camper mouthing off to a junior counselor. “Never see each other again?”

I’m supposed to lower my voice, but somehow that information doesn’t get past my brain.

“At least we would have had two more weeks. And maybe a chance to do something without setting the whole thing on fire,” I say. And then, privately: Maybe a chance to keep existing in the world without knowing I was nothing more than a fix-it. Runner-up. Second place.

That’s not fair, and I know it. Not to my parents, who never once made me feel like anything less than the center of their universe, even with all my brothers. And not to Savvy, who didn’t ask for any of this.

But it doesn’t make the hurt go away, and right now, I need to go away with it. Give it a place to breathe. A place to scream.

“That’s just like you, though, isn’t it, Abby? Avoiding the issue.” She doesn’t say it in an accusatory way. It’s worse—she’s encouraging me. There’s the same motivational gleam in her eye she gets in her Instagram stories, before she shares her mantra of the week, one of “Savvy’s Savvies.” I wish I could swipe out of it, but real life doesn’t come with force quit. “You’re miserable with all the tutoring, and you won’t tell your parents. You want to be a photographer, but you’re too scared to give your work a fighting chance. You have a thing for Leo, but—”

“Would you shut up?” I blurt. The embarrassment is blind-ing, white-hot, stabbing into every single pore of my skin. “Do you realize what just happened? Everybody wanted you. Everybody did. And instead of getting the kid who followed the rules and got good grades and did all the shit my parents wanted out of a daughter, they got me. Thoughtless, stupid, untalented me.”

This time I’m the one who notices the people pausing around us. Izzy, Cam, and Jemmy chief among them, hovering between us and the cafeteria with the same conflicted looks of people who want to help but don’t know how.

I duck my head, my face so hot I can practically feel it burning the ground I’m staring at.

“Abby,” says Savvy, her voice low and encouraging. “I don’t want to waste a bunch of time telling you how untrue all of that is.”

“Then don’t. The last thing I need is one of your Instagram pep talks.”

She frowns but doesn’t back down. Instead she squares her shoulders, her resolve hardening. “It isn’t about Instagram. If you would just be receptive to a little advice—”

“Because that’s done wonders for me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

What it’s supposed to mean is that I did listen to her. I worked up the nerve to tell Leo my feelings, and before I could get a word out he crushed them into fine dust. I got over my self-consciousness and tried to show my parents my photos, and they didn’t care enough to look. Every piece of “advice” Savvy has given me has led me down a path where I’m worse off than before.

“You act like you know everything, like you have the answers to fix everyone, but you’re just as messed up as the rest of us, Savvy.” Her eyes are wide from a blow I haven’t even landed yet, but it doesn’t stop me from throwing it. “I saw those old pictures. You used to be fun and hang out with your friends, but that stupid Instagram is your whole personality now. You’re just a control freak with nice hair.”

She blinks hard, hurt flashing in her eyes, and I’ve done it—cracked the impenetrable force that is Savannah Tully. All these years of holding it in, of not letting myself get angry, and now I’ve gone so far over the edge I don’t know how to get back.

“That’s not fair,” Savvy says, so quietly I almost don’t hear it.

Of course it isn’t. None of this is fair. But I can’t hold my tears back long enough to answer. I point myself in the direction of the nearest trail, wait until I am out of her line of sight, and start to bawl.