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.”
I took a deep breath. I stood up. The room shifted and I remembered how drunk I still was. I told myself that if I regretted it in the morning, I could just delete the account. I’d delete the account and no one would ever know, and it would be like none of this ever happened.
I got into bed then, and, too exhausted to torture me anymore, my brain was quiet. And finally I went to sleep.
“Come to my house. I promise we won’t get caught,” she said. “I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise.” She said it until the word “promise” was nothing but mouth sounds and Xavier was laughing.
“We’ll have to be very quiet once we get inside,” she said. “Until tomorrow morning when my parents go to the marriage counselor they think I don’t know they go to. Good thing you already made me scream.”
Tomorrow this will be done, he told himself. Tomorrow he would do the smart thing and cut this off, if she hadn’t already. He’d just let himself have one night of this, and then be finished again. For good this time.
That’s what he told himself. But even then, he knew he was lying.
I woke up to my mother standing in my bedroom door, a pair of Minnie Mouse ears on top of her head. “We’re back and we brought you a lil’ present, sleepyhead,” she said, all charming and folksy, as though that was actually the way she talked to me. Which I guessed she did now, ever since Marc came around. She took the ears off her head and tossed them onto the bed.
If I have any natural skills as a liar, she’s how I got them. With every new boyfriend, my mom “reinvented herself,” which is what she would have called all the lying if anyone ever confronted her about it, which no one would have, because I was the only one who knew. I saw the way my mother twisted herself around, as though the facts of one’s past and one’s personality could be slipped into and out of like a coat. I saw how easy it was to make fake things seem real.
I sat up in bed. “Aw thanks!” I said, loud and cheery. “Welcome home!” I always played along. It was easier that way.
“You girls sure do have fun,” is what Marc had said once. Girls, both of us.
They’d been together a year and a half now, my mom and Marc. She met him around the time I met Xavier. The version of herself she was with him was very different than the one she’d been with the last two guys. With Edwin she’d been aloof and frosty, and for a brief period had suggested I call her “Caroline” instead of “Mom.” With Richard she’d taken an interest in my schoolwork and kept trying to cook for me, which I actually didn’t mind because she’s good at it. But it only lasted three weeks. With Marc, Mom was boisterous and friendly, as much as she could be, and almost never around. Which was how I liked it.
My mom was better with a boyfriend. I guess that sounds sad, but it was also just true. On her own she was restless and angry. She thought everything in the whole world was bad and everyone was bad, and everywhere she looked she found evidence to support this. It got worse after her mother, my grandma, the one whose locket I wore, died two years before, even though I knew my mother hadn’t really liked her. My grandmother had gotten terrible dementia the prior year, and my mother was the one who found the nursing home, the one who made sure Grandma was getting good care. She’d been the only one of her siblings to visit regularly. I knew she resented it, but she also seemed to secretly like it, too, because it confirmed her belief about how selfish they were. My mother likes to be right, even about bad things. Maybe about bad things especially.
Marc is twenty-three years older than my mother and the owner of a large chain of budget two-star hotels in popular vacation destinations. He spent all his time traveling between them, checking their quality. Since they’d gotten together, he took my mother along with him.
She actually seemed kind of happy. And I was glad for her. I was also glad when she was gone. He left stacks of cash for me “for food and stuff ” when they went out of town, but it was always way too much, like two hundred dollars for a three-day trip when there were already groceries in the fridge. At first I tried to refuse it – it felt weird taking his money like that. But it made my mother upset when I didn’t. “Sasha, stop it. Marc will feel bad,” she said once, when I deposited the pile of twenties back on the kitchen table. As if keeping Marc happy was our shared goal. So I kept it after that, never spent it, let it build up in a pile in the bottom drawer of my dresser.
“Come down and say hi,” my mother said. And I nodded. When she shut the door my phone buzzed. A text from Xavier.
Happy Birthday pal!! he wrote. He was doing the joke we always did.
Thank you, so kind of you to remember, I wrote back. I was definitely born, there’s no doubt about that.
Funny that you were ever a baby, he wrote. You are waaaaaaay bigger now.
There was a pause then. Dots appeared. Stopped. Came back.
I know how sorry you are for going off last night, so don’t worry . . . I forgive you, he wrote. I wondered what he (as me) was forgiving himself for. Just the stuff with Ivy? The moment before? The almost kiss?
Thank you You’re a true pal, I wrote.
You are too, he wrote back.
So . . . what happened with Ivy? I wrote. I was breaking the joke. I hated having to ask.
There was a pause
