This is a person who tells me grisly, ridiculously personal details about her cases, knowing I won’t make a peep. This is a person who very frankly explained sex to me in the third grade when I interrupted one of her and my dad’s movie nights during the fogged-up car window scene in Titanic. This is a person who cried when she told me about Santa Claus, because she felt so bad for lying.
This is not a person who keeps secrets, and especially not from me.
“I—fell on my skateboard.”
“Are you okay?” Her eyes are already edging toward the first aid kit, which, between me and my three brothers, is stocked more regularly than any of our lunch boxes.
I wave her off, not looking her in the eye. “Fine. Great!” Which may have had a chance of sounding believable if I didn’t follow it up by nearly tripping over the mountain of Velcro and light-up boy shoes haphazardly piled at the door as I attempt to sprint toward my room.
“You sure?”
“Yup!”
A beat passes, one of those stretched-out ones like she’s going to call me out on something. I hover at the door of my room, bracing myself for it: I know you know the thing I didn’t want you to know! Like she saw it on my face as soon as I walked in, and only just put the pieces together with her uncanny psychic mom powers.
Instead she says, “Well, I left some of those flyers on your bed, if you get a chance to—”
“Thanks!” I cut her off, and close my door swiftly behind me.
I beeline for my laptop, as if opening a new screen will make the thing I saw on the other one go away. But to get to it I have to shove off the pile of aforementioned glossy, painfully colorful flyers propped on top of it, along with a Post-it Note that says “Looks fun!!” stuck on top.
They’re all for Camp Reynolds, this new summer program the school guidance counselor told my parents about. He tried to sell me on it too, cheerfully telling me over the human-head-size candy bowl he keeps in his office that it’s perfect for “kids like me”—a.k.a. kids whose college prospects are dwindling with every lost decimal of their GPA. It’s supposed to get students up to speed with the SATs and college application prep and all the other stuff that I’m going to be shoved into the cross fire of next year.
Until two hours ago, my life’s mission was getting out of it. But whatever sense of linear order my life has just got blown to pieces.
I shove the flyers onto the mattress, drumming my fingers on the keyboard as I wait for the laptop to wake up. Whoever this Savannah is, she can’t really be my sister. They swapped my spit out for someone else’s, or sent me the wrong results. I mean, the thing said I’m more likely than others to match musical pitches, and I’m so tone-deaf my brother Brandon—arguably the most agreeable kid to ever live—screamed bloody murder when I tried to sing to him as a baby. These are some other slightly Irish, unibrow-prone girl’s DNA results that got bungled with mine, and in a few hours we’ll all sit at the dinner table and laugh about the whole thing.
But I glance at the “Relations” page anyway so I can do my due diligence when I make a customer complaint. Savannah Tully, says the name on the top of the list.
And then my heart wrings like a sponge in my chest. Georgia Day, it reads. We predict Georgia Day is your first cousin.
And the next one: Lisa McGinnis. We predict Lisa McGinnis is your second to third cousin.
The names below it—second, third, even fifth cousins—are unfamiliar. But Georgia and I were born in the same month, and even though she lives in San Francisco, we’re in loose touch, tagging each other in the occasional Tumblr meme and texting whenever the body count gets a little preposterous on Riverdale. And Lisa definitely friended me on Facebook within an hour of Poppy’s funeral last summer.
Which can only mean …
“Oh my god.”
I don’t realize I’ve yelled it until I hear a knock and my dad’s head pops in. “What is it?”
I slam the laptop shut. “I thought I saw a spider.”
My voice is just loud enough to carry to the boys’ room, where an instant commotion is set off.
“Spider? Where?” pipes Brandon, who is notoriously afraid of them.
“Spider? Where?” demands Mason, who is going through an aggressive Spider-Man phase.
Before anyone can get a word in edgewise, a pan clatters from the kitchen, which can only be Asher trying to take macaroni-related matters into his own hands again. Dad winces, and Mom yells, “I got it!” in the same exasperated way she always does, and so begins an extremely familiar number in the soundtrack of Day family chaos.
“You got that draft ready to rumble?”
I can hear how tired his voice is before he’s even fully in the room, the kind that’s way past “parent of three boys and one very stubborn teenager” levels of tired. Ever since Poppy died, it sort of seems like he and my mom are never not in motion. My dad gets to his office at the crack of dawn and my mom gets home at about a bajillion o’clock at night, the two of them desperately trying to make sure someone’s always home or home adjacent to keep track of us now that my grandpa can’t.
Which is why I feel extra bad that I am teetering the line between a solid C and high D in English, and extra extra bad that he’s not even mad about it the way a normal parent would be, and is instead reading the umpteenth draft on this essay I have written about why Benvolio from Romeo and Juliet is a total buzzkill for constantly nagging his friends.
Okay, the thesis is slightly more academic than that, but the point stands. English isn’t exactly my strong suit. It’s not that I don’t like reading, or that I’m a bad student—actually, up until this year, I was doing okay in the land of academia—but my vendetta against English in particular is that I hate arguing, and arguing is like 90 percent of any English class you take. Sure, it’s organized, nerdy arguing, but arguing nonetheless—about a thesis statement, or some character’s motivation, or what some author did or didn’t mean to say.
And I’m about as Type B as they come. I have no interest in arguing, or confrontation in general. Give me the wrong scoop of ice cream? I’ll eat it. Sneak into my room and cut the sleeves off my red sweater for your Spider-Man costume? Shit happens.
Lie to my face about a sister who lives a few suburbs away for sixteen years?
Well.
“Yeah,” I say, like the cowardly coward that I am. I pull it off the printer and hand it to him.
My dad frowns. “What’s got your gourd?”
“Nothing.”
My phone buzzes, and a picture of Connie pretending to lick the display case at Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. pops up on my screen. Nobody in their right mind calls on a phone anymore, but Connie’s so busy with her chronic overachieving that she claims she doesn’t have the time to type.
“I know it’s a drag, but it gets a little better each time, right?” says my dad, holding the essay up.
Not in the slightest. I pick up the phone and my dad waves himself out with a flourish, taking the fifth draft of my godforsaken essay with him.
“Yo. Put Leo on. I’ve got a pep talk ready.”
“I’m not at Leo’s.”
“You’re not?”
There’s something almost accusatory in the way she asks, and I think maybe she’ll bring it up—the weirdness we’ve all been semidancing around since the BEI. But she cuts through the tension before I can even decide if it’s real or not, saying, “In that case, 31.8 percent, sucker.”