You Have a Match(15)
Something so big that my parents have made a conscious effort to lie to me about it every day for the last sixteen years.
My phone buzzes in my hand, and I give a little jump. The word Dad comes up, and Savvy looks away sharply, like she’s seen something she isn’t allowed to see.
Where r u? Just finished up
“Crap.” I spring away from her, like he’s going to jump out of the bushes. “He’s probably headed over.”
“We’ve got to figure out what happened.”
“Uh, yeah.” I close my eyes, thoughts coming too fast. “I mean, my parents keep me pretty busy, but if you’re around next Sunday, maybe—”
“Next Sunday I leave for summer camp.” Savvy starts backing away from me, the two of us looking like extremely anxious repelling magnets. “Bad service and like, one shared computer for the junior staff. Barely enough Wi-Fi to Skype.”
“Yikes.”
Now that I know about this I’m not sure if I can go the full summer not knowing. We both felt it in that thunderclap of a feeling, the echo of it still humming in between us.
“Even if you were here, I’m gonna be slumming it in the community center getting SAT prep questions beaten into my skull.”
“Come to camp with me.”
It’s not a demand, but not a request, either. She says it the way Connie might—with the weight of shared history, and the expectation that I’ll say yes.
The laugh that bubbles in my chest is borderline hysterical, but it only makes Savvy all the more persistent.
“It’s called Camp Reynolds. You can take an academic track. Half studying, half regular camp. They just started the program this year.”
My mouth drops open. The flyers on my bed. Camp Reynolds. It’s the same one the counselor’s been pushing on me all semester—only the brochure was full of aggressively cheerful stock photo students laughing at their calculators. It looked like nerd jail. Certainly nobody said anything about being let outside.
Savvy falters, mistaking my reaction. For a moment, she isn’t Savannah Tully, Bona Fide Instagram Star With a Bossy Streak, but Savvy, a person who looks every bit as clueless and freaked out as I am.
“Is that ridiculous?” she asks.
It occurs to me that she has a much bigger stake in getting to the bottom of this than I do. If I walk away, nothing in my life has to change. I could pretend I never met her. Go on living this carefully preserved lie that my parents must have had reasons for telling, for guarding all these years.
But even if I could pretend everything was normal, there is something else I can’t shake. One look at that picture of my parents beaming with Savvy’s mom is all it takes to see they must have been closer than just friends—the kind of close I am with Connie and Leo. That inseparable, all-encompassing, ride-or-die kind of close. Which means whatever happened, it must have been catastrophic.
I don’t want to think that could happen to me and Leo and Connie. It’s my worst nightmare come to life.
And there’s that latch again—the need to see it through. To figure out what happened. If not for our parents’ sake, then for my own, because even imagining a world where I don’t speak to Connie and Leo for eighteen years leaves an ache no amount of time could ever heal.
“No more ridiculous than the rest of this.”
Before either of us can overthink it, we swap numbers and dart in opposite directions of the park. My dad, it turns out, is right where I left him, standing in front of Bean Well and looking over some paperwork with his eyebrows puckered. I watch him, trying to find some way to still the tornado in me—the adrenaline thumping in my bones and the sudden guilt that feels like it might crush them.
“Get any good shots?” he asks.
There’s a breath where I think about telling him everything, spilling my guts, if only to get this feeling out of my body and put it somewhere else.
But trying to imagine how that conversation would go just leads to a massive mental roadblock, one that suddenly has Savvy’s face. I don’t know what she is to me, really. At least aside from the literal, biological sense. But whatever it is has taken root in me and is tangled deep.
Then a slithering voice comes unbidden in the back of my head: They lied to me first. If they’re allowed to keep this kind of secret from me my whole life, I sure as hell should be allowed to keep one from them.
“A few,” I tell him.
I worry that he might ask to see them, but he’s uncharacteristically distracted, tucking the paperwork back into a folder and heading toward the car. It occurs to me that my mom should probably be handling the sale—it was her dad’s place, after all—and it reminds me, not without an extra shot of shame in my churning guilt latte, that I’m not the only one who misses Poppy. Nobody wants to sell this place. But there are some things in life you don’t have a choice about.
I wonder what that choice was eighteen years ago.
I feel marginally less like the world’s worst daughter when I mention, on the car ride home, that I’ve been looking into Camp Reynolds and have decided I’m interested in going. My dad perks up and looks so pleased with himself that my guilt only seems to get bigger, like every time I try to kill a cell of it, it divides and gets twice as big as it was before.
“It really does sound fun,” says my dad, glancing over.