You Have a Match(29)

The trouble is, I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them.

“Also, you know her parents are ‘donated a building to the Seattle Center’ level of rich, right? Most of the profits from her Instagram go to charity. She’s out there doing the most because she really wants to help people. Even considering the obscene amount of green juice she has thrust on me, you gotta respect that hustle.”

I have this impulse to defend myself, but I guess Finn is Savvy’s friend, not mine. I swallow it down and say, “So you’ve known her a long time.”

“Since the beginning, basically,” says Finn, leaning farther into the tree trunk to be a little closer to me. “Me, Savvy, Mickey, and Leo.”

It’s weird hearing Leo’s name tacked on to theirs. I try to think of all the times Leo may have casually mentioned Savvy, but it’s too eerie. Our shared DNA aside, there’s this sense Savvy and I have been on parallel paths—living in the same area, dragging our cameras everywhere, sharing Leo—but even now, having met her and knowing what we know, it still feels impossible for our worlds to touch.

“You’re Abby, right? Of Abby-and-Connie lore?”

“What makes you so sure I’m Abby and not Connie?”

“Cuz he tags an ‘Abby’ to credit all those pictures you take for his foodie Instagram.” He glances down at the ground, this little pulse of nervousness, and back at me. “Also he was super upset when—well, you were the one whose grandpa died last summer, right?”

My face is so red I pull my camera away from it like my cheeks might set it on fire. “Yeah?”

“Sorry,” says Finn, forgetting for a second to be terrified of the height. “I mean—it sounded like you were close, the way Leo was talking about it.”

“We were.”

I don’t know what it is about being up this high that makes the ache come back, somehow even fresher than it was in the weeks after he died. Maybe because it was around this time last year that my parents started preparing us to lose him. I’d known he was getting weaker—we spent so much time together that I probably understood how much before my parents did—but last summer it was this blur of visiting hospitals and murmuring about pneumonia and my uncle coming into town. This summer I can look clearly back on it and it’s not a blur, but a definitive line. A world where Poppy was here, and a world where he isn’t.

It’s selfish to think I lost more of him than everyone else, but I had more of him. I had his stories about traveling the world after serving in Vietnam, getting into hijinks across Europe and taking pictures of everything along the way. I had that settled, thoughtful quiet of his, the kind too many people mistook for disinterest, but I knew always had some valuable thought on the other side of it if I only waited long enough. I had full rein of him in a way my brothers, or even, I think, my mom never did—I don’t think I ever asked him a question he didn’t have an answer for.

I wish more than anything I could ask him something now. I was prepared to lose him, maybe. But I wasn’t prepared for what happens after the losing.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

I wave him off. “It’s fine. Really.”

The two of us sit there, breathing in the damp morning air.

“Anyway, that’s my two cents on Sav, take it or leave it,” Finn finally says. He taps the little sign at the top of the tree. “But we came up here for a reason.”

With that, he closes his eyes, abruptly ending the conversation. I stare at him, waiting for the punch line, but he seems like he’s seriously projecting wishes at some dead girl who apparently won’t take receipts unless you’re more than twenty feet above sea level.

I let out a sigh, popping my camera lens back on. I’m all the way up here. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I close my eyes, feeling stupid, trying to think of a wish. I wish I hadn’t come here. Unhelpful, but true. I wish Savvy liked me. I open my eyes, mad at myself for even thinking it, and they immediately sting and tear up. Even more unhelpful, but also true. I wish …

My throat aches, and I stare out at the fog, at the place in the distance where I should be able to see the suburbs beyond it. Most of the things I could wish for I can’t have. It’s big stuff, like how I wish Poppy were still here and we weren’t selling Bean Well. Or medium stuff, like I didn’t worry so much about where I stand with Leo and Connie, or I wasn’t one ping in my parents’ inbox away from get busted for skipping out on summer school. Or stuff that wells up in me from some place I can usually keep quiet—I wish I were old enough to do whatever I wanted, to go out and take photographs all over the world instead of the same sleepy suburb over and over and over again.

I wish I didn’t feel like a problem my parents had to solve.

And, reluctantly, something that is maybe less of a wish and more of a confession: I wish I knew why they never told me about Savvy. I wish I knew why they lied. I wish I didn’t care, like I’ve been telling myself I don’t since our spat, because caring will make it that much harder to walk away from.

I hide my face behind the camera’s viewfinder. That’s enough wishing for the day. Otherwise the ghost is going to shove me off the tree for whining and I’ll have to pick my own part of the woods to haunt.

“What are you wishing for?” I ask instead.