You Have a Match(28)

For once in my short time of knowing him, Finn goes quiet.

“Well, Camp Not-So-Evergreen-After-All sucks, but it’s not like I had anywhere else to be,” he says after a pause, in a tone that’s a little too casual. “Besides, I was clearly meant to come here and unravel this nonsense for you.”

We’ve reached the end of the campgrounds. I turn back, but nobody’s watching us. I take the opportunity to pull a pack of gum out of my back pocket and shove a stick of it in my mouth.

“How good are you at climbing trees?” Finn asks.

I think of all the things I have scaled in my lifetime, from trees to the electrician’s van to the literal roof of our school, all in pursuit of a good angle for a shot. “Too good. Why?”

“Because we have to climb one if we’re going to talk to the ghost.”

This is probably the part where I should turn around and leave Finn and his minor league delusions to himself.

“Plus, sick view,” he says, making a camera gesture with his fingers and a clicking noise with his tongue. He must have seen me fiddling with Kitty at breakfast. “Bet you haven’t gotten a good shot since you got here.”

Okay, he’s got me on that. Even if we get busted, at least I might get a few good landscapes of the island and the water before they toss us out. I pat my backpack, checking to make sure Kitty’s relatively secure, and let Finn lead the way.

“So basically, some girl bit it at camp in like, the fifties or something. Don’t google it, it definitely happened. She was climbing a tree and fell and broke like, all of her bones.”

“I thought you were going to solve my problems, not make more of them.”

“We’re not going to the tree she fell off of; they chopped it down. We’re going to the one next to where it used to be. The Wishing Tree. You climb it and make a wish and—”

“Fall to your untimely death?”

“Gaby, the ghost who haunts the camp, makes it come true.”

He says this matter-of-factly, leading us through the thick, root-tangled path that spits out to a clearing before I can wonder too much if he’s really a serial killer disguised as an overgrown Labrador. Sure enough, there’s a tree in the middle of it—thick trunked and squat, bursting with solid branches, looking about as climbable as a tree can look. For a second I forget about everything else, itching to get my hands on the rough bark, to see how fast and high I can climb.

“Well, my only wish is to get out of here.”

“Nah. You came here for a reason,” says Finn, touching the tree. “And I brought you here because I’m bored and I want to know the reason.”

“I told you.” Not by any means intentionally, of course.

“Yeah, I’m going to need a heck of a lot more to go on than that.”

Instead of answering I start to climb, reaching out for a thick branch and curling my fingers around the damp bark, losing myself in the satisfaction of pulling myself up and up and up. The tree is so well-traveled that I can almost feel the grooves of where other campers must have climbed. Sure enough, the higher we get, the more we see little carvings faded into the bark: sets of initials, little sentiments, tiny shapes. And at the top, a miniature, paint-chipped signpost nailed to the tree with three fading words: MAKE A WISH.

I settle there and breathe in the view—layers on layers of wilderness, thick trees that give way to rocky beach then the pale blue of the water, the heavy white of the fog. Finn is talking as he works his way up, more cautious than I am, but I can’t hear him over the endless sky.

Eventually he’s close enough that I hear him say, “Told you. Stick with me this summer, Bubbles, and I’ll get you the best views this place has to offer.”

I’m already peering through Kitty when he says it, holding her lens cap between my teeth and using my other arm to brace myself to the tree. I take a few shots that may or may not turn out—I may have about as much regard for my mortality as a Looney Tune, but even I’m not stupid enough to test my luck by scrolling through or trying to adjust the lens.

“Guess the photography thing runs in the family, huh?” he asks.

I hum to acknowledge him, taking a few more shots. “I like to be behind the camera, not in front of it.”

Finn lets out a soft laugh. One that makes me wonder if, for all his goading about this tree, he might not be so great with heights.

“Must be weird to see someone get famous with your own face, huh?”

I wrinkle my nose. “She looks nothing like me.”

“Eh, you might not be clones, but you’re definitely Savvy-esque. And look, I don’t know how long you’ve actually known her, but she’s chill. You know, under the whole compulsive-goody-two-shoes, aggressive-hashtagging, pulling-the-ugly-leaf-out-of-her-salad-so-it-photographs-well bit.”

He waits, like I’m going to talk over him. The truth is, I don’t know enough about her to try.

“But she’s also like, not only the friend you call at midnight when your car tire blows. She’s the friend you call when someone Matt Damons you and leaves you in a war zone or on Mars. She’d do anything for people she cares about.”

It’s not that I don’t believe him. I do. Savvy is as intense as they come, and I can easily see that bleeding into the way she takes care of her friends.