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.
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.
