The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

  “Your house is on fire.”

  There’s a second where none of us moves, and then all three of us scramble out, leaving the cars open and beeping in protest as we run down the rest of the block, weaving through the crowd until we’re on the sidewalk. The shithole formerly known as Ivy’s house is smoking pathetically, one wall completely gone and the others not much better, bits of charred roof and furniture strewn into the front lawn. The firefighters are packing up their equipment, ready to go.

  Holy shit.

  Somehow what comes out of my mouth is, “How many fucking times did your landlord say he was going to fix the wiring?”

  “Oh my God,” Dot says. “Was anyone in there?”

  I shake my head. “Her mom’s in Costa Rica. Fuck, Ives. You could have been in there.”

  Ivy’s staring at the house, her eyes slightly narrowed like she’s trying to figure it out.

  “God, wow,” Dot says. She puts her hand on Ivy’s arm. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “She’s not okay,” I snap, because who the fuck is she to be here, to be part of this, to act like it really matters to her world whether this person she’s known for half an hour burned alive or not? “She could have died. If this had happened last night, she would have been in there.”

  “But I wasn’t,” Ivy says flatly.

  “Still… God, all your shit. All your school stuff. Your clothes.” All the crafts we made when we were little, her half of the construction paper heart that says best friends forever, though fuck if I’m about to say that in front of Dot. I take her hand. “Ivy.”

  Ivy’s still looking at her house like she’s making a decision, and I think about Dot’s face at the club when she was looking up at her. Two natural disasters in one night.

  She’s so fucking beautiful, in the streetlight and the smoke.

  Her mouth quirks up into a smile. “Good,” she says quietly. “Good. Burn it all down.”

  …

  Ivy doesn’t want to talk to the cops tonight—she says she’ll take care of that tomorrow—so we get out of there before anyone can ask us to identify ourselves. I doubt it’ll end up being much of an investigation. The wires in that house had been sparking for God knows how long, and it’s not like there was anyone to gain anything from burning it down. And despite the number of girls in this town Ivy’s loved and then left, I don’t think anyone actually wants to kill her. I could be wrong.

  “Why’s your mom in Costa Rica?” Dot asks. We’ve driven the car a few blocks away, and now we’re sitting against the hood just…decompressing.

  “She’s teaching yoga to starving orphans,” Ivy says.

  I expect that to confuse Dot, I don’t know, but she just smiles a little. Ivy digs around in her purse for her vape pen, takes a long pull, and then gives it to Dot even though I hold out my hand.

  Dot hesitates.

  “Just hold the button and breathe in,” Ivy says.

  “Is it pot?”

  Ivy laughs. “Yeah. You don’t have to; it’s okay.”

  “I just never have before.” She pauses one more second, then wraps her lips around it and breathes in.

  “Hold,” Ivy says. “Hold. Pull in a little fresh air; don’t breathe out… Good. You’re a natural.”

  I roll my eyes and take the pen.

  “Andie used to always cough when she was your age,” Ivy says.

  Dot clears her throat, obviously trying not to cough. “I’m not as young as I look,” she says.

  Ivy chuckles. “Good. How old are you?”

  She pauses.

  “Oh, come on,” Ivy says. “You think I’m going to go back to Kinetic and tell them you snuck in? If they started kicking out everyone who wasn’t twenty-one, they’d go out of business.”

  She rubs her skinny arms to warm up. “Seventeen. I just turned.”

  “When?” Ivy says.

  “August fifteenth.”

  Ivy laughs a little more. Her birthday’s the sixteenth. I guess she thinks that’s cute or something.

  “How old are you?” Dot says.

  Ivy takes the pen from me and pulls a long drag. “Nineteen.” She doesn’t mention that she just turned, too. Ivy’s six months younger than me, which seemed like a decade when we were younger. She was the little one. I was supposed to take care of her.

  It’s almost laughable now, except that it’s not.

  Dot’s mesmerized. “Are you in college?”

  She nods. “URI.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Fashion merchandising,” she says, still holding her breath.

  Dot climbs onto the hood of the car. “The next-generation Anna Wintour.”

  I don’t know who that is, but I guess Ivy does, because she watches her, finally exhaling. “Yeah,” she says after a beat. “We’ll see.”

  “How long have you been going to clubs like this?” Dot asks.

  We both know what Dot’s really asking here—how long has Ivy been a professional lesbian—but Ivy just says, “Awhile.”

  “This is sort of my first time,” Dot says. “Being out like this.”

  Ivy keeps her eyes on her. “I figured.”

  They have this long moment of just looking at each other, and Dot is still sitting on my car, and to be honest, any patience I had for this little lesbian mentorship program is just about out. “Okay, Cinderella,” I say to Dot. “Where can I drop you off?”

  Ivy turns to me. “We’re going to your house,” she says like it’s obvious.

  “We’re going to my house. She’s going home.”

  “I’m not going home,” Dot says. “I told my parents I was sleeping over at my friend’s house.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So where’s your friend’s house?”

  “I can’t show up there at one in the morning.”

  “She’s coming with us,” Ivy says, fixing me with a hard stare.

  I chew the inside of my cheeks.

  “C’mon, Andie,” she says with a little pout. “We don’t have anywhere else to go.” She puts an arm around Dot and tugs her in close, and she comes willingly, her chin tilted up and her eyes on Ivy.

  God. What the fuck else can I do? The kid clearly came out tonight with no plan outside of finding someone to whisk her away for a night—and can we just take a fucking moment to roll our eyes at the fact that not only is she successful her very first night out, she’s fucking Ivy Harlowe successful. Ivy’s newly homeless and has just been through some kind of trauma, whether or not she knows it, and my mom is the type who would eat me alive if she found out I let her go to a hotel or something after that instead of bringing her somewhere safe.

  My mom is also the type who doesn’t give much of a shit about casual lesbian sex under her roof, which sounds like a good thing until you need an excuse to not let your best friend fuck a stranger in your brother’s old bedroom.

  Goddamn it.

  “You want to come with me?” Ivy says to Dot, softly, with the kind of tenderness she’ll give one girl for one night and never again, and Dot nods without breaking eye contact with her.

  One night and never again. God. Fine. If Dot doesn’t want to let me save her, so be it.

  I drive the five minutes between Ivy’s house and mine, which isn’t exactly a palace, either, but at least it’s probably not going to catch fire at a moment’s notice. We leave the lights off and rush quietly up the stairs so we don’t wake up my parents, and Ivy, as predicted, leads Dot straight to my brother’s room. I guess I should be grateful she didn’t assume she was getting mine. Max moved in with his then-girlfriend, now-wife four years ago, so his room has become sort of our makeshift guest room, complete with his old clothes still in the dresser and Bruins posters on the walls.

  Ivy says something in Dot’s ear and leaves her standing in the cent
er of Max’s room with her arms around herself while Ivy comes over to the doorway. She smiles at me, leaning her head against the doorframe. “Thank you,” she says, her eyes soft and twinkly.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  She smacks a kiss on my cheek. “You’re my favorite.”

  “I know. Have fun.”

  She glances back at Dot. “Oh, I will.”

  Ivy goes back into the room, leaving the door slightly open, and I don’t go right away even though I know I should. I watch Ivy slide up to Dot and speak to her softly, and when Dot nods, Ivy lifts her chin with two fingers.

  And then she does something weird, something I’ve never seen her do, and I’ve seen Ivy kiss hundreds of girls: she hesitates. Right before their lips touch, she pauses, glancing up from Dot’s lips and into her eyes, and there’s something so un-Ivy-like in the way she looks—nervous—that I convince myself it’s a trick of the light or something.

  They’re kissing a minute later, Ivy’s hands in Dot’s hair, gripping the back of her head, Dot’s fingers searching the hem of Ivy’s dress, and all of a sudden I don’t want to watch anymore. I close their door and go to my room, where Ivy and I have had a thousand sleepovers and never had sex.

  I get out of my clothes and wash the glitter off my face and flop down on my bed and try to ignore the noises from the next room. And when that doesn’t work, I turn up the music on my phone, reach over to my bookshelf, pull out one of my favorite romance novels, and lose myself in it until I fall asleep.

  …

  My parents have already heard about Ivy’s combusted house when I come down to breakfast the next morning, even though Ivy herself is still in bed. My mom’s a nurse, which is like having access to the world’s fastest tip line. She knows what’s going on in Providence before it’s even happened.

  “I told you that place was a death trap,” she says, spatula in her hand, my father’s greatest dad apron around her waist. “Don’t know how many times I told Ivy, hire Mike, get him to fix that place before you explode.” Mike is our handyman who my mom might believe has magical powers. “And look what happens.”

  “I’m not sure it really exploded,” I say. “More of a gentle boil.”

  Dad turns the page in his newspaper, his reading glasses balanced on the tip of his crooked nose. “How’s Ivy handling it?”

  I shrug. “It’s Ivy.”

  “I assume she’s here,” my dad says, and Mom laughs.

  “She’s here, all right,” she says. “And I know exactly what she was doing. Unless that was porn someone was blasting at two a.m.”

  “How do you know that was Ivy?” I say. “It could have been me.”

  Mom gives me a look. God. You know it’s bleak when even your mother is disappointed in your sex life.

  “I don’t know if she’s still here,” I say.

  “Ivy?” Dad says.

  “Not Ivy,” I say. “The girl.”

  She is. She and Ivy come downstairs when we’re halfway through pancakes and eggs. They’re both wearing my brother’s clothes; Ivy looks hot as hell in an old tied-up button-down and a loose pair of chinos rolled up above her spike heels, her hair slicked back, and Dot’s just drowning in a Red Sox T-shirt and an old pair of gym shorts, her makeup from last night smudged around her eyes. Dot freezes when she sees my parents, but Ivy saunters over, kisses my mom’s cheek, and steals a piece of bacon from the paper-towel-covered plate by the stove. “Morning.”

  “Hmm,” my mom says, studying Dot. “And who’s this?”

  “This is, um.” Ivy looks at Dot like she might be seeing her for the first time. “Spot, or something.”

  Ha. But also ouch.

  “Dot,” she supplies quietly.

  Ivy is unbothered. “Right. Dot.”

  “Well, Dot,” my mom says. “Why don’t you sit down and eat something?”

  Dot looks like she’d sooner disappear into the floor, but she sits down anyway, twisting the hem of my brother’s shirt in her tiny hand. “Thank you,” she says.

  My mom serves her and Ivy some pancakes and Ivy a reproachful look for good measure, which she answers with a cheesy smile. “So. Dot,” my mom says. “Is that Korean?”

  “Mom,” I snap, while my dad chokes on a laugh. She means well, she just is missing a certain brand of tact. She might give Ivy a lot of shit, but the two of them are cut from the same shameless cloth.

  “Um, it’s just short for Dorothy,” Dot says. “And I’m Vietnamese.”

  “Are you in school?” Mom asks.

  Dot nods, sipping her orange juice. “I just started my senior year.”

  “Oh, really? Where, Brown? RISD?” my mom says, knowing full goddamn well it is not Brown or RISD.

  “Um, I meant high school.”

  “High school,” my mom says to Ivy. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  Ivy butters a piece of toast. “Not particularly.”

  Dot says, “I do want to go to RISD, though,” and Ivy glances up at her.

  My dad, who’s able to, unlike my mom, sense basic human discomfort, clears his throat and reaches into his pocket. “Please ignore my wife,” he says. “She likes to practice interfering in Ivy’s love life in the hopes that she’ll someday get to do it for Andrea’s.”

  “Thank you,” I say, while Ivy cracks up. “Thank you for that.”

  “Hope you don’t mind I borrowed these,” he says to Ivy, dropping her keys into her hand.

  “Going through a gay woman’s purse,” Ivy says. “Isn’t that a hate crime?”

  “You lose jurisdiction when you come home in the middle of the night and leave your shit strewn all over my kitchen,” he says.

  She smiles at him. “You went and got my car.”

  “It’s in the driveway.”

  “You lovely, lovely hate-crimer. Are you seeing anyone?”

  This is all business as usual for me, minus the whole fire thing, but Dot’s watching like this is the best movie she’s ever seen.

  “House looked pretty scary,” Dad says. “You doing okay?”

  Ivy shrugs. “Sure. It’ll be good. Fresh start and all that. Lived in that shithole for too goddamn long.” Ivy’s mother is rarely home—she’s always traveling, chasing whatever artist’s colony or get-rich-quick scheme calls to her that month—so Ivy’s been alone in that house for a while.

  “What’s the plan?” Dad says.

  “Get my own place, finally,” she says. “Maybe something closer to school. Might take some time, though, especially since I have to replace everything.”

  “You can stay here as long as you need,” Mom says, and Ivy beams up at her, that smile that gets her anything, that got my father to walk ten blocks at the crack of dawn unprompted to go pick up her car. Ivy Harlowe, to quote a song she loves, has the world on a string, house or no house.

  We eat and make small talk for a while, Dot still watching us in amazement, and after a little while, Ivy checks the time on her phone and wipes her hands on her napkin.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says with a dramatic sigh. “I have a fire inspector to speak to. You think insurance will pay for all my shoes?”

  “Do you even have insurance?” I say.

  “I don’t know. A girl can dream.” She stands up and looks at Dot, and I think we’re all expecting her to leave her here stranded—wouldn’t be the first time I’ve given some abandoned girl a bus schedule—but she says, “Come on. I’ll drop you off at your friend’s house.”

  Dot’s as surprised as I am. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, come on.”

  Dot thanks me and my parents while Ivy gets her purse and hands Dot her discarded club clothes, and then Ivy kisses me and says she’ll see me tonight and they leave. I can hear their voices through the open window as they walk to the car but can’t make out what they’re saying, then some
thing makes Ivy laugh and give Dot a gentle shove.

  “Huh,” my mother says. “Never thought I’d live to see Ivy voluntarily spend time with a girl after her tongue’s out of her twat.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom, God created euphemisms for a reason.”

  “‘Twat’ is a euphemism. How did we end up raising Miss Fucking Manners?” she asks my dad, who shrugs and takes his meds.

  “Anyway,” I say. “I wouldn’t call Ripley’s yet. She’s giving her a ride, not exactly picking out matching towels.”

  Mom snorts. “Ivy in a relationship. That would be the day.”

  “Yeah,” I say, watching her car back out of the driveway, Dot fiddling with the radio.

  “Don’t you have work?” my dad says to me.

  “I’m going, I’m going.”

  …

  My family owns a strip club, which never really stops being a strange thing to say to people, even when you’ve grown up around it your whole life. It’s called Davina’s, after my dad’s mom, who founded it with my grandfather back in the early seventies. Rhode Island used to have extremely lax sex work laws, and people were really taking advantage of that, opening up these intense, anything-goes clubs, and Davina’s was meant to be kind of a counterpoint to that. It’s just topless dancing, nothing all that scandalous, and it’s bright and bubbly instead of dark and sensual. There are cardboard palm trees on the walls for some reason, and we get a lot more bachelorette than bachelor parties, if that gives you an idea.

  It’s how my parents met, too. My dad was the assistant manager, in his twenties, and my mom was a dancer here when she was in nursing school. Dad took over the business after my grandparents retired to Colorado, but he has bipolar disorder and the stress of running the place wasn’t great for him, so he’s mostly stepped back and let my brother manage everything for the past five years. Now Max handles the finances; his wife, Catherine, hires and corrals the dancers; and ever since I’ve been out of high school I’ve been responsible for the day-to-day operations of everything that goes into the place besides the dancers themselves, so think kitchen staff, security, DJ.

  You might think that growing up around a topless bar is some kind of lesbian fantasy, but we have great benefits and wages for our dancers, which means once people start working here, they tend not to leave. Most of them have been around for years. They’re like my aunts.