You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

  “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.

  five

  There are several things my parents are unaware of when they drop me off at the ferry dock, where I am, at the mercy of the entire universe, somehow escaping to Camp Reynolds for the summer.

  The first of those things is, obviously, Savvy.

  The second is that I deleted the email about me failing English and having to go to summer school. And then I used our Netflix password to hack into both of my parents’ emails and delete it from theirs, listing all emails from the school district as spam while I was at it. And after, I sprinted home between school and tutoring sessions to check our home voicemail and intercept every message left by the power-hungry twentysomething who runs the attendance office and feasts on the misery of all the students whose parents he calls in the middle of the day.

  The third is that when my mom asked if I’d made my bed and cleaned my room I said yes, even though the floor is more clothes than carpet and it’d be a miracle if someone found the bed right now, let alone made it.

  To be fair, I haven’t exactly been rolling in spare time. Last week was finals, plus Connie was packing for her big Europe trip with her cousins, and Leo was prepping for a summer job in the kitchen at Camp Evergreen (or, as I dubbed it when we were kids, “Camp Whatevergreen”), and I was more than a little preoccupied leading my new super hip double life as Abby Who Doesn’t Lie To Her Parents and Abby The Lying Liar. We were planning to meet up to see a movie or something before we all took off, but I guess it slipped through the cracks.

  The last of the cars start filing onto the ferry, so walk-on passengers have to get on or get left. My dad hugs me first.

  “Take care of yourself,” he says. “If a bear tries to eat you, punch it in the nose.”

  My mom swats at him. “There are no bears on that island.” At my look, she sighs and admits, “I checked.”

  My dad and I both laugh at her, and she swoops in and hugs me tight. I squeeze back, hard, like I can squeeze out the competing waves of guilt and anger that just crushed me, followed by a trickle of something else. Something uneasy and unfamiliar. I’ve been so distracted by “Operation Stealth Sister,” as Connie has started calling it, that it didn’t occur to me until now that I’m leaving for a full month. I’ve never been away from my parents for more than a few days in my whole life.

  Before I can do something dumb like blubber all over them in front of several dozen ferry commuters, all three of my brothers pipe up at once, and I’m smushed with two hugs that are arguably more violent than not and one lick to my face, courtesy of Asher.

  I wipe my face with my sleeve and give them all noogies, and the three of them spin out back toward the car, growling and hissing and taking on their “monster” personas for whenever I mess up their hair. My dad follows them before they end up monstering themselves off a ledge into the Puget Sound, and my mom hugs me one last time.

  “We’re leaving to see your uncle in Portland in a few days, but we’re only there for a week,” she reminds me. “But if you need anything, let us know.”

  I hug her back, feeling like a bigger monster than all three of my brothers combined.

  The ferry ride is a short one, a jaunt across the water to where Camp Reynolds sits on the edge of one of the islands that surround the Seattle area and beyond. I’m about to fully let myself lean into my impending panic spiral, but I look out the window and see the day is so stark clear that for once you can actually see Mount Rainier in its full glory, peeking out over the suburbs in the distance. With all the fog in this city, that damn mountain is basically my white whale. I pull Kitty out, glad she has the long-range lens on her already, and am about to head out to the front of the boat when—

  “Abby?”

  I know who it is before I turn around, before my brain even consciously thinks his name. I know from the two swoops, the one that plummets in my stomach and the one that goes up my spine, the full second of my body fighting itself that I’ve gotten used to feeling any time he takes me by surprise.

  But this isn’t surprise. This has skipped right past surprise and straight to what in the legitimate fuck.

  “Leo?”

  I haven’t seen him in a few days, which has inconveniently only heightened the things about him I’ve been trying diligently not to notice. Read: the way he’s grown out his hair a bit, too short to tuck behind his ear but long enough that my fingers are twitching to try. Read also: the way the sun is streaming in from the ferry window, lighting up the amber of his eyes on his aforementioned face. Still reading: the way he is smiling, a full-body smile, the kind that might have started in his lips but clearly goes all the way down to his toes.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  Before I can ask what he’s doing here, the guilt I was already coated in gets a fresh new layer of more guilt painted right on it.

  Because here’s the thing: I haven’t told Leo about any of this. I could blame being busy, or say that I wanted to tread carefully about finding Savvy when Leo didn’t find anyone. But while both are true, neither are truer than this: the Big Embarrassing Incident is somehow still bigger than us both.

  “I’m—uh—going to camp?”

  “I can’t believe it,” he says.

  And, of all things, he crosses the space of the waiting area and wraps his arms around me in a bear hug so firm I can see the popcorn he’s holding spilling out in the periphery. It’s a wave of warmth and cinnamon and home. I almost forget to hug him back, my heart beating somewhere in my throat instead of doing the one damn job it’s supposed to do, my face so hot that I’m sure he can feel it where my cheek is pressed to his chest.

  Jesus. I used to nap on top of him during movie nights when we were little. Now one second of prolonged contact is all it takes for my limbs to go wonkier than Connie’s after the student government kids raided some parents’ beer stash.

  “Abby,” he says, so earnest and stunned that for once there’s not even a pun to accompany it. “This is the best surprise.”

  I blink into his chest, and he lets me go, beaming like someone just shoved stardust down his throat.

  “First I score a summer job at Camp Evergreen, and now you’re going to be there, too?”

  I know the name well. It’s the camp Leo and Carla have spent every summer at since we were little kids, since their parents used to work on the staff. He’d come back with all these stories about misadventures with camp friends around the same time Connie would come back from traveling with stories about her cousins, and I’d nod and only half listen so the jealousy wouldn’t eat me alive.

  “No, I’m going to Camp Reyn
olds,” I correct him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says with a derisive snort. “I forgot they renamed the place when Victoria took over and they collab’d with that academic thing.”

  “Oh,” I say, and in my head, a slower, deeper, phenomenally more screwed Oh.

  He tilts his head, and something in my chest aches at the sight. How that head tilt is so familiar to me, so familiarly mine, and how it’s been so long since I’ve seen it. Long enough that I realize he’s grown even taller in the last few months, and I’ve been so busy keeping my head down around him, I missed it.

  Leo’s head untilts, and it dawns on me that Leo thinks I followed him here. And he seems ridiculously happy I did.

  I stare back out the window, at the view of Mount Rainier passing us by, trying to recover from the whiplash. I should be relieved, shouldn’t I? Maybe this is proof that the weirdness is over, and we’ve made it out the other side. Finally made the BEI our bitch and are better off for it.

  But I guess if I’m being honest, the weirdness didn’t start with the Big Embarrassing Incident. It’s been brewing since last August, when he got back from camp. We hadn’t seen him in a few months, and he’d had, as Connie put it, “an extreme glo up.” Not only had Leo shot up several inches, but he seemed to have acquired a jawline and some major “I dragged kayaks back and forth across a wet beach every day for two months” biceps.

  I mean, yeah, I noticed. Suddenly we couldn’t swap hoodies anymore and other people in our class were asking me things like whether Leo was dating anyone or—most awkwardly of all—if he was dating me.

  I rolled my eyes and waved everyone off, because it was all super dumb—until it wasn’t. Until Connie went to visit her grandparents over Thanksgiving break, and Leo dragged me to a line outside Best Buy for some game release, and we spent an entire night huddled in the dark, sleep-deprived and delirious and probably judgment-impaired from all the cranberry sauce in our veins. Until right when the sky started to bleed pink, and I eyed the roof of Leo’s dad’s pickup truck, thinking that maybe from that height I might be able to get a shot of the sunrise over the mountains in the distance. Until the moment when, before I’d even so much as moved a muscle, Leo put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t you dare, Abby Day.”