Four

four

“So,” Savvy starts.

I laugh this nervous laugh I’ve never laughed before. “So.”

I can’t look at her, but I’m also looking right at her. My eyes are on her and around her, everywhere and nowhere at once. The me and the not-me of her. I can’t decide what’s weirder, the parts of her I recognize or the parts that I don’t.

She diverts off the path unexpectedly, grabbing someone’s mucked-up, abandoned water bottle, and stalks off to the recycling can. I stand there, not sure if I was meant to follow, but she doesn’t look back.

“That was going to bother me,” she says by way of explanation when she gets back.

Even in this short amount of time I am starting to get a taste for Savvy’s world—or at least, the world as Savvy makes it. Clean. Precise. Controlled. A lot of things that I most certainly am not.

“I’ll start,” she says, with the air of someone used to taking charge of situations. “I guess I should say that I’ve always known I was adopted.”

We’re walking, but her eyes are steady on me, making it clear I have her full and undivided attention. Just from her three seconds of prolonged eye contact it’s clear she is not a person who does anything in halves—when she’s focused on me, she is focused, only pausing to get out of the way of cyclists and kids on Razor scooters.

“I guess I should say … I had no idea you existed.”

I’m afraid she might take that the wrong way, but she only nods. “You either. My parents always told me that my bios were really young and didn’t stay together. But it looks like they had you.”

Before I can think to soften it in some way, I blurt, “And like, three brothers.”

Savannah’s eyebrows shoot up. “You have three brothers?” Those are the words she says out loud. The ones I hear are, We have three brothers?

I’m surprised by the sudden flash of possessiveness I feel for these wild, ridiculous, gross boys of mine who learned all their wildest, most ridiculous, and grossest tricks from me. Not even because I think she’d want anything to do with them. More like I’m suddenly afraid that she wouldn’t. Like maybe she’d think less of them, these little extensions of me, the chubby cheeks and grimy fingers and scabbed knees that make up my world.

When I finally look over at Savvy, though, there’s this slight give between her brows. Like maybe she gets it. Like maybe all either of us can do is try.

“Could be four,” I say, trying to keep it light. “Sometimes I lose count.”

Savvy doesn’t do that thing where she laughs at your joke to fill up space. A small part of me respects it, but most of me is itching in the quiet, not sure what I should or shouldn’t say.

“I always assumed I was an accident,” says Savvy.

“Me too, to be honest.” It’s the first time I’ve ever acknowledged the thought out loud. I mean, my parents had me during law school, which I know from Connie’s biannual viewing of Legally Blonde is no easy feat. That, and they didn’t bother with the big white wedding. As far as I know, a family friend did the whole “do you take this human” bit and sent them on their merry way.

“But you’re—what, sixteen?” Savvy asks.

I nod. A year and a half younger than her, according to the picture she posted posing with a bunch of rainbow balloons on her eighteenth birthday in December. It had more than a hundred thousand likes.

“You know what’s crazy? I didn’t even mean to take the test,” she says. “It was a formality. We did a sponsored post with the DNA site—for Instagram, I mean,” she says, waving it off like she already knows that I know about it, and doesn’t want to get into it. “I did it for the health section. And yeah, I thought maybe one of my—one of your parents might pop up, which, whatever. I’ve always known it would be easy to find them if I looked into it. But I never imagined…”

Her eyes sweep up to mine in question, like I might know something she doesn’t. It sets me even further on edge. I wonder where my loyalties are supposed to lie, or if there are loyalties to be had at all. There’s this unhelpful knee-jerk reaction to defend my parents, and an even less unhelpful knee-jerk reaction to tell her whatever I can think of, anything to throw them under the bus after they lied to me all these years.

“I keep thinking someone snuck a hallucinogenic into my McFlurry,” I say, skirting the issue entirely. A strategy pulled right out of what Connie calls “the Abby Day playbook on chronic conflict avoidance” and Leo has dubbed “making a Day of it.”

Savvy lets it slide. “Tell me about it. When that email came in—”

“QUACK, quack, quaaacckkk!”

We look up with a jolt and see two little girls, obviously sisters, crouching at the edge of the lake and quacking. Their matching shoes and leggings are all muddied up, their identically red hair spilling out of pigtails. The smaller one is pushing the older one forward, echoing her quacking noises.

Savvy and I both follow the direction of their quacks out to the lake, and she surprises me by letting out a short laugh. It softens her for a second, and I see something familiar in her that isn’t just my face.

“Duck Island,” she says, shaking her head fondly at the little patch of land in the middle of the lake. It’s a bird sanctuary, so overgrown with trees that even as small as it is, you can’t see through it to the edge of the lake on the other side.

I almost don’t say it. I’m oddly self-conscious around her, like I can feel her taking stock of me, of things I haven’t even examined myself. But the quiet is more overwhelming than the noise of my own blathering, so I tell her, “When I was little, I thought Duck Island meant it was like, some kind of kingdom run by ducks.”

I’m not ready for the incredulous smile on her face when she turns back around. “So did I,” she says. “Since people aren’t supposed to go there. Like it was some secret duck world, right?”

It’s the first time she’s looked really, fully human to me. Everything about her—her uncanny posture, the discerning look in her eyes, the thoughtful pauses she takes before she speaks—has seemed so deliberate and planned, like we’re living in her Instagram feed and every moment of it is being documented, up for the world’s judgment.

But she turns around to look at me with a grin that’s right on the verge of a laugh, and it’s like someone pulled up a veil between us, opening up a depth of her where I couldn’t not see myself if I tried.

Maybe that’s why I suddenly feel compelled to blurt, “I’ve been there.”

The grin falters. “On Duck Island?”

I nod, maybe too vigorously, trying to get it back. “My friend Connie and I, we—we took a kayak over there once. Just to see.”

Savvy appraises me, her “I’m legally an adult and you’re not” face back in full force. “You’re really not supposed to do that.”

She’s right. Given the island’s status as a sanctuary, there’s a big old human ban slapped on signs all over the park. But kids and kayakers are roaming around it all the time. If Green Lake has any kind of authoritative body stopping people from doing it, I sure as heck have never seen them.

“I know,” I say quickly. “But we were super careful. Barely even got off the boat.”

“Then what’s the point?”

I lift up Poppy’s old camera, which I’ve swapped out for Kitty today. I don’t do it often, given my less-than-stellar track record for keeping things intact, but sometimes I need a piece of him with me. It feels like a talisman, the weight of it steadying me when it’s around my neck.

“The view,” I tell her sheepishly, because it feels slightly less dorky than I wanted to stalk some birds.

Her lips form a tight line and it looks so much like a face my dad makes that I’m bracing myself for a lecture, but she holds out her hand. “Can I see?”

“Huh?”

Savvy juts her chin toward the mass of trees in the middle of the lake. “Duck Island.”

“Oh. I don’t…”

Show people my photos,I almost say. But as embarrassed as I am about someone seeing my photos, I am somehow more embarrassed about confessing it.

She tilts her head at me, misinterpreting my hesitation. “You didn’t post them?”

“Oh,” I say, to stall for time. Time to figure out how I’m going to gracefully tell her that she may be allowed to share all my DNA, but she is not allowed to see photos I took on my camera. “Maybe.”

She gestures impatiently for me to hand my phone over, and I’m too overwhelmed not to. Besides, this is what I wanted, wasn’t it? Someone I could trust with this kind of thing. And even though Savvy is a lot of things I didn’t expect, she could still be that someone, if I give her the chance.

“Hold on. It’s, uh…”

I try to remember the Instagram handle Leo gave me. He was so proud of the pun. Something about saving things. Something about my last name. Something about …

The words aren’t there, but Leo’s face is—the way he was beaming on my fifteenth birthday, that August afternoon when he’d finally gotten back from camp and Connie had gotten back from a trip and we were all sweating profusely and slurping our Big League Milkshake Mashes from our perch at Richmond Beach. He took my phone from me, his dark eyes trained on mine, a rare sliver of sun poking through the fog and lighting up the bronze of his face.

“It’s not a real gift. It’s kinda dumb. Anyway—you can change the username, if you want—”

“Just show her already, you dope,” said Connie, yanking the phone from him and putting it in my hands.

“Right. So. You know how some of my camp friends made Instagrams for our stuff? Don’t be creeped out, but I took some photos off your camera. I wanted to find a way to save them, and…”

There it is, unearthed from somewhere in my brain: @savingtheabbyday.

I pull it up and hand it to Savvy without looking at it. She thumbs the screen and her eyebrows lift, looking genuinely impressed.

“You took these?”

Maybe I should be offended by the surprise in her voice, but I’m too busy being humiliated that my Instagram probably looks like a bird-watching society threw up on it. “Yeah.”

“These are really great,” she says, lingering on one of my favorites—a sparrow with its beak open, mid-crow, its wings poised in the second right before it took flight. I practically had to stop breathing for a full minute to get that shot, anticipating every shudder of her little bird body, waiting for the perfect moment. “You could monetize this.”

I nearly choke on my own spit trying not to laugh. “Nah,” I say, taking the phone back from her.

“No, really,” Savvy pushes. “This is the kind of stuff you could sell to local papers, to gift shops, the whole nine yards. Why not look into it? What’ve you got to lose?”

Everything,I almost say, even though it’s bordering on melodramatic and definitely veering into teenage cliché. Even if I weren’t mortally terrified at the idea of people looking through my lens, photography is the only thing that’s mine. No teacher telling me I’m doing it the wrong way, no parents asking about it while exchanging super unsubtle glances at the dinner table. Nobody calling the figurative or literal shots but me.

“I couldn’t … I don’t want to be like that,” I say, which is easier than saying I’m scared.

“Like what?” she asks sharply.

“Like—I don’t know.” She’s watching me with her eyes narrowed, and just like that I’m sweating again. Not only my hands, but my entire stupid body, like a one-girl geyser. “I—I don’t really care about Instagram or all the other noise. I do this for fun.”

Holy Duck Island, do I need to shut up. She goes stiff, and it’s clear I haven’t just put my foot in my mouth, but swallowed it. The more she stares, the more the circuits in my brain start to fire unhelpfully, trying to fix the stupid words I said with more stupid words, like I’m piling up a stupid word sandwich.

“I think monetizing it might wreck it.”

Savvy takes a breath and chooses her answer carefully. “I’m not miserable just because I’m making money.”

There it is—the thing that’s been irking me under the surface since I first got here. That she never even bothered to explain her whole Instagram hustle, because she already knows that I know. Because she already assumes I’ve sunk time into her, clicking on her Purina spon con, zooming in on her earth bowls, staring at her mountain of birthday balloons.

And worst of all, because she’s exactly right.

She turns away from me, back toward the lake. “You’ll have to make a living eventually,” she says, shrugging like she isn’t as bothered as she clearly is. “Shouldn’t you be doing what you love?”

Jesus. I came here looking for an ally, and instead I managed to find the least-teenagery teenage girl in all of Seattle. My eyes are stinging like some dumb little kid’s, the disappointment so misplaced in me that I don’t know how to let it out, except—

“You love posing with water bottles in a bunch of spandex?”

Shit.

Her mouth forms a tight line once more, her head whipping toward me so fast that her ponytail makes a little snap, whipping in the muggy air. I freeze, not sure which one of us is more stunned by it, her or me.

I open my mouth to apologize, but Savvy turns away before I can, looking back at the quacking toddlers. Their squawks have reached a fever pitch, the kind of frenzy that I know from way too much experience with my brothers is going to end in either a fit of giggles or one of them in tears.

“So, no secret duck kingdom?” Savvy asks, as if the last minute didn’t even happen.

My relief makes my limbs feel heavy, makes me want to sit in the grass or maybe just shove my face into it and stop myself from saying anything that might muck it up again. I’m not used to the back-and-forth of meeting someone new, of trying to suss each other out. I’ve gone to school with the same kids and been best friends with the same two people my whole life. This would be weird even if she didn’t share all my DNA.

“Not even a duck dynasty,” I say, which earns me a groan.

“Shame,” she says, glancing over. “My mom always told me there was a whole duck kingdom. Like with its own government and a ruler and everything. She called her—”

“Queen Quack,” we say at the same time.

I blink at her, at the question in her eyes. “That’s what my mom told me,” I say.

Savvy considers this. “I always thought that was something my mom made up.”

My voice is small when I answer. “Me too.”

Savvy blows out a breath, and the two of us stare out at the cluster of trees in the middle of the lake, sharing the same pace but remembering a different time.

“This is weird,” says Savvy. “But do you think our parents knew each other?”

I frown. One “Queen Quack” does not a conspiracy theory make. “I mean…”

But as I stare out at the water, the slight breeze lapping it to the edges of the lake, I realize it’s the only part of this senselessness that makes sense. It may be near impossible to imagine my parents giving up a kid born only a year and a half before I was, but it’s even harder to imagine them giving her to strangers.

Savvy pulls out her phone and in an instant has a photo pulled up. It’s from a holiday card, taken in front of the giant Christmas tree in Bell Square, shoppers milling all around them. Hugging Savvy between them are a man and a woman with pristine posture but kind eyes and warm smiles, dressed in sleek khakis and cashmere knits. They look like a Hallmark card, but in a good way. In a way that you just kind of know if they invited you over for dinner they’d put more food on your plate without asking and hug you extra hard at the door.

“That’s us,” says Savvy.

I’m about to say something dumb—a comment about how she looks like them that is guaranteed to wreck the moment—but then I take the screen from her, zooming in on her mom.

“Wait. I’ve seen her.”

“She teaches art classes. Maybe—”

“No, in photos. Wait. Hold on. Hold on.”

Savvy takes her phone from me and rocks back on her heels, as if to say, Where else am I gonna go?

It takes me a second to figure out how to access the Dropbox where we’ve been dumping the files for our big end-of-semester Honors Anthropology project. The one that nudged Leo into taking the DNA test, that pulled us all into it with him and led to this.

I found a photo of my parents’ wedding in a shoebox tucked into the basement closet. The picture I took of it loads on my phone, and there they are, my parents in all their late-nineties glory. My mom is in a plain white dress with hair large enough for small objects to get caught in its orbit, and my dad is in a suit beaming and so bony that he looks more like a kid than someone who’s about to be a parent.

And there, in the middle, is the family friend who officiated the ceremony.

I look over at Savvy to ask the obvious question, but her eyes have bugged out looking at my phone screen. It’s her mom.

“The year,” she says, seeing the date in the corner of the photo. “That’s before either of us was born.”

My heart feels like it’s beating in my throat. Our eyes connect with such immediacy that the force of it is like a thunderclap. Even as every part of me is trying to reject the truth, the two of us stare at each other with a sudden understanding: Something big happened here. Something much bigger than we could have imagined.

Something so big that my parents have made a conscious effort to lie to me about it every day for the last sixteen years.

My phone buzzes in my hand, and I give a little jump. The word Dad comes up, and Savvy looks away sharply, like she’s seen something she isn’t allowed to see.

Where r u? Just finished up

“Crap.” I spring away from her, like he’s going to jump out of the bushes. “He’s probably headed over.”

“We’ve got to figure out what happened.”

“Uh, yeah.” I close my eyes, thoughts coming too fast. “I mean, my parents keep me pretty busy, but if you’re around next Sunday, maybe—”

“Next Sunday I leave for summer camp.” Savvy starts backing away from me, the two of us looking like extremely anxious repelling magnets. “Bad service and like, one shared computer for the junior staff. Barely enough Wi-Fi to Skype.”

“Yikes.”

Now that I know about this I’m not sure if I can go the full summer not knowing. We both felt it in that thunderclap of a feeling, the echo of it still humming in between us.

“Even if you were here, I’m gonna be slumming it in the community center getting SAT prep questions beaten into my skull.”

“Come to camp with me.”

It’s not a demand, but not a request, either. She says it the way Connie might—with the weight of shared history, and the expectation that I’ll say yes.

The laugh that bubbles in my chest is borderline hysterical, but it only makes Savvy all the more persistent.

“It’s called Camp Reynolds. You can take an academic track. Half studying, half regular camp. They just started the program this year.”

My mouth drops open. The flyers on my bed. Camp Reynolds. It’s the same one the counselor’s been pushing on me all semester—only the brochure was full of aggressively cheerful stock photo students laughing at their calculators. It looked like nerd jail. Certainly nobody said anything about being let outside.

Savvy falters, mistaking my reaction. For a moment, she isn’t Savannah Tully, Bona Fide Instagram Star With a Bossy Streak, but Savvy, a person who looks every bit as clueless and freaked out as I am.

“Is that ridiculous?” she asks.

It occurs to me that she has a much bigger stake in getting to the bottom of this than I do. If I walk away, nothing in my life has to change. I could pretend I never met her. Go on living this carefully preserved lie that my parents must have had reasons for telling, for guarding all these years.

But even if I could pretend everything was normal, there is something else I can’t shake. One look at that picture of my parents beaming with Savvy’s mom is all it takes to see they must have been closer than just friends—the kind of close I am with Connie and Leo. That inseparable, all-encompassing, ride-or-die kind of close. Which means whatever happened, it must have been catastrophic.

I don’t want to think that could happen to me and Leo and Connie. It’s my worst nightmare come to life.

And there’s that latch again—the need to see it through. To figure out what happened. If not for our parents’ sake, then for my own, because even imagining a world where I don’t speak to Connie and Leo for eighteen years leaves an ache no amount of time could ever heal.

“No more ridiculous than the rest of this.”

Before either of us can overthink it, we swap numbers and dart in opposite directions of the park. My dad, it turns out, is right where I left him, standing in front of Bean Well and looking over some paperwork with his eyebrows puckered. I watch him, trying to find some way to still the tornado in me—the adrenaline thumping in my bones and the sudden guilt that feels like it might crush them.

“Get any good shots?” he asks.

There’s a breath where I think about telling him everything, spilling my guts, if only to get this feeling out of my body and put it somewhere else.

But trying to imagine how that conversation would go just leads to a massive mental roadblock, one that suddenly has Savvy’s face. I don’t know what she is to me, really. At least aside from the literal, biological sense. But whatever it is has taken root in me and is tangled deep.

Then a slithering voice comes unbidden in the back of my head: They lied to me first. If they’re allowed to keep this kind of secret from me my whole life, I sure as hell should be allowed to keep one from them.

“A few,” I tell him.

I worry that he might ask to see them, but he’s uncharacteristically distracted, tucking the paperwork back into a folder and heading toward the car. It occurs to me that my mom should probably be handling the sale—it was her dad’s place, after all—and it reminds me, not without an extra shot of shame in my churning guilt latte, that I’m not the only one who misses Poppy. Nobody wants to sell this place. But there are some things in life you don’t have a choice about.

I wonder what that choice was eighteen years ago.

I feel marginally less like the world’s worst daughter when I mention, on the car ride home, that I’ve been looking into Camp Reynolds and have decided I’m interested in going. My dad perks up and looks so pleased with himself that my guilt only seems to get bigger, like every time I try to kill a cell of it, it divides and gets twice as big as it was before.

“It really does sound fun,” says my dad, glancing over.

I don’t say anything, and he starts going into some variation of the “we’ll always be right here to come get you if you need it” spiel, which I tune out when I see a new text on my phone from a 425 number. I am right on the verge of rolling my eyes, certain it’s a pushy reminder to get my parents on board. Instead, it’s a link to Savvy’s latest Instagram post, along with the caption: “do what u love, especially if what u love is posing with a water bottle in a bunch of spandex.”

I snort.

“What’s shaking?” my dad asks.

“Nothing,” I say, exiting out of my texts just as another notification comes in, and the smirk wilts right off my face. It’s an email from the school, with a subject line so aggressive it feels like our principal is shouting it right into my eardrums: MANDATORY SUMMER SCHOOL—SIGN-UP INSTRUCTIONS WITHIN.

Shit.