The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

  “Thank you,” I say, and she kisses my cheek. She sighs and pulls back a little, tucking my hair behind my ears like she used to when I was a kid.

  “And now we need to go talk to your dad, okay?” she says.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  We go back downstairs. Max and Dad have moved to the couch. Max has a beer, and Dad looks like he could use one.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” I say.

  They look at each other.

  And Dad says, “We have to close the club.”

  May

  “I could sell the tickets,” I say.

  “I could beat you with this coat hanger,” my mother says. “Are we listing stupid ideas?”

  We’re at Sloan’s, and she’s helping me spend my birthday money I got from my grandmother on clothes for Italy before I leave in two weeks. Normally this would be a job for the dynamic duo, obviously, but…well. I guess we’re not really much of a duo these days, dynamic or otherwise. I haven’t seen Ivy since my party, except for once at a distance at Kinetic, and we’ve barely even texted. It’s been like having a stomachache for half a month. It hurts and sometimes you can forget it’s there.

  “It just feels extravagant,” I say. “Considering.”

  “Selling a pair of plane tickets is not going to save the club,” she says.

  “I know, but jeez, let a girl dream.”

  Mom leafs through some sundresses. “You need this,” she says. “You broke up with Elizabeth; you’re going through whatever the hell’s going on with you and Ivy.”

  “They’re just not… Neither of them is the one,” I say. “And I thought at least one would be.”

  “Okay. So they’re not the one. So you pick up, you keep going, you travel to Italy. Maybe you meet the one there.”

  “You don’t want me falling in love with someone who lives in Italy.”

  “No, I suppose that would get expensive. But how romantic.”

  “I just wish I could get some kind of, like, fast forward,” I say. “Like, just for a minute. I could come right back here, but if I could just see whether or not things were going to be okay.”

  “You really think you’ve invented a new and exciting problem here, huh?” she says. She pats my cheek. “Everyone would like that.”

  “Right, but I need it.”

  She holds up a pair of pants. “These would be cute.”

  “Sure, on Ivy.” I groan. “What are you even supposed to do when it turns out nothing is what you thought it was and everything you’d been planning is totally for nothing? How do you just keep starting over?”

  “Because what’s the alternative?” she says. “Sometimes you’re going to have to call it quits and keep going with something else. Look at your father and me now.”

  “What are you going to do?” I say.

  She sighs and hangs a shirt over her arm. “I don’t know. I’ll go back to full-time. He’s always talked about doing translation work. Maybe he’ll try that.”

  “I can’t believe we’re going to close. I really don’t believe it.”

  “I wish people could see what you see,” she says. “What makes it so special. How we treat our girls, how happy they are. But the people who care about that kind of thing, they’re not the ones who are going to strip clubs. They don’t care if the girls are happy. They care about the show.”

  I stop, a ratty sweatshirt in my hands, thinking.

  “What?” my mom says.

  “So they aren’t the ones,” I say. “The customers. It’s just like Ivy and Elizabeth. They’re not the ones.”

  “Okay?”

  “I like your metaphor about giving things up and moving on and everything,” I say. “But put that on hold for a sec, because I have an idea and I think maybe I can save the club.” I take out my phone, type I need your help and send it to one Dot Nguyen.

  …

  Dot adjusts some kind of setting on her camera. “Weird to be filming someone else,” she says. “All my camera strategies are specifically designed to make me look good.”

  “Well, now you just make Libby look good,” I say. I’m fluffing up Libby’s hair and getting her ready to be filmed. She’s wearing her street clothes, and Dot put just enough makeup on her to bring out her features on camera but not like she’s going onstage. She looks like a civilian, which is the point.

  I step out of the frame and say, “Okay,” and nod to Dot, and she presses a button on her camera and gives me a thumbs-up. “Why do you like working at Davina’s?” I say.

  Libby stretches and looks a little sheepish. “Dav’s isn’t like other places I’ve worked at,” she says. “You walk in and immediately, the atmosphere is different. It’s bright. It’s happy. And that’s not just surface stuff; we get paid really well, so we’re not competitive about tips, and management makes sure the customers treat us well. There’s never been any pressure to do things we don’t want to do, and I got five months of paid maternity leave when I had my daughter. It’s a family-owned business and you can tell, because they treat all of us like family, too.”

  Dot lowers the camera and I say, “That was awesome.”

  “Yeah?” Libby says.

  “Definitely. Exactly what we were looking for.”

  “Plus you looked hot,” Dot says. “And that’s what’s most important in any situation.”

  “Do you think this’ll work?” Libby says.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “But we’ve got to try something.”

  “This place can’t shut down,” Libby says. “Never say die, right?”

  “Maybe sometimes say die,” I say, going to Dot to look over her shoulder at the footage. “Just not right now.”

  …

  We film ten different dancers giving their iteration of the same thing—why Dav’s is different, and why it absolutely shouldn’t close, and why people who never thought of themselves as strip club patrons should come give it a look. They’re feminist and personality-filled and make our dancers seem like actual people. We’re leaning into the pink walls and the palm trees. We’re playing for a different audience.

  Dot edits it all together into a two-minute video and we upload it to Instagram and Facebook and whatever else Dot suggests and basically cross our fingers it’ll go viral.

  “It got picked up by some tiny paper I’d never heard of,” I update my mom while we’re doing dishes the Saturday night before I leave for Italy. “But it got a bunch more shares on Facebook from it.”

  “Is it translating to customers?” Mom says.

  “Not…yet,” I say. “But this is the first weekend since it’s been out. People had plans. Next weekend we’ll see.”

  “Next weekend you won’t be here,” she reminds me.

  “I know, I know.” I’m so excited and so nervous.

  My mom starts to say something, probably nagging me once again about packing, but upstairs there’s a muffled crash and my dad yelling, “Fuck!”

  My mom and I exchange looks. He’s been having a rough week.

  “Can you finish up down here?” she asks me.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  She goes upstairs to calm him down, and I take a deep breath and dive into the rest of the dishes. When they’re done and I head back to my room, I can hear my mom talking quietly and my dad crying, and I feel that sick combination of worried and awkward that I always do when he’s not doing well, and I pick up my phone to distract myself.

  Normally I’d text Ivy. Tell her I need to get out of the house.

  And nowadays, she’d probably tell me that she’s busy.

  Melody’s working and Alyssa’s up at school this weekend, so I text Diana. She’ll meet me at Mama’s in twenty.

  …

  “I’m honored to be your backup plan,” Diana says to me. She’s still dressed biz cas
from work and looks so put together with her hair up in a clip and her eye makeup just so. Why can everyone in my life but me do eye makeup?

  I say, “Shut up, I love you.”

  She laughs and sips her beer. “So what’s going on with you and Ivy anyway? You’re just nothing now?”

  “I don’t know. We had a fight on my birthday.” I don’t know if it was actually a fight, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

  “You two have had fights before.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I’m sure we’ll be fine. Or something. We’ll be something.” We’re always something.

  “But, uh…not that happily-ever-after thing.”

  “No,” I say. “No, it’s looking like the door’s very much closed on that one.”

  She wrinkles her perfect little nose. “I gave you bad advice.”

  “In your defense, if this were a romance novel, it would have worked out great. We fall into each other’s arms, the end. And instead life is just…still going. I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “Well, the good news is, you know what they say about God closing doors.”

  “It proves his corporeal existence?”

  “His what now?” Diana shakes her head and sets her drink down. “You have to figure out what’s next.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know, like, six girls you would be adorable with. Girls looking for something serious. Get someone to U-Haul their way right into your heart.”

  I trace the rim of my glass. “I don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Honey. You’re more than ready.”

  I shake my head. “All of this with Elizabeth and Ivy… I think I need a break from looking for my one true love or whatever.”

  “Okay, that’s even easier. Do something casual. Fuck around for a while. Now I know, like, sixty girls to recommend.”

  I laugh. “I’ve never really done the sleeping around thing.”

  “There’s no time like the present.” A new song comes on, this country thing my mom used to sing to me when I was little.

  “I don’t think it’s me,” I say. “I think I need to figure out how to be by myself for a little while.” Channeling Ivy still, but different.

  “Okay, but if I find out you didn’t sleep your way through Italy, I’m going to be extremely disappointed.”

  “It’s so weird that I’m leaving,” I say. “When I get home, Dav’s might be closed. Elizabeth will be on her way to Boston. And I’ll just be…me.”

  Diana shrugs. “So you need a plan for the future. If your job’s gone, your girlfriend’s gone, okay. A fresh start. So then if it’s not girls, what’s it gonna be?”

  “I’m thinking about going back to school.” I didn’t really realize I was serious about that until I said it.

  “Yeah? What do you want to study?”

  I laugh a little. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, what do you like?”

  Ivy. My answer has always been Ivy. “Love stories, I guess.” The kind that end when they’re supposed to.

  She throws her arms up. She’s a little drunk. She gets drunk so fast. Diana’s great at her medical receptionist job and aces her community college classes and would be a great person to come to for advice if she could stay sober for more than half of happy hour. “So write a love story! You can be an author!”

  “I have no idea how to write a book.”

  “Well, that’s why you go to school.”

  “I’m about to spend two weeks studying Italian literature, so I guess I’m on the right track.” My phone starts buzzing, so I shift in my seat to pull it out of my back pocket. “That’s weird,” I say.

  “Who is it?”

  “Ivy.” We don’t really call each other anyway—that’s why so-and-so invented texting—and obviously not right now. “Should I answer it? I should answer it.” It can’t be good that she’s calling me. Hopefully she’s just drunk. Or maybe it’s a butt-dial. That’d be ideal.

  “I think you should answer it,” Diana says.

  I nod and take a few steps away from the table, as if that will make it any quieter in here. “Hey?”

  “Hey,” she says. She sounds out of breath. “Is your mom there?”

  “No, I’m out. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Can you call her?”

  “She’s taking care of a thing with my dad.”

  “Shit. Okay. All right.”

  “Ivy,” I say. “What’s going on? Are you hurt?” It wouldn’t be the first time Ivy’s called my mom for medical advice.

  “It’s—no, it’s not me,” she says. She takes a deep breath. “Dot took something and she’s freaking out.”

  “What did she take?”

  “I don’t know. Hang on.” I hear her speak away from the phone and something that sounds like crying. Then to me again, “Can you come here? I need help.”

  I swallow. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  …

  Ivy buzzes me up the second I hit the doorbell, and the door’s unlocked when I get to the top of the stairs.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I say as I go inside, but there’s no one here. The living room’s in shambles; there are empty bottles and plastic red cups everywhere and broken streamers on the floor. And I can hear someone vomiting in the bathroom.

  Ivy’s kneeling on the floor next to Dot, her hand on her back, and Dot’s shaking so hard that I’m afraid she’s going to fall into the toilet. Ivy looks up at me, her eyes big.

  “What the fuck did she take?” I say.

  “I told you, I don’t know. One of her friends gave her something.”

  “Her friends were here?”

  Ivy turns back to Dot. “I threw her a graduation party.”

  “You what?”

  Dot flails and pushes herself away, her dress snagging on the tile floor. She’s crying. Her makeup’s all over her face.

  “It’s okay,” Ivy tells her. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” Dot screams. “Everybody get the fuck away from me!”

  “It’s just Andie and me,” Ivy says. “There’s no one here.”

  Dot gets up, her legs quivering underneath her. We both hover, but she charges past us and out of the bathroom. “It’s getting hard to breathe,” she says. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Sit down,” Ivy says, and to my surprise, Dot listens and sits down on the couch. She covers her face with her hands and sobs, and Ivy bites down on her finger. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”

  I catch Dot’s wrist to get her pulse. It’s like a hummingbird, and her skin is clammy and hot. “Ivy, she’s burning up.”

  “I know.”

  “Her heart’s going so—”

  “I know.”

  “You really don’t know what she took?”

  “I don’t know! She likes E.”

  “This is not E.”

  “I fucking know it’s not E!”

  “I want to go home,” Dot sobs. “I don’t know what the fuck… I can’t breathe.”

  I pull Ivy aside. “We need to take her to the hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Ivy.”

  “She’s not eighteen. Her parents will find out.” Her eyes are wild. “They will send her away.”

  “Okay, but that’s better than dead.”

  “She won’t be allowed to go to school in the fall, she won’t be allowed to see her friends, or make videos, or do anything but stay in that house and work on those fucking boats. She would rather die than have her whole fucking life taken away. And she’s not going to die. She’s not going to die.”

  “I know she’s not going to die, but—”

  “You are going to be fine,” Ivy says. She crouches down in front of Dot. “Spot, lo
ok at me. You’re in my apartment, you’re okay. It’s going to stop.”

  “Ivy,” I say.

  Ivy doesn’t look away from Dot. “Remember when you smoked all that pot after getting your blood drawn and freaked out?” she says to me. Tenth grade. Movie theater. Bad time. Not like this.

  “This is not that,” I say.

  “It’s that.”

  “I can’t breathe,” Dot says.

  “I could breathe,” I say.

  “She’s just panicking. She’s upset. She’s fine.” Ivy takes Dot’s hands, her fingernails digging into Dot’s skin. “You are fine.”

  “I’m gonna throw up again,” Dot says.

  “Okay. Come on.”

  “Don’t touch me! You can’t fucking— I know what’s going on, I’m watching you!”

  I take my cell phone out and step into Ivy’s bedroom, because Dot’s sobbing so loudly, I’m not sure I’d be able to hear over it if I stayed in here or followed them to the bathroom. I call home and close my eyes.

  “Andie?” Mom says.

  “I think Dot’s overdosing. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What did she take?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Ivy’s apartment.”

  “You need to call 911,” my mom says, obviously. “Is she conscious? You need to try to find out what she took so the paramedics know how to help her.”

  “She is, but she’s not being cooperative. She’s really upset. Ivy doesn’t want to call 911; can you just help? Can you tell me what to do?”

  “Honey, what you do is you call 911. Ivy needs to think about Dot right now and not herself. And you need to think about what needs to be done instead of what Ivy wants to do.”

  I don’t know how to answer her, don’t know how to tell her that Ivy is thinking about Dot, that this whole fucking night happened because Ivy was trying to do something for Dot, to throw her a goddamn graduation party, and I don’t know what to do, and then Ivy’s voice rips through the apartment.

  “Andie!”