You Have a Match(25)

“Leo,” I bleat. He’s supposed to be done for the night. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey, man,” says Finn, talking over me. Well, not really. My voice is so small I can barely hear it. “How’s it—”

“What did you just…” He stops, seeing the look on my face, and recalibrates. Even in this moment, when he has full license to be mad, he’s thinking of my feelings instead of his own—but he can’t keep it out of his voice, a hurt so quiet and deep that it breaks my heart. “You came here because of Savvy.”

His eyes lock on mine, with an intensity that makes it feel like every living thing in the cafeteria has crushed to a halt. Even Finn’s mouth snaps shut, and he takes a step back like he’s trying to get out of the way of whatever is happening in the ten feet of space between us.

“And now you’re leaving?”

“I was going to come find you and explain,” I say in a rush.

I brace myself for Leo to ask for an explanation, but what happens instead is worse. He just kind of deflates, and his eyes wander away from mine, toward the back exit.

“Leo, wait.”

He doesn’t. Finn cocks his head toward the door, a silent Go.

I don’t hesitate, running through the kitchens even though I was explicitly told not to run through the kitchen, along with approximately one bajillion other rules that Victoria warned me about before dinner. But when I stumble out into the campground, a thick fog has rolled over the island, just barely broken up by the guiding lights between the cabins overhead. The back of the kitchens spits me right out into a main fork diverging in five different directions, and I don’t see the back of Leo in a single one.

I want to pick one and run down it, on the off chance that I’ll pick the right one and catch him, but that’s the thing. I can outrun him, maybe, but I can’t outrun whatever just happened back there. At this point I don’t even know if I can keep up with myself.





eight




“Uh, Abs, not that it isn’t great to hear from you … but it’s almost two o’clock in Italy, and according to math, that makes it the buttcrack of dawn in Seattle.”

I cringe, holding the phone closer to my ear and shifting to avoid the gaze of the camp employee who reluctantly let me into the main office after I stood outside it like a lost dog. “It’s five in the morning,” I tell Connie sheepishly.

“That’s just unholy. What have they done to you?”

The truth is, I was calling with every intention of asking her about Leo and dissecting the conversation she had with him all those months ago. But as soon as I hear her voice on the other end, the rest comes spilling out of me too fast for the question to catch up.

“Connie, you’re not gonna believe this. But Leo’s here. Apparently this is Camp Evergreen with some new name. I ran into him on the freaking ferry.”

“Wait, what?”

“He’s known Savvy his whole life—”

“Wait, what?”

“—except now he’s furious with me—”

“Uh, back up here—”

“Not that it even matters, because I’m busting out of here as soon as it’s late enough for me to call my parents. Eight in the morning is probably the sweet spot—”

“Abby. Abby. Hold on. I’m going to … take a very large bite of this sfogliatelle,” she says, in perfect Italian because it is, after all, Connie, who achieved near fluency for kicks over the past semester. “Then I am going to chew and process everything you just said.”

After several seconds of chewing, she clears her throat and says, “Okay, first of all, extreme jealousy that you guys get to spend the summer together without me aside, please explain why Leo is mad? I didn’t think he had a barometer for anger much higher than a puppy.”

I blow out a breath and watch it fog up the office window. “I … might have forgotten to tell him about Savvy.”

A moment passes. “You forgot?”

Which is to say, she’s not buying it, the same way Leo probably won’t either.

“I’m a jerk,” I say, so I won’t have to go into it.

“You’re not a jerk. A cautionary tale on conflict avoidance, maybe, but not a jerk.”

“No, I am.” I sink into one of the chairs and prop my head on the back of it. “Even Savvy hates me. I’ve pissed off one of my best friends and my secret sister, and I haven’t even been here a full day. I’m going home.”

“Wait a minute. So you’re telling me you hacked into every form of communication your parents own and came all the way out there, and now you’re just gonna give up?”

Oh boy. Here comes one of Connie’s famous pep talks. I brace myself, even though I expected one. I wouldn’t have called if I hadn’t.

“I mean … I wanted to know what happened with our parents. But not enough to torture myself for the next four weeks.”

“First of all, forget your parents,” says Connie, without missing a beat. “That girl is your damn sister. Do you know how much I’ve always wanted one of those?”

Connie spent most of our childhood asking her parents for a sibling, pleas that usually reached a fever pitch whenever another one of my brothers was born. Whenever someone mistook us for sisters it was the highlight of her week. As soon as we were allowed to roam the mall by ourselves Connie was always trying to play the sister card—Can I get a dressing room next to my sister? or My sister’s saving us seats over there. It was fun, both because it was a game and because Connie really is like a sister to me. But to Connie it was less of a game and more like wishful thinking.