“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.”