The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

She snorts. “Just go out with her, fuck her a few times, it’ll be great. What reason do you have not to? Can you get me out of this dress?”

  I swallow. “Yeah.”

  …

  Our group text with the girls lights up pretty soon after that, and we end up meeting everyone at Mama’s, this bar up on College Hill with cheap drinks and incredible tater tots. It’s not technically a gay bar, but the queers unofficially claimed this place back in my parents’ day—I mean, come on, it’s called Mama’s; that’s not for straights—and it stuck.

  Alyssa tried to stay home to pack before she heads back to school, but we dragged her out and now she’s mostly stressing about not having it done, so we’re getting her drunk. Melody’s still at Dav’s working, but Diana, Melody’s partner, twist-outs and Boston accent, is here, drinking mai tais and showing us pictures of the Airbnb in New York where they’re running off to celebrate the anniversary of their first…something.

  Ivy nurses her drink and tries to not look nauseated with either disgust, because we’re talking about relationships, or jealousy, because we’re talking about New York. She’s already kind of over us and is searching the room for some new stranger to bring back to her place—my place—but we know what we’re getting into when we go out with Ivy. Not five minutes later, she’s out in the corner, making out with some girl, when Diana turns the topic back to Elizabeth and whether or not I’m going to text her. “Why the fuck wouldn’t you?” Diana says.

  Alyssa laughs. “You know why not.”

  “God, Andie, seriously? Still?”

  “It just doesn’t seem like… This doesn’t feel like the time,” I say.

  “It hasn’t been the time for what, fifteen years?” Diana says. “When is it going to be?”

  “No, I mean, she’s living in my house now. I don’t want to… If there’s a chance something’s going to actually happen, it’s now. If this was, you know, if this was a story, this is when it happens. She realizes the girl next door has been there the whole time.” I may be a drink or two deep at this point.

  “Things happening usually require one person telling the person who has no idea that they’re in love with them,” Diana says.

  “And have been,” Alyssa adds, “for fifteen years.”

  “I’m just saying, it doesn’t seem like the right time to bring someone else into this,” I say, right as Ivy slides back to the table, apparently bored of her conquest.

  “Into what?” Ivy says.

  I say, “Hiring a new dancer,” with the smoothness of someone who’s been telling lies of omission to her best friend for fifteen years. The conversation continues cleanly enough, despite the eye rolls from Diana and Alyssa, who are so sick of my shit, but a few minutes later, Alyssa glances at the door and chokes on a laugh. “Uh-oh. Look who’s here.”

  Diana looks, her huge brown eyes scanning the doorway. “Who?”

  It’s Dot. Her hair is French braided, and when she gets closer—which she does right about immediately—I can see the deep-blue glitter eye shadow perfectly circling her eyes.

  “Ivy’s girl from last night,” I say quickly. What the hell is she doing here?

  Diana whistles. “Someone’s got a fan.”

  Dot comes up to Ivy’s side and smiles at her. “Hi.”

  “Hey,” Ivy says—not unfriendly, but not exactly inviting, either.

  It’s enough for Dot, though, who immediately pulls up a chair and settles at the table between Ivy and Diana. She turns that smile on all of us. “Hi. I’m Dot.”

  Diana thinks Ivy’s indiscretions are hilarious—I swear she and Melody have some kind of bingo board at home where they track all the outrageous things Ivy does—so she is all over this. “Dot. Hi, sweetie. Look how adorable you are!”

  “Thanks!”

  “Soooo what brings a hot young thing like you to a place like this?”

  She shrugs. “Just checking out the scene.” She reaches for a sip of Ivy’s drink, but Ivy snorts and moves it away from her. She’s honed in on a girl on the other side of the bar who’s huddled with some friends on the minuscule dance floor. Dot’s not even a blip on her radar anymore.

  If Dot notices, she doesn’t seem bothered. She asks Diana about herself, which of course leads to answers about Melody, and in a minute, Dot’s exclaiming over the Airbnb pictures. Alyssa and I make faces at each other.

  “This is amazing,” Dot says. “I love New York. I’m thinking of going there for college, if I don’t get into RISD.”

  “What program at RISD?” Diana says.

  “Painting. I want to be a makeup artist, so having a BFA would be awesome.” Well, look at us planning ahead. Way, way ahead.

  “Ivy almost went to RISD,” Diana says.

  Ivy snorts. “No I didn’t.”

  Dot watches her.

  “You’d be a great makeup artist,” Diana says. “That eye shadow look is incredible.”

  Dot turns to her and grins. “I do YouTube videos!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, I want to be, like, one of the big ones. I don’t have that many subscribers now, but yeah…that’s my goal. There aren’t a ton of Asian-American girls doing videos in English, so it felt like, I don’t know. If you can’t find it, make it, right?”

  “Majoring in painting sounds amazing,” Alyssa says. “My parents would be all over me. How are you going to earn a living?”

  “Oh, mine are,” Dot says. “It’s that, all the time, just in Vietnamese. My parents have this shrimp boat business and my older brothers all get up at five a.m. to help with that, and I just… No thank you.”

  “Waking up at five a.m. is probably not for everyone,” Diana says diplomatically.

  “I’m guessing these parents don’t know you’re at a bar with a bunch of dykes,” Alyssa says. Maybe I should call them.

  “Uh, yeah, no,” Dot says. “They’re…very Catholic. I told my mom I was bisexual when I was fourteen and I think we both just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “Fun!” Diana says.

  “Eh, whose parents ever reacted well?” Alyssa says.

  Diana laughs. “Andie’s.” I roll my eyes a little, but of course she’s right. My parents are also Catholic, but I’m guessing not the kind Dot’s talking about. My parents knew I was gay before I did.

  Dot turns to me with wide eyes. “Oh my God, Andie, your parents are amazing. Oh my God. You are so lucky.”

  Oddly, I don’t feel that way right now. “Yeah, they’re something, all right.”

  Dot says, “No, they’re, like… God. They’re so amazing.”

  “They’re amazing,” Diana agrees.

  Dot says, “They saw me coming downstairs with Ivy and they were, like, totally fine with it. If mine knew I was having sex, God, I can’t even think about it.”

  She is clearly fucking dying for Ivy to give her any sort of response to her mentioning them having sex. Some kind of acknowledgment, anything. But Ivy hasn’t looked at any of us in a while. She’s still watching that girl on the dance floor, and pretty soon after that, once the conversation’s turned to how old we all were our first time (nineteen for Diana, eighteen for me and Alyssa, and fourteen, although she doesn’t volunteer that now, for Ivy) she gets up abruptly and goes to the bar. Better position to scope out her prey.

  Dot makes a big show of pretending not to notice, asking Diana some more questions about her anniversary and Alyssa what she’s studying instead of painting—Alyssa can’t even draw—and I sigh and get up and follow Ivy over to the bar.

  “Makeup videos, huh?” I say to her.

  Ivy doesn’t look away from the dancing girl. “What?”

  “Dot?”

  “Who?”

  “Oh my God, Ivy.”

  “Oh.” She shrugs and takes a sip of her drink. “Yeah, apparently.”

>   “That’s, uh…kind of shallow.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, I guess she’s not saving orphans in her spare time like the rest of us.”

  Fine. “So you realize you’re being stalked, right?”

  “What?” she says, eyes narrowed on the girl.

  “Can you pay attention for a fucking second?”

  She sighs and turns to me. “She asked me this morning where some cool places were to hang out, I told her here. It’s not exactly shocking she’d come out here. She’s a baby gay. She’s exploring.”

  “She thinks you’re going to take her home.”

  “Well, I imagine she’ll find out I’m not when I don’t.”

  “You’re not going to talk to her?”

  “And say what? She doesn’t expect anything of me. I never gave her a reason to.”

  “You just said it—she’s a baby gay. They get attached.”

  “And they get over it.” Ivy finishes her drink. “She’ll be fine. And she’s not my responsibility if she isn’t.”

  Sometimes I forget how easy this is for her. She’s never cruel about shaking people off, but she’s never felt bad about it, either. And I just don’t understand that. I don’t know how to not feel like I owe everyone everything all the time.

  Ivy goes out to the floor, dancing by herself, sidling up close-but-not-too-close to the girl. Alyssa comes over and nudges me.

  “Here’s a concept,” she says, and oh boy is she drunk. “What if you juuuust…tell her?”

  I turn back to the bar to get a new drink.

  “No, don’t get something here. Me and Diana want to go to Kinetic. Melody’s gonna join after work. You coming?”

  Back at our table, Diana’s gathering her shit together, but Dot’s watching Ivy and looking goddamn stricken, and I’m only human for fuck’s sake.

  And it’s not as if I don’t know that feeling.

  “Someone needs to tell Dot not to wait for Ivy,” I say.

  “Why do I feel like you’re going to say that someone is you?”

  “Hopefully because I’m a nice person. Let me get something out of this.”

  “You are a nice person. You’re also the person who always cleans up after Ivy.” She tugs on my sleeve. “Let your duties down for one night. Come dancing.”

  “I’ll meet you there later.”

  She sighs and kisses my cheek. “Yeah. Okay.”

  I order two rum and Cokes—that’s what I drank when I was in high school—and bring them back over to our table, where Dot is scrolling through her phone and trying desperately to look nonchalant. I sit down across from her and slide one glass to her.

  “Thank you,” she says softly.

  I give her a minute. “You okay?”

  She shrugs, but a second later she says, “She barely even noticed me.”

  I almost feel bad for her. “Yeah…that’s Ivy. She, uh, moves on.”

  “She’s staring at that girl in blue. She’s not even hot.”

  “She’s pretty hot.”

  She sulks.

  “Well, what did you think would happen?” I say. “You’d walk in here and she’d forget every other girl exists?”

  Dot looks at me incredulously. “Have you seen me?”

  “Wow, okay, they make them confident these days, I guess.” I take a deep breath. “Look, Dot. The thing about Ivy is, she’s sort of a onetime experience. She’s a lot more interested in the hunt than anything else.”

  “That’s not true,” Dot says. “She didn’t exactly have to hunt me, or whatever. I didn’t really need convincing. And trust me, that was fine with her.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “You weren’t in the room,” Dot says. “You didn’t see her face. You didn’t hear her—”

  “I’m not saying she didn’t have a good time,” I say. “I’m just saying she doesn’t like to give anyone a chance to get attached. Ivy doesn’t really do the feelings thing.”

  “But it’s not like it was just sex and then it was over. We talked after. We slept all curled up together, like… You don’t do what we did without feelings,” Dot says.

  “God. You really, really do. Especially if you’re Ivy.”

  Dot watches me, tracing her finger around the rim of her glass.

  “Trust me,” I say. “I’m telling you this for your own good. Ivy Harlowe is not your girlfriend. She’s just a good story.”

  Dot shakes her head slowly. “You’re jealous.”

  Hang on. “Excuse me? I’m trying to help you.”

  “Bullshit. You think the way you look at her is subtle? You’re jealous, so you have to minimize what she and I had. You weren’t there. You don’t know.”

  I feel hot and breathless and fucking furious, watching this kid try to tell me about Ivy. About me. “I know that ‘what she and you had’ is exactly what she’s had with a hundred other girls.”

  She shrugs easily. “A hundred other girls aren’t me.”

  “Wow. All right. Fuck you, do what you want. But if you think I’m jealous that I’m not one of Ivy’s toys she uses once and throws in the trash, you’re even stupider than you seem.”

  She stands up, glass in hand. “Thanks for the drink.”

  God, fuck this. I have friends to go meet, and Ivy has a girl in a blue dress to take home. There is literally no reason to concern myself with this kid any longer. Hope that ego doesn’t hurt when it hits the ground.

  I do turn and take one more look on my way out, though. Dot’s moved to the bar, her eyes narrowed on Ivy, and just then she pushes off it and heads to the dance floor. She goes straight to a girl near Ivy and starts dancing with her, and it’s immediately clear that she knows what she’s doing where dancing is concerned if, from what I can tell, literally nowhere else. She moves easily, carelessly, her body sliding like it isn’t quite solid, and I see the girl Ivy’s been talking to notice her right before I turn around.

  I’d be embarrassed for Dot if she were a little less annoying, but, well. Can’t say my heart’s breaking that she’s going to get shot down at close range instead of just watching from a distance while Ivy picks up someone else like every other heartbroken lesbian in Rhode Island has at some point in her sexual development.

  So I walk the two blocks to Kinetic and dance it out with the girls for an hour or two, but I’m tired before too long and this shifty-eyed girl I am very much not interested in won’t get her shifty eyes off me, so it’s not too late when I get home. Only to discover Ivy in the stairwell, like she couldn’t even make it all the way into my brother’s room, half dressed and wrapped around…

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

  Dot tucks her forehead into Ivy’s neck and starts laughing.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I say to Ivy.

  “Seriously? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “You’re kind of in the middle of my hallway.”

  Ivy whispers something in Dot’s ear, and she nods and goes into my brother’s room and shuts the door. Ivy leans against the wall, way too nonchalant for someone in a bra and a yanked-down sundress. The same dress I’d zipped up in the dressing room.

  Dot must have unzipped it now.

  “Can I help you?” she says to me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Foooreplay?”

  “You’re sleeping with the same person twice? You don’t…do that.”

  “I don’t believe this is some contract I’ve signed,” she says. “She’s cute, she’s a nice girl, she’s great in bed, she wanted it, and I wanted it. Did I have to start running everyone I sleep with by you when I moved in? Is that a contract I signed?”

  I can’t believe this. “She’s stalking you.”

  “You’re awfully loud when I’m drunk.”


  “She’s going to get even more attached and you’re going to be stuck with her.” And God, Dot’s just going to be reeking of I told you so tomorrow morning, and I don’t think I can take that on an empty stomach.

  Ivy laughs, the kind of genuine laugh you don’t get out of her all that often. “I’m really not concerned that I won’t be able to shake off a seventeen-year-old when I want to.”

  “She’s going to get ideas,” I say. “She’s going to think it means something.”

  She kisses me, sloppy and too short.

  “This is not one of your romance novels,” she whispers, her face still close to mine. “It’s just a girl fucking a girl.”

  With that, she goes back into Max’s room. I hear soft voices and not quite as soft laughter.

  Ivy never does this.

  This is not…this is not how Ivy sleeping with the same girl more than once for the first time ever was supposed to go.

  So I go to my room, kick my shoes against the wall, and take out my phone.

  And I text Elizabeth: hey.

  October

  “Are you more of a white wine or a red wine person?” Elizabeth asks me.

  I’m more of a cheap beer person, but I feel like that isn’t the right answer. We’re at this restaurant called Clair de Lune, which even townie-me knows is the place that college kids’ parents take them when they come to visit. There are tablecloths.

  We’ve been texting for the past three weeks, but now it’s the first weekend in October and the date is actually happening. She’s been busy, with wedding prep and veterinary school, and I’ve been making up things I was doing so it would sound like I, too, have a life, every time she takes a while to answer a text and I convince myself she’s ghosting me, because why the hell is a twenty-two-year-old in veterinary school who looks like that and has the money to bring me to Clair de Lune not ghosting me?

  “Um…whichever is fine,” I say after an awkwardly long pause.

  “White goes best with shellfish,” she says. “If you know what you’re ordering.”

  “Uh, yeah, I like shellfish.”

  “Perfect,” she says, and she turns to our server and orders a bottle of something fancy-sounding.