You Have a Match(7)

But I glance at the “Relations” page anyway so I can do my due diligence when I make a customer complaint. Savannah Tully, says the name on the top of the list.

And then my heart wrings like a sponge in my chest. Georgia Day, it reads. We predict Georgia Day is your first cousin.

And the next one: Lisa McGinnis. We predict Lisa McGinnis is your second to third cousin.

The names below it—second, third, even fifth cousins—are unfamiliar. But Georgia and I were born in the same month, and even though she lives in San Francisco, we’re in loose touch, tagging each other in the occasional Tumblr meme and texting whenever the body count gets a little preposterous on Riverdale. And Lisa definitely friended me on Facebook within an hour of Poppy’s funeral last summer.

Which can only mean …

“Oh my god.”

I don’t realize I’ve yelled it until I hear a knock and my dad’s head pops in. “What is it?”

I slam the laptop shut. “I thought I saw a spider.”

My voice is just loud enough to carry to the boys’ room, where an instant commotion is set off.

“Spider? Where?” pipes Brandon, who is notoriously afraid of them.

“Spider? Where?” demands Mason, who is going through an aggressive Spider-Man phase.

Before anyone can get a word in edgewise, a pan clatters from the kitchen, which can only be Asher trying to take macaroni-related matters into his own hands again. Dad winces, and Mom yells, “I got it!” in the same exasperated way she always does, and so begins an extremely familiar number in the soundtrack of Day family chaos.

“You got that draft ready to rumble?”

I can hear how tired his voice is before he’s even fully in the room, the kind that’s way past “parent of three boys and one very stubborn teenager” levels of tired. Ever since Poppy died, it sort of seems like he and my mom are never not in motion. My dad gets to his office at the crack of dawn and my mom gets home at about a bajillion o’clock at night, the two of them desperately trying to make sure someone’s always home or home adjacent to keep track of us now that my grandpa can’t.

Which is why I feel extra bad that I am teetering the line between a solid C and high D in English, and extra extra bad that he’s not even mad about it the way a normal parent would be, and is instead reading the umpteenth draft on this essay I have written about why Benvolio from Romeo and Juliet is a total buzzkill for constantly nagging his friends.

Okay, the thesis is slightly more academic than that, but the point stands. English isn’t exactly my strong suit. It’s not that I don’t like reading, or that I’m a bad student—actually, up until this year, I was doing okay in the land of academia—but my vendetta against English in particular is that I hate arguing, and arguing is like 90 percent of any English class you take. Sure, it’s organized, nerdy arguing, but arguing nonetheless—about a thesis statement, or some character’s motivation, or what some author did or didn’t mean to say.

And I’m about as Type B as they come. I have no interest in arguing, or confrontation in general. Give me the wrong scoop of ice cream? I’ll eat it. Sneak into my room and cut the sleeves off my red sweater for your Spider-Man costume? Shit happens.

Lie to my face about a sister who lives a few suburbs away for sixteen years?

Well.

“Yeah,” I say, like the cowardly coward that I am. I pull it off the printer and hand it to him.

My dad frowns. “What’s got your gourd?”

“Nothing.”

My phone buzzes, and a picture of Connie pretending to lick the display case at Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. pops up on my screen. Nobody in their right mind calls on a phone anymore, but Connie’s so busy with her chronic overachieving that she claims she doesn’t have the time to type.

“I know it’s a drag, but it gets a little better each time, right?” says my dad, holding the essay up.

Not in the slightest. I pick up the phone and my dad waves himself out with a flourish, taking the fifth draft of my godforsaken essay with him.

“Yo. Put Leo on. I’ve got a pep talk ready.”

“I’m not at Leo’s.”

“You’re not?”

There’s something almost accusatory in the way she asks, and I think maybe she’ll bring it up—the weirdness we’ve all been semidancing around since the BEI. But she cuts through the tension before I can even decide if it’s real or not, saying, “In that case, 31.8 percent, sucker.”

I am so far removed from reality that I genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about.

“You owe me soda bread. And no cheating, you can’t have Leo do the whole thing for you,” she tells me.

“Uh…”

“Anyway, I’ll just call Leo’s phone, is he still around?”

“Yeah.”

Connie pauses. “Why do you sound weird?”

My mouth is open, but the airflow between my lungs and the outside world seems to have stopped, like I’m breathing into a plastic bag.

Savannah Tully.

“Um.”

I can’t seem to get past monosyllables. It’s like my tongue is too thick for my mouth, as if I’ve become some whole other person since my ill-fated skateboard ride back from Leo’s, and I’m not sure how she’s supposed to act, what she’s supposed to say.