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 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.
I
