Xavier bumped up against me and grinned that grin that he did when he was just a little bit drunk. The lights flashed. Xavier took the whisky from his bag.
Was it time to tell him? Even through all that alcohol the thought made my stomach twist. I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.
He cracked the top, took a sip. When he handed it to me, I gulped. The room shifted. We raised our arms and shook our hips. Another band went on. Cymbals and bells. More dancing.
Nsst nsst. Bzzz bzzz bzzz. We grinned wide white teeth glowing in the dark. The room was packed, people on all sides pushing us toward each other, arms and shoulders, knees colliding. What was I ever worried about? I smiled up at him. But when he looked down at me, he had this curious expression on his face, and maybe it was all the alcohol, but I swore he was staring at me in a very different way than usual. It was the same look I remembered from the night he’d forgotten.
I felt a delicate bubble of hope getting bigger and bigger inside my chest, terrifying and dangerous, but I could not even stop it.
Maybe this is happening, I told myself. For real this time.
A spotlight on stage lit up a singer all in glitter. She was enormous and gorgeous, like someone from another better planet. She leaned in toward the microphone. Her voice was a sex growl. “I wrote this song to be fucked to, but you could dance to it, too.” She leaned back, and shouted, “WE ARE ALL GODDAMN MIRACLES!!” Music burst forth like confetti, the lights blinked on and off. I could feel Xavier’s breath on my cheek.
And we were really dancing like no one was watching.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
But then I looked up and realized someone was.
She was over by the bar when the lights flashed, but I swear a second before I saw her, I’d felt her, deep in my gut the way some animals sense an earthquake just before it comes.
Holy fuck.
Ivy.
“Xavier,” I said. The music was so loud. “XAVIER!” I grabbed his hand. He turned toward me, his mouth so close again. He was smiling, but I could barely see it, I could only smell the smell of him and feel his hard chest against my chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw motion near the bar. Ivy was making her way toward us.
My heart pounded and pounded. I felt like the building was on fire. Like the flames were about to swallow us whole. “Let’s go outside!” I said.
Xavier nodded.
Then he froze.
“Oh God,” he said. He’d seen her, too.
“C’mon!” I said. But he wasn’t listening to me anymore.
Somehow she was always smaller than I remembered her. She was tiny and wiry in black knee-length cutoffs and an army-green tank top. She had a million metal bracelets on each wrist like armor and hair clumped and cut short, big eyes with eyeliner caked around them that had maybe been on for a couple of days. She had a pointed chin like a bat, a wide mouth, and a space between her two front teeth. The fact that Ivy wasn’t conventionally beautiful made it worse. Power you get from being beautiful is cheap. But Ivy’s appeal just came from the her of her. She was a tornado, unpredictable and cracklingly alive. “She isn’t scared of anything,” Xavier had told me once with pride and awe. “Like literally not one single thing.” But everyone is scared of something is what I had thought, though I didn’t say it.
Ivy was right in front of us now. Xavier wasn’t moving. Her friend Gwen was next to her. Gwen and I shared a nod. In elementary school Gwen and I had briefly been friends, good friends even. But that was a very long time ago.
The song ended, and the band started playing something else, slower and softer.
“I’m going to get another drink,” Gwen said, then slipped away, as though maybe that had been the plan all along.
I stood there with Xavier and Ivy. The room swirled around us.
“It’s been . . . ,” Xavier said, finally. They hadn’t been in contact at all since that day a month ago when everything happened.
“Too long,” Ivy said. She pressed her flat hand against his chest. I stared at Ivy’s short bitten nails and chipped silver polish. I imagined Ivy could feel Xavier’s big sweet heart thumping against her palm. “I need to talk to you,” Ivy said. I saw Ivy glance at my blue hands, then up at Xavier’s hair. “Give us a minute?” she said to me.
I turned toward Xavier. I knew I needed to stop this, whatever was about to happen. But when our eyes met, I realized it was already too late. “I’ll find you soon?” he said.
I froze, as everything I wasn’t saying bubbled up inside me. Ivy was a monster and would destroy him. And last time he just barely survived her. And this was supposed to be the night I finally told him the truth. I had waited so long for this.
“Sash?” Xavier said. He sounded so gentle and concerned. “Is that okay?”
Later I would think back to this moment, wonder if everything might have been different if only I’d given a different answer.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
I turned away, then pushed through the crowd. When I looked back, Xavier and Ivy had been swallowed up.
I got in line for the bathroom. I was a wild and desperate animal. I needed to do something, to stop this, to save him. But I had no idea what.
Gwen walked by holding a drink. She gulped it down and put the empty glass on a table. She gave me a little wave as she headed toward the front door. I called out to her. “Gwen! Wait!”
Gwen came back. “Where are you going?” I said.
“Home,” Gwen said. She looked at my hands. “So . . . is that like a weird fetish thing or something?” She grinned.
I remembered when we were friends back in fourth grade, going over to her house. It was fancy and completely silent. Gwen lived there with her father, who was always at work, and her mother, who spent all day in bed. Gwen had said that this was because her mother was very popular and had a lot of friends who lived far away in other countries in other time zones and she stayed up very late at night talking to them. “That’s why she’s in bed,” Gwen said. “During the day she has to catch up on sleep. Also sometimes at night she goes to parties.” The story had seemed kind of strange to me at the time, but I had reminded myself my own mother did plenty of weird things. Who could really say why mothers did what they did?
Gwen’s mother passed away a few years after that. We weren’t friends anymore by that point, but I’d heard that she had been sick for a long time, had spent years slowly dying. I understood then what the story had been about. The idea of my once friend inviting people over and then telling that lie to cover up what was actually happening made my chest hurt. I went to the funeral alone and sat at the back. I’m not sure if Gwen even saw me.
Standing there that night at Sloe Joe’s, I thought of Gwen’s silent house, her sick mother, of how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen.
“She came here looking for him, you know,” Gwen said.
“She did?” That made it worse. But I wondered why Gwen was telling me this. “How did she even know he’d be here?”
Gwen shrugged. “She just figured, I guess. Haven’t you noticed how good she is at that?”
“At what?” I said.
“Getting what she wants.” Gwen gave me a half smile. “Have a good night, girly.” She turned and headed toward the door again.
I stayed in line, breathing hard.
If Ivy bumping into him here wasn’t an accident, it meant she wanted something from him. Maybe she even wanted him back.
But that doesn’t mean she can have him, I reminded myself.
I imagined leaving the bathroom and finding him. He would be alone. “So where’d you know that girl from?” he’d say. “She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. What was her name? Plant? Root?” And he’d grin, at his own dumb joke.
And he’d take the whisky out of his bag.
And we’d go outside and finish it.
And we’d play our game ag
ain.
And finally, finally, I would tell him the truth.
Only when I got back from the bathroom, he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the dance floor, wasn’t at the bar. Finally, I headed out to the tiny concrete courtyard in the back where people went to smoke sometimes. There was a group sitting around a picnic table, passing a vaporizer. I turned toward the corner, and that’s when I spotted them. Xavier and Ivy, up against the wall, their eyes were closed. They weren’t kissing or moving or anything, they were just like that, holding each other tight.
I felt hot and sick, full of rage and terror.
I backed up quickly, before they saw me. I went through the bar, outside into the hot night, and then I was gone.
My heart pounded powerfully, painfully. I didn’t know then what I know now: Be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.
Xavier
They say guys make stupid decisions with their dicks, but Xavier knew the very dumbest ones he’d ever made were the ones he made with his heart.
Ivy held his hand as she led him through the trees toward that place in the woods, midway between their houses, where they always used to go. She squeezed tight like she was trying to keep him from running away. He probably should have run—some part of him knew that—but his stupid heart kept marching him forward.
When he’d seen Ivy at Sloe Joe’s, he’d tried to remind himself that he was supposed to be mad, but all he’d felt was surprised, and maybe a little bit scared, and mostly just very, very happy to see her.
She brought him outside to the courtyard, and instead of saying anything, she’d just wrapped her arms around him and stayed like that. And then after a while asked him, please would he please come with her to their spot in the woods, and he said okay.
On the train, she’d leaned her head back against his chest and nestled into him like the whole last month of them being apart hadn’t even happened. When he caught sight of them together in the reflection in the glass, he saw that he was smiling.
Now they walked in between the trees where there was no path, but they both knew the way blackout drunk with their eyes closed. They’d come here together so many times, starting back when it was still winter but the smell of spring was creeping in over the melting snow. “It’s the time of year to fuck against a tree in the woods” is what Ivy had told him when she’d brought him the first time. And then she’d taken off his gloves and put his hands up under her coat and sweater onto her warm skin.
Now, the air was hot and thick in that late-July way. And as he followed her, he tried not to think about the last time they’d spoken before this. He tried not to think about how he’d gone to a party in a neighboring town to hear his friend Ethan’s band play on a night Ivy had said she was busy with a family thing. But then he found her there, out back next to one of the kegs, wrapped up in a skinny punk-looking guy with a septum ring and a leather cuff on each wrist. And when she looked up and saw him seeing her, she didn’t even seem surprised. Almost like she’d expected to get caught, or wanted to. “Oh shit, is this the chump you’ve been texting me about?” the punk guy asked. And he laughed.
Xavier tried not to think about how he’d waited to hear from her after that, assumed she’d come to him full of apologies, like she usually did after she’d done something messed up, only this time she didn’t. And he tried not to think about how a week after that he’d gone back to their place in the woods, because it was late and he couldn’t sleep and maybe some part of him hoped she might be out there missing him like he’d been missing her. And the crazy thing is, she was there. But she wasn’t alone. Turned out, she didn’t think of it as her and Xavier’s spot the way he did. He left as quickly as he could. They never heard Xavier running in those woods. They were making too much noise on their own.
He was trying not to think about that then as Ivy pulled him forward, twigs cracking under their feet. The moon was so bright, everything was glowing. The farther away from the rest of the world they went, the easier it was to tell himself that all of this was happening outside of regular space and time and didn’t count. That he could have this one night, whatever this was, and not even have to pay for it later.
Now they had reached the place where they always used to go, but there was something new: a tire dangling from a tree branch, connected to a rope that did not look thick or strong enough to hold it. Ivy pressed a button on the swing and a string of lights glowed yellow.
Ivy leaped up onto the swing, stuck one leg out behind her. She had taken ballet for years as a kid and could still move like that, like the air that surrounded her was different than regular air, thicker and thinner both. And when she smiled at him, everything else was wiped away, and the only thing in his mind and his heart was how very much he had missed her.
She lowered herself down, slipped both legs into the middle of the tire. “Wind me up, please,” she said, like a kid asking him to play. Ivy was so many things all at once. And so he held her hand and walked circles around her until the rope was high and tight and it seemed like it might snap. And then he let her go and she spun and spun as the rope unwound. She leaned her head back, and she opened her mouth like she was screaming, but no sound came out. When the spinning stopped, she got off the swing and pulled him to her.
That’s when he realized she was crying.
“I am such a shit,” she said. “I’m an absolute horrible, awful shithead.”
His heart was beating so hard. “Wait,” he said. All he wanted then was for her to stop crying. When Ivy cried, it felt like the only thing in the world that mattered. “Please . . .” But as he searched for the right words, she raised her hand to his lips to quiet him, shook her head, and looked down.
“I deserve for you to hate me.” She looked up at him, blinked her big wet eyes. “Do you?”
And he told her what he’d always told her when she cried over something she’d done—that everyone makes mistakes. And of course he didn’t hate her. He never could.
She stood on her tiptoes and leaned in close.
Xavier had heard that the moment before an accident time slows down. One second feels like a minute, an hour, a month. That’s what it was like then, out there in those woods, her lips inching toward his so slowly, his heart racing, stomach twisting, like he knew this kiss would either kill him or save him.
“This is a terrible idea,” he said quietly, right before their lips touched. “This is definitely going to end in disaster.”
“Not this time,” she said. “I promise this time. Nothing bad will happen.”
Later he would look back at that night and remember how they’d both believed so much in the truth of what they’d said.
It’s just that only one of them was right.
Sasha
I stood at the station, waiting for the train, staring into the dark empty tracks, trying not to picture the things I could not stop picturing. Xavier and Ivy out in the courtyard, pressed together. Xavier and Ivy kissing. Xavier and Ivy, wherever they were now, her hand against his chest, reaching in, tearing out his heart, putting it into her mouth, and eating it.
Somehow I ended up with the rest of the whisky. I was sick and hollow and needed this to stop, so I sipped and sipped until it was gone. But it didn’t fix anything.
I closed my eyes and new images filled my head, ones that hurt as much as the others, maybe more: Xavier’s face so close to mine, his grin seeming to mean something I so desperately wanted it to.
It hadn’t always been painful with me and Xavier. There was a whole year before this when we were friends and only friends. Best friends. And that was it.
We were in the same English class and paired up for a project. I had assumed Xavier was just this regular guy, boring and normal. But the more I got to know him, the more I realized I’d been unfair. He was smart. And weird and silly. And so talented. One day I was eating Swedish Fish and I gave him one, and he stu
ck it to his notebook and drew an entire little world around it, strange and funny and beautiful. Another time he spent the entire class passing me a series of notes, each containing only a single letter, spelling out THIS IS A VERY INEFFICENT WAY TO WRITE A NOTE. Another day he brought in a hollowed-out penny and showed me a magic trick he’d learned on YouTube. “My backup career idea is amateur street magician,” he’d said. “What’s your non-backup career idea?” I’d asked. “Sorcerer,” he’d said.
Eventually I got to know him well enough to realize this: he delighted in the small things, but also knew that in the grand scheme of the world, nothing we did or felt mattered at all. And he got how that was unbelievably terrifying, but also was the thing that made us free.
But even though nothing mattered and a person could basically do whatever they wanted, he was still kind. Not just nice, but truly kind, which is different.
He never judged anyone for anything or about anything. He was boundlessly forgiving. He was sensitive and didn’t know how to protect himself sometimes. He said I had an unshakable core and he envied me. “Being in love is a painful nightmare,” he’d told me once. “You’re lucky because your heart is too tough for it.” He thought it was true. So had I.
But he is how I learned I was wrong.
I remembered what he’d told me when we were first becoming friends. We were at his house working on our English project, talking about dating people, and I told him how I didn’t really believe in it. “Make out and move on,” I said. “That’s my MO.” I did a corny grin.
He had told me he had a history of getting crushes on girls who always thought he was too normal to bother with at first (just like I had, though of course I never told him)—tough weirdos, girls who played drums, who pierced their own ears, who made robots in their basements, girls who wore shit-kicking boots and actually used them to kick shit. Girls who maybe he liked more than they liked him, who he never quite had even when he had them. And who always ended up breaking his heart.
Bad Girls with Perfect Faces Page 2
