You Have a Match(10)
“Can you see the label on the bottle?” she’s asking. “They’re gonna make us redo it if—”
“Yup, label’s fine, it’s just the weird shadows from the leaves,” says a girl with her. “Maybe if we…”
I can only see the back of her, but there’s no mistaking it. I hesitate, trying to think up an opening line. Something other than Hey, may I just be the first to say, what the actual fuck?
Before I can get close enough, the biggest, fluffiest Labrador retriever to ever exist comes barreling at me, paws up and pouncing on me like my bones are held up with kibble. I squeal, letting him bowl me over into the grass—Rufus, I remember, from the deep dive I took on Savannah’s Instagram account last night—and he yelps his approval, a bottle of sunscreen falling out of his mouth.
“I got him, I got him,” says someone—the one with the camera, an Asian girl with two long French braids and a broad smile. Either I am extremely concussed from Rufus, or she is rocking a full sleeve of punk Disney princess tattoos on her left arm and various Harry Potter–related ones on her right. “Whose even is this, you furry little thief?” she asks, seeing the sunscreen at our feet. Now that she’s closer I can see the edges of the tattoos are temporary, all bright and gleaming in the sun. She turns back to me. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly, “he only ever does this to—”
Her mouth drops open. She looks me up and down, or at least as much of me as she can with Rufus on top of me.
“Savvy,” she says. She clears her throat, taking a step back like I’ve spooked her, while Rufus continues to lick my face like it’s a lollipop.
“Um,” I manage, “are you…?”
Another hand comes into view, offering me a lift up. I take it—colder than mine, but not cold enough to cancel out the immediate eeriness. I feel like I’ve been displaced in time.
“Hey. I’m Savvy.”
Poppy had this thing he always said when we were out with our cameras. He’d show me how different lenses captured different perspectives, and how no two photos of the same thing were ever alike, simply because of the person taking them. If you learn to capture a feeling, he told me, it’ll always be louder than words.
Sometimes I can still hear the way he said it. The low, gravelly sound of his voice, with that bare hint of a smirk in it. I always clung to it, growing up. He was right. Feelings were always easier in the abstract, like the breathless moment the skateboard tilted down the big hill in my neighborhood, or the reassuring way Connie squeezed my hand between our desks before a big test. Words always fell short. Made the feeling cheap. Some things, I think, there weren’t supposed to be words for at all.
Everywhere I go I have those words tucked somewhere in my heart, but right now they’re pulsing through me like a drumbeat that somehow led me here, a few short miles and a hop across a familiar street, to the loudest feeling I’ve ever felt.
“Abby,” I introduce myself.
I stare at her staring at me and the resemblance is so uncanny I’m not sure if I’m staring at a person or a bunch of people all at once. I guess, having little brothers, it’s hard to see the parts of them that look like my parents and the parts that don’t—they’re still mostly sticky and hyper and un-fully-formed. I’ve only ever noticed the parts of me that look like them because I grew up with everyone telling me.
But there is something about seeing Savvy, with my mom’s dainty nose and my dad’s high forehead, Asher’s and Brandon’s full cheeks, and Mason’s distinctive cowlick in the crown of her hair, that seems less like genetic inevitability and more like science fiction. Like she was conjured here, all the people I love smushed into one very short, extremely chic person.
Her hair, though—even with all the product she’s used, it’s starting to come undone in the heat, and it’s all mine, all my mom’s. Wild and untamed, the kind that curls in some places and frizzes in others, so it never once does us the favor of looking the same from one day to the next.
“Wow. It’s like Alternate Dimension Savvy. One where you’re taller and wear actual clothes instead of athleisure all day,” the other girl mutters, peering at us in turn. Even Rufus seems uneasy, his furry head bobbing from me to Savvy and back, letting out a low, confused whine.
Savannah—Savvy—clears her throat. “Well—I mean—I suppose we do look a little alike.”
Her eyes graze me. It only takes a second, but I see the places she lingers. My ratty shoelaces. The widened rips in my jeans from yesterday. The gum in my mouth. The tiny scar that interrupts my left eyebrow. The slump of my limp ponytail, held together with a glittery scrunchie of Connie’s that doesn’t match anything I’ve ever touched, let alone owned.
I try not to bristle, but when her eyes meet mine, almost clinical in the way she’s accounting for the pieces of me, my eyes are narrowed. I do a once-over of her but can’t find a single flaw. She looks like she fell out of a Lululemon ad.
“Yeah,” I concede. “A little.”
There’s an awkward beat where the three of us stand there, looking and not looking. Maybe there’s a word for the feeling after all. Maybe it’s disappointment.
“I’m Mickey,” says her friend, extending her hand to shake. “Er, McKayla. But everyone calls me Mickey, on account of—well,” she says, showing me her left arm, which also features a rainbow gradient version of Cinderella’s Castle in the Magic Kingdom smack-dab in the middle of all the Disney characters. “Bit of a thing.”