Ash collects rocks along the way and Ivy is full now, completely covered. Her shiny things have run out of room. They start cracking, falling off, leaving a trail of shattered glass and porcelain. I step on a shard and feel a sting deep in my foot, feel a warm wetness seeping out. I look behind me as we walk and see a trail of bloody footsteps, and I feel a strange, twisted pride that there is now proof that I have been here.
We sit on the dock and Ash deposits his pile of rocks. “Look at this,” he says. “We can make our own shooting stars.” He throws a rock into the water and an explosion of light follows it down as it sinks.
“Holy shit!” Ivy says. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s bioluminescent plankton. There’s a bloom right now. It lights up when it feels movement.”
“Can we swim in it?” Ivy says.
He grins. “Yeah.”
My splash is silent. I feel the shock of cold water all the way to my bones. Everything is sharp, in focus. We yelp and laugh as the glow of millions of microscopic organisms define the outlines of our bodies as we move, as they mark our existence, as they make us shooting stars.
We emerge, sticky with salt water. Ash’s skin sparkles in the moonlight. I don’t know if it’s Ivy or me who licks him, but I can taste the salt on his skin along with something metallic, like blood, and I imagine the tiny glowing creatures inside me, lighting me up. Is this what Ivy tastes when she consumes people the way she does? Is this what it feels like to be made out of hunger?
22
Our two weeks are abruptly cut short when Ivy’s agent calls about a series of meetings with some new casting directors in LA she’s never worked with before. “This could be big,” she says, throwing clothes into a suitcase. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. A new opportunity. A chance to reinvent myself.”
She says nothing about Ash, how Tami insisted on “quality time” with him today, how he is somewhere else, in his other life, while we have to go back to being a secret. She says nothing about how she’s going to be gone for four days, how I have no idea what to do without her.
I walk outside with Ivy when her car arrives. The grass is brown and dry. No one has cleaned up my bloody footprints.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” I say. “As your assistant?”
“Stay here and relax,” she says. “You should still use the house when I’m gone. Everything that’s mine is yours.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I mean it.”
The air is bad today. The driver is wearing a mask. He says nothing as he hoists Ivy’s suitcase into the trunk of the car.
“Are you going to be okay?” I say.
She laughs. “Of course I am. I’m a professional. I’ve done this a million times.”
Of course she has. I don’t know why I’m so afraid of her being alone.
Or maybe I’m just afraid of myself being alone.
She kisses me on the cheek and says, “Be good,” then gets into the car.
“I always am,” I say, but the driver has already closed the door.
Ivy is gone, on her way to the ferry, to the airport, to a hotel in another city, to a series of offices where she will meet men who hold the keys to her future.
And where am I? Subterranean.
Ivy disappears across the water, then into the sky, and I disappear into the forest. I am on hold. Waiting until she comes back and we can be whole again.
Maybe I am home. Maybe I am watching nature documentaries with my fathers. Maybe it is a seamless transition. Maybe nothing’s changed all that much.
Maybe I drive to the coffee shop in town by the ferry terminal. People stare at me as I wait in line, hiding behind my sunglasses. They whisper. I am now the girl who hangs out with Ivy Avila. I was no one before.
Maybe Ash texts me and I text him back. Maybe he calls me on the phone and we talk like old friends. We do not mention the night we became other things. He tells me how he’s considering majoring in music at Yale next year instead of economics, how his mom will throw a fit but will eventually become too distracted by her own work to care, how his dad will probably secretly be proud. Maybe I ask him what Tami will think. Maybe he says we don’t talk about Tami.
Or maybe it is not that easy. Maybe I am sick and sleep deprived, poisoned, emptied, turned completely invisible, all the pigment and weight sucked out of me. But somehow Daddy can still see me. When I was a kid he always knew I was getting sick before I did. He feeds me smoothies with mysterious green powders. He juices anemic veggies from the garden.
Maybe I am still my fathers’ daughter. Maybe all the fresh green foods clean me out from the inside and fill in all the places I am missing, maybe I am nourished, and a surprise rainstorm bursts out of the afternoon and calms the heat and clears the air, maybe all the plants are given another chance to live, and I go into the forest and roll on the soggy ground so the coating of mud will tell me where my skin is.
After I am clean and fed, I find a pair of tweezers. I shine a light on my foot. I poke at the swollen place where the shard of Ivy’s glass is lodged, digging in, trying to find something solid inside my flesh. Jolts of pain shoot through me, but they are not unpleasant. With each one, I think, This is how I know I’m alive.
I put the tweezers down. The glass is unfindable. Skin will grow over it, this tiny fragment of Ivy that is now a permanent part of me. I will turn it into a pearl.
23
Don’t have too much fun without me while I’m gone, Ivy’s text to us says in the morning.
Impossible, Ash texts back.
We exchange various heart emojis.
Today is the day of her first big meeting. I feel like I should be doing something. Praying. Doing some kind of magic. But before I can figure that out, my phone rings. Ash. It must be a mistake. I pick it up but say nothing, expecting to hear the swishing of pants moving, jostling in a bag, some evidence of this call being an accident.
“Hey,” Ash says. Bubbles pop inside my chest.
“Hey,” I say back.
“Are you busy right now?”
“Not really.”
I pretend I am a girl in a show. I pretend I am Ivy in The Fabulous Fandangos when she was still wholesome. A nice girl talking to a nice boy on the phone.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” he says.
“What do you want me to say?”
Her room on the show looked just like mine.
“Sing me something,” he says.
“I can’t sing.”