This is somewhat mitigated, at least, by the fact that Leo’s parents are both psychology-majors-turned-teachers and knew this about him before he even started forming full sentences. They’re both pretty busy with work, but they make up for it with enough family game nights, weekend outings, and infinite parental empathy to make the parents from The Brady Bunch look like chumps. If anyone is prepared to handle their kid asking questions like the ones Leo has, it’s them.
But that doesn’t mean Leo won’t talk himself out of it anyway, for everyone’s sake but his own.
“It’s just, there’s really no wikiHow page on how to tell your white parents you’re looking for the family that actually, y’know, looks like you.” He pauses before adding, “That, and Carla doesn’t want to know.”
Ah. Carla and Leo were adopted together and are full-blooded siblings so close in age they’re mistaken for twins more often than not. But that’s all either of them has ever known about the adoption—that they came as a pair, when Leo was a year old and Carla was brand-spanking new.
“I guess that’s fair,” I say cautiously.
“Yeah. But it’s—I don’t know. I’ve never been good at … not knowing things.”
Leo and I may be different in a lot of ways, but here we are too alike: the “latch” factor.
Leo’s knowing thing goes as far back as I remember him. He’s always trying to understand how stuff works, whether it’s whatever paradox Fermi’s dealing with or the precise amount of time it takes to use a mixer on egg whites for the perfect cloud eggs. As early as preschool he was driving every teacher he had up the wall, ending every explanation anyone gave him for anything with “But why?” To this day, his mom still mimics his piping little voice—“But why? But why? But why?”—a teasing glint in her eye.
For me, though, it’s a doing thing. While Leo’s been busy asking questions, I’ve been busy not asking enough of them. An idea pops into my brain and I can’t talk myself out of it: Cut my hair to see if it would grow back overnight. Hop past the NO TRESPASSING sign on a trail to get a better view. Commit to whatever the hell was going through my head during the infamous BEI.
Maybe it’s why we’ve always kind of gravitated to each other. I pull Leo off the ledges of his thought spirals. He pulls me off literal ledges. We’ve got each other’s backs.
“Here,” I say, pulling up my results. “Show me how to get to the ancestry part so I can hack into your account later.”
Leo goes rigid. A van decked out with soaped-up words in our school colors loudly idles in front of Leo’s place and comes to a stop, and Carla hops out and waves to the other cheerleaders in her carpool. Leo stands up from the couch so fast someone might have electrocuted him.
Then his shoulders slump, like something he’s held together too long is starting to fold up inside him.
“It’s, uh—it’s pretty straightforward,” he mumbles. “Just tap the ‘Relations’ thing under ‘Ancestry.’”
Carla spots me through the window and picks up the pace, her backpack bouncing on her shoulders and her ponytail bobbing. I wave at her, waiting for the page to load, and Leo lets out a sigh.
“It’s probably better to drop the whole thing,” says Leo. “It might just be a waste of time, and I should be focusing on my future, you know?”
He says something else that gets drowned out by the words on my phone screen, which are somehow impossibly loud.
“Abby?”
I’m on my feet so fast that I trip on the carpet. Leo grabs me before I pitch forward, and there’s this momentary shock of his warm hands on my skin. Before I’m totally paralyzed by it, we’re interrupted by the clatter of my phone bouncing off the carpet and onto the faded hardwood.
“Uh—am I interrupting something?” asks Carla, looking between me and Leo with a faint smirk.
Leo releases me so abruptly that I feel like a balloon someone accidentally lost hold of—I’m untethered. Aimless. Unsure of where to go, except that I need to get out of here fast, away from walls and words on a screen and the way Leo is looking at me, like he’s already ten minutes ahead anticipating whatever stupid thing I’m about to do next.
“I have to—I just realized—I have tutoring,” I blurt.
Leo reaches down to pick up my phone, but I dive for it, grabbing it before he can. He tries to make eye contact with me, but I can’t, or it’s all going to spill out of me before I even know what it means.
“Abby, what’s…”
“On a Saturday?” Carla asks, scowling.
“For, uh—” They’re both staring at me. I try to think of a single school subject I’m taking or even one passable word in the English language I can use to excuse myself, but there’s only room for one thought in my brain right now, and it’s swelling like a balloon. “I just have to—I gotta—I’ll text you later.”
Leo follows me to the door, but I’m too fast for him. Within seconds I’ve yanked my helmet onto my head, grabbed Kitty, shoved my phone into my back pocket, and torn onto the sidewalk faster than my rickety old skateboard has ever gone. Halfway home, the stupid thing Leo no doubt predicted happens: I roll right into a crack in the pavement, end up flying like a crash test dummy, and find myself a few mortifying seconds later on my very bruised butt with my skateboard lying in the grass of someone’s front yard.
I sit there, my heart beating in my ears, my mouth tasting like pennies from biting down on my tongue. I do a quick body-check and discover that, while the embarrassment may be lethal, the rest of me remains relatively unscathed.
Only after I pull myself up does my phone slip out of my back pocket, revealing one majorly cracked screen. I cringe, but that doesn’t stop the phone from unlocking, or opening to the page that’s been burned into my eyes ever since I saw it—a message request from a girl named Savannah Tully that reads, Hey. I know this is super weird. But do you want to meet up?
A message request from a girl named Savannah Tully, who the DNA site identifies as my full-blooded sister.
two
When you find out your parents have harbored a secret older sibling from you for all the sixteen years you’ve inhabited the Earth, the last thing you should probably do is suck in a mouthful of air and yell, “Mom!”
But I walk through the front door and do exactly that.
It takes her approximately ten seconds to reach me, and they are simultaneously the longest and shortest ten seconds of my life. Long enough to understand that what happened is going to fundamentally change me forever; short enough to decide I don’t want it to just yet.
“What happened?” she asks, her eyes widening at my knees. I look down and only then notice the matching bloodstains around the holes in my jeans, which have now ripped so wide they look like I’m trying to send my legs to another dimension.
I open my mouth. “I…”
Her arm is streaked with green paint from one of my brothers’ art projects, her wild brown hair yanked into a high bun, and she’s balancing a laundry basket on one hip and a large folder of depositions on the other. She stands there in all her my mom–ness, her brow furrowed and her teeth biting her lower lip, and suddenly the whole thing is absurd.