You Have a Match(85)

My mom’s eyes are watering. She’s thinking of Poppy, and not the shop. But to me they were always kind of the same thing.

“I sure hope so.”

My dad gets up to join us, and they both wordlessly squeeze me, turning me into an Abby sandwich. The hug goes on so long that it feels like it could make me invincible, as if all the things outside it can’t do anything to me while we’re here. It makes me feel small, and everything around us even smaller. I wonder if there will ever come a day that I’m old enough not to feel like the center of my universe is this.

“For the record,” I say, “I’m really glad I’m your kid.”

“For the record, we wouldn’t change one thing about you,” says my mom.

My dad waits three full seconds before adding, “Except we might have gotten accident insurance on all your screens a little sooner.”

We laugh, my dad’s warm and low, my mom cackling the same cackle she did with Pietra, me barely managing not to snort. Nothing changes when we break apart, the way nothing really did before we came together—not anything important, anyway. Maybe just the view.





thirty-four




My parents end up going to bed early enough that it’s still light out. I hook my phone up to the charger and use it to call Leo, unsurprised when it goes straight to voicemail. I try the camp’s front office phone next. My name must come up on caller ID, because Mickey picks up and says, “Oh, good. Can I put you on speakerphone before half the camp riots? Phoenix Cabin is freaking out that you’re gone. This whole night has been s’mores with a side of anarchy.”

I laugh into my sleeve so I don’t wake my parents. “Actually … is Leo there? I really need to talk to him.”

“Hold up.”

I hear the tap of her putting the phone down on the front desk, my heart fluttering in this way that feels more in my throat than in my chest. I don’t know exactly what I plan on saying, but for once, I’m not worried about it. The kinds of things I want to say right now can’t be planned.

“Hey, Abby. Leo’s busy.”

It’s a hard stop, with no quip to soften it. Not a Try calling back later, or even a Sorry.

“Is he?”

Mickey blows out a breath. “Do I even want to know?”

I rest my head in my hands, smushing the phone farther into my cheek. “My life is basically a CW drama right now, is all.”

“You’re telling me.” She drums her fingers on the desk, the faint noise echoing on the other side of the line. “Don’t worry. I’ll knock some sense into him. I know it’s none of my business, but I’m emotionally invested in the two of you getting your heads out of your asses and confessing your love for each other already.”

I don’t bother muffling this laugh because it sounds too much like I’m being strangled.

“Sorry,” says Mickey, not sounding it one bit.

“Don’t be.” I hesitate, but not nearly as long as I should. “Also—while we’re, uh, inserting ourselves into each other’s business—Savvy and Jo are extremely done.”

There’s a pause. “Huh.”

“Do with that information … what you will.”

I can almost feel the heat of Mickey’s cheeks burning through the phone. “It’s tough out here for a Ravenclaw.”

“Didn’t you say you were a—”

“Humans are in constant evolution, Abby. Ever-changing, constant growth, et cetera,” says Mickey, a smile in her voice.

“Let’s hope.”

After we hang up I sit there against the wall of the hotel room, my phone still juicing up. I’m connected to legitimate Wi-Fi for the first time in weeks, so I find myself poking through it—looking at Connie’s Facebook pictures of gelato and pizza and what appears to be her very smug-looking cousin drenched and posing by an Italian fountain. Scrolling through all the photography Tumblr accounts I follow. Doing anything I can to distract myself from the fact that the one person I need to talk to most is the one I have no way to reach.

My finger hovers over the Instagram app. I don’t even know if I’m logged in. I press it anyway, waiting for it to load, and—

Oh.

Oh my god.

At first I think I’m logged into someone else’s account by mistake, because there are so many notifications that the app looks like it’s going to crash trying to account for them all. That, and the follower count—it’s over twenty-six thousand. Pushing twenty-seven.

I scroll down. My jaw about unhinges from my face.

It’s my account, all right. @savingtheabbyday, just how Leo set it up. But it’s not only pictures from the time Leo and I met up before camp. It’s pictures from the last few weeks—specifically, the ones I dumped from my memory card into the Dropbox we were all sharing to work on our Anthro projects.

I tap the most recent one, posted two days ago. No caption, but underneath a bunch of periods are at least a dozen photography hashtags, none that I’ve ever heard of. It’s an image of the fog rolling in on the Sound, a photo I took one sleepy morning so early that even Savvy wasn’t around yet. One sleepy morning when I was, unsurprisingly, thinking of Leo.

It has thousands of likes. Dozens of comments. I sit up straighter, accidentally squeaking my shoes against the hotel’s linoleum floor, sure I’m hallucinating this whole thing.