You Have a Match(20)

Leo’s mouth opens, surprised. “You remember.”

Even if my knees weren’t threatening to knock into each other, I wouldn’t know how to respond to that. I remember? Every excruciating second of it is tattooed so permanently to my consciousness that I’m pretty sure it’s the last thing I’ll see before I die.

“Uh, yeah.”

“When we almost—”

“When I almost—”

“Sorry,” we both blurt. I try to take a step back and the stupid boat lurches and I stumble forward. Leo reaches out in case he has to catch me, and when he doesn’t my eyes fly up right into his and snap like a key fitting into a lock.

“It’s okay. That was back in the Day,” he says, trying to be cheeky. “I got over it.”

I blink at him, but the spell is already broken. “You … got over it?”

He reaches up and scratches the back of his head, sheepish. “I mean—we both did, right?” he says, the words coming too fast.

“Right,” I whisper.

But nothing feels right, not with the words I got over it pinballing all over my brain. Did he mean the embarrassment? Or could he have meant something else?

I pivot toward the doors that lead to the front of the boat. I turn my head, nodding for him to follow, and when I catch his eye it hitches some part of me and holds me there. The Leo-shaped ache in me I have tried every way I can think of to ignore, humming louder than ever, pushing me to open my mouth and say something.

But even if Leo liked me at one point, he liked me, past tense. As in, not anymore. And if that were true, it would mean Connie deliberately lied to me.

No. Connie wouldn’t lie to me, especially not about something as important as this.

“Did you know there was this baby orca, like years and years ago, that got separated from its pod and just followed the ferries around all day? They named her Springer.”

Leo is starting to talk really fast in that way he does just before what Connie calls one of Leo’s “information dumps,” which is basically when he shakes his brain and an encyclopedia falls out. Except this time, it’s less Leo geeking out and more Leo freaking out, desperate to fill the awkwardness with something else.

So I listen. The wind is whipping at our faces, blowing my curls out in every direction and into my mouth, tousling Leo’s hair over his face. Soon the boat slows to a crawl, and I close my eyes and make a promise to myself. No matter what happens, by the end of this summer, I am going to get over Leo. I am going to learn to be just his friend again, for Leo’s sake, and for Connie’s, but most of all, for mine. What Savvy and I are doing may have us in way over our heads, but this I can manage.

I turn to face him, buoyed with resolve, almost relieved. It’ll be like exposure therapy—Leo on Leo on Leo until I’m so sick of him that it’ll be like that week we ate leftovers of the Number Twelve from Spiro’s every day for two weeks and never wanted to look at a pineapple on a pizza again. By the end of camp, Leo will be pineapples, and I will be free.

“Where’s Springer now?” I ask.

“She has two calves, and she’s chilling with a pod in Vancouver,” says Leo, his cheeks flushed, either from relief or the wind. “You’ll have to settle for a shot of a less famous orca this summer.”

Leo searches my face, an anxious almost-smile on his. I smile back and push the back of my shoulder into his chest. “Unless you tell anyone my middle name is Eugenia. Then I won’t be taking photos, I’ll be feeding you to them.”

Leo tweaks me on the side, hard enough that I yelp and end up stumbling straight back into him. There is this arresting moment of heat, his front against my back, some want that rises up in me faster than the waves lapping against the shore. I turn my head to meet his eye, but he grabs me by both shoulders and whips me around so fast that I gasp out a laugh, one he meets with a smile inches from my face, close enough that it feels like a current shocked us both.

It’s lighting up his eyes, and when he leans in, they are the only thing I see. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

I don’t know what game Leo is trying to play here, but I’d kill for some pineapple right now.





six




Camp Reynolds is a scam.

And for the record, so is Savvy.

It starts out okay, if awkward. After the ferry lets us off, Leo heads into a van with other staff members, and a counselor helps the rest of us smush ourselves onto a bus. It becomes evident in the first ten seconds of being on said bus that of the actual campers, I might be the oldest one here. While I knew it was going to be rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors, from here it just looks like a bunch of babies.

Like a bunch of painfully smart babies.

Like, “look at this cool thing I just programmed my graphing calculator to do” levels of smart babies, which is a thing happening in the front row of this bus that has attracted so much attention that the driver tells everyone to sit back down before the nerdy mosh pit tilts us into a ditch.

I tell myself to relax. I probably won’t be in sessions with them. There are different tracks in the “Reynolds method”—kids prepping for AP classes next year like these probably are, and kids like me who are prepping for the SATs. With any luck, they’re hiding around here somewhere or ended up on a different, much less math-inclined bus.