How does it feel? I would ask them if I could speak. How does it feel to be afraid?
They draw their guns, but I do not care. I am done caring. All I know is everything is on fire, but I am not afraid. Sometimes things need to be burned down. Some seeds only open and grow when they’ve been through fire.
I see myself in a garden, working alongside a man who looks exactly like Daddy but is not Daddy. He is telling me about soil, about what makes it rich, what nutrients it needs to make things grow. He looks up and meets the eye of one of the therapists on his way to the outdoor group circle, a man who looks just like Papa but who is not Papa. Their smiles make the sun burn brighter; the tomato vines stretch, their fruits darken. I wish I was theirs.
I wonder what it would feel like to be born in the middle of that glance. What would it feel like to be caught inside that love, to be created by it?
There is no garden. There is only fire. There is only my mother’s gin-drenched voice: “Ivy, what have you done?”
At the end of this story, there is just me, surrounded by flames. Everything I built is gone. There is no home, no Papa, no Daddy, no Lily.
There is no Fern. There has never been Fern.
There are strangers looking, talking, taking pictures, posting my new story into the world. My eternal audience, making me, destroying me, then making me again, over and over, our own little ecosystem, our own little universe. Nothing to something to nothing again.
There has always been Fern, but that was never her name.
Ivy. Evergreen. The most aggressive weed. Adaptable. Impossible to kill.
It has not rained. It will not rain. There is water all around this island, but none to put the fire out.
There are sirens painting the night into a hallucination. With every rotation they say: This is not real. This is not real.
But this is real. This is the only real thing.
There’s a police officer saying, “Ivy Avila, you are under arrest,” and then he says all the other things cops say on TV shows as they lead the girl to the police car, as they put their hands close to where they shouldn’t just to let her know that they can.
But this is real and my show has been canceled, and now there’s nothing left of me but a charred shell in the shape of a girl who used to be somebody, full of dust and specks already forming something new. Something solid. Something better. Something mine.
39
A pool can be drained. It can be scrubbed with bleach. But not us.
You will never really be gone. But we’ve made an agreement.
Maybe you will come back. Maybe you will get scared and want to take control again.
But I am here. I will always be here.
My job is to love you.
We are broken and we are whole. We are discarded and we are loved. We are worthless and we are special. We are everything in between.
All of these things are true.
All lies say something about the liar.
I am Ivy and I am Fern, and I did not kill a man.
But I took the pill. I let Ash drive. I did not kill Vaughn, but I am complicit. My silence makes me complicit. Every moment I do not tell the truth, I am letting a boy get away with murder. I am letting those men on leather couches break girls’ lives before they even start. They do everything they can to convince us that we have no choice.
But they are liars. And we know the truth.
No one can stay in the sky forever. Not Ash. Not Tami. Not the men who make or break lives.
There is no such thing as destiny. There are only choices made and choices not made.
Everyone has to come down sometime.
Truth is contagious. It catches and spreads like wildfire. The whole world is tinder.
Everyone can see through glass walls. We just pretend that we can’t.
When glass walls get too hot, they shatter.
Fire. Ash. Glass shards. This is the world we were given. But I want something better.
Go home, Raine. Go home and claim your grief. Go home and scream about the people who stole your life. Tell everybody. Tell them who hurt you. Keep speaking no matter what they do to try to shut you up.
There are so many endings. There are the ones we think we know. We know what makes a tragedy—the hero dies. But what if someone dies and he’s not the hero of anyone’s story? What do you call that?
How much money was Vaughn’s life worth? What a vulgar question, and yet we ask it, we attempt to put a number on it, and that number is delivered to the young widow wheezing in her crumbling, crowded home, and that number will be deposited in the bank, where it will collect interest for the rest of her life.
That’s what money does. It makes more money.
This is not justice. This is not salvation. But maybe Raine will be able to breathe now. She will be provided for, but it will never be enough.
Money can buy bodies, but it can never bring back the dead.
Money can buy lawyers. But what is the price of justice? What is the price of salvation?
The rain will fall as it always eventually falls. The ashes will be washed away and what is left of the world will emerge sparkling once more.
But the fires came closer than ever to the island this time. What will happen next year, and the year after that, when things get hot? What will we do with the flying sparks that travel miles on the wind? How do we keep them from landing?
Miles of forest, gone. Whole lives, erased. Whole towns, flattened. Suburbs of suburbs of suburbs. The world expands and then it contracts. We are the big bang. We are the massive black hole at the center of everything.
And still, there are years ahead for those who remain. Life will sprout out of the ashes. Whole mountains are empty, waiting to be filled with brand-new life.
Maybe the world is not built for us, but we are still in it. The moon still pulls the tides even as the sea rises, and we keep beating toward the shore, desperate for contact.
Our fathers, the real ones, they never leave us, even if we have to build them out of earth and ruins, even if they are salvaged from broken things. They live somewhere inside, caring for the girl who was taken, but whose outline is still discernable, faint whispers of her memory echoing in our empty spaces, her need like smoke, untouchable but yearning to be held.
“Help me,” the ghost of myself says. “Help me,” she will always say. And maybe sometimes the best we can do is create other ghosts to listen.
There’s an ending we’ve been sold, the one we’ve been taught to think we want, the happily ever after—the girl ends up with the boy, or some other similar configuration. Two halves, joined, made whole. The origin of love.
But girls have been taught all sorts of wrong things.