You Have a Match(36)

“Well,” she says wryly, “seeing as we are on the edge of a very steep ledge right now, it seems unwise to say no.”

I let out a laugh and pluck her camera off the tripod. I’m momentarily thrown off by the lack of viewfinder—I’ve been using Poppy’s older model more often this past week.

“Say ‘spon con.’”

Savvy looks a little miserable about it but turns and sees we’re in the endgame of prime sunrise and doesn’t waste any more time. In the second it takes for me to blink she’s kicked up one graceful leg behind her, pulled it up with one arm, and extended her other out to the sky, like a lithe Fabletics-clad sky dancer. She’s intentionally framed it so the sun will peek out in the circle she’s made with the arm holding on to her leg, and so I lean a fraction of an inch down to get it dead center.

“That oughta do it,” I say after a few shots.

“Thanks,” she says sheepishly. I brace myself for her to go through the shots when I hand the camera back, but she doesn’t. Like she trusts my ability. It feels nice—or at least it does until she turns and says, “Just so you know, this whole thing … being a junior counselor. I didn’t think it would be this weird, or I would have said something.”

I pause, holding my camera to my face, finger resting on the shutter. “Maybe you wouldn’t have invited me, you mean?”

She clears her throat, taking a step back. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m not—I don’t like bossing people around.”

I pull my camera away from my face to raise my eyebrows at her, somewhat at my own peril. It earns me a slight smirk.

“Okay, that much,” she amends. She shuffles her feet in the grass, still barefoot from the pose. Rufus is rolling around a few feet away with the black sneakers of Savanatics lore. “Look—I only want to do a good job. This place is important to me, and I … I want to do it justice.”

“Fair enough,” I say.

She accepts it with a nod, and we fall into an uneasy quiet. Now that we’re actually talking we can’t justify putting off what we came here to do—talk about our parents. I brace myself, and we stare at each other, playing a game of chicken over who will bring it up first. In the end, we both swerve.

“Your camera,” she says. “I’ve never seen one like that before.”

“It’s old as hell, is probably why.” I offer it to her, and she takes it, peering into the viewfinder. She seems so genuinely interested that before I can think the better of it, I add, “It was my grandpa’s.”

It’s the first time it has crossed my mind that my grandparents were also biologically hers. Poppy probably knew about her. It wasn’t just my parents lying to me—Poppy must have, too.

It hits me in an unexpected place, one I didn’t even think could be hit. I almost wish I hadn’t said anything. Or at least that I hadn’t said it in the past tense.

She hands the camera back more carefully than she took it. “Is he the one who got you into photography?”

“Yeah,” I say, relieved that she didn’t bring it up. It’s not that I don’t want to share Poppy with her. I just don’t know if I’d be able to do him justice. It’s hard to describe someone when you feel less of what they were and more of what they aren’t anymore. “We used to take little road trips. Go on hikes. Nothing too far from home.” Nothing like this, I almost say, and feel like a traitor.

“That must have been nice.”

She doesn’t say it in that throwaway way you do to be polite, but like she means it. It makes me feel bold enough to ask a question of my own.

“How about you? How’d you get into…” I gesture at the sunrise, to the spot where her limbs went full Play-Doh in the name of social media influencing.

“Instagram?” she asks. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always—I mean, my parents, they’re pretty into, like, health stuff. Like, borderline paranoid.”

I hold myself back from blurting, You don’t say.

“So I guess I’ve just always been a part of the whole wellness world.”

“Wellness?” I don’t mean it to sound doubtful. I’m actually curious.

“You know. Nutrition. Yoga. Meditation,” says Savvy, moving to sit in the grass next to Rufus. “Stuff I hated as a kid, but like, I get now. I think of it as a toolkit for dealing with stress, you know? And it’s easier to understand, maybe—or at least a little more accessible to people—with Instagram making it pretty, breaking it down into easier steps. It doesn’t seem as isolating or hard.”

It’s what Finn was trying to tell me. Savvy is legitimately into this whole scene to help people. And it’s one thing to believe him, but it’s another to see the proof in the way she talks about it—her words coming out a little faster, unintentional and unplanned.

“Anyway, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Savvy adds. “Make it fun. Me and Mickey, I mean. It was her idea to turn it into an Instagram account in the first place. We started it here a few summers back.”

She says it with this kind of wistfulness, like Mickey’s far away instead of right down the trail, no doubt arguing with Leo over which fruit they’re going to put into this morning’s muffins. I think about the conversation we accidentally dropped a ton of eaves on last night—Mickey literally has nothing to do with this.