by Emma Lord
And I’m about as Type B as they come. I have no interest in arguing, or confrontation in general. Give me the wrong scoop of ice cream? I’ll eat it. Sneak into my room and cut the sleeves off my red sweater for your Spider-Man costume? Shit happens.
Lie to my face about a sister who lives a few suburbs away for sixteen years?
Well.
“Yeah,” I say, like the cowardly coward that I am. I pull it off the printer and hand it to him.
My dad frowns. “What’s got your gourd?”
“Nothing.”
My phone buzzes, and a picture of Connie pretending to lick the display case at Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. pops up on my screen. Nobody in their right mind calls on a phone anymore, but Connie’s so busy with her chronic overachieving that she claims she doesn’t have the time to type.
“I know it’s a drag, but it gets a little better each time, right?” says my dad, holding the essay up.
Not in the slightest. I pick up the phone and my dad waves himself out with a flourish, taking the fifth draft of my godforsaken essay with him.
“Yo. Put Leo on. I’ve got a pep talk ready.”
“I’m not at Leo’s.”
“You’re not?”
There’s something almost accusatory in the way she asks, and I think maybe she’ll bring it up—the weirdness we’ve all been semidancing around since the BEI. But she cuts through the tension before I can even decide if it’s real or not, saying, “In that case, 31.8 percent, sucker.”
I am so far removed from reality that I genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about.
“You owe me soda bread. And no cheating, you can’t have Leo do the whole thing for you,” she tells me.
“Uh…”
“Anyway, I’ll just call Leo’s phone, is he still around?”
“Yeah.”
Connie pauses. “Why do you sound weird?”
My mouth is open, but the airflow between my lungs and the outside world seems to have stopped, like I’m breathing into a plastic bag.
Savannah Tully.
“Um.”
I can’t seem to get past monosyllables. It’s like my tongue is too thick for my mouth, as if I’ve become some whole other person since my ill-fated skateboard ride back from Leo’s, and I’m not sure how she’s supposed to act, what she’s supposed to say.
“Oh shit. Are you more Irish than I am after all? You’re like, Saoirse Ronan’s secret twin—”
“No. I mean, I am more Irish, but—”
“Is it one of the health things? Oh man, I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? If it makes you feel better, I totally got flagged on the celiac gene—”
“It’s not that.”
The words come out a snap, which stuns both of us into silence. I’m never short with Connie, or anybody, really. I get riled, sure, and impatient, but never with anyone but myself.
I’m not even sure what I am right now, though.
“Abs?”
I can’t. If I tell her, it’ll be real. And I’ll have to do something about it. Okay, I won’t have to, but that’s the thing with me—it’s the “latch” factor. If I let myself get in too deep on this, I won’t be able to let it go, even if I wish more than anything that I could.
I won’t let myself latch on to this. I can’t.
“It’s not—I mean, yeah, I’m more Irish than you.” Even in the midst of what might be my First Ever Existential Crisis, I can’t help but rub it in. “But I…”
Maybe I’ll regret saying it, but it feels like there is some kind of pressure building up in me that might explode if I don’t let it out.
I spring out of my chair and shut the door to my room again as slowly as I can, muffling the click. That’s twice now I’ve shut my door in a span of ten minutes. I almost never close it—my brothers are in and out so often that it’s basically a second living room—so I’ll have to make this fast.
“It says I have a sister.”
Connie is dead silent, and then: “Huh?”
“Like, a full-blooded sister. Some girl named Savannah Tully who lives a half hour from us, in Medina.”
“Whoa, like rich-person Medina?”
She is missing the point here. “Like, full-blooded as in we have the same parents. Like, the parents that I have made some other person before me who I don’t know about. And get this—it says she’s eighteen.”
Another silence, and then: “Oh my god.”
“What?”
“Abby … she looks like you.”
“She what? How did you—how are you—”
“She’s got like, half a million followers on Instagram.”
“Okay, how do you even know it’s—”
“Because she legit looks like you. I’m sending you a link.”
Don’t, I almost tell her, but it’s too late. I’ve latched. I’ve freaking latched, and I have to know.
I pull the phone away from my ear and tap the link, landing on an Instagram account with the handle @howtostaysavvy. The bio reads, “wellness dweeb, nutrition nerd, wannabe mermaid. all about staying savvy.”
Connie wasn’t exaggerating—her follower count is obscene.
I scroll down and see the first few images. A beaming girl jumping on a rocky beach, her limbs splayed out in a strappy bikini, the water of the Puget Sound gleaming in the background. Another of her at a white table outside of some restaurant, chestnut brown hair blowing in the wind and tongue stuck out playfully, her fork poised above a colorful salad. A selfie with a Labrador retriever, close enough to see the dusting of freckles on her scrunched nose, the white of her teeth in her open, midlaugh smile, the poreless perfection of her skin.
I close the app, my hands shaking.
“She doesn’t look anything like me.”
“Bullshit.” And then: “So what are you going to do? Can you message her?”
“She already messaged me.”
“Way to bury the lede,” Connie exclaims. “Saying what?”
I pull it back up and tell her, pacing across the room as if I can get farther away from the words on the screen even though the phone is still in my hand.
“Are you gonna message her back?”
No. Yes. “I don’t know.” I end up doing what I usually do when faced with a difficult choice: pull a Carrie Underwood and let Connie take the wheel. “What would you do?”
Thirteen-year-old Connie would have told me, along with a twelve-step action plan in a shared Excel sheet so aggressively color-coded that the Lucky Charms leprechaun would have shuddered at the sight. Seventeen-year-old Connie is, unfortunately, too wise for that.
“Let’s make a pros and Connies list,” she offers instead.
I groan, both at the pun that Connie will never let die and the prospect of making said list. A “pros and Connies” list is different from a typical pros and cons list, not just because it makes everyone’s eyes roll into the backs of their heads, but because instead of framing the question as, “What would happen if I did this?” Connie insists on writing the list as, “What would happen if I didn’t do this?” That way, she insists, the cons aren’t negatives, but cold truths. Connies, if you will. Fitting, I guess, because Connie is nothing if not brutally honest.
The first pro is so immediate that there’s no point in writing it down: I wouldn’t make my parents mad. I’m assuming they’d be mad. Right? Like, whatever this is, it’s not only super weird, but they must have gone to some pretty extreme lengths to hide it from me.
And I’m not exactly in a great position to go around upsetting my parents. Between shuffling me to tutors, constantly replacing my broken phone screens, and fielding calls from concerned neighbors every other day saying they saw me climb something I wasn’t supposed to, having me for a kid seems baseline exhausting.
Yet something else knocks all that guilt aside: the idea of an ally. Someone I could talk to about things I can’t share with my parents or even Connie—things like the BEI. Or how I am sometimes so overwhelm
ed by all the scrutiny on my grades that if anything, it makes the situation worse. Or how I have no idea how I’m supposed to fit into the world after high school, if there’s even a proper place for me to fit at all.
Someone who might be to me what Poppy was, before he died. Someone who understood me well enough that I never felt self-conscious telling him about the embarrassing stuff, or even sharing my photos. I come from a family of worrywarts and planners, but he was the one who was always like me—he loved a good adventure, was every bit as impulsive, had embarrassing stories to tell that rivaled mine. I could tell him the truthiest truths of me—the good, the bad, and the “I’m pretty sure I threw away my retainer and it’s somewhere in the sixty bags of garbage behind the school gym” levels of ugly—without ever getting the sense that I might disappoint him.
There it is. The “Connie.” Maybe I can find a person who understands me the way nobody else can. If I don’t do this, I’ll never have the chance.
“Hey, Abby? I’ve got some notes!” my dad calls.
I close my eyes. “I gotta go. But—don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
“’Course not.” Before I can hang up, Connie asks, “Wait, not even Leo?”
“I’ll tell him, I just want to…”
Scream into my pillow? Bust into my parents’ bedroom and yell “I KNOW THE TRUTH!” like I live in a comic and there’s a speech bubble over my head? Run away, join the circus, and never think about any of this ever again?
“Got it. Godspeed.” There’s a beat. “Also, is it weird if I follow her?”
“Connie.”
“What? She’s goals. She can do those crazy handstand yoga poses. And I’m obsessed with Rufus.”
“Who?”
“Her dog.”
“Goodbye.”
I hang up and take the kind of breath that is less of a breath and more of a decision. One that, pros and Connies aside, I couldn’t unmake if I tried.
I open up the app and type back: Are you free tomorrow?
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. If you 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 li
ttle 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.
