You Have a Match(9)

And I’m not exactly in a great position to go around upsetting my parents. Between shuffling me to tutors, constantly replacing my broken phone screens, and fielding calls from concerned neighbors every other day saying they saw me climb something I wasn’t supposed to, having me for a kid seems baseline exhausting.

Yet something else knocks all that guilt aside: the idea of an ally. Someone I could talk to about things I can’t share with my parents or even Connie—things like the BEI. Or how I am sometimes so overwhelmed by all the scrutiny on my grades that if anything, it makes the situation worse. Or how I have no idea how I’m supposed to fit into the world after high school, if there’s even a proper place for me to fit at all.

Someone who might be to me what Poppy was, before he died. Someone who understood me well enough that I never felt self-conscious telling him about the embarrassing stuff, or even sharing my photos. I come from a family of worrywarts and planners, but he was the one who was always like me—he loved a good adventure, was every bit as impulsive, had embarrassing stories to tell that rivaled mine. I could tell him the truthiest truths of me—the good, the bad, and the “I’m pretty sure I threw away my retainer and it’s somewhere in the sixty bags of garbage behind the school gym” levels of ugly—without ever getting the sense that I might disappoint him.

There it is. The “Connie.” Maybe I can find a person who understands me the way nobody else can. If I don’t do this, I’ll never have the chance.

“Hey, Abby? I’ve got some notes!” my dad calls.

I close my eyes. “I gotta go. But—don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

“’Course not.” Before I can hang up, Connie asks, “Wait, not even Leo?”

“I’ll tell him, I just want to…”

Scream into my pillow? Bust into my parents’ bedroom and yell “I KNOW THE TRUTH!” like I live in a comic and there’s a speech bubble over my head? Run away, join the circus, and never think about any of this ever again?

“Got it. Godspeed.” There’s a beat. “Also, is it weird if I follow her?”

“Connie.”

“What? She’s goals. She can do those crazy handstand yoga poses. And I’m obsessed with Rufus.”

“Who?”

“Her dog.”

“Goodbye.”

I hang up and take the kind of breath that is less of a breath and more of a decision. One that, pros and Connies aside, I couldn’t unmake if I tried.

I open up the app and type back: Are you free tomorrow?





three




I know the drive from my house to Green Lake so well that it feels less like visualizing a map of roads than a map of myself. As a kid I’d wake up every Saturday at the crack of dawn, waiting, waiting, waiting for Poppy to come pick me up and take me to Bean Well, the little coffee shop he had started with Gammy, who died before I was born. My parents would spend their weekends catching up on their law school reading, and I’d spend them munching on chocolate-chip scones, coloring endless pages of dragons and unicorns, and fiddling with the buttons of Poppy’s beaten-up old Nikon camera.

My dad pulls up to Bean Well with an almost apologetic sigh. “You don’t want to pop in?”

I do. I miss Marianne, the manager, who has taken over since Poppy died last year. I miss the sugar crunch on top of the scones and the regulars marveling at me being “so grown up” and Mrs. Leary’s dog, who loves the place so much that sometimes he wanders over on his own to whine for free dog treats.

I miss taking this place for granted, because now I can’t. Marianne is retiring and my parents are selling the place, and a big old chunk of my childhood right along with it.

I wrench my eyes away from the lit-up Bean Well sign above the door, to Ellie the barista with her Cindy Lou Who–high topknot laughing at someone’s joke at the register.

“Maybe later,” I say. “I heard there was a bald eagle popping in and out of the park, thought I might try to get a shot.”

A lie wrapped inside of a lie that just jump-vaulted off a cliff into another lie, but not one that my dad will question. The thing is, Green Lake is almost exactly halfway between Shoreline and Medina, which Savannah and I figured out in our brief exchange last night before planning to meet here.

“Sounds good, kiddo. I’ll text when I’m done with the realtor.”

I step out of the car and into the humid June fog, feeling the frizz of my curls start to rise like they’ve become sentient. I start to pat them down but stop myself. If Savannah really is my sister, I have no reason to impress her. We’re made up of all the same weird stuff, aren’t we?

Which somehow has not stopped me from stress-chewing my way through an entire pack of gum and changing my socks three times, as if putting on the striped ones would have made this catastrophically strange thing any less strange.

A shiver runs up my spine as I cross the street to the park, keeping my eyes peeled. I’m a few minutes late, but it’s not like I could tell my dad to step on it because I have a date with my own personal reality show. I’m assuming I’ll find Savvy by the benches, but they’re full of kids with sticky ice-cream fingers and joggers stretching their limbs.

I squint, and there, beyond the benches, toward one of the massive trees that borders the lake, is a girl in pale pink capri workout leggings and a pristine white top posing with a water bottle, her hair mounted in a slick, shiny ponytail without a single strand out of place.