I do. I know exactly what it feels like to dissolve.
“Dr. Chen has this thing she says all the time: You are not your trauma. It’s something that happened to you, it’s something you have to work with, but it’s not who you are.”
“Dr. Chen sounds wise.”
“Dr. Chen is a bitch. She doesn’t know anything. Everything I have, everything I am, is because of what happened. I was nobody before that. Those casting couches are where I was born.”
“No,” I say. “That’s just where your career was born.”
“But what else is there?”
I have nothing to say to that. I look at Ivy and notice she has started a new collection. But now instead of shiny things, she is covered in garbage. Here is the oily sheen of someone else’s forehead, the crust of dried skin from somebody’s lip, the acne from some girl’s hairline caked over with concealer.
“People think that when you’re famous you’re surrounded by people who worship you. But it’s not you they worship. It’s the package they want, and the package is all bullshit. But the people who are really running the show, all those guys in power, they’re even worse. They’re surrounded by so much celebrity and beauty, it doesn’t even impress them anymore, so they get hungry for something else. Tami’s right—girls like me are everywhere. We’re disposable. What the guys in charge want is more than to just consume us. That’s easy. They want the power of creating us, the power of making or breaking a life. And they know they can do it, because our hunger turns us into puppets. It’s our hunger that makes us vulnerable. It will make us do anything.”
“Fuck your hunger,” I say. “Don’t blame your hunger. You didn’t do anything. You were a child. Those people raped you. Your mom let them rape you. Your hunger or whatever you want to call it had nothing to do with that.”
Ivy has tears in her eyes. She says, “That pill wore off.”
“And the dealer is dead,” I say.
She rolls over and screams into her pillow. She sounds like someone being murdered. She sounds like someone’s insides being torn out, a throat being ripped open. I watch her back heaving, the notches of her spine and the bones of her shoulder blades trying to break through her flesh. She is a cornered animal trapped inside a beautiful girl’s skin, thrashing and pounding on the bed, gnashing her teeth, tearing herself apart, ripping open the barely healing cuts from last night, turning herself into a giant wound. She is want and pain and hunger and skin and bones and blood. She is other people’s garbage. Even if her fantasy comes true, even if she flies away with Ash to some paradise, that will still be all she ever is, and I am the only one who can hear her screams.
Ivy finds a half-empty bottle of something under her nightstand and gulps it down, eyes closed, liquid streaming out of her mouth and down her chin. Her body is here but she is gone. Her soul has flown to that safe place it found so many years ago, away from all the people who would hurt it. I will never know where that is. The map is locked deep inside her where no one is allowed to go.
I want to tell her she’s not garbage. I want to tell her Ash is wrong, everyone is wrong. But I know she cannot hear me.
I should remind her of the inevitable. I should remind her the police will come soon with their questions. But she is trapped inside her little world, where all that exists is the storm inside her own mind. Everything else is just a prop, disposable.
So I drift away, through the smoke, up my hill. The sliver of Ivy is finally out of my foot, but now I can’t feel my feet at all. Who needs feet when they’re floating, a ghost, invisible, forgotten?
Ivy, I can’t remember if I told you I love you. Perhaps the breeze will bring you the message. But by then, you may already be all the way gone.
You have already given up.
But I have not.
34
There are infinite stories and infinite endings, but they all lead to the same place.
Daddy thinks we all get reincarnated to repeat suffering over and over again until we figure out the magic trick to not worry about our pain anymore.
Papa thinks we turn into dirt, into dust, and eventually back into atoms, into energy. We turn from biology into physics. We are stardust that will eventually get turned back into stars. The universe is expanding now, but it will probably reverse course at some point, like a rubber band that gets stretched too tight and snaps back in on itself. A reverse big bang. Nothing into something into nothing again. Energy gets recycled, but not souls.
Daddy calls it samsara. Papa calls it science. Daddy says the Buddha was the original psychologist. Papa just sighs.
Some endings have a surprise twist. Everyone loves surprise twists, even the tragic ones.
Of course the police figure out who owns the car. Ash called and told them it was Ivy. But still, they take their time, and Ash is already on a plane going somewhere without us, on his way to some frozen island like Iceland, somewhere Tami won’t have to break a sweat. In first class, they will have their own room, their own bed with satin sheets, walls to separate them from their neighbors, and the noise of the plane’s engine will drown out any sounds they might make to distract themselves from what they’ve left behind.
There’s a fine line between feeling shame and having a conscience, and maybe Ash and Tami have always been able to buy their way out of both.
They end up together because that’s how destiny works. You’re born on a path and it does not diverge, no matter how much you want it to. It is a law of science that the simplest solution is the best one. A river always finds the easiest path to the ocean.
In the end, there is always equilibrium. There is always balance in the universe. Vaughn is dead and Ash’s punishment is he will give up Ivy. In the logic of their world, that will make him and Tami even.
And what about Ivy?
* * *
• • •
There’s the version we all know, the classic: Pick the most innocent among us and destroy her. Find the victim and throw tragedy at her. Or worse, make her the destroyer too. Beat her up so bad, she breaks. Turn her into one of us.
That’s the choice when you are broken. Either you turn into dust, or you start breaking things.
But what is left for us to break?
* * *
• • •
I wake up to the smell of smoke.
This ending is different, but it leads to the same place. In every ending, someone always has to pay.
I hear the gunshots. Somehow I run down the hill even though I still can’t feel my feet.
Some people have lost so much, they don’t have anything more to lose.
I beat the police to Ivy’s house, but someone else got there first.