But there is something about seeing Savvy, with my mom’s dainty nose and my dad’s high forehead, Asher’s and Brandon’s full cheeks, and Mason’s distinctive cowlick in the crown of her hair, that seems less like genetic inevitability and more like science fiction. Like she was conjured here, all the people I love smushed into one very short, extremely chic person.
Her hair, though—even with all the product she’s used, it’s starting to come undone in the heat, and it’s all mine, all my mom’s. Wild and untamed, the kind that curls in some places and frizzes in others, so it never once does us the favor of looking the same from one day to the next.
“Wow. It’s like Alternate Dimension Savvy. One where you’re taller and wear actual clothes instead of athleisure all day,” the other girl mutters, peering at us in turn. Even Rufus seems uneasy, his furry head bobbing from me to Savvy and back, letting out a low, confused whine.
Savannah—Savvy—clears her throat. “Well—I mean—I suppose we do look a little alike.”
Her eyes graze me. It only takes a second, but I see the places she lingers. My ratty shoelaces. The widened rips in my jeans from yesterday. The gum in my mouth. The tiny scar that interrupts my left eyebrow. The slump of my limp ponytail, held together with a glittery scrunchie of Connie’s that doesn’t match anything I’ve ever touched, let alone owned.
I try not to bristle, but when her eyes meet mine, almost clinical in the way she’s accounting for the pieces of me, my eyes are narrowed. I do a once-over of her but can’t find a single flaw. She looks like she fell out of a Lululemon ad.
“Yeah,” I concede. “A little.”
There’s an awkward beat where the three of us stand there, looking and not looking. Maybe there’s a word for the feeling after all. Maybe it’s disappointment.
“I’m Mickey,” says her friend, extending her hand to shake. “Er, McKayla. But everyone calls me Mickey, on account of—well,” she says, showing me her left arm, which also features a rainbow gradient version of Cinderella’s Castle in the Magic Kingdom smack-dab in the middle of all the Disney characters. “Bit of a thing.”
I take her hand, wishing Connie could have come with me. I even start to wish Leo were here. People who define the little borders of my world in a way that plain old me in my beaten-up Adidas and sudden inability to string words into sentences can’t on their own.
“Oh,” I realize, seeing the rings stacked on Mickey’s middle finger as she pulls her hand away. “You’re the girlfriend.”
Mickey’s entire face blooms red, starting at her neck and ending somewhere at the tips of her ears. “Well, not the girlfriend,” I backtrack, wondering if that was rude. “Savvy’s, I mean. From Instagram?”
Savvy’s mentioned the girl she’s dating in a few of her posts, but they all have a distinct “my girlfriend in Canada” vibe. Beyond a few artfully staged shots of their hands or captions alluding to her, she never actually makes an appearance. The rings, though, I remember seeing just off frame in a shot of some bougie vegan place Savvy ate at in Bell Square last month.
“Oh,” says Savvy, looking flustered. “She’s not…”
Mickey only gets redder. “No, no, we’re just friends. Best friends! Since like, the beginning of time,” she says, “but—”
“Sorry,” I blurt. “I—saw the rings, on Instagram, and thought—”
“You’re thinking of Jo. She’s interning at some fancy office downtown,” says Mickey, whose turnaround on social recovery is way higher than mine or, apparently, Savvy’s, who offers a “Yeah” to confirm.
There’s another silence. I nudge some dirt in the wet grass with my foot, right as Savvy looks down and does the same. It’s unnerving. It’s why, I realize, we’ve been dancing around the thing we came here to do—we are both breaking a rule by being here. An unspoken one. A rule buried so deep in our past that our parents never even told us it existed. It has strange power over us even now, standing right in front of each other with the proof that we’re both real.
“I, uh—my dad’s gonna text soon. He’s finishing up some stuff down the street.”
I wince as soon as I say it: my dad. Because he’s not my dad, is he? Technically he’s our dad. And only then does the weirdness feel less abstract and more solid, like some barrier in between us we can both touch.
Savvy nods. “Do you want to sit?”
I eye the bench, knowing if I let that happen the ringing in my brain is going to go full scream. “We could walk on the path around the lake?”
Savvy seems relieved. “Yeah.”
“I’ll kick it here with Rufus,” says Mickey, with a wink. “Try to figure out who the heck he robbed of their SPF sixty.”
I’ve known Mickey for all of two seconds, but as we take off on the overly crowded gravel path, I somehow genuinely miss her. My throat feels drier than the griptape on top of my skateboard, my palms sweaty enough that I might have just emerged like some creature from the algae overgrowth in the lake. I feel—not myself. Not the person I usually am, whoever she is. I’ve never had to think about it before, never had anything to measure myself by, and now there’s this walking, talking, Instagram of a measuring stick, some new way to define myself that there’s never been before.
We’re quiet as we put some distance between us and the rest of the people on the path. She leads like it’s second nature, but when she checks back to make sure I’m still behind her, the unease brewing in her is clear. I wonder if it’s the same for her as it is for me—the strangeness of feeling like I’m looking at some other version of myself, and the sudden dread that I’m not sure I like it much at all.
four
“So,” Savvy starts.
I laugh this nervous laugh I’ve never laughed before. “So.”
I can’t look at her, but I’m also looking right at her. My eyes are on her and around her, everywhere and nowhere at once. The me and the not-me of her. I can’t decide what’s weirder, the parts of her I recognize or the parts that I don’t.
She diverts off the path unexpectedly, grabbing someone’s mucked-up, abandoned water bottle, and stalks off to the recycling can. I stand there, not sure if I was meant to follow, but she doesn’t look back.
“That was going to bother me,” she says by way of explanation when she gets back.
Even in this short amount of time I am starting to get a taste for Savvy’s world—or at least, the world as Savvy makes it. Clean. Precise. Controlled. A lot of things that I most certainly am not.
“I’ll start,” she says, with the air of someone used to taking charge of situations. “I guess I should say that I’ve always known I was adopted.”
We’re walking, but her eyes are steady on me, making it clear I have her full and undivided attention. Just from her three seconds of prolonged eye contact it’s clear she is not a person who does anything in halves—when she’s focused on me, she is focused, only pausing to get out of the way of cyclists and kids on Razor scooters.