“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Ivy says. “Like a favor.” She seems for a moment unsure, almost nervous, just as I am fortified with a sudden, shocking confidence.
“Okay.”
She will make me useful. I feel myself leaning in, ready to catch her need.
But then the electricity of the moment is stolen as her mother arrives, a little wobbly on her feet, with a drink in her hand, the low cut of her tight dress showing bronzed skin pulled over very fake breasts. “Honey, darling,” she says. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“I’m busy, Mom,” Ivy says, her face clouding over. I feel my own heart pulled toward her, like it wants to piece together all the parts of her that are breaking.
“What are you doing up here? The party’s downstairs. Nobody important is upstairs.”
I look at Ivy and she’s looking out the window again. She hasn’t yet found whatever, or whoever, she’s looking for.
“Is he here?” her mom says.
“I don’t think so,” says Ivy, hardened.
“Who?” I want to say. I feel something twist inside me. Is that jealousy?
“Come on,” her mom says. “Talk to me. It’ll be just a minute.”
“Fine.”
So I drift away. Just like that, I am erased. Ivy has been claimed by her mother and it’s nearing midnight.
The light of the party has dimmed. Everything is darker, more shadowed. People are closer to the ground, huddled, almost horizontal.
A couple is fighting.
Two boys are kissing while their girlfriends egg them on.
A girl is puking in the bushes.
Lights turn on in rooms upstairs, then dim back down.
The corners are full of people who couldn’t make it to chairs.
I remember what Daddy said: “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
Spilled drinks everywhere.
Broken glasses and dishes.
A chair, half charred by some mysterious, now extinguished fire.
No one is having fun anymore, but no one is leaving. Maybe they think they’ll camp out here, wake up in the morning, and start it all over again. They’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping they’ll get lucky and something will change.
The reality show star is crying, alone. People back away slowly, like they don’t want to catch what she has.
A sound of raised voices, a fight brewing, a glass breaking.
Limbs grasping in the shadows.
Boats rocking on the dock.
Small, consistent, forever waves, lapping against the rocky shore, the clicks and rolls of the rocks as they collide, a tiny fraction of the time it will take for them to break each other down into fragments, into sand.
As I walk away from the house, I turn one last time and see, through the glass, Ivy standing at the top of the grand staircase, with the lurching and comatose debauchery winding down around her, a transparent home full of so many strangers.
How can she live in this house made of glass? What is the architecture that keeps it standing?
Her face displays a private softness, an opening, but no one is looking, no one but me. But then it’s like she remembers she is not alone, not safe, and in a split second she transforms, conjures a second self and dons her like a shroud. She is once again the star everyone wants, an actress, someone who is always someone else.
I walk away, through the graveyard of stranded cars on Olympic Road. I stand in the middle of the road and look up into the clear sky, searching for the moon, but it is not there.
A raccoon runs across the street. Daddy would say that means something. He’d look it up: the spiritual significance of a raccoon on a new moon.
He will be sleeping on the couch when I get home, will startle awake at the sound of the door and say something like “I must have dozed off while reading.” He will hug me and try to hide the fact that he is sniffing my breath for alcohol. I will find comfort in this as I pretend to be annoyed.
* * *
• • •
I start my climb away from the shore. Old pine and fir trees creak as I pass, despite the lack of breeze. They send messages below the surface, over mycelium highways, alerting the trees farther up of my approach. There is the sense that everything freezes right before I get there, like I keep walking in on a secret party I am not invited to and no one wants me to know is happening.
The forest crowds around me as I make the ascent up the hill, returning, changed.
Bare feet hardened by gravel, shoes in my hands.
Maybe I am made of forest.
Maybe I want to be wild.
Me, alone, all the way home.
13
I still haven’t seen Ash. I’m trying not to think about this. He’s probably busy, and seeing me is not at the top of his priorities list. He has a girlfriend. He has a life. I’m just the bored and boring girl from his hometown who has nothing better to do than think about him.
Except now I have Ivy. Now I have her text from last night inviting me on a day trip today. She called it an adventure. I called in sick to work. There are more important things than that fraction of a paycheck.
When Lily asked me how the party was, I told her it was just a few people from Ivy’s sober meditation group and we ordered pizza and played board games. I could tell she was thinking about not believing me, but luckily she still thinks I’m the most honest person she’s ever known.
I don’t know if I’m going to tell her about today’s outing. Maybe I want a secret.
Papa’s at work and Daddy’s volunteering somewhere, and I’ve been sitting on my front porch ready to go for nearly an hour. Ivy said she’d pick me up this morning. I don’t know what her idea of morning is, so I made sure I was ready early.
Daddy says the fruit trees are stressed. They talk to him. They tell him they need more water because it hasn’t rained in a long time. It’s only June and everything is already starting to feel dusty. He says when he was a kid this didn’t happen.
I hear her before I see her. The crunch of gravel beneath tires. The trees sway as they whisper her approach like a game of telephone up the road, and I am the last to know.
She’s in one of those new cars I’ve only seen in ads, in a mirror-like silver that reflects the forest around it. As far as I know, she’s the first person on the island to get one, which is saying a lot. People love their high-tech toys here, and they love people knowing they spent way too much money for them, though they’d never admit it.
The car stops and the driver’s-side door opens upward, like the hatch of a spaceship. Ivy’s head pops up over the top, her long brown hair in a messy bun and her face free of makeup, but still breathtaking, still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.