by Emma Lord
“I’m sorry,” says Leo. He takes a step in, and I have to consciously plant my feet to the sticky mess hall floor to stop myself from moving in, too.
I bite down the hurt, tossing the contents of my tray into the trash, and ask, “What’s your problem with Finn, anyway? Isn’t he your friend?”
“Of course he is.” Leo takes my tray for me, his voice considerably lower. “But Finn … he’s had a rough year. And there’s a bit of an edge to him now. A reckless one. And you’re already pretty reckless on your own.”
He leans in closer, his eyes trained on mine, and I hate myself for feeling it—that electricity from last night, the thick gravity of the storm between us. I’m almost mad at him for bringing the current back. But he has no way of knowing that current means something entirely different to me than it does to him.
“And for what it’s worth, I’m always on your side,” he says. “But part of being on your side is telling you the truth. Which is that you should put a stop to this thing with Savvy before it goes full Lord of the Flies.”
I try and fail to hold in my monumental sigh. He’s right. And as mad as I am at Savvy, I am also stuck on the mystery of the magpies, on the brief connection we had this morning. Something fragile enough that if we bend it any more than we have to, it might break.
“We’ll … do some kind of dumb prank, then,” I relent. “Cut off the Wi-Fi in the counselor lounge so she can’t update her Instagram or something.”
Leo loosens up considerably. “That’s not a bad idea. It might actually get her to hang out with us.”
I wrinkle my nose.
“Just avoid messing with her job here,” says Leo. “It’s important to her.”
I chew the inside of my cheek, biting down the urge to say that being able to take photos in my free time here was important to me, and that sure didn’t stop her from coming for it. “’Course not,” I mumble.
Leo’s face settles back into a smile, albeit an uneasy one. I hesitate, and then so does he, and finally he says, “Be careful tonight.”
I can’t tell if he means to be careful climbing the rock or careful of Finn, but maybe that’s for the best. “I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” I say, trying to ease the tension.
Instead Leo’s mouth forms a tight line, his eyes on the other side of the mess hall like he is considering something. I can see the exact moment he decides on it, his jaw clicking before he turns back to me.
“I was being unfair before. Finn’s a good guy.”
“So … you are into the idea of me and Finn?”
It’s supposed to come out cheeky, but it’s choppy and too loud in my ears.
Leo shakes his head and tilts it like he always does at me, except this time there’s something weary in it. Something that catches in my chest, the push and pull, the knowing and not knowing where we stand.
“I want you to be happy,” he says.
Of all the things he’s ever said to me, this might be the worst. Because I know what would make me happy, and it’s not something he can give. Instead of answering him I step in closer and reach up, rubbing his hair with my closed fist until it goes all floppy, expecting him to laugh the way he did when we were kids. But his eyes just stay heavy on mine, weighted in a way I can still feel after we’ve both turned and gone our separate ways.
I file out of the mess hall with the rest of the breakfast stragglers, trying to shake off my unease, and immediately stumble into all three girls from Phoenix Cabin waiting for me outside. I stop in my tracks.
“Finn told us what happened. That Savvy busted us all, and now we have to spend the whole summer locked up in class,” says Jemmy, her nostrils flared.
“Yeah,” I say miserably.
I’m about to apologize, but Izzy cuts in and says, “He said you’re coming up with a plan to get back at her.”
I brace myself. This is it, then. Savvy stole my summer and took all my new friends with her. If there really are sides to this battle, there’s no doubt whose they’d be on.
But Cam’s mouth puckers into a determined line, and the others fall in behind her. She takes a step forward, looking like the leader of some very angry Powerpuff Girls, and says, “We want in.”
fifteen
Make Out Rock, as it turns out, may officially be the least sexy place in the entire Pacific Northwest—unless the five of us all competing over who can make the most believable bear noises while chugging an entire liter of smuggled Sprite qualifies as “sexy.”
“Finn, you’re banned unless you stop the uncontrollable burping,” says Izzy, a phrase that may be the cherry on our unsexy sundae. “Also, last check on the final draft of this before we go over Operation Wack.”
We shuffle around in the darkness, our faces lit by the glow of Izzy’s phone. On the screen is a dummy Instagram account we built that looks almost identical to Savvy’s, with all her recent uploaded photos and the bio exactly the same. Except where it should say “How To Stay Savvy” it reads “How To Stay Wacky,” and we also uploaded some old adorkable pictures of her at camp so it would look like her account was hacked by a nostalgic ghost.
The idea was mine, but the execution was all Finn. While we were stuck in SAT prep, he snuck onto the Wi-Fi to upload his old camp pictures—Savvy and Mickey hamming it up in matching braces and handmade One Direction T-shirts, Savvy sleeping on top of Leo and Finn with drool dribbling out of her mouth, and all of them with two Pringles shoved into their mouths, flinging out their elbows like ducks down by the shore.
Photos I realized I’d seen before, when Leo had shown them to me and Connie after getting back home from camp. But even if I’d memorized their faces, I’d have no way to make the connection between the Savvy she was then and the Savvy she is now, all polished at the edges, every inch of her contained and poised.
The account is private, so nobody will see it except us and Savvy. She’ll probably see the lock icon on the profile and figure out it’s a prank before she even sees the goofy pictures. But scrolling through them all, I’m glad I took Leo’s advice and went for a good clean prank instead of actual revenge. I’ve seen flashes of this more lighthearted Savvy, but it’s something else to see the evidence of it.
The more I look at younger Savvy, the closer I get to understanding the older one. It reminds me that I made her laugh this morning. And for a moment, we were okay.
“These are precious,” says Cam, laughing at one where Finn and Savvy are posing with their tennis rackets like lightsabers. She tweaks Finn on the nose. “Look at baby you.”
Izzy nods in agreement. “She should post these in real life. To her stories, at least.”
“Less admiring how precious twelve-year-old me is, more going over the plan,” says Finn, but not with enough conviction for anyone to miss that he’s blushing. “Jemmy?”
Jemmy, who is apparently the Dungeon Master of a very large all-girl Dungeons & Dragons group, decided to put herself in charge of this heist. Ultimately she decided the only way to get the junior counselors out of bed without grabbing their phones was to pretend someone had seen a bear—hence our bear noise rehearsal—prompting them to head through their cabin’s back exit, which opens into a hallway that goes to the camp office.
At that point, Cam—who, as it turns out, is always clad in neon leggings and shirts because she’s a competitive runner—will sprint in and grab Savvy’s phone. She’ll hand it off to Izzy, who will use some possibly shady but undeniably convenient hacking skills to get into Savvy’s phone, log her out of her Instagram, and log on to the How To Stay Wacky one. Cam will then sprint it back in, the five of us will make a mad dash back to the camper cabins, and Savvy will be none the wiser until tomorrow morning’s ritual Instagram scroll.
The plan is far from foolproof (I blame the SAT prep for somehow, against all odds, making us all a bit stupider), but none of us really cares. Class was every bit as bone-crushingly tedious as we expected, but all this ridiculous plotting has bonded us enough that I
fessed up and told them the whole Savvy and Abby soap opera subplot drama that is our lives.
It took a few minutes for everyone to get up to speed—“I thought this shit only happened in Disney Channel movies,” said Jemmy, approximately five times—but it was a relief once we all were. They’re not mad at Savvy anymore, but their hero worship went down a few healthy pegs. They see her as a human being instead of an untouchable Instagram god. Which puts us all on the same page, even if that page involves us hiding in different parts of the woods like a junior SWAT team with walkie-talkies we borrowed from the middle school boys’ cabin across camp.
“Okay, Abby,” says Jemmy, cueing me from the tree she’s hiding behind. “Go for the Oscar. Three … two … one.”
I wince, sucking in a lungful of air, and recite the words that Jemmy made me memorize and subsequently rehearse by yelling them into a pillow. “Bear! I saw a bear. There’s a bear in the camp!”
My voice carries over the camp from the woods. Rufus immediately starts howling and the lights flicker on in the junior counselor cabin. Even from this distance, I can hear Savvy: “Wait, guys, there aren’t any bears here!”
Jemmy nudges me in the ribs, hard, and I obligingly yell, “Oh no! A bear! Ahhhhh!”
She raises an eyebrow at me like she is director Patty Jenkins of Wonder Woman in the flesh and I just destroyed her cinematic masterpiece, but it does the trick. Through their window we have a full view of the junior counselors booking it out of the cabin, Savvy nudging Rufus out along with them.
The door shuts, and Jemmy flicks on the walkie-talkie. “Okay, girls. It’s showtime.”
sixteen
“Let me get this straight,” says Connie on the other end of the phone. “You’ve only been there a week, and you drove your sister to a minor league felony?”
I press the camp phone closer to my ear, my eye on the door as if Savvy might pop out from behind it. “In my defense, how on earth could I have predicted an Instagram prank was going to lead to grand theft auto?”
“Back up here. What possessed her to steal a camp van?”
I cringe. “She, uh, did not realize it was a fake account. And when she couldn’t delete the pictures fast enough, apparently she kind of … took off? And drove up the hill to where there was better Wi-Fi in town, so she could fix it?”
“You’re joking,” says Connie, delighted by this drama.
In fact, I am not. Savvy did just that, and so early in the morning that none of us were awake to see it happen. I was, however, quite awake and trying to get shots of the sunrise when she drove the jacked Camp Reynolds minivan back down the hill, after which I witnessed a chewing-out from Victoria so legendary that I almost dropped Kitty in secondhand horror.
“I wish I were. She got a ton of demerits. Like, the ones they usually give campers,” I say. “We’ve been on cleaning duty together for nearly two weeks and she won’t even look at me.”
“So I guess that means no progress on figuring out what the hell happened with your parents?”
I hold the phone away from my mouth so she won’t get the full volume of my sigh. “Nada.” I sense another pep talk brewing, so I’m quick to add, “But you were right, you know. About staying. The rest of it … it’s actually been kind of fun.”
Sure, getting stuck in an academic cage all morning is rough, but the other girls have made it oddly bearable. Once they let us out in the afternoon, demerit duty aside, we’re relatively free. We go kayaking. We play dumb camp games and set marshmallows on fire. We swap bug spray and ghost stories and T-shirts. We take enough goofy pictures of ourselves that Kitty is sometimes less of a camera and more of a mirror.
Come to think of it, I’ve taken so many pictures that Kitty’s memory card is probably wheezing with effort to save them—sweeping views of the Puget Sound, of thick, infinite clouds, of unusual birds, of bunnies and butterflies and deer. Pictures that make me proud to go through my camera roll, that finally ease this ache I’ve had as long as I can remember to get out and see the world beyond Shoreline, beyond the three-mile radius of my house. It feels like something’s opened up to me—not only landscapes and sweeping views, but the future. It’s not clear, but it’s wider than I ever remember it feeling, full of possibility, of places I can go someday.
“Are you guys just gonna do a big old photo dump on your Instas at the end of the summer?” I asked the rest of the Phoenix Cabin girls before dinner one night, when we were swapping a chip bag Leo smuggled for us back and forth. I’d been AirDropping them photos—the ones we took of ourselves, not anything I’ve been taking on my own—but I hadn’t seen any of them volleying for the shared computer in the rec room or wandering around to get bars on their phones.
“Oh, no, this is for our finstas,” Jemmy explained, holding out her phone. “I’m nowhere near the level to be launching a brand yet.”
I looked at the screen and saw that like the “How to Stay Wacky” account we made, there were only a handful of followers, and it was locked. Connie had a finsta too, but I was never on Instagram to see it. Jemmy’s was in the same vein. Kind of like a scrapbook, without any real theme.
“Oh. I guess mine’s a finsta too then, since the posts are only for fun.”
“Kind of,” said Cam. “Mostly it’s good to have your own space, I guess? Get to know your vibe? So when we launch our legit accounts we know what our vision is.”
“What are your visions?” I asked.
Cam beamed, adjusting the blond hair she’d pulled into a much lower, non-Savvy ponytail in recent days. “There’s a whole body-positive running community on Instagram. I’m gonna start with that, and have my thing be highlighting running brands with inclusive sizing that are actually cute, and match them up with weekly curated playlists.” She cast one leg out like a ballerina, showing off the purple leggings with cloud prints she was wearing. “This one’s full Ariana, obviously.”
Izzy plucked some of the spandex on her calf and snapped it back, making her yelp out a laugh. “Well, I’m gonna be a doctor, so I’m gonna use mine to chronicle everything like a photo diary—premed, med school, residency,” she told me. “Like Grey’s Anatomy, but make it Gen Z. And with like, way less murder.”
Before I could react, Jemmy grinned widely, making a bow-and-arrow movement. “Our Dungeons & Dragons group makes all our own cosplay, so I’m gonna chronicle the campaign we’re kicking off in the fall. We’ve all decided it doesn’t end until every last one of us is dead.”
I stared at each of them in turn, impressed. “Wow, I love all of these,” I said. I was so into their ideas that for the first time I wanted to be on Instagram as an actual recreational hobby, and not just something I glanced at once a year to make sure Leo hadn’t posted pictures of the clown from It on my account on April Fools’ Day.
But there was one part that didn’t make sense. “If you all have your own Instagram ideas … why are you so into Savvy?”
“Well, first off, cuz she’s a badass,” said Jemmy. “But also because of the workshop she’s leading next week.”
“Workshop?” I asked. I knew there were specialty classes that rotated every week, but I’d been too busy harassing Mickey and Leo in the kitchens and running around the campground with Kitty and Finn to pay much attention.
“Social Media and the Personal Brand,” said Izzy. “Savvy built her Instagram up from basically nothing in two years. If anyone knows how to do it, it’s her.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jemmy, “we signed you up, but we can pull your name off it if you’d rather not.”
There was this warmth, then—one I’d been too nervous to acknowledge, in case it went away. Like I really did belong here. Like I was capable of finding my place outside the bubble I’d been living in, with the same best friends and the same town and the same endless to-do list on Abby’s Agenda.
“See?” says Connie, tugging me out of my thoughts. “You just have to bust out of your shell a bit. Maybe do something totally radical, even, li
ke show your photos to people who aren’t me and Leo.”
“Let’s not get too carried away.”
“How is Leo, by the way?”
I glance out the window of the main office, wondering if I’ll spot him on his way to the kitchen so I can wave him over to say hi, but no luck. Truth is, I was worried Leo might be mad after what happened with Savvy, but even he agreed her reaction was out of proportion. In true Benvolio form, though, he has stayed fair to both parties, hanging out with us each individually without bringing it up.
“He’s good,” I say. “He and Mickey have been doing these little cook-offs after dinner every night and letting me and Finn be celebrity judges.”
“So you’re basically living out Leo’s Chopped fantasies?”
“Or nightmares. Last night he accidentally dumped an entire container of cinnamon into the pork sisig Mickey was trying to teach him to make. She said that’s what he gets for going off script on her family recipes.”
“I wish I could be there,” says Connie. “I’m missing out on everything. It’s like Thanksgiving break all over again.”
I manage not to wince thinking of the BEI, which either means I’ve made progress, or have done enough humiliating things to eclipse it since. “Don’t worry. You’re not missing much,” I tell her. “I haven’t tried to fling myself at Leo again. I got the message on that loud and clear.”
I’m expecting her to laugh, but there’s silence on the other end of the line—enough that for a second I think the call was dropped.
“That was a joke,” I add quickly.
“Yeah,” says Connie, with a weak laugh. “Besides, what about Finn? He sounds nice.”
