by Emma Lord
“It’s— I don’t know. Like, how you know that statistically speaking, the odds that there isn’t some other form of life in the universe are like, zilch.” He picks at a seam in his jeans that hasn’t quite come loose yet but is on its way. “But why the quiet? Do they not want to know us? Or can they just not reach us yet?”
I nudge Leo’s shoulder with mine, tentative at first, but then he sags some of his weight into me. The relief is almost embarrassing. I hate that it takes one of us being upset for things to feel okay between us.
“My family tree is the Fermi paradox.”
I wait in case he wants to elaborate. That’s the thing with Leo, though. I always understand more about him in the beats after he says something than when he says it.
“Well, whatever that means—I’m sure it’s that they can’t reach you,” I tell him. “I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to know you.”
Leo bristles. I take some of the edge off, because we both need it: “Even if you are kind of a dork.”
This earns me a sharp laugh. “Hey.”
“Facts are facts.”
He bops me on the knee with the palm of his hand, his skin touching mine where my jeans are ripped. His eyes linger on an old scar, just above my kneecap. I have no memory of what it’s from, but Leo does. He always keeps score of that kind of thing, like it’s some personal failing of his—ever since we were little, I’ve been the daredevil, and he’s been the safety net. Me climbing and jumping and shimmying into places I shouldn’t, and Leo a few feet behind, warning and worrying and probably developing Abby-shaped ulcers in every one of his organs along the way.
Before he can comment on it I rest my head on his shoulder, like when we were kids and napped on each other on the bus—one of the few times I was ever still for more than a few moments. Only it doesn’t feel quite like it did. There’s a new firmness to him, and he’s so tall now that my head doesn’t fall in the same place. It presses us closer, me trying to find some purchase on him, him scooting to let me fit.
I really shouldn’t do this. I know better. But it feels like I am playing a game of chicken with the universe—like I can make this whole thing feel normal, even when it actively is not.
Because normal isn’t my heart beating in my fingertips and in the skin of my cheek on his T-shirt sleeve. Normal isn’t noticing the way that cinnamon smell of his has gone from grounding to dizzying, taking on something sweeter and too innate in me to name. Normal isn’t having a big, stupid, ridiculous crush on one of my best friends, especially when he most certainly doesn’t have one on me.
And there it is: the BEI bubbling its way back to the surface and popping all over again. My brain is so into reliving it that sometimes I’m almost glad my parents keep me busy—the more time I sink into trying to keep up at school, the less time I have to think about how I colossally messed things up with Leo and almost took down our whole little trio with it.
I take my head off his shoulder, turning to face him. “And you know, the database on this thing updates all the time,” I press on. “You could check in a few months and maybe someone related to you will have taken the test. This isn’t game over.”
Leo lets this sink in. “I don’t know if I want to be like, waiting on that, you know?”
“So give me your password and I’ll check on it for you.”
He huffs out a laugh that’s equal parts appreciative and dismissive. “I’d still be waiting on it.”
I hop off his couch, reaching for his laptop. “Then I’ll change your password. Write it down on a teensy piece of paper and eat it.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he says.
“I’m serious,” I tell him, poised to type. “Minus the eating part.”
“What would the eating part even have accomplished?”
We’re veering off course, but I can tell he hasn’t fully gotten this off his chest yet. And even though he’s not going to tonight, and it will likely manifest into another one of his cooking and/or baking frenzies that will keep me and Connie fed at lunch for the next week, we can at least try.
I glance back at him, waiting.
“I don’t even really think about it that much. I mean, I didn’t, until recently. But I always kind of figured if I wanted to know, I could.”
“You can’t ask your parents?”
Leo glances at the driveway, as if one of them is going to jump out from under the porch window. “Well—the adoption was closed, so…”
“You don’t think they’d be chill with you looking?”
“No, no, they—of course they would,” he says, his eyes lingering on the front of the house.
The most Leo thing about Leo is this: he’s always putting other people’s feelings before his, always trying to keep the peace. Someone nearly ran him over in Pike Place Market running a red, and when the driver immediately burst into hysterics, Leo apologized to her. It’s like he’s a barometer for human emotion, and anytime someone is out of whack he feels obligated to tip the scale back in their favor.
This is somewhat mitigated, at least, by the fact that Leo’s parents are both psychology-majors-turned-teachers and knew this about him before he even started forming full sentences. They’re both pretty busy with work, but they make up for it with enough family game nights, weekend outings, and infinite parental empathy to make the parents from The Brady Bunch look like chumps. If anyone is prepared to handle their kid asking questions like the ones Leo has, it’s them.
But that doesn’t mean Leo won’t talk himself out of it anyway, for everyone’s sake but his own.
“It’s just, there’s really no wikiHow page on how to tell your white parents you’re looking for the family that actually, y’know, looks like you.” He pauses before adding, “That, and Carla doesn’t want to know.”
Ah. Carla and Leo were adopted together and are full-blooded siblings so close in age they’re mistaken for twins more often than not. But that’s all either of them has ever known about the adoption—that they came as a pair, when Leo was a year old and Carla was brand-spanking new.
“I guess that’s fair,” I say cautiously.
“Yeah. But it’s—I don’t know. I’ve never been good at … not knowing things.”
Leo and I may be different in a lot of ways, but here we are too alike: the “latch” factor.
Leo’s knowing thing goes as far back as I remember him. He’s always trying to understand how stuff works, whether it’s whatever paradox Fermi’s dealing with or the precise amount of time it takes to use a mixer on egg whites for the perfect cloud eggs. As early as preschool he was driving every teacher he had up the wall, ending every explanation anyone gave him for anything with “But why?” To this day, his mom still mimics his piping little voice—“But why? But why? But why?”—a teasing glint in her eye.
For me, though, it’s a doing thing. While Leo’s been busy asking questions, I’ve been busy not asking enough of them. An idea pops into my brain and I can’t talk myself out of it: Cut my hair to see if it would grow back overnight. Hop past the NO TRESPASSING sign on a trail to get a better view. Commit to whatever the hell was going through my head during the infamous BEI.
Maybe it’s why we’ve always kind of gravitated to each other. I pull Leo off the ledges of his thought spirals. He pulls me off literal ledges. We’ve got each other’s backs.
“Here,” I say, pulling up my results. “Show me how to get to the ancestry part so I can hack into your account later.”
Leo goes rigid. A van decked out with soaped-up words in our school colors loudly idles in front of Leo’s place and comes to a stop, and Carla hops out and waves to the other cheerleaders in her carpool. Leo stands up from the couch so fast someone might have electrocuted him.
Then his shoulders slump, like something he’s held together too long is starting to fold up inside him.
“It’s, uh—it’s pretty straightforward,” he mumbles. “Just tap the ‘Relations’ thing under ‘Ancestry.’”
<
br /> Carla spots me through the window and picks up the pace, her backpack bouncing on her shoulders and her ponytail bobbing. I wave at her, waiting for the page to load, and Leo lets out a sigh.
“It’s probably better to drop the whole thing,” says Leo. “It might just be a waste of time, and I should be focusing on my future, you know?”
He says something else that gets drowned out by the words on my phone screen, which are somehow impossibly loud.
“Abby?”
I’m on my feet so fast that I trip on the carpet. Leo grabs me before I pitch forward, and there’s this momentary shock of his warm hands on my skin. Before I’m totally paralyzed by it, we’re interrupted by the clatter of my phone bouncing off the carpet and onto the faded hardwood.
“Uh—am I interrupting something?” asks Carla, looking between me and Leo with a faint smirk.
Leo releases me so abruptly that I feel like a balloon someone accidentally lost hold of—I’m untethered. Aimless. Unsure of where to go, except that I need to get out of here fast, away from walls and words on a screen and the way Leo is looking at me, like he’s already ten minutes ahead anticipating whatever stupid thing I’m about to do next.
“I have to—I just realized—I have tutoring,” I blurt.
Leo reaches down to pick up my phone, but I dive for it, grabbing it before he can. He tries to make eye contact with me, but I can’t, or it’s all going to spill out of me before I even know what it means.
“Abby, what’s…”
“On a Saturday?” Carla asks, scowling.
“For, uh—” They’re both staring at me. I try to think of a single school subject I’m taking or even one passable word in the English language I can use to excuse myself, but there’s only room for one thought in my brain right now, and it’s swelling like a balloon. “I just have to—I gotta—I’ll text you later.”
Leo follows me to the door, but I’m too fast for him. Within seconds I’ve yanked my helmet onto my head, grabbed Kitty, shoved my phone into my back pocket, and torn onto the sidewalk faster than my rickety old skateboard has ever gone. Halfway home, the stupid thing Leo no doubt predicted happens: I roll right into a crack in the pavement, end up flying like a crash test dummy, and find myself a few mortifying seconds later on my very bruised butt with my skateboard lying in the grass of someone’s front yard.
I sit there, my heart beating in my ears, my mouth tasting like pennies from biting down on my tongue. I do a quick body-check and discover that, while the embarrassment may be lethal, the rest of me remains relatively unscathed.
Only after I pull myself up does my phone slip out of my back pocket, revealing one majorly cracked screen. I cringe, but that doesn’t stop the phone from unlocking, or opening to the page that’s been burned into my eyes ever since I saw it—a message request from a girl named Savannah Tully that reads, Hey. I know this is super weird. But do you want to meet up?
A message request from a girl named Savannah Tully, who the DNA site identifies as my full-blooded sister.
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 …
<
br /> “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.
