You Have a Match(50)
He tries to meet my eye, but I don’t let him. I’m afraid of what he’ll see. Afraid of what he won’t.
Savvy shakes her head just beyond us, somehow tangling the sweater even more. “You know what she said?” she tells Mickey. “Why she’s not coming this weekend? Because apparently I messed up by scheduling it in pink instead of green, and— Oh.”
Whatever is happening, every single person in a ten-foot radius of us catches on before I do, because I have to follow their stricken looks to the source—a girl so tall, pale, and ethereal that I might never stop staring if her eyes didn’t look like they could cook me into charred Abby meat within a second of making contact.
Still, it doesn’t connect. Not the silence, or the way the girl looks laughably out of place in a pair of loafers and a plaid pantsuit, or even how Mickey has put so much distance between herself and Savvy in the time it took for me to blink that she might have teleported next to me.
“Jo?” Savvy manages.
Jo’s eyes narrow, stark and blue and seething. “Surprise,” she says. The sarcasm doesn’t do anything to mask the hurt.
“I’m— Shit.” Savvy straightens up, pulling off the sweater. “Jo, wait.”
“Save it,” Jo mutters, stalking off toward the parking lot in front of the main camp building. Savvy follows her, barefoot and shivering, not saying a word.
Mickey presses a pair of black sneakers into my hands. “She needs these,” she tells me.
I glance over, wondering why she’s given them to me, but she’s staring so determinedly at the shoes and not at any of us that I know better than to ask. I take them and she sets off in the opposite direction, leaving me on the shore with a pit of dread so low and distinct in my stomach, it seems impossible that Savvy’s problems haven’t always been tangled up in mine.
nineteen
Getting Savvy’s shoes to her ends up being a bust. By the time I reach the parking lot, she and Jo are nowhere to be found, and so is whatever mode of transportation brought Jo here. I end up stashing the shoes at the junior counselors’ cabin and hiding from Leo with the Phoenix Cabin girls, who all heard about Jo—or at least, the part about Jo surprising Savvy, and not the part where it turned into an episode of The Real Housewives of Camp Reynolds.
“It’s so romantic. All my girlfriend’s done is send a postcard from Minnesota,” Izzy grumbles over dinner.
Jemmy sighs. “Still a leg up from texting John Mulaney GIFs, which is my boyfriend’s love language.”
Cam snorts. “Well, my boyfriend, Oscar Isaac but specifically as Poe Dameron, would be showering me with endless affection if he weren’t so busy saving the cosmos.”
We all let out an appreciative laugh, and everyone turns to me, expecting me to chime in with some gripe of my own. My throat goes tight before I can, and I take an unnecessarily large slurp of juice to avoid it.
The next morning I’m out even earlier than usual. I couldn’t sleep anyway, and I want to make sure Savvy’s all right, but she isn’t in any of our usual spots. It’s like the island swallowed her up.
I do find Rufus, though, who nudges me up one of his favorite paths. I oblige, throwing a stick back and forth as we go. I’m taking a picture of Rufus with his tongue flopping out the side of his mouth when Kitty informs me in no uncertain terms that her memory card is full. It’s only eight, so I figure I won’t have to wait too long to get to the shared computer and dump the contents into a Dropbox.
Rufus follows me, still nudging me with the stick, but when I throw it toward the main office he disappears around the corner and doesn’t come back.
“Yo, Rufus,” I call out. “Whatever your little klepto paws are getting into, leave it— Shit.”
For the record, that is not the word I envisioned coming out of my mouth when I clapped eyes on Savvy’s mom for the first time. Also for the record, what the hell.
A week ago I wouldn’t have recognized her without her face tilted toward me, but now I’ve seen so many photos of her on Savvy’s phone that her likeness is basically a tab that is eternally open in my brain. By some small mercy, she and Savvy’s dad are too distracted petting the heck out of Rufus to notice me. At least, they are for a second.
“Oh, good. Are you a counselor?”
I shove my baseball cap so low on my head that I look like a celebrity trying to sneak out of a Pilates class. “Uh,” I manage.
Her dad squints at me as I back away from them, nearly tripping on a rock. “We’ve met before, right? You’re one of Savvy’s friends?”
“I’m not—I’m just—sorry!” I blurt, and before they can say anything else, start sprinting for Savvy’s cabin like our lives depend on it.
I make it halfway there when it happens: I am running at myself. I am running toward a mirror in the middle of the campgrounds, and am about to smash into the glass.
I skid to a stop, wheezing, and realize when my reflection wheezes in a much more graceful manner that it’s not me at all, but Savvy without makeup, her hair unstyled and in its full frizzy-curled, untamed Day woman glory.
We grab each other by the shoulders.
“Your parents,” we both say.
I scowl at her and she scowls right back, and we both say, “No, your parents.”