Seven

seven

“Who taught you how to wash dishes, the Hulk?”

I pause in the admittedly hostile washing of the plate in my hand and turn my head one begrudging fraction of an inch. It’s the boy from this afternoon, the exact same smirk on his face, as if it’s been there this whole time.

“Well,” he says when I don’t answer, “if the whole dish-washing thing doesn’t work out, at least you’ll have a solid career replacing the kid mascot for Dubble Bubble.”

So he’s a chatty type. Too bad. Whatever curiosity I had for him before is every bit as shoved down the drain as the leftover chili I’ve been washing off these mucked-up plates.

He leans against the sink, watching me in my vigorous routine of wash, dry, stack. “I’m Finn, by the way.”

I offer him a tight smile. He takes it in and lets out an exaggerated sigh.

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll help you. But only because you look kind of pathetic.” A pause. “And also cuz I got assigned kitchen duty, too.”

“What did you do?”

He waves me off. “What didn’t I do? Can’t get away with anything under the new regime,” he says. “It’s like they’ve all gotta be shitting me, if you know what I mean.”

I pause, the sink still running piping hot water into the soapy basin. “I didn’t see you at the pit,” I accuse.

“Ah, so you were looking for me?”

Ordinarily I’d be embarrassed, but I don’t care what this Finn guy thinks of me. I’m too angry to care what anyone thinks, really. A week of after-dinner kitchen duty assigned by a sixty-year-old woman with a whistle hanging around her neck will do that to you.

“I was there. Preoccupied, maybe, by the ‘Camp Reynolds’ sign I was defacing, but definitely there.”

I sigh, handing him the scalding-hot wet dish in my hands. He takes it so cheerfully that I can only guess he was hoping to get saddled with kitchen duty.

“You planning on telling me your name, or should I just give you one?”

I ignore him, handing over another dish. The thing is, Savvy’s been avoiding me. After Victoria assigned me kitchen duty and gave me a stern talking-to about “language” and a printout of the foot-long list of rules she didn’t care that I didn’t know about, she was nowhere in sight. And when I finally cornered her outside the cabins hours later, she had the nerve to think I was coming to apologize to her.

“What was I supposed to do?” she hissed under her breath. “It’s my first day as a junior counselor. The youngest one we’ve ever had, by the way, because Victoria trusts me. And then you come blazing in and deliberately test my authority in front of everyone—”

“I’m sorry, since when is what I put in my mouth part of your authority?”

“Did you not even bother to read the rules?” Before I could answer, she let out a huff and stepped back from me in faint disgust. “Of course you didn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She took a breath and glanced around the edge of the building—making sure nobody saw her with her delinquent blood match, I could only guess—and said, “Listen, let’s forget about this. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. Come to the rec room during the free hour before curfew.”

“I can’t,” I told her. “Thanks to you, I have kitchen duty after dinner for a week.”

It was almost worth the punishment to get to drop that little bomb on her and watch her mouth form an inadvertent “oh” of surprise. Savvy, I’d already learned, was not a person who adjusted well to people messing with her master plans.

Then her brows furrowed, and she pointed at me. Pointed at me. Like we were in an after-school special, and she was the Extra-Disappointed Teacher. “You’ve got nobody to thank for that but yourself.”

I thought that was going to be it, because she whipped around to head back to the camp. But I let out a laugh that was more of a scoff, this ugly noise I’d never heard myself make before. I was almost proud of myself—hidden talent unlocked—until it prompted Savvy to turn back and say, “If you’re just going to make a bunch of trouble, why’d you bother to come at all?”

She said it fast, without even looking at me, but it still landed hard enough to sting. And just like that, all the anger I was trying to work up was knocked right out of me, and I was more puddle than person. I’d been someone’s little sister for less than a week, and I already screwed the whole thing up.

“Dubble Bubble girl it is,” says Finn, shaking me out of my thoughts and back to the plates I’d been mauling with the sponge. “Unless your parents gave you a better one.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “I’m out of here tomorrow.”

“Uh, come again?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Huh,” says Finn, propping himself up on the counter and taking his sweet time with the whole dish-drying thing. “So what’s the plan, then? Hike up the two-mile-long hill to the main road and stick your thumb out until a local takes pity on you? Or swim back to the mainland and hitch a ride on a fish?”

I only tell him because I’m still working up the nerve to go through with it. Saying it out loud makes it less terrifying. “I’m calling my parents.”

“Yowza. That bad?” he asks. “Listen, Savvy’s all bark and no bite, so if that’s what’s got your Camp Reynolds hoodie in a twist—”

“I didn’t even want to be here in the first place.”

Only now that I’ve said it do I realize how true it is. Even before I accidentally blew up my own spot and earned myself top billing on Savvy’s shit list, I haven’t been able to squash my uneasiness—the sense that so many things I thought I knew are falling apart, and I’m not even there to watch them crash. My parents have been lying to me about Savvy. Connie might have lied to me about Leo. And the distance between me and them only seems to magnify the weirdness of it ten times more than if I were home.

It would be easier to leave. To pretend the last twenty-four hours never happened. Nobody would have to get angry, nobody would get hurt.

“What brought you here, then?” Finn asks. “Are you one of those SAT score chasers, the Stanford-or-bust type?”

“Exact opposite.”

“So you’re a Savvy stan?”

I wrinkle my nose. “She wishes.”

Finn manages to finish drying exactly one dish. I go ahead and hold my applause. “Gotta say, I’m impressed—usually it takes a lot longer than three seconds to get under Savvy’s skin.”

“Guess I’m an overachiever after all.”

“You know, it’d be a shame if you left now.”

I’m supposed to ask him why, but I really, really don’t care what he has to say. The only thing I care about is doing these dishes, finding Leo to explain this whole mess, and doing whatever I can to get the first ferry off this island in the morning.

“It’s just that, without Wi-Fi decent enough to stream more than twenty seconds of Netflix, your little spat is the closest thing to binge-worthy entertainment we’ve got.”

I roll my eyes.

“What makes it funnier is you guys weirdly look alike. More than any of her Savanatics.” Finn pauses, somehow making even less progress drying his second plate. At this rate we’ll be here all night. “I mean, it’s uncanny. Even that ‘shut up, Finn, you’re driving me nuts’ face you’re making right now is spot-on Sav—”

“Of course it is,” I blurt. “She’s my stupid sister.”

I maybe had half a chance of playing that off as a bad joke if I hadn’t punctuated it by accidentally dropping the plate in my hands, freezing as it bounces off the rubber part of the kitchen floor and cracks on the tiles under the sink. I lean down to pick it up, and when I rise, Finn is staring at me with his mouth wide open.

“Holy shit.”

I turn away from him to put the broken plate pieces in the trash. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like Savvy and I pinky-swore or made some kind of blood oath that we wouldn’t tell anyone.

“Okay, okay, back up, Bubbles. Savvy’s adopted.”

Ignore him. Ignore him and he’ll go away.

“So you’re, what? Her half sister?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, is what I am.”

“How’d you find her? Did you stalk her here?” His eyes are alight, loving every minute of this. He’s on board with the weirdness that is my family so fast I’m struggling to keep up, and it’s my damn life. “Are you single white female–ing your own flesh and blood?”

That earns him a snort, only because I couldn’t want to be less like Savvy and her stupid rules if I tried.

Finn prattles on like he’s writing the next great book-turned-HBO-murder-mystery-miniseries. “You are. And she doesn’t even know you’re here, does she? She’s just minding her business, Instagramming her juices, and there you are lurking in the—”

“She asked me to come here.” I round on him so unexpectedly that he takes an exaggerated, comical step back, putting his hands up in surrender. “She’s my full-blooded sister, by the way, and she reached out to me. She’s the one who wants to figure out why our parents didn’t tell us about each other, and she’s the one who dragged me into this SAT soul-sucking, bubble-gum-banning bullshit in the first place.” I take a breath, firming the resolve that’s been working its way up in me since this endless dish duty began. “So yeah, I’m leaving. I have no interest in spending the summer feeling like an idiot.”

It’s almost satisfying to see the smug amusement get knocked right off Finn’s face. That is, until I hear the whoosh of the kitchen doors opening and turn to see Leo walking in. He has clearly heard everything. He stands there, his apron in one hand and something wrapped in aluminum foil in the other, and looks at me like I’ve grown an extra limb.

“Leo,” I bleat. He’s supposed to be done for the night. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey, man,” says Finn, talking over me. Well, not really. My voice is so small I can barely hear it. “How’s it—”

“What did you just…” He stops, seeing the look on my face, and recalibrates. Even in this moment, when he has full license to be mad, he’s thinking of my feelings instead of his own—but he can’t keep it out of his voice, a hurt so quiet and deep that it breaks my heart. “You came here because of Savvy.”

His eyes lock on mine, with an intensity that makes it feel like every living thing in the cafeteria has crushed to a halt. Even Finn’s mouth snaps shut, and he takes a step back like he’s trying to get out of the way of whatever is happening in the ten feet of space between us.

“And now you’re leaving?”

“I was going to come find you and explain,” I say in a rush.

I brace myself for Leo to ask for an explanation, but what happens instead is worse. He just kind of deflates, and his eyes wander away from mine, toward the back exit.

“Leo, wait.”

He doesn’t. Finn cocks his head toward the door, a silent Go.

I don’t hesitate, running through the kitchens even though I was explicitly told not to run through the kitchen, along with approximately one bajillion other rules that Victoria warned me about before dinner. But when I stumble out into the campground, a thick fog has rolled over the island, just barely broken up by the guiding lights between the cabins overhead. The back of the kitchens spits me right out into a main fork diverging in five different directions, and I don’t see the back of Leo in a single one.

I want to pick one and run down it, on the off chance that I’ll pick the right one and catch him, but that’s the thing. I can outrun him, maybe, but I can’t outrun whatever just happened back there. At this point I don’t even know if I can keep up with myself.