Three

three

I know the drive from my house to Green Lake so well that it feels less like visualizing a map of roads than a map of myself. As a kid I’d wake up every Saturday at the crack of dawn, waiting, waiting, waiting for Poppy to come pick me up and take me to Bean Well, the little coffee shop he had started with Gammy, who died before I was born. My parents would spend their weekends catching up on their law school reading, and I’d spend them munching on chocolate-chip scones, coloring endless pages of dragons and unicorns, and fiddling with the buttons of Poppy’s beaten-up old Nikon camera.

My dad pulls up to Bean Well with an almost apologetic sigh. “You don’t want to pop in?”

I do. I miss Marianne, the manager, who has taken over since Poppy died last year. I miss the sugar crunch on top of the scones and the regulars marveling at me being “so grown up” and Mrs. Leary’s dog, who loves the place so much that sometimes he wanders over on his own to whine for free dog treats.

I miss taking this place for granted, because now I can’t. Marianne is retiring and my parents are selling the place, and a big old chunk of my childhood right along with it.

I wrench my eyes away from the lit-up Bean Well sign above the door, to Ellie the barista with her Cindy Lou Who–high topknot laughing at someone’s joke at the register.

“Maybe later,” I say. “I heard there was a bald eagle popping in and out of the park, thought I might try to get a shot.”

A lie wrapped inside of a lie that just jump-vaulted off a cliff into another lie, but not one that my dad will question. The thing is, Green Lake is almost exactly halfway between Shoreline and Medina, which Savannah and I figured out in our brief exchange last night before planning to meet here.

“Sounds good, kiddo. I’ll text when I’m done with the realtor.”

I step out of the car and into the humid June fog, feeling the frizz of my curls start to rise like they’ve become sentient. I start to pat them down but stop myself. If Savannah really is my sister, I have no reason to impress her. We’re made up of all the same weird stuff, aren’t we?

Which somehow has not stopped me from stress-chewing my way through an entire pack of gum and changing my socks three times, as if putting on the striped ones would have made this catastrophically strange thing any less strange.

A shiver runs up my spine as I cross the street to the park, keeping my eyes peeled. I’m a few minutes late, but it’s not like I could tell my dad to step on it because I have a date with my own personal reality show. I’m assuming I’ll find Savvy by the benches, but they’re full of kids with sticky ice-cream fingers and joggers stretching their limbs.

I squint, and there, beyond the benches, toward one of the massive trees that borders the lake, is a girl in pale pink capri workout leggings and a pristine white top posing with a water bottle, her hair mounted in a slick, shiny ponytail without a single strand out of place.

“Can you see the label on the bottle?” she’s asking. “They’re gonna make us redo it if—”

“Yup, label’s fine, it’s just the weird shadows from the leaves,” says a girl with her. “Maybe if we…”

I can only see the back of her, but there’s no mistaking it. I hesitate, trying to think up an opening line. Something other than Hey, may I just be the first to say, what the actual fuck?

Before I can get close enough, the biggest, fluffiest Labrador retriever to ever exist comes barreling at me, paws up and pouncing on me like my bones are held up with kibble. I squeal, letting him bowl me over into the grass—Rufus, I remember, from the deep dive I took on Savannah’s Instagram account last night—and he yelps his approval, a bottle of sunscreen falling out of his mouth.

“I got him, I got him,” says someone—the one with the camera, an Asian girl with two long French braids and a broad smile. Either I am extremely concussed from Rufus, or she is rocking a full sleeve of punk Disney princess tattoos on her left arm and various Harry Potter–related ones on her right. “Whose even is this, you furry little thief?” she asks, seeing the sunscreen at our feet. Now that she’s closer I can see the edges of the tattoos are temporary, all bright and gleaming in the sun. She turns back to me. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly, “he only ever does this to—”

Her mouth drops open. She looks me up and down, or at least as much of me as she can with Rufus on top of me.

“Savvy,” she says. She clears her throat, taking a step back like I’ve spooked her, while Rufus continues to lick my face like it’s a lollipop.

“Um,” I manage, “are you…?”

Another hand comes into view, offering me a lift up. I take it—colder than mine, but not cold enough to cancel out the immediate eeriness. I feel like I’ve been displaced in time.

“Hey. I’m Savvy.”

Poppy had this thing he always said when we were out with our cameras. He’d show me how different lenses captured different perspectives, and how no two photos of the same thing were ever alike, simply because of the person taking them. Ifyou learn to capture a feeling, he told me, it’ll always be louder than words.

Sometimes I can still hear the way he said it. The low, gravelly sound of his voice, with that bare hint of a smirk in it. I always clung to it, growing up. He was right. Feelings were always easier in the abstract, like the breathless moment the skateboard tilted down the big hill in my neighborhood, or the reassuring way Connie squeezed my hand between our desks before a big test. Words always fell short. Made the feeling cheap. Some things, I think, there weren’t supposed to be words for at all.

Everywhere I go I have those words tucked somewhere in my heart, but right now they’re pulsing through me like a drumbeat that somehow led me here, a few short miles and a hop across a familiar street, to the loudest feeling I’ve ever felt.

“Abby,” I introduce myself.

I stare at her staring at me and the resemblance is so uncanny I’m not sure if I’m staring at a person or a bunch of people all at once. I guess, having little brothers, it’s hard to see the parts of them that look like my parents and the parts that don’t—they’re still mostly sticky and hyper and un-fully-formed. I’ve only ever noticed the parts of me that look like them because I grew up with everyone telling me.

But there is something about seeing Savvy, with my mom’s dainty nose and my dad’s high forehead, Asher’s and Brandon’s full cheeks, and Mason’s distinctive cowlick in the crown of her hair, that seems less like genetic inevitability and more like science fiction. Like she was conjured here, all the people I love smushed into one very short, extremely chic person.

Her hair, though—even with all the product she’s used, it’s starting to come undone in the heat, and it’s all mine, all my mom’s. Wild and untamed, the kind that curls in some places and frizzes in others, so it never once does us the favor of looking the same from one day to the next.

“Wow. It’s like Alternate Dimension Savvy. One where you’re taller and wear actual clothes instead of athleisure all day,” the other girl mutters, peering at us in turn. Even Rufus seems uneasy, his furry head bobbing from me to Savvy and back, letting out a low, confused whine.

Savannah—Savvy—clears her throat. “Well—I mean—I suppose we do look a little alike.”

Her eyes graze me. It only takes a second, but I see the places she lingers. My ratty shoelaces. The widened rips in my jeans from yesterday. The gum in my mouth. The tiny scar that interrupts my left eyebrow. The slump of my limp ponytail, held together with a glittery scrunchie of Connie’s that doesn’t match anything I’ve ever touched, let alone owned.

I try not to bristle, but when her eyes meet mine, almost clinical in the way she’s accounting for the pieces of me, my eyes are narrowed. I do a once-over of her but can’t find a single flaw. She looks like she fell out of a Lululemon ad.

“Yeah,” I concede. “A little.”

There’s an awkward beat where the three of us stand there, looking and not looking. Maybe there’s a word for the feeling after all. Maybe it’s disappointment.

“I’m Mickey,” says her friend, extending her hand to shake. “Er, McKayla. But everyone calls me Mickey, on account of—well,” she says, showing me her left arm, which also features a rainbow gradient version of Cinderella’s Castle in the Magic Kingdom smack-dab in the middle of all the Disney characters. “Bit of a thing.”

I take her hand, wishing Connie could have come with me. I even start to wish Leo were here. People who define the little borders of my world in a way that plain old me in my beaten-up Adidas and sudden inability to string words into sentences can’t on their own.

“Oh,” I realize, seeing the rings stacked on Mickey’s middle finger as she pulls her hand away. “You’re the girlfriend.”

Mickey’s entire face blooms red, starting at her neck and ending somewhere at the tips of her ears. “Well, not the girlfriend,” I backtrack, wondering if that was rude. “Savvy’s, I mean. From Instagram?”

Savvy’s mentioned the girl she’s dating in a few of her posts, but they all have a distinct “my girlfriend in Canada” vibe. Beyond a few artfully staged shots of their hands or captions alluding to her, she never actually makes an appearance. The rings, though, I remember seeing just off frame in a shot of some bougie vegan place Savvy ate at in Bell Square last month.

“Oh,” says Savvy, looking flustered. “She’s not…”

Mickey only gets redder. “No, no, we’re just friends. Best friends! Since like, the beginning of time,” she says, “but—”

“Sorry,” I blurt. “I—saw the rings, on Instagram, and thought—”

“You’re thinking of Jo. She’s interning at some fancy office downtown,” says Mickey, whose turnaround on social recovery is way higher than mine or, apparently, Savvy’s, who offers a “Yeah” to confirm.

There’s another silence. I nudge some dirt in the wet grass with my foot, right as Savvy looks down and does the same. It’s unnerving. It’s why, I realize, we’ve been dancing around the thing we came here to do—we are both breaking a rule by being here. An unspoken one. A rule buried so deep in our past that our parents never even told us it existed. It has strange power over us even now, standing right in front of each other with the proof that we’re both real.

“I, uh—my dad’s gonna text soon. He’s finishing up some stuff down the street.”

I wince as soon as I say it: my dad. Because he’s not my dad, is he? Technically he’s our dad. And only then does the weirdness feel less abstract and more solid, like some barrier in between us we can both touch.

Savvy nods. “Do you want to sit?”

I eye the bench, knowing if I let that happen the ringing in my brain is going to go full scream. “We could walk on the path around the lake?”

Savvy seems relieved. “Yeah.”

“I’ll kick it here with Rufus,” says Mickey, with a wink. “Try to figure out who the heck he robbed of their SPF sixty.”

I’ve known Mickey for all of two seconds, but as we take off on the overly crowded gravel path, I somehow genuinely miss her. My throat feels drier than the griptape on top of my skateboard, my palms sweaty enough that I might have just emerged like some creature from the algae overgrowth in the lake. I feel—not myself. Not the person I usually am, whoever she is. I’ve never had to think about it before, never had anything to measure myself by, and now there’s this walking, talking, Instagram of a measuring stick, some new way to define myself that there’s never been before.

We’re quiet as we put some distance between us and the rest of the people on the path. She leads like it’s second nature, but when she checks back to make sure I’m still behind her, the unease brewing in her is clear. I wonder if it’s the same for her as it is for me—the strangeness of feeling like I’m looking at some other version of myself, and the sudden dread that I’m not sure I like it much at all.