You Have a Match(14)

There it is—the thing that’s been irking me under the surface since I first got here. That she never even bothered to explain her whole Instagram hustle, because she already knows that I know. Because she already assumes I’ve sunk time into her, clicking on her Purina spon con, zooming in on her earth bowls, staring at her mountain of birthday balloons.

And worst of all, because she’s exactly right.

She turns away from me, back toward the lake. “You’ll have to make a living eventually,” she says, shrugging like she isn’t as bothered as she clearly is. “Shouldn’t you be doing what you love?”

Jesus. I came here looking for an ally, and instead I managed to find the least-teenagery teenage girl in all of Seattle. My eyes are stinging like some dumb little kid’s, the disappointment so misplaced in me that I don’t know how to let it out, except—

“You love posing with water bottles in a bunch of spandex?”

Shit.

Her mouth forms a tight line once more, her head whipping toward me so fast that her ponytail makes a little snap, whipping in the muggy air. I freeze, not sure which one of us is more stunned by it, her or me.

I open my mouth to apologize, but Savvy turns away before I can, looking back at the quacking toddlers. Their squawks have reached a fever pitch, the kind of frenzy that I know from way too much experience with my brothers is going to end in either a fit of giggles or one of them in tears.

“So, no secret duck kingdom?” Savvy asks, as if the last minute didn’t even happen.

My relief makes my limbs feel heavy, makes me want to sit in the grass or maybe just shove my face into it and stop myself from saying anything that might muck it up again. I’m not used to the back-and-forth of meeting someone new, of trying to suss each other out. I’ve gone to school with the same kids and been best friends with the same two people my whole life. This would be weird even if she didn’t share all my DNA.

“Not even a duck dynasty,” I say, which earns me a groan.

“Shame,” she says, glancing over. “My mom always told me there was a whole duck kingdom. Like with its own government and a ruler and everything. She called her—”

“Queen Quack,” we say at the same time.

I blink at her, at the question in her eyes. “That’s what my mom told me,” I say.

Savvy considers this. “I always thought that was something my mom made up.”

My voice is small when I answer. “Me too.”

Savvy blows out a breath, and the two of us stare out at the cluster of trees in the middle of the lake, sharing the same pace but remembering a different time.

“This is weird,” says Savvy. “But do you think our parents knew each other?”

I frown. One “Queen Quack” does not a conspiracy theory make. “I mean…”

But as I stare out at the water, the slight breeze lapping it to the edges of the lake, I realize it’s the only part of this senselessness that makes sense. It may be near impossible to imagine my parents giving up a kid born only a year and a half before I was, but it’s even harder to imagine them giving her to strangers.

Savvy pulls out her phone and in an instant has a photo pulled up. It’s from a holiday card, taken in front of the giant Christmas tree in Bell Square, shoppers milling all around them. Hugging Savvy between them are a man and a woman with pristine posture but kind eyes and warm smiles, dressed in sleek khakis and cashmere knits. They look like a Hallmark card, but in a good way. In a way that you just kind of know if they invited you over for dinner they’d put more food on your plate without asking and hug you extra hard at the door.

“That’s us,” says Savvy.

I’m about to say something dumb—a comment about how she looks like them that is guaranteed to wreck the moment—but then I take the screen from her, zooming in on her mom.

“Wait. I’ve seen her.”

“She teaches art classes. Maybe—”

“No, in photos. Wait. Hold on. Hold on.”

Savvy takes her phone from me and rocks back on her heels, as if to say, Where else am I gonna go?

It takes me a second to figure out how to access the Dropbox where we’ve been dumping the files for our big end-of-semester Honors Anthropology project. The one that nudged Leo into taking the DNA test, that pulled us all into it with him and led to this.

I found a photo of my parents’ wedding in a shoebox tucked into the basement closet. The picture I took of it loads on my phone, and there they are, my parents in all their late-nineties glory. My mom is in a plain white dress with hair large enough for small objects to get caught in its orbit, and my dad is in a suit beaming and so bony that he looks more like a kid than someone who’s about to be a parent.

And there, in the middle, is the family friend who officiated the ceremony.

I look over at Savvy to ask the obvious question, but her eyes have bugged out looking at my phone screen. It’s her mom.

“The year,” she says, seeing the date in the corner of the photo. “That’s before either of us was born.”

My heart feels like it’s beating in my throat. Our eyes connect with such immediacy that the force of it is like a thunderclap. Even as every part of me is trying to reject the truth, the two of us stare at each other with a sudden understanding: Something big happened here. Something much bigger than we could have imagined.