You Have a Match(82)

“Do you?”

I look at them, and at my lap, considering. It feels important to say the right thing here, like the result of this conversation will mean more to them than it does to me. So I have to let them say it. I have to let them get this off their chests if I’m ever going to get anything off mine.

I lean back, feeling the way I sometimes do when I take that first step off the ground—up a tree, or a rickety old ladder, or someone’s car. That sense of pushing off of something solid, leaving something behind, and thinking, No going back now.

My mom takes a breath, and when she speaks, it sounds like she’s been waiting to say the words a lot longer than I’ve been waiting to hear them.

“When Savvy happened—we were young, and confused, and … I honestly can’t remember a lot of that time. It’s murky to me still. Sometimes it’s easier not to think about it too much.” She clasps her hands together, like she is trying to press the words into the feeling, leaning forward so I can feel it, too. “But with you—I remember every moment. You were ours. Before you were even real.”

She’s getting teary-eyed, and I go completely still, wondering if I should say something. But my dad is watching me over her shoulder, and something in his expression tells me to wait.

“We decided on you together,” says my mom. “The day you were born was the happiest day of our lives. Like … something had lifted, maybe. Out of all the darkness. The thing we’d been waiting for.”

I blink back my own tears. It’s not that I have trouble believing her. But it’s overwhelming, hearing it all like this. I think in life you can know you’re loved without peering too closely at the edges of it. It’s almost scary, seeing that there aren’t any—it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It just kind of is.

My mom lowers her voice and says, “But if I were in your shoes, thinking what you thought, I’d be upset, too.”

They’re both watching me—no, waiting. This is the part where I’m supposed to say my bit. Put it all out there. Talk to them the way Savvy told me I should, the way I haven’t, really, since Poppy died and everything felt like too much of a mess to untangle from the outside.

But it’s one thing to finally have the resolve. It’s another thing entirely to find the words.

“I think I was—surprised, is all.” I clear my throat. “And mad, maybe.”

They nod, in sync the way they always are. I wait for one of them to say something, to give me an out so I don’t have to dig any deeper than that, but neither do.

So I dig.

“There was this big, giant secret that I didn’t see coming. And I know there were good reasons for why everything shook out the way it did, but it rattled me.” I look away so I don’t lose my nerve. “And I know you don’t think of me as—a replacement. But the other thing that I can’t stop thinking about is how Savvy’s kind of—well. She would have been a lot easier to handle than me.”

My dad almost starts to laugh, but when I look up sharply and meet his eye, he blows out air instead. “Why would you think that?”

It feels pathetic to say it out loud—worse, maybe, that I have to explain it to them. My parents and I have barely even discussed Savvy’s existence, so the jump from “I found out I had a sister” to “I might have a complex about how inadequate I sometimes feel compared to my sister” is justifiably more jarring to them than it is for me, having had a full month to marinate in it. But I feel like it’s something I have to say now, in one of these rare moments when there’s nothing to interrupt us, and real life seems suspended somewhere outside the rainy windows.

“She’s a lot more—on track than I am, I guess. And sometimes with everything the way it’s gotten … the tutoring, and the extra prep courses, and everything being so intense … it kind of feels like you don’t think I’m on one.” I think I’m finished, but the last part slips out unbidden: “Like I’m letting you down.”

Neither of them jumps in right away, and I feel my face burn. I don’t want to accuse them of anything, or blow this out of proportion. People have worse problems than their parents harping on them about their grades.

But it feels bigger than that. Like it’s not rooted in my grades, but something deeper—the way Savvy’s parents and their worries about her health were. And when my parents exchange this pointed glance, like they’re trying to decide which one is going to answer me, I’m pretty sure that hunch is right.

“First of all,” says my dad, “we’ve never felt like you’re letting us down. Everyone needs extra help sometimes.”

I fidget, shifting my weight on the seat and working up the nerve to keep meeting their eyes.

“I’m just not sure if I … need that help.”

I straighten my spine, channeling my inner Savvy. Channeling something that I must have been born with too and am only just figuring how to use. “Honestly, it just made things worse. I’ve been so busy that I don’t even have time to catch up after all the tutoring. And like, here—we had all this time. Free time. And I kept up with everything. I’m actually doing well.”

They don’t seem wholly convinced of my theory, but receptive. Enough that my dad says, “Victoria mentioned that.”