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’d 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.