Where is Ivy? Not on this road, quiet and barren. Not on this driveway, surrounded by rustling branches. Not in the glass house, full of absence. Most of the party has started its sad procession home. Bodies slumped in the hallway. Asleep in the bushes. All these wind-up toys, unwinding.
Ivy is alone, sitting cross-legged outside on an oversized pillow, staring at the miniature palm trees she supposedly bought the house for, tropical plants that, years ago, would never have survived here.
“Look at those stupid trees,” she says as I slide silently beside her. “They don’t belong here.”
She is grinding her teeth. Her knee is bouncing. She is made out of chemicals.
“I wish I was like you, Fern,” she says.
“Me?” I say. “Why?”
“You have everything I’ve ever wanted. You’re exactly who I’d be if I could be anyone.”
“But I’m no one.”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “You don’t have to be. You don’t want anything.”
“Of course I want things.”
I don’t say, “I want Ash.” I don’t say, “I want you.”
“Do you want to hear a story?” She takes a swig from a bottle of something. I do not bother answering.
“I fell in love with Ash because he played me a song he wrote. That’s all it took. Three, maybe four minutes.” She is talking fast. Her mouth can barely keep up with her memories. “He doesn’t play them for anyone, his songs. He has a whole album’s worth now. He doesn’t let anyone see that part of him. Only me. Nobody knows it’s even there.”
I don’t tell her Ash has played me his songs too.
“It was beautiful, Fern. I mean it. Like real art. Not that bullshit I get paid to do. I know what it is. I’m not lying to myself. You know all those guys who were here? That band Ash was so excited about? I begged them to let me tour with them as an opener last year. I offered to take almost no money. But they pretty much laughed in my face. They’ll come to my parties, the straight ones will fuck me, but they don’t want me associated with their brand.” Her fingers make sloppy air quotes around “brand.” “Because my music is a joke. I’m a joke.”
I remember the night at the old army fort, when Ash told her she wasn’t crazy, how that made her melt into him. I want to do the same thing, want to tell her you’re not a joke, but she starts talking again before I have a chance.
“Dr. Chen says I need hobbies, things I do just for fun, just for me. Something I’d enjoy even if no one was watching. But I don’t even know what that means. Even when no one’s watching, I pretend they are. When I’m brushing my teeth, when I’m fucking peeing, Fern, I imagine people watching me. I don’t know who I am without an audience. So I perform for ghosts. I’ve grown up as a commodity. I don’t know how to be anything else. I want to be expensive. Put a price tag on me, tell me how much I matter.”
“You matter,” I say. But I know she can’t hear me.
“Who am I with no one watching? I’m nobody. I disappear. I turn into a fucking ghost screaming ‘Look at me!’ but no one can hear me, so maybe I get mad and start going around breaking stuff to get noticed and all those things ghosts do. I have to haunt people just so they’ll pay attention to me. I have to scare them. That’s the only way to get their attention. But there’s nothing scary about me. That’s the big joke. I’d make a terrible ghost. Or maybe I could be one of those ones who cry all the time, who you hear in the wind, who hide in the clouds—that one who’s always wandering around looking for something she lost. But she’s been a ghost so long she doesn’t even remember what that thing is, just that it’s missing, and she goes around wailing about how empty she is.”
Finally, Ivy looks at me, like she just remembered I’m here. “Maybe I am a ghost,” she says. “Maybe I’m haunting you.”
She doesn’t know that the real ghost is me.
“But that night on the beach, with Ash, with his music—I sang with him, and then he played the song again, and then again, and eventually it was me singing the song, and he was harmonizing like he was the backup singer, and it was the realest shit I’d ever done, and there was no one there to see it. Just me and Ash, and that was all I needed—for him to see me. Only him. No one else really sees me. And I’m the only one who sees him.” She smiles, deep inside her dream. She is somewhere far away, on a different kind of island, a place where she is not surrounded by passed-out strangers, where the air is fresh and does not smell of things burning. “And then it started raining, one of those tropical downpours, not like it rains here. And he had to hide his guitar under an overhang, and we just started running on the beach through these sheets of rain, getting totally drenched, and lightning was flashing all over the place, lighting up the sky all kinds of weird colors, and we probably could have died, the lightning was so close, then it’d go black again, and we were just running blind in it, holding hands, completely free, and I could have kept running and running forever holding his hand like that, just running into the night and the lightning. All I want is to stay in that night forever.”
But this is a different kind of night. It is a different kind of island where the water’s freezing all year round and the beach is made of sharp rocks instead of soft sand and the rain is never warm.
She pulls on her nose. “Dr. Chen thinks talking about my pain will make it go away or something. But that’s bullshit. Talking about my pain just makes me feel it again. The only thing that ever took away my pain was Ash. He was even better than drugs. Dr. Chen can take her PhD and shove it.” Ivy tries to laugh but it sounds like static. “In rehab they’re always talking about chasing the first high,” she says. “That night was the best high of my life.”
Ivy leans against my shoulder. “You’re wonderful,” she says. “It’s like I made you up. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She entwines her fingers through mine and lifts my hand to her mouth, kisses it, and the image of my skin flickers on and off, while the electricity of hers surges, and I fade while she becomes a light so bright, I’m almost blinded.
“Does anyone ever catch it?” I say.
“Catch what?”
“The first high.”
I feel her harden next to me. She pulls her hand away from mine. “Go home, Fern.”
I asked the wrong question. And just like that, I am no longer wonderful.
She stands up and wobbles for a moment, grabs the bottle and walks away, into the house, the bodies of unconscious strangers strewn at her feet.
* * *