You Have a Match(13)

She’s right. Given the island’s status as a sanctuary, there’s a big old human ban slapped on signs all over the park. But kids and kayakers are roaming around it all the time. If Green Lake has any kind of authoritative body stopping people from doing it, I sure as heck have never seen them.

“I know,” I say quickly. “But we were super careful. Barely even got off the boat.”

“Then what’s the point?”

I lift up Poppy’s old camera, which I’ve swapped out for Kitty today. I don’t do it often, given my less-than-stellar track record for keeping things intact, but sometimes I need a piece of him with me. It feels like a talisman, the weight of it steadying me when it’s around my neck.

“The view,” I tell her sheepishly, because it feels slightly less dorky than I wanted to stalk some birds.

Her lips form a tight line and it looks so much like a face my dad makes that I’m bracing myself for a lecture, but she holds out her hand. “Can I see?”

“Huh?”

Savvy juts her chin toward the mass of trees in the middle of the lake. “Duck Island.”

“Oh. I don’t…”

Show people my photos, I almost say. But as embarrassed as I am about someone seeing my photos, I am somehow more embarrassed about confessing it.

She tilts her head at me, misinterpreting my hesitation. “You didn’t post them?”

“Oh,” I say, to stall for time. Time to figure out how I’m going to gracefully tell her that she may be allowed to share all my DNA, but she is not allowed to see photos I took on my camera. “Maybe.”

She gestures impatiently for me to hand my phone over, and I’m too overwhelmed not to. Besides, this is what I wanted, wasn’t it? Someone I could trust with this kind of thing. And even though Savvy is a lot of things I didn’t expect, she could still be that someone, if I give her the chance.

“Hold on. It’s, uh…”

I try to remember the Instagram handle Leo gave me. He was so proud of the pun. Something about saving things. Something about my last name. Something about …

The words aren’t there, but Leo’s face is—the way he was beaming on my fifteenth birthday, that August afternoon when he’d finally gotten back from camp and Connie had gotten back from a trip and we were all sweating profusely and slurping our Big League Milkshake Mashes from our perch at Richmond Beach. He took my phone from me, his dark eyes trained on mine, a rare sliver of sun poking through the fog and lighting up the bronze of his face.

“It’s not a real gift. It’s kinda dumb. Anyway—you can change the username, if you want—”

“Just show her already, you dope,” said Connie, yanking the phone from him and putting it in my hands.

“Right. So. You know how some of my camp friends made Instagrams for our stuff? Don’t be creeped out, but I took some photos off your camera. I wanted to find a way to save them, and…”

There it is, unearthed from somewhere in my brain: @savingtheabbyday.

I pull it up and hand it to Savvy without looking at it. She thumbs the screen and her eyebrows lift, looking genuinely impressed.

“You took these?”

Maybe I should be offended by the surprise in her voice, but I’m too busy being humiliated that my Instagram probably looks like a bird-watching society threw up on it. “Yeah.”

“These are really great,” she says, lingering on one of my favorites—a sparrow with its beak open, mid-crow, its wings poised in the second right before it took flight. I practically had to stop breathing for a full minute to get that shot, anticipating every shudder of her little bird body, waiting for the perfect moment. “You could monetize this.”

I nearly choke on my own spit trying not to laugh. “Nah,” I say, taking the phone back from her.

“No, really,” Savvy pushes. “This is the kind of stuff you could sell to local papers, to gift shops, the whole nine yards. Why not look into it? What’ve you got to lose?”

Everything, I almost say, even though it’s bordering on melodramatic and definitely veering into teenage cliché. Even if I weren’t mortally terrified at the idea of people looking through my lens, photography is the only thing that’s mine. No teacher telling me I’m doing it the wrong way, no parents asking about it while exchanging super unsubtle glances at the dinner table. Nobody calling the figurative or literal shots but me.

“I couldn’t … I don’t want to be like that,” I say, which is easier than saying I’m scared.

“Like what?” she asks sharply.

“Like—I don’t know.” She’s watching me with her eyes narrowed, and just like that I’m sweating again. Not only my hands, but my entire stupid body, like a one-girl geyser. “I—I don’t really care about Instagram or all the other noise. I do this for fun.”

Holy Duck Island, do I need to shut up. She goes stiff, and it’s clear I haven’t just put my foot in my mouth, but swallowed it. The more she stares, the more the circuits in my brain start to fire unhelpfully, trying to fix the stupid words I said with more stupid words, like I’m piling up a stupid word sandwich.

“I think monetizing it might wreck it.”

Savvy takes a breath and chooses her answer carefully. “I’m not miserable just because I’m making money.”