Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World

by Ashley Herring Blake

  Ivy’s eyes stung as she glanced around the room. “There’s Charlie York.” She jabbed a finger toward a cute, dark-skinned boy from her history class. “He’s nice. Go for it.” Her voice sounded flat and mean at the same time, the black gleam of a snake’s eyes.

  June frowned, but glanced at Charlie. “You think I should?”

  Ivy forced herself to look at her. There was an eagerness in June’s question that Ivy had never heard before. Her heart was no longer zooming. It wasn’t melting or standing still.

  It was shattering.

  “Sure,” Ivy whispered.

  June wrapped both her hands around the empty cup so hard that the plastic crinkled loudly. “You really think I should go ask him? Like, really really?”

  “I think you should do whatever you want to do,” Ivy snapped. She couldn’t help it. Her shattering heart was sharp, jagged pieces of glass everywhere.

  “Okay, maybe I will,” June said, folding her arms.

  “Okay, good.”

  June frowned at Ivy, clearly confused, but she didn’t move toward Charlie. Neither of them made a move to do anything. They just stood there, watching all the couples dance around them like they weren’t even there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ivy’s Keeper

  June had somehow convinced her mother to let Ivy and Taryn spend the night. Ivy dropped her new messenger bag full of borrowed clothes on the floor of June’s room and slumped into a squashy armchair in the corner. June’s room was pretty, all soft blues and greens with white wood furniture. If Ivy weren’t feeling so rotten, she would’ve marveled over the gauzy canopy draped over the bed and how all June’s books were organized by color.

  But Ivy was feeling rotten, and so she said nothing about anything. And, of course, after the girls changed into pajamas, Taryn suggested they watch a movie about a big, dramatic high school dance.

  June’s mom set them up with all kinds of weird snacks like green bean chips and baby carrots with hummus and vegan carob-chip cookies. The three of them piled onto June’s big bed, with June in the middle. She and Taryn giggled over the romantic drama, but Ivy couldn’t force out even one laugh. It was all boys with girls, girls with boys. How was Ivy supposed to know how to handle all these feelings for June, all these feelings at all, if everything she saw and read about and heard about was all boy-girl, girl-boy?

  Ivy started getting madder and madder at the whole thing. At June’s dumb giggle. At Taryn’s Drew this and Drew that. Ivy was so tired. She just wanted to go home. She wanted a birthday cake with her family, and she wanted Layla to sing “Happy Birthday” in French like she’d done every year since she started learning the language in eighth grade. But wanting all that just made Ivy angrier because she had no home and she had no birthday cake and right now, she might as well have no Layla and no family.

  Ivy watched the lime-green alarm clock on June’s bedside table tick over to 9:33. She’d been thirteen for eleven hours.

  “What’s wrong, Ivy?” Taryn asked. She threw a piece of natural, unbuttered, sea-salted popcorn at Ivy’s head.

  “Hmm? Nothing,” Ivy said, tossing the popcorn back at Taryn.

  Taryn lifted herself onto her elbow and peered at Ivy over June. “You’re quiet.”

  “I’m watching the movie.”

  “Did you have a good birthday?”

  Did. Past tense. It was over and done with. “Yeah.”

  “Was it weird, not being with your family?”

  “It was fine.”

  Ivy could feel Taryn frowning at her. June was mercifully silent. The movie played on, but Ivy could tell no one was really watching it. Taryn was on a mission.

  “Pondering mysteries?” Taryn asked.

  “No,” Ivy snapped. “I’m not pondering anything.”

  “What do you mean, ‘pondering mysteries’?” June asked, but neither Ivy nor Taryn answered her. Ivy dared a glance at Taryn, who looked crushed. Ivy had never been so rude about refusing to play their game before. But Ivy didn’t know what to say. She felt raw, a painting that wasn’t dry yet. One hard nudge and she’d smear all over the place.

  “What’s going on, Ivy?” Taryn asked.

  “Nothing is going on.”

  Taryn sat up and crossed her legs, ready for battle. “Do you know why I started the pondering mysteries thing?”

  “Because you can’t handle silence?” Ivy said.

  Taryn frowned and shook her head. June was trapped between the two of them, her eyes fixed on the TV screen.

  “No,” Taryn said quietly. “I started it so you’d talk to me.”

  That made Ivy sit up. “What does that mean? I talk to you all the time.”

  “No you don’t. Not about anything important. It’s like, when we started middle school, you just… stopped.”

  “Since sixth grade? That’s not true. I see you every day.”

  “Seeing isn’t sharing. And then when I—”

  Taryn pressed her mouth flat and lay back down.

  “When you what?” Ivy asked.

  “Never mind. You don’t get it.”

  “Listen, Taryn, I do tell you stuff. I tell you about…” But Ivy couldn’t finish that sentence. She knew she hadn’t told Taryn about her treehouse pictures and liking girls, but she hadn’t been this way since last year, had she? Then again, last year was when Taryn and all the other girls in school started talking about boys constantly. And Ivy never knew what to say anymore.

  “Oh, like you told me all about how your parents forgot your birthday?” Taryn asked, and Ivy felt herself pale. “You think I haven’t noticed?”

  Ivy shook her head and looked away, embarrassed. Forgotten.

  Taryn’s own phone rang, belting out the theme song to Star Wars. She sighed and grabbed it from the nightstand.

  “It’s my mom. She’ll want to hear about the dance.” Taryn scooted off the bed and left the room, heading toward the bathroom in the hall without another word.

  Ivy released a lungful of air. Taryn’s mom would keep her distracted for at least ten minutes, so Ivy had some time to get her heart rate back to normal. Taryn shared everything with her mom. Right now she was probably sharing that Ivy couldn’t seem to share anything.

  “Did your parents really forget?” June asked after a few seconds. On the TV screen, a girl and a boy plotted to set their best friends up on a date.

  Ivy didn’t answer her, just shrugged and kept staring at the screen.

  “What’s pondering mysteries?” June asked.

  “It’s a thing we do when we get quiet for a while,” Ivy said without looking at her. “We tell each other stuff we find mysterious about the world or whatever we might be thinking about.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Oh yeah, a blast. Couldn’t you tell?”

  June inhaled at Ivy’s sharp tone, but Ivy ignored her.

  “I should’ve let you two talk alone,” June said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “You don’t seem okay.”

  Ivy gritted her teeth. The one time she wanted someone to tell her everything was okay, she got the opposite.

  “You seemed kind of upset,” June said. “Before now, I mean. At the dance.”

  June’s voice was soft and sensitive. It infuriated Ivy. It made Ivy so mad that June didn’t already know. It made Ivy so angry that she had to reveal this part of herself, that she couldn’t just be and let that be okay and enough. It made Ivy so furious because if June didn’t know, then that meant she wasn’t Keeper. It meant Ivy had everything wrong, and she had no idea how to make it right.

  But there was one thing she could do.

  “You really want to know?” Ivy asked, but she didn’t wait for June to answer before she was up and digging through her messenger bag for her yellow notebook. She flipped it open to the drawing she spent all afternoon working on.

  She dropped the notebook on June’s lap.

  “Here. My letter to the world,” Ivy said.

&
nbsp; But as soon as she said it, as soon as her notebook left her hands, all her fury melted into nothing. She was bare and tiny, a girl standing in front of her first crush, confessing everything.

  The drawing was one of her stormy drawings. Probably her favorite. The tree mimicked the sunset, all golds and oranges and lavenders and dusty pinks. The colors bled one into the next, making the tree look like a sky, pink apples bobbing from cloudlike leaves. Behind it, the real sky was the lightest blue and smooth, the kind of clear you got first thing in the morning.

  Inside the treehouse, two girls stood facing each other, so close their noses were tip to tip. Both of their hands were laced together and held between them. There was no space between their bodies. Chest, hips, legs. They were complete comfort and peace. They were gentle sunsets after a storm. They were together, and it made Ivy blush from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.

  It was so terrifyingly obvious, she wanted to rip the notebook out of June’s hands. But June was holding it so tightly, her fingertips were white as she took in all the details.

  One girl had soft pink hair, wild curls that had been left unbraided for too long. The other girl had a dark pixie cut growing out, a single braid plaited next to her ear.

  One girl was Ivy.

  The other girl was June.

  And that was terrifyingly obvious too.

  June blinked at the picture, her face completely expressionless.

  9:46.

  9:47.

  “June.”

  June shook her head, like she was clearing it.

  “June, please say something.”

  But June remained silent, staring at the picture. Ivy stood next to her, breathing in and out, but the panic was filling her up. June hated it. She hated Ivy for feeling it. Everything was falling apart, the treehouse branches snapping, the winds blowing.

  “What’s going on?” Taryn asked, appearing in the doorway. Ivy didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She was trying to keep from crying, from screaming, from grabbing her secrets and running home.

  Home.

  A sob rose up in Ivy’s throat, and she shoved her hand against her mouth to keep it inside. She reached for her notebook, and June let it go, her fingers limp. Probably from shock, Ivy thought. June finally lifted her eyes to Ivy’s and they were wet.

  Ivy had made June cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Ivy whispered.

  “Ivy, I—”

  “What is it?” Taryn asked again. She stepped closer and Ivy started to close her notebook, but not before Taryn grabbed a corner and pulled it toward her.

  Ivy let her. It didn’t matter anymore.

  Taryn’s eyes devoured the page. Ivy waited for a shocked gasp, an “Oh my God,” anything, but Taryn didn’t do any of that. Instead, she ran her hand over the picture and smiled.

  She actually smiled.

  Ivy frowned at her, but before she could ask what Taryn was thinking, Taryn told her.

  “I knew June was the girl.”

  Something went cold in Ivy. “What… what do you mean?”

  Taryn looked at Ivy. Her lower lip wobbled. June was silent, but tears poured down her face, both of her hands pressed to her cheeks.

  “I… I just wanted you to talk to me,” Taryn said.

  “What do you mean?” Ivy asked again, louder.

  Taryn took a deep breath and handed Ivy’s notebook back to her. Then she went over to her own bag and pulled out a notebook.

  A purple notebook.

  “I still think you should talk to someone about it. Even if it’s not me,” she said. And then she offered the notebook to Ivy.

  The purple notebook Ivy had lost.

  Ivy stared at it like it would sprout wings at any moment. “You’re Keeper.”

  Taryn frowned. “I’m… who?”

  “It was you. The notes in my locker.”

  Taryn swallowed, but she nodded. “I found the notebook that morning at the gym. It was on the floor, so I picked it up and—”

  “But you weren’t there.”

  “I was there early with my mom. We brought doughnuts for everyone, but I couldn’t find you, and then I found this.” She held up the notebook.

  Ivy’s mouth went dry. That morning in the gym, she remembered Layla mentioning that Taryn had been there, before Ivy and June came back from the library. She’d totally forgotten.

  “Your name wasn’t in it,” Taryn went on, “but I knew it was yours. I knew and I—”

  “And you didn’t give it back to me?” Ivy’s voice raised to a screech and Taryn flinched.

  “I was in shock, okay? I couldn’t believe it at first.”

  “Oh, because it’s such an awful thing to like a girl?”

  “No, Ivy, that’s not it. Just listen!” Taryn’s eyes filled with tears. “I was upset that you didn’t tell me. All this stuff in the notebook, it was obviously important to you, and I—”

  “I wasn’t ready to tell you!”

  “But you were ready to tell June?”

  June made a whimpering sound and covered her face with her hands.

  “That’s my choice, Taryn,” Ivy yelled, tapping the purple notebook. “None of this was yours.”

  “But writing those notes with me helped,” Taryn said. “And I’d wanted to talk to you for a long time about, well, how you didn’t talk to me anymore. You think I want to babble on and on about Drew Dunaway all the time? I just couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. And I thought that if I talked about him, maybe you’d talk about someone you liked or at least something that mattered to you. You never even talk to me about your family anymore. Then your house got destroyed, and you never talked about that either. I just thought writing to you without telling you it was me might be good for both of us.”

  Ivy wanted to argue, but she couldn’t. It was true. But none of that mattered right now. All that mattered was that her best friend had betrayed her, her crush hated her, and nothing was her own. Nothing was right—not her friends, not her crush, not her drawings.

  Ivy yanked the notebook out of Taryn’s hands and grabbed her messenger bag. She stuffed both notebooks inside and threw the strap over her shoulder. She slipped her feet into her shoes.

  She didn’t look at June, and June didn’t try to stop her.

  She didn’t look at Taryn, even though Taryn’s deep sobs were all she could hear.

  She just left.

  It was time to go home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Ivy, Lost and Found

  Outside, it was dark and warm. Ivy kept expecting June or Taryn to burst out of the house and follow her, but there were no footsteps behind her.

  Ivy couldn’t even hear her own footsteps as she ghosted over the sidewalk. That was exactly what she felt like. A ghost, like everything in her was slowly fading. Her family forgot about her, her best friend betrayed her, her crush… well… she wasn’t exactly sure what June was thinking, but based on her silence and tears, it couldn’t be anything good.

  Ivy walked away from downtown, away from the inn. Twenty minutes and a few turns later, it got quiet. She could still hear the hum of cars, but mostly it was crickets and breezes through the tall grasses of the cornfields and the big front yards in need of mowing. It smelled like rain, and the wind had that full feeling to it, like it was bringing something with it.

  Ivy kept walking until she saw a familiar gravel driveway. Turning onto it, she broke into a run, her bag bouncing against her hip. Her feet crunched the rocks, and she felt almost giddy because her feet had crunched the rocks of this driveway so many times before.

  She was finally going home, to the last place where everything made sense.

  The trees broke and opened into her front yard. It was so dark that Ivy almost didn’t see it.

  Nothing.

  She saw… nothing.

  She knew her house was gone, but it had still been here, even if it was only rubble. Not even three weeks ago, it was here. She could look around and see
familiar things.

  Now it was really gone.

  There was nothing left. No rubble, nothing. Just a giant pile of bricks and a big dumpster filled with junk near the oak tree that Ivy fell out of when she was six and broke her right arm. Where her house once stood was an empty hole, like a giant grave waiting to be filled.

  She sank to her knees in the too-long grass. She saw the storm cellar doors, but other than that, her whole life was… dead.

  It was a ghost, just like her.

  The wind kicked up and blew her hair around. A few drops of rain started to fall, but she barely felt them because she was gone. She’d never been at her house alone before, but somehow this felt right. It felt exactly how this night should end.

  She got up and went to sit under the big oak. Its trunk was wide and knobby, and its leaves kept her mostly dry from the rain. In the distance, thunder rumbled, getting closer every minute. She knew it was dumb to sit under a tree during a thunderstorm, but this felt kind of perfect too. Like she and the storm and her lost house all belonged together.

  So she sat there and cried. She sat there and held her own hand, trying to feel her own skin against her fingers. Trying to feel real, trying to own something.

  “Ivy!”

  The storm was loud now, just like her crying, and Ivy thought she heard her name all mixed up with the wind, like it really was making them one. Even under the thick oak leaves, her shirt and hair were soaked. Her bag was tucked under her legs, protecting her notebooks, all she had left.

  “Ivy!”

  She lifted her head. Because that wasn’t the wind and some cosmic connection to the storm.

  “Ives!”

  Ivy peered through the sheet of rain and saw a bobbing flashlight and a girl running.

  Layla crashed onto her knees next to Ivy, kicking up mud and dead leaves. The flashlight spun on the ground, and she threw her arms around Ivy. Her secondhand raincoat was slick and smelled like cheap plastic.

  “Oh my God, Ivy,” she said, pulling back and pressing her hands on Ivy’s shoulders. “You’re here. Thank God, you’re here.” She dug her phone out of her pocket and tapped on it, her fingers shaking. “Dad, I found her. She’s at our house…. No, the old house…. Yeah…. No, we’ll meet you back at the hotel. Okay, bye.”