You Have a Match(52)

Ah. That. I wince, opening the protein bar Savvy handed to me before yanking me onto a hiking path and telling me to follow her.

“There’s a medium-to-large-ish chance I failed a class and I’m supposed to be in summer school right now.”

“Summer school?”

And there it is again. The raised eyebrows, the disbelieving tone. Even with literal twigs in her hair and her nose redder than Rudolph’s she manages to ooze the kind of authority that would make my school principal hand Savvy the keys to her office without thinking twice.

“Yeah, yeah, we can’t all be Betty Coopers,” I say.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound … judgy. I was surprised, is all.”

Well, that’s a notch up from her being unsurprised, so I’ll take it. I’m about to circle back to Savvy’s parents crossing the Puget Sound over her sniffles, but Savvy finally comes to a stop.

“Whoa.”

The path has given way to a clearing with a wide view and a sharp, unexpected drop—not quite as high as some of the perches I’ve seen since we got here, but breathtaking. We’re far enough away that we can see the camp below, the cabins and the cafeteria and the tennis courts stretched out beyond us, campers starting to mill about lazily for the less-structured Sunday agenda. I don’t realize how quiet it is up here until Savvy lets out a sneeze and I flinch.

Savvy touches my shoulder. “It gets really muddy,” she warns.

I glance down at the drop from the edge below. It isn’t perilous, but it’s steep, and it doesn’t really look like there’s much of a way to get back up if you tumble down.

I take a step back, resenting that I heard all those thoughts in Leo’s voice.

“What is this place?”

“Well, it was where we did archery, that one summer after the first Hunger Games movie came out and a bunch of kids were into it. But then nobody wanted to hike all the way up here, and the path got overgrown, and … most people forgot about it.”

Her eyes linger on the base of a tree but wrench away so quickly that I know better than to look at whatever it was.

“But not you.”

Savvy shrugs and sits down on a tree stump. I plop down on the stump next to her, still wondering if I really saw my parents’ car or if I’m going to wake up in the cabin to find out this was all some bonkers bug spray–induced fever dream.

“So our parents hate each other.”

“We don’t know that,” says Savvy.

“The last time I saw a Prius going that fast, the REI flagship downtown was having a garage sale.” I sink my teeth into the protein bar. “Besides, all of our collective parents were here, which means mine probably saddled three boys under the age of ten with my unsuspecting uncle and took the six A.M. ferry. And then just … left?”

The hurt doesn’t really know where to settle in me, or if it even should. They have no way of knowing that I know they’re here. And it’s not like they left because they were mad at me. Hell, they’re here because they’re mad at me. But the whole thing has me uneasy. The decision to come all the way here must have been a big one. That can only mean the force that drove them out is bigger—bigger, even, than getting to see me.

“Ugh,” says Savvy, burying her head in her knees. “I wish our parents would just … chill.”

“I mean, I blatantly lied to mine and hacked into their emails to avoid my legal obligation to attend summer school, so they’re probably at the right amount of un-chill,” I admit. “Yours, on the other hand … what’s got them so worked up about the sniffles? Are you sure they’re not here because of Jo?”

“No,” Savvy says miserably, her face muffled by her leggings. “Jo’s long gone.”

“Oh.”

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to ask. Being with Savvy is like—there’s this closeness, an understanding somewhere in the core of us, in our matching eyes and rhythms and magpie charms. And there’s this friendship that we’ve started to build between us. But it’s missing the in-between. The part in the middle of being a friend and being related, where you know things about each other’s lives and know where you fit and what kind of person you are when you’re with them.

“My parents—they’ve been like this ever since I can remember. When I was a kid I’d sneeze and end up in the pediatrician’s waiting room. One time they kept me home from school because my tongue was green, and it took the whole damn day for us to remember I’d had a Jolly Rancher the night before.”

“Were you like, super sick as a kid or something?”

“Not even. But they always seemed to think—”

She stops herself, staring at the half-eaten protein bar in her hands, and licks her upper lip.

“Seemed to think what?”

She stares for a few more moments without answering. I’ve had to get used to this. Savvy’s pauses, the way she is always trying to word things so carefully. It’s better not to try to prompt her. She’ll usually say whatever it is eventually, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

“They seemed to think—well—they’ve always been paranoid about me having some kind of undiagnosed heart condition. Which, as far as I know, I don’t,” she adds quickly. “Just one weird blip on a monitor as a baby that even the doctor said not to worry about, but my mom was convinced it was something else, and that if I ever got too sick it would make it pop up and become a real problem.”