You Have a Match(53)

“That’s … an oddly specific fear.”

Savvy nods, watching me, and only then do I realize her hesitation. Maybe it isn’t odd. Maybe it’s just specific.

“Nobody in my family had any weird heart things that I know about. Do your parents think we do?”

“I kind of assumed? I was mostly busy being annoyed.” Savvy blows out a breath. “But it all kind of rubbed off in the end, I guess.”

“Uh, you’re like, the opposite of a hypochondriac. I’m pretty sure even if you were at death’s door you would challenge the grim reaper to a green juice shot contest and be on your merry way. You’re like, the healthiest person I know.”

“Yeah, because I had to be. As long as I was doing a whole song and dance about taking care of myself, my parents would get off my case.” She lets out a laugh, extending out her knees and stretching her back, like the words loosened something in her joints and she doesn’t know how to hold them. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that.”

I nudge her knee with mine, and it settles her a bit. “I think that’s the kind of thing your friends probably already know.”

Savvy’s smile gets smaller, less intentional. Like she’s revisiting something. “Yeah.” She adds, “To be clear, I like what I do. The Instagram, I mean. Or…”

“You like spending time with Mickey.”

Savvy straightens up so quickly that I know I’m right, but almost wish I hadn’t been. Or at least figured out that I should have kept my mouth shut.

“Are you going to leave?” Savvy asks, her voice quieter than it’s been all morning.

I pick at a weed in the ground, stabbing its stem with my fingernails, watching the juices dye my skin green. There’s no scenario where my parents don’t yank me out of here. But the disappointment isn’t as much of a blow as I thought it would be. The time I’ve had here—the mornings watching the sun rise with Savvy and Rufus, the afternoons on the water with the girls and sneaking around to get good views with Finn, the nights eating food with my fingers with Leo and Mickey—it was always too good to last. Like when you’re in a good dream, but you know you’re dreaming. I was here on borrowed time.

“I don’t want to.”

Some of Savvy relaxes, like she can only let herself go a few degrees at a time. “Well, you’ve already missed summer school, right? The damage is done.”

“There’s a second session,” I say miserably. “And it doesn’t start until after camp ends in two weeks, but I’m sure they’ll pull me out anyway. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

“Are your parents big into you getting into a good college or something?”

I shrug. We actually haven’t talked about it all that much. I always kind of assumed I’d go to the community college nearby until I figured out what I wanted to do, and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.

“Then why are they so fixated on your grades and signing you up for all this stuff?”

“I’m not, like, dumb.”

“I know,” says Savvy. Not too fast, or too placatingly. “Victoria mentioned your first practice scores were probably too high to justify SAT prep.”

Even elbows deep in trying to dissect our parents’ drama, I’m oddly tickled to hear this.

“I … I don’t know. My grades were always fine. But this year … not as much, I guess.”

What I don’t say is that they dipped after Poppy died. That it happened right before the start of junior year. That the grades themselves weren’t so bad, maybe, but how I didn’t seem to care scared the pants off my parents.

And it’s not that I didn’t care, exactly. It’s just that by the time the school year started, I was exhausted. Everything was changing—not only the big, scary changes, but the little, more practical ones. The shakeups in our routines, the things my parents had to account for without Poppy around to help. I didn’t realize how much of the care and keeping of Abby Day had been relegated to him. Didn’t realize until my parents shifted to make up for it, and suddenly way too much of their focus was aimed at me.

“They just started putting me in tutoring for everything, even the stuff where I was doing okay.”

“But you hate it.”

“With a burning, fiery passion.”

“And you haven’t told them.”

It’s not a question. My reputation for letting problems fester has apparently preceded me.

“It wasn’t so bad, at first,” I explain. The protein bar starts to taste mealy, like it’s too thick to chew. I wrap up the remains and set it on my knee, staring as it stays perfectly balanced, waiting for it to fall. “Poppy—my grandpa—he always used to knock them out of the whole helicopter parenting thing, if they were going off the rails. Sometimes he’d even fake kidnap me, and we’d go up to the trail or to Green Lake with our cameras.”

“That sounds fun.”

My eyes are still perfectly trained on the bar, and I’m almost glad when it falls, so my eyes have something to focus on instead of tearing up the way they want to.

“Yeah.” My voice wavers. “Anyway, joke’s on them. The more tutoring they put me through, the worse my grades get.”