I am so far removed from reality that I genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about.
“You owe me soda bread. And no cheating, you can’t have Leo do the whole thing for you,” she tells me.
“Uh…”
“Anyway, I’ll just call Leo’s phone, is he still around?”
“Yeah.”
Connie pauses. “Why do you sound weird?”
My mouth is open, but the airflow between my lungs and the outside world seems to have stopped, like I’m breathing into a plastic bag.
Savannah Tully.
“Um.”
I can’t seem to get past monosyllables. It’s like my tongue is too thick for my mouth, as if I’ve become some whole other person since my ill-fated skateboard ride back from Leo’s, and I’m not sure how she’s supposed to act, what she’s supposed to say.
“Oh shit. Are you more Irish than I am after all? You’re like, Saoirse Ronan’s secret twin—”
“No. I mean, I am more Irish, but—”
“Is it one of the health things? Oh man, I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? If it makes you feel better, I totally got flagged on the celiac gene—”
“It’s not that.”
The words come out a snap, which stuns both of us into silence. I’m never short with Connie, or anybody, really. I get riled, sure, and impatient, but never with anyone but myself.
I’m not even sure what I am right now, though.
“Abs?”
I can’t. If I tell her, it’ll be real. And I’ll have to do something about it. Okay, I won’t have to, but that’s the thing with me—it’s the “latch” factor. If I let myself get in too deep on this, I won’t be able to let it go, even if I wish more than anything that I could.
I won’t let myself latch on to this. I can’t.
“It’s not—I mean, yeah, I’m more Irish than you.” Even in the midst of what might be my First Ever Existential Crisis, I can’t help but rub it in. “But I…”
Maybe I’ll regret saying it, but it feels like there is some kind of pressure building up in me that might explode if I don’t let it out.
I spring out of my chair and shut the door to my room again as slowly as I can, muffling the click. That’s twice now I’ve shut my door in a span of ten minutes. I almost never close it—my brothers are in and out so often that it’s basically a second living room—so I’ll have to make this fast.
“It says I have a sister.”
Connie is dead silent, and then: “Huh?”
“Like, a full-blooded sister. Some girl named Savannah Tully who lives a half hour from us, in Medina.”
“Whoa, like rich-person Medina?”
She is missing the point here. “Like, full-blooded as in we have the same parents. Like, the parents that I have made some other person before me who I don’t know about. And get this—it says she’s eighteen.”
Another silence, and then: “Oh my god.”
“What?”
“Abby … she looks like you.”
“She what? How did you—how are you—”
“She’s got like, half a million followers on Instagram.”
“Okay, how do you even know it’s—”
“Because she legit looks like you. I’m sending you a link.”
Don’t, I almost tell her, but it’s too late. I’ve latched. I’ve freaking latched, and I have to know.
I pull the phone away from my ear and tap the link, landing on an Instagram account with the handle @howtostaysavvy. The bio reads, “wellness dweeb, nutrition nerd, wannabe mermaid. all about staying savvy.”
Connie wasn’t exaggerating—her follower count is obscene.
I scroll down and see the first few images. A beaming girl jumping on a rocky beach, her limbs splayed out in a strappy bikini, the water of the Puget Sound gleaming in the background. Another of her at a white table outside of some restaurant, chestnut brown hair blowing in the wind and tongue stuck out playfully, her fork poised above a colorful salad. A selfie with a Labrador retriever, close enough to see the dusting of freckles on her scrunched nose, the white of her teeth in her open, midlaugh smile, the poreless perfection of her skin.
I close the app, my hands shaking.
“She doesn’t look anything like me.”
“Bullshit.” And then: “So what are you going to do? Can you message her?”
“She already messaged me.”
“Way to bury the lede,” Connie exclaims. “Saying what?”
I pull it back up and tell her, pacing across the room as if I can get farther away from the words on the screen even though the phone is still in my hand.
“Are you gonna message her back?”
No. Yes. “I don’t know.” I end up doing what I usually do when faced with a difficult choice: pull a Carrie Underwood and let Connie take the wheel. “What would you do?”
Thirteen-year-old Connie would have told me, along with a twelve-step action plan in a shared Excel sheet so aggressively color-coded that the Lucky Charms leprechaun would have shuddered at the sight. Seventeen-year-old Connie is, unfortunately, too wise for that.
“Let’s make a pros and Connies list,” she offers instead.
I groan, both at the pun that Connie will never let die and the prospect of making said list. A “pros and Connies” list is different from a typical pros and cons list, not just because it makes everyone’s eyes roll into the backs of their heads, but because instead of framing the question as, “What would happen if I did this?” Connie insists on writing the list as, “What would happen if I didn’t do this?” That way, she insists, the cons aren’t negatives, but cold truths. Connies, if you will. Fitting, I guess, because Connie is nothing if not brutally honest.
The first pro is so immediate that there’s no point in writing it down: I wouldn’t make my parents mad. I’m assuming they’d be mad. Right? Like, whatever this is, it’s not only super weird, but they must have gone to some pretty extreme lengths to hide it from me.
And I’m not exactly in a great position to go around upsetting my parents. Between shuffling me to tutors, constantly replacing my broken phone screens, and fielding calls from concerned neighbors every other day saying they saw me climb something I wasn’t supposed to, having me for a kid seems baseline exhausting.
Yet something else knocks all that guilt aside: the idea of an ally. Someone I could talk to about things I can’t share with my parents or even Connie—things like the BEI. Or how I am sometimes so overwhelmed by all the scrutiny on my grades that if anything, it makes the situation worse. Or how I have no idea how I’m supposed to fit into the world after high school, if there’s even a proper place for me to fit at all.
Someone who might be to me what Poppy was, before he died. Someone who understood me well enough that I never felt self-conscious telling him about the embarrassing stuff, or even sharing my photos. I come from a family of worrywarts and planners, but he was the one who was always like me—he loved a good adventure, was every bit as impulsive, had embarrassing stories to tell that rivaled mine. I could tell him the truthiest truths of me—the good, the bad, and the “I’m pretty sure I threw away my retainer and it’s somewhere in the sixty bags of garbage behind the school gym” levels of ugly—without ever getting the sense that I might disappoint him.