There it is. The “Connie.” Maybe I can find a person who understands me the way nobody else can. If I don’t do this, I’ll never have the chance.
“Hey, Abby? I’ve got some notes!” my dad calls.
I close my eyes. “I gotta go. But—don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”
“’Course not.” Before I can hang up, Connie asks, “Wait, not even Leo?”
“I’ll tell him, I just want to…”
Scream into my pillow? Bust into my parents’ bedroom and yell “I KNOW THE TRUTH!” like I live in a comic and there’s a speech bubble over my head? Run away, join the circus, and never think about any of this ever again?
“Got it. Godspeed.” There’s a beat. “Also, is it weird if I follow her?”
“Connie.”
“What? She’s goals. She can do those crazy handstand yoga poses. And I’m obsessed with Rufus.”
“Who?”
“Her dog.”
“Goodbye.”
I hang up and take the kind of breath that is less of a breath and more of a decision. One that, pros and Connies aside, I couldn’t unmake if I tried.
I open up the app and type back: Are you free tomorrow?
three
I know the drive from my house to Green Lake so well that it feels less like visualizing a map of roads than a map of myself. As a kid I’d wake up every Saturday at the crack of dawn, waiting, waiting, waiting for Poppy to come pick me up and take me to Bean Well, the little coffee shop he had started with Gammy, who died before I was born. My parents would spend their weekends catching up on their law school reading, and I’d spend them munching on chocolate-chip scones, coloring endless pages of dragons and unicorns, and fiddling with the buttons of Poppy’s beaten-up old Nikon camera.
My dad pulls up to Bean Well with an almost apologetic sigh. “You don’t want to pop in?”
I do. I miss Marianne, the manager, who has taken over since Poppy died last year. I miss the sugar crunch on top of the scones and the regulars marveling at me being “so grown up” and Mrs. Leary’s dog, who loves the place so much that sometimes he wanders over on his own to whine for free dog treats.
I miss taking this place for granted, because now I can’t. Marianne is retiring and my parents are selling the place, and a big old chunk of my childhood right along with it.
I wrench my eyes away from the lit-up Bean Well sign above the door, to Ellie the barista with her Cindy Lou Who–high topknot laughing at someone’s joke at the register.
“Maybe later,” I say. “I heard there was a bald eagle popping in and out of the park, thought I might try to get a shot.”
A lie wrapped inside of a lie that just jump-vaulted off a cliff into another lie, but not one that my dad will question. The thing is, Green Lake is almost exactly halfway between Shoreline and Medina, which Savannah and I figured out in our brief exchange last night before planning to meet here.
“Sounds good, kiddo. I’ll text when I’m done with the realtor.”
I step out of the car and into the humid June fog, feeling the frizz of my curls start to rise like they’ve become sentient. I start to pat them down but stop myself. If Savannah really is my sister, I have no reason to impress her. We’re made up of all the same weird stuff, aren’t we?
Which somehow has not stopped me from stress-chewing my way through an entire pack of gum and changing my socks three times, as if putting on the striped ones would have made this catastrophically strange thing any less strange.
A shiver runs up my spine as I cross the street to the park, keeping my eyes peeled. I’m a few minutes late, but it’s not like I could tell my dad to step on it because I have a date with my own personal reality show. I’m assuming I’ll find Savvy by the benches, but they’re full of kids with sticky ice-cream fingers and joggers stretching their limbs.
I squint, and there, beyond the benches, toward one of the massive trees that borders the lake, is a girl in pale pink capri workout leggings and a pristine white top posing with a water bottle, her hair mounted in a slick, shiny ponytail without a single strand out of place.
“Can you see the label on the bottle?” she’s asking. “They’re gonna make us redo it if—”
“Yup, label’s fine, it’s just the weird shadows from the leaves,” says a girl with her. “Maybe if we…”
I can only see the back of her, but there’s no mistaking it. I hesitate, trying to think up an opening line. Something other than Hey, may I just be the first to say, what the actual fuck?
Before I can get close enough, the biggest, fluffiest Labrador retriever to ever exist comes barreling at me, paws up and pouncing on me like my bones are held up with kibble. I squeal, letting him bowl me over into the grass—Rufus, I remember, from the deep dive I took on Savannah’s Instagram account last night—and he yelps his approval, a bottle of sunscreen falling out of his mouth.
“I got him, I got him,” says someone—the one with the camera, an Asian girl with two long French braids and a broad smile. Either I am extremely concussed from Rufus, or she is rocking a full sleeve of punk Disney princess tattoos on her left arm and various Harry Potter–related ones on her right. “Whose even is this, you furry little thief?” she asks, seeing the sunscreen at our feet. Now that she’s closer I can see the edges of the tattoos are temporary, all bright and gleaming in the sun. She turns back to me. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly, “he only ever does this to—”
Her mouth drops open. She looks me up and down, or at least as much of me as she can with Rufus on top of me.
“Savvy,” she says. She clears her throat, taking a step back like I’ve spooked her, while Rufus continues to lick my face like it’s a lollipop.
“Um,” I manage, “are you…?”
Another hand comes into view, offering me a lift up. I take it—colder than mine, but not cold enough to cancel out the immediate eeriness. I feel like I’ve been displaced in time.
“Hey. I’m Savvy.”
Poppy had this thing he always said when we were out with our cameras. He’d show me how different lenses captured different perspectives, and how no two photos of the same thing were ever alike, simply because of the person taking them. If you learn to capture a feeling, he told me, it’ll always be louder than words.
Sometimes I can still hear the way he said it. The low, gravelly sound of his voice, with that bare hint of a smirk in it. I always clung to it, growing up. He was right. Feelings were always easier in the abstract, like the breathless moment the skateboard tilted down the big hill in my neighborhood, or the reassuring way Connie squeezed my hand between our desks before a big test. Words always fell short. Made the feeling cheap. Some things, I think, there weren’t supposed to be words for at all.
Everywhere I go I have those words tucked somewhere in my heart, but right now they’re pulsing through me like a drumbeat that somehow led me here, a few short miles and a hop across a familiar street, to the loudest feeling I’ve ever felt.
“Abby,” I introduce myself.
I stare at her staring at me and the resemblance is so uncanny I’m not sure if I’m staring at a person or a bunch of people all at once. I guess, having little brothers, it’s hard to see the parts of them that look like my parents and the parts that don’t—they’re still mostly sticky and hyper and un-fully-formed. I’ve only ever noticed the parts of me that look like them because I grew up with everyone telling me.