Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

“Too long,” Ivy said. She pressed her flat hand against his chest. I stared at Ivy’s short bitten nails and chipped silver polish. I imagined Ivy could feel Xavier’s big sweet heart thumping against her palm. “I need to talk to you,” Ivy said. I saw Ivy glance at my blue hands, then up at Xavier’s hair. “Give us a minute?” she said to me.

I turned toward Xavier. I knew I needed to stop this, whatever was about to happen. But when our eyes met, I realized it was already too late. “I’ll find you soon?” he said.

I froze, as everything I wasn’t saying bubbled up inside me. Ivy was a monster and would destroy him. And last time he just barely survived her. And this was supposed to be the night I finally told him the truth. I had waited so long for this.

“Sash?” Xavier said. He sounded so gentle and concerned. “Is that okay?”

Later I would think back to this moment, wonder if everything might have been different if only I’d given a different answer.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

I turned away, then pushed through the crowd. When I looked back, Xavier and Ivy had been swallowed up.

I got in line for the bathroom. I was a wild and desperate animal. I needed to do something, to stop this, to save him. But I had no idea what.

Gwen walked by, holding a drink. She gulped it down and put the empty glass on a table. She gave me a little wave as she headed toward the front door. I called out to her. “Gwen! Wait!”

Gwen came back. “Where are you going?” I said.

“Home,” Gwen said. She looked at my hands. “So . . . is that like a weird fetish thing or something?” She grinned.

I remembered when we were friends back in fourth grade, going over to her house. It was fancy and completely silent. Gwen lived there with her father, who was always at work, and her mother, who spent all day in bed. Gwen had said that this was because her mother was very popular and had a lot of friends who lived far away in other countries in other time zones and she stayed up very late at night talking to them. “That’s why she’s in bed,” Gwen said. “During the day she has to catch up on sleep. Also sometimes at night she goes to parties.” The story had seemed kind of strange to me at the time, but I had reminded myself my own mother did plenty of weird things. Who could really say why mothers did what they did?

Gwen’s mother passed away a few years after that. We weren’t friends anymore by that point, but I’d heard that she’d been sick for a long time, had spent years slowly dying. I understood then what the story had been about. The idea of my once friend inviting people over and then telling that lie to cover up what was actually happening made my chest hurt. I went to the funeral alone and sat at the back. I’m not sure if Gwen even saw me.

Standing there that night at Sloe Joe’s, I thought of Gwen’s silent house, her sick mother, of how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen.

“She came here looking for him, you know,” Gwen said.

“She did?” That made it worse. But I wondered why Gwen was telling me this. “How did she even know he’d be here?”

Gwen shrugged. “She just figured, I guess. Haven’t you noticed how good she is at that?”

“At what?” I said.

“Getting what she wants.” Gwen gave me a half-smile. “Have a good night, girly.” She turned and headed toward the door again.

I stayed in line, breathing hard.

If Ivy bumping into him here wasn’t an accident, it meant she wanted something from him. Maybe she even wanted him back.

But that doesn’t mean she can have him, I reminded myself.

I imagined leaving the bathroom and finding him. He would be alone. “So where’d you know that girl from?” he’d say. “She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. What was her name? Plant? Root?” And he’d grin, at his own dumb joke.

And he’d take the whisky out of his bag.

And we’d go outside and finish it.

And we’d play our game again.

And finally, finally, I would tell him the truth.

Only when I got back from the bathroom, he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the dance floor, wasn’t at the bar. Finally I headed out to the tiny concrete courtyard in the back where people went to smoke sometimes. There was a group sitting around a picnic table, passing a vaporizer. I turned toward the corner, and that’s when I spotted them. Xavier and Ivy, up against the wall, their eyes were closed. They weren’t kissing or moving or anything, they were just like that, holding each other tight.

I felt hot and sick, full of rage and terror.

I backed up quickly, before they saw me. I went through the bar, outside into the hot night, and then I was gone.

My heart pounded powerfully, painfully. I didn’t know then what I know now: be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.

XAVIER

They say guys make stupid decisions with their dicks, but Xavier knew the very dumbest ones he’d ever made were the ones he made with his heart.

Ivy held his hand as she led him through the trees toward that place in the woods, midway between their houses, where they always used to go. She squeezed tight like she was trying to keep him from running away. He probably should have run – some part of him knew that – but his stupid heart kept marching him forward.

When he’d seen Ivy at Sloe Joe’s, he’d tried to remind himself that he was supposed to be mad, but all he’d felt was surprised, and maybe a little bit scared, and mostly just very, very happy to see her.

She brought him outside to the courtyard, and instead of saying anything, she’d just wrapped her arms around him and stayed like that. And then after a while asked him, please would he please come with her to their spot in the woods, and he said okay.

On the train, she’d leaned her head back against his chest and nestled into him like the whole last month of them being apart hadn’t even happened. When he caught sight of them together in the reflection in the glass, he saw that he was smiling.

Now they walked in between the trees where there was no path, but they both knew the way blackout drunk with their eyes closed. They’d come here together so many times, starting back when it was still winter but the smell of spring was creeping in over the melting snow. “It’s the time of year to fuck against a tree in the woods,” is what Ivy had told him when she’d brought him the first time. And then she’d taken off his gloves and put his hands up under her coat and sweater onto her warm skin.

Now, the air was hot and thick in that late-July way. And as he followed her, he tried not to think about the last time they’d spoken before this. He tried not to think about how he’d gone to a party in a neighboring town to hear his friend Ethan’s band play on a night Ivy had said she was busy with a family thing. But then he found her there, out back next to one of the kegs, wrapped up in a skinny punk-looking guy with a septum ring and a leather cuff on each wrist. And when she looked up and saw him seeing her, she didn’t even seem surprised. Almost like she’d expected to get caught, or wanted to. “Oh shit, is this the chump you’ve been texting me about?” the punk guy asked. And he laughed.

Xavier tried not to think about how he’d waited to hear from her after that, assumed she’d come to him full of apologies, like she usually did after she’d done something messed up, only this time she didn’t. And he tried not to think about how a week after that he’d gone back to their place in the woods, because it was late and he couldn’t sleep and maybe some part of him hoped she might be out there missing him like he’d been missing her. And the crazy thing is, she was there. But she wasn’t alone. Turned out, she didn’t think of it as her and Xavier’s spot the way he did. He left as quickly as he could. They never heard Xavier running in those woods. They were making too much noise on their own.

He was trying not to think about that then as Ivy pulled him forward, twigs cracking under their feet. The moon was so bright, everything was glowing. The farther away from the rest of the world they went, the easier it was to tell himself that all of this was happening outside of regular space and time and didn’t count. That he could have this one night, whatever this was, and not even have to pay for it later.

Now they had reached the place where they always used to go, but there was something new: a tire dangling from a tree branch, connected to a rope that did not look thick or strong enough to hold it. Ivy pressed a button on the swing and a string of lights glowed yellow.

Ivy leaped up onto the swing, stuck one leg out behind her. She had taken ballet for years as a kid and could still move like that, like the air that surrounded her was different than regular air, thicker and thinner both. And when she smiled at him, everything else was wiped away, and the only thing in his mind and his heart was how very much he had missed her.

She lowered herself down, slipped both legs into the middle of the tire. “Wind me up, please,” she said, like a kid asking him to play. Ivy was so many things all at once. And so he held her hand and walked circles around her until the rope was high and tight and it seemed like it might snap. And then he let her go and she spun and spun as the rope unwound. She leaned her head back, and she opened her mouth like she was screaming, but no sound came out. When the spinning stopped she got off the swing and pulled him to her, and that’s when he realized she was crying.

“I am such a shit,” she said. “I’m an absolute horrible, awful shithead.”

His heart was beating so hard. “Wait,” he said. All he wanted then was for her to stop crying. When Ivy cried, it felt like the only thing in the world that mattered. “Please . . .” But as he searched for the right words, she raised her hand to his lips to quiet him, shook her head, and looked down.

“I deserve for you to hate me.” She looked up at him, blinked her big wet eyes. “Do you?”

And he told her what he’d always told her when she cried over something she’d done – that everyone makes mistakes. And of course he didn’t hate her. He never could.

She stood on her tiptoes and leaned in close.

Xavier had heard that the moment before an accident time slows down. One second feels like a minute, an hour, a month. That’s what it was like then, out there in those woods, her lips inching toward his so slowly, his heart racing, stomach twisting, like he knew this kiss would either kill him or save him.

“This is a terrible idea,” he said quietly, right before their lips touched. “This is definitely going to end in disaster.”

“Not this time,” she said. “I promise this time. Nothing bad will happen.”

Later he would look back at that night and remember how they’d both believed so much in the truth of what they’d said.

It’s just that only one of them was right.

SASHA

I stood at the station, waiting for the train, staring into the dark empty tracks, trying not to picture the things I could not stop picturing. Xavier and Ivy out in the courtyard, pressed together. Xavier and Ivy kissing. Xavier and Ivy, wherever they were now, her hand against his chest, reaching in, tearing out his heart, putting it into her mouth, and eating it.

Somehow I ended up with the rest of the whisky. I was sick and hollow and needed this to stop, so I sipped and sipped until it was gone. But it didn’t fix anything.

I closed my eyes and new images filled my head, ones that hurt as much as the others, maybe more: Xavier’s face so close to mine, his grin seeming to mean something I so desperately wanted it to.

It hadn’t always been painful with me and Xavier. There was a whole year before this when we were friends and only friends. Best friends. And that was it.

We were in the same English class and paired up for a project. I had assumed Xavier was just this regular guy, boring and normal. But the more I got to know him, the more I realized I’d been unfair. He was smart. And weird and silly. And so talented. One day I was eating Swedish Fish and I gave him one, and he stuck it to his notebook and drew an entire little world around it, strange and funny and beautiful. Another time he spent the entire class passing me a series of notes, each containing only a single letter, spelling out THIS IS A VERY INEFFICIENT WAY TO WRITE A NOTE. Another day he brought in a hollowed-out penny and showed me a magic trick he’d learned on YouTube. “My backup career idea is amateur street magician,” he’d said.

“What’s your non-backup career idea?” I’d asked.

“Sorcerer,” he’d said.

Eventually I got to know him well enough to realize this: he delighted in the small things, but also knew that in the grand scheme of the world, nothing we did or felt mattered at all. And he got how that was unbelievably terrifying, but also was the thing that made us free.

But even though nothing mattered and a person could basically do whatever they wanted, he was still kind. Not just nice, but truly kind, which is different.

He never judged anyone for anything or about anything. He was boundlessly forgiving. He was sensitive and didn’t know how to protect himself sometimes. He said I had an unshakable core and he envied me. “Being in love is a painful nightmare,” he’d told me once. “You’re lucky because your heart is too tough for it.” He thought it was true. So had I.

But he is how I learned I was wrong.

I remembered what he’d told me when we were first becoming friends. We were at his house, working on our English project, talking about dating people, and I told him how I didn’t really believe in it. “Make out and move on,” I said. “That’s my MO.” I did a corny grin.

He had told me he had a history of getting crushes on girls who always thought he was too normal to bother with at first (just like I had, though of course I never told him) – tough weirdos, girls who played drums, who pierced their own ears, who made robots in their basements, girls who wore shit-kicking boots and actually used them to kick shit. Girls who maybe he liked more than they liked him, who he never quite had even when he had them. And who always ended up breaking his heart.

“I guess maybe my MO is Mmmmm Optimistic,” he said. “Because every time, I always have lots of hope and think it’s gonna turn out great. Or maybe Moron, Obviously. Because . . . obviously.”

I remembered when he first told me the whole thing, I’d thought the girls he described sounded maybe a little similar to me. And I’d really hoped he would never like me as anything more than a friend – I would’ve hated to have to hurt his big sweet heart. He was not my type at all. The guys I usually liked were androgynous and pretty. And besides, I’d had no interest in dating anyone, anyway.

Back then I couldn’t have imagined what would happen later, how everything would twist around inside me. But that’s the thing about life. No matter how smart you are, you’ll just never be able to imagine any of what’s coming for you, not until it’s right there, standing on your throat.

It was after 2:30 in the morning when I finally got home, but the moment I walked into my room, the bone-deep exhaustion that promised to take me swiftly to sleep burned away. And there I was, alone, wide-awake, and drunk.

I took out my phone and texted Xavier. Hope you’re ok wherever you are . . .

I held my breath, waited for the texting dots, just in case. I imagined what he might write back: You won’t believe the ridiculous night I had . . . or maybe Is it too early for birthday diner breakfast? I stared at my phone. But no message appeared.

What could he be doing at that moment? I didn’t want to imagine. But I couldn’t help it. Maybe he and Ivy were still at Sloe Joe’s. Maybe they were dancing slowly in the corner out of time to the music. Maybe they were having full-on sex out back in the courtyard. People did that sometimes, I had seen them.

STOP!

I tried to remind myself that I would talk to Xavier tomorrow, and there was nothing I could do now. But I also knew that when a story grabs ahold of you, it won’t let you go until it’s ready.

Maybe they were on the train together. Maybe Ivy was falling asleep on him and he was gazing lovingly at the top of her head. Maybe they were at that spot in the woods, maybe she was sneaking Xavier into her house.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

All of a sudden, something occurred to me: if I really needed to know what was going on, I didn’t have to torture myself imagining. I could torture myself with real, actual information if I just checked Ivy’s Instagram.

Ivy’s awful Instagram.

Back at the very beginning when they first got together, Xavier checked it constantly. He’d get a hit of the Ivy drug every time she put up something new, which was multiple times a day. “She has a ton of random dude followers who comment on her pictures and stuff,” Xavier had said. “They are big users of that tongue emoji. They are always posting the tongue to her. But it doesn’t actually matter.” Xavier had told me that Ivy said she’d let any guy follow her so long as his avatar pic was of a real human being and he didn’t seem to be a bot. He’d said she thought it was funny to have all these random creeps commenting. When Xavier told me all of this, it sort of sounded like he was trying to convince himself, like he didn’t quite believe it was all so harmless, but really, really wanted to.

After they broke up, Xavier couldn’t stop looking. “Please help me,” he’d said. “Throw my phone out the window or remove my eyeballs or something.” He held up his phone. There was a supersaturated picture of Ivy in the foreground of the screen, a wiry male arm draped over her shoulder, a leather cuff wrapped around the guy’s wrist. Xavier squished his eyes shut and turned his head away while I clicked unfollow.

But now I went to her page. Ivy was on there under the name Twisted Tree, username TwistedTree16. The avatar photo was a close-up of a mouth with the tongue out and nothing more, so if you didn’t already know it was her, you’d never be able to figure it out. And the account was locked.

Of course it was.

Xavier said her parents were super nosy and tried to monitor everything she did ever since they caught her drinking with an older boy when she was thirteen. She had to make sure to log out of her computer every time she left the house so they couldn’t snoop through her email, and never leave her phone unguarded even for a second. “They’ve threatened to kick her out if they catch her doing one more ‘bad’ thing,” Xavier had said, back when he and Ivy had first started hanging out. “I think they’re this close to actually doing it.”

I stared at the mouth and the little closed padlock. I felt then a strange mix of disappointment and relief. I wanted to see what was in there, but also oh so desperately did not.

But this wasn’t about me. This was about Xavier. This was about the dark black pit he was finally, finally almost out of. This was about all the damage Ivy could do – would do – if I didn’t gather enough information to keep it from happening somehow.

At least that’s what I told myself.

I knew I should have stopped then. I knew I should have let it go, gone to bed, dealt with it in the morning.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

Because my beast of a brain already had a plan.

XAVIER

Xavier and Ivy stared at each other googly-eyed, kiss-drunk. “I really missed you,” she said. And then she held his face in her hands and looked right at him in this way that overwhelmed him with love. During moments like this, it was impossible to remember the bad things that had happened. This feeling was the real one. Everything else was just noise.

“I can’t believe I ever let you go,” Ivy said. “There is no one as kind or as sweet as you. Like literally no one on earth. I am garbage.”

“You’re not,” Xavier said. “Stop saying . . .”

But then Ivy did something, something he would think about later, something he would replay in his head over and over so many times, trying to understand it.

She took both his hands, brought them up to her face, held one on each cheek and looked him straight in the eye. Then she lowered his hands down to her collar.

“Do it,” she said.

Xavier didn’t understand. “Do what?”

“Choke me.” She tried to wrap his hands around her neck. She tried to get him to squeeze. It took a while for his brain to process what was even happening. He started to pull away. She wouldn’t let him.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“But I deserve it,” she said. “And you do want to. I can tell.”

Xavier realized then that they were both drunker than he’d thought. And that he really, really, did not like the feeling of his hands around her throat. He did not like how thin her neck felt, how easy it would be to break her.

“No,” he said. “Stop! I don’t want that at all!”

He tried to pull away again. This time she let him go.

“Just kidding,” she said. Then she buried her face in his chest. “You still smell the same. It’s very hard to remember a smell, but I swear I always could with you . . .”

And then she kissed him again, harder this time. She kissed him and wiped every thought he’d ever had out of his brain. She kissed him and pressed up against him, and when she reached into the hole in the tree for the big box of condoms she’d put there in the spring and there was only one left in the box, he tried not to think about what had happened to the others.

Xavier wondered if later he would regret this. He wondered if later he’d remember this moment and wish he could go back and drag himself out of the woods and stop whatever happened next. The problem with time is it only ever goes forward. And when you are careening toward disaster, you never know it until it is way too late.

SASHA

I knew what I was doing was fucked up, but if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. I picked a name too common for easy Googling (Jake Jones) and a location (a random town about thirty miles away) and wrote an innocuous bio line (“Some random guy”). I told myself my intentions were pure – I just wanted to see how much danger Xavier was in exactly. So I could figure out how to save him. If some part of me already had other more elaborate plans, well, at least I wasn’t aware of it.

I made up a new Jake Jones email address and an Instagram account to link it to, then got some fake followers by signing up for a free trial of some shady music streaming service.

I followed a bunch of accounts to make my following and followers numbers look normal. I uploaded a bunch of close-ups of the white wall of my bedroom, to give myself a reasonable number of posts. I was going to set the account to private anyway, so it’s not like Ivy would be able to see what my pictures were, she just needed to see that I had some, that I was real.

Now all I needed was a photo of a guy. One that didn’t appear online anywhere so it wasn’t reverse image searchable. A guy of about the right age, good-looking but not unbelievably so.

I went upstairs to my bedroom closet, dug around in the back until I found the little digital camera I’d had five summers ago when I got sent to a sleepaway camp that didn’t allow phones while my mom was dating a chef who hated kids. I got the charger, plugged in the camera, flipped it on, and found the perfect picture of a dude in his late teens with dark hair that stuck up in the front, a big pouty, almost feminine, mouth, and a swim-instructor body, which made sense because he was one.

I uploaded the photo, then cropped it so you could see only half the face, half a tongue, and one muscular bicep, and hit save. And then, just like that, Jake was real. My eyes were closing. It was almost four. So I did the thing this was all leading up to: I went to Ivy’s page again, and I clicked “request to follow.”