by Emma Lord
“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.
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 sinc
e 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—”
