You Have a Match(24)

“Doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “I’m out of here tomorrow.”

“Uh, come again?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Huh,” says Finn, propping himself up on the counter and taking his sweet time with the whole dish-drying thing. “So what’s the plan, then? Hike up the two-mile-long hill to the main road and stick your thumb out until a local takes pity on you? Or swim back to the mainland and hitch a ride on a fish?”

I only tell him because I’m still working up the nerve to go through with it. Saying it out loud makes it less terrifying. “I’m calling my parents.”

“Yowza. That bad?” he asks. “Listen, Savvy’s all bark and no bite, so if that’s what’s got your Camp Reynolds hoodie in a twist—”

“I didn’t even want to be here in the first place.”

Only now that I’ve said it do I realize how true it is. Even before I accidentally blew up my own spot and earned myself top billing on Savvy’s shit list, I haven’t been able to squash my uneasiness—the sense that so many things I thought I knew are falling apart, and I’m not even there to watch them crash. My parents have been lying to me about Savvy. Connie might have lied to me about Leo. And the distance between me and them only seems to magnify the weirdness of it ten times more than if I were home.

It would be easier to leave. To pretend the last twenty-four hours never happened. Nobody would have to get angry, nobody would get hurt.

“What brought you here, then?” Finn asks. “Are you one of those SAT score chasers, the Stanford-or-bust type?”

“Exact opposite.”

“So you’re a Savvy stan?”

I wrinkle my nose. “She wishes.”

Finn manages to finish drying exactly one dish. I go ahead and hold my applause. “Gotta say, I’m impressed—usually it takes a lot longer than three seconds to get under Savvy’s skin.”

“Guess I’m an overachiever after all.”

“You know, it’d be a shame if you left now.”

I’m supposed to ask him why, but I really, really don’t care what he has to say. The only thing I care about is doing these dishes, finding Leo to explain this whole mess, and doing whatever I can to get the first ferry off this island in the morning.

“It’s just that, without Wi-Fi decent enough to stream more than twenty seconds of Netflix, your little spat is the closest thing to binge-worthy entertainment we’ve got.”

I roll my eyes.

“What makes it funnier is you guys weirdly look alike. More than any of her Savanatics.” Finn pauses, somehow making even less progress drying his second plate. At this rate we’ll be here all night. “I mean, it’s uncanny. Even that ‘shut up, Finn, you’re driving me nuts’ face you’re making right now is spot-on Sav—”

“Of course it is,” I blurt. “She’s my stupid sister.”

I maybe had half a chance of playing that off as a bad joke if I hadn’t punctuated it by accidentally dropping the plate in my hands, freezing as it bounces off the rubber part of the kitchen floor and cracks on the tiles under the sink. I lean down to pick it up, and when I rise, Finn is staring at me with his mouth wide open.

“Holy shit.”

I turn away from him to put the broken plate pieces in the trash. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like Savvy and I pinky-swore or made some kind of blood oath that we wouldn’t tell anyone.

“Okay, okay, back up, Bubbles. Savvy’s adopted.”

Ignore him. Ignore him and he’ll go away.

“So you’re, what? Her half sister?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, is what I am.”

“How’d you find her? Did you stalk her here?” His eyes are alight, loving every minute of this. He’s on board with the weirdness that is my family so fast I’m struggling to keep up, and it’s my damn life. “Are you single white female–ing your own flesh and blood?”

That earns him a snort, only because I couldn’t want to be less like Savvy and her stupid rules if I tried.

Finn prattles on like he’s writing the next great book-turned-HBO-murder-mystery-miniseries. “You are. And she doesn’t even know you’re here, does she? She’s just minding her business, Instagramming her juices, and there you are lurking in the—”

“She asked me to come here.” I round on him so unexpectedly that he takes an exaggerated, comical step back, putting his hands up in surrender. “She’s my full-blooded sister, by the way, and she reached out to me. She’s the one who wants to figure out why our parents didn’t tell us about each other, and she’s the one who dragged me into this SAT soul-sucking, bubble-gum-banning bullshit in the first place.” I take a breath, firming the resolve that’s been working its way up in me since this endless dish duty began. “So yeah, I’m leaving. I have no interest in spending the summer feeling like an idiot.”

It’s almost satisfying to see the smug amusement get knocked right off Finn’s face. That is, until I hear the whoosh of the kitchen doors opening and turn to see Leo walking in. He has clearly heard everything. He stands there, his apron in one hand and something wrapped in aluminum foil in the other, and looks at me like I’ve grown an extra limb.