Bad Girls with Perfect Faces. Lynn Weingarten
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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 then, texting dots appeared and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. My heart pounded. I wondered how many heart attacks each year are caused by those little hell dots. Finally a message:
Will tell you later. Don’t worry, everythings good ☺
What did that mean?
It was then that I remembered what I’d done the night before, the person I’d created.
I went to Instagram to see if “Jake” had been granted access.
He had.
Suddenly Ivy’s feed was right in front of me, hundreds of perfect little squares in full-saturated color. The most recent picture was of Ivy and Gwen from the night before, faces pressed together. WINESTAINSMILE was the caption. There was nothing new of Xavier. Maybe “everythings good” really did mean that he was being smart this time. They had a drunken hug, shared a nostalgic moment. Maybe they’d talked, she’d apologized, and then that was it.
But there were so many more pictures, so much more to look at. I knew I shouldn’t, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself.
There were a few photos of her wearing ballet shoes with regular clothes, doing crazy ballet poses in everyday situations, one of her in full makeup, devouring a meatball sub, a close-up of a Popsicle-stained tongue, a looped video of her rolling back and forth on a pair of roller skates, a few pictures of a very fluffy dog.
I scrolled back a few months, looked at the ones from right around New Year’s. There was a shot of a guy from far away. He was running up a hill in the snow in a T-shirt and shorts, the slanty winter sun setting behind him, surrounding him with light. This was Xavier from the first time the two of them had met.
Xavier had told me the story, and I’d thought about it so many times, I felt like I had been there myself.
He had been out running on a Sunday afternoon, the last day of winter break – he loved to run in the winter, outside in the freezing cold with nothing in his ears but the wind. They lived not too far from each other, Xavier and Ivy, though he hadn’t known that at the time. He was running by her house and she was standing at the end of her driveway, while he made his way up the hill, just standing there watching him. When he got close, she’d yelled, “Hey, I’ll be your alibi if you want.” He stopped, confused, asked her what she meant. “For whatever crime you’re fleeing the scene of,” she said. “That’s the only reason a person would be out running in this. If anyone asks what you were doing, I’ll tell them we were fucking.” And she stared at him and didn’t even crack a smile. Then invited him to come inside her house. He said the whole thing had been so strange and confusing he didn’t know what to do but say yes. And that’s how it started.
Just then a new picture appeared in Ivy’s feed. There was a face out of focus in the background, a shock of blue hair behind one ear, mouth half open, smiling, eyes closed. In the front of the frame was a spoonful of vanilla ice cream with Froot Loops stuck into it. This had been Xavier’s favorite special-occasion treat as a kid. He had asked for it every birthday growing up. It became a tradition for him even after his parents stopped doing it.
Last year, I was the one who got it for him.
The morning of his seventeenth birthday, the first thing Xavier felt was a body sliding up against him, and then a kiss on the cheek, and hot breath near his ear. “Eyes closed, mouth open,” Ivy said.
Then she fed him something. Xavier was smiling before he even swallowed.
She remembered.
He felt her get up off the bed. He opened his eyes. She was across the room, back to him, walking to the bathroom. The summer sun was coming through the window and her sheer curtains. She was naked and unselfconscious in a way he couldn’t imagine ever being. It didn’t feel safe to look at her. It didn’t feel safe because of what it did to him.
Don’t let this happen again, Xavier told himself. He couldn’t believe he was there. He thought about the night before, after all the stuff in the woods, Ivy convincing him to come stay over. She promised they wouldn’t get caught, as though that was the only thing to be concerned about.
“That’s maybe not the best idea . . .” Xavier had said.
“But the maybe-not-the-best ideas are the best ideas, aren’t they?” Ivy had smiled that smile that meant she knew there was no way Xavier could resist her.
And she had been right.
Xavier had texted his mom that he was staying at Sasha’s. His parents trusted him so much that it would never even occur to them that Xavier could lie. Which made him feel especially guilty when he did.
Xavier stared at Ivy’s back, then forced himself to look away. He reached for his jeans on the floor, took his phone out of the pocket, and for a moment Xavier was back in the real world. He saw the text from Sasha sent late the night before.
Sasha.
Xavier thought again about the great birthday time they’d been having. It was the first real fun Xavier had had in so long. And he thought of how for a moment it had seemed like . . . well, Xavier didn’t know exactly. It seemed like the air between them had shifted or something. Like things were inching in a strange direction. Xavier wasn’t even sure if he had been making it up or not. And then Ivy appeared.
But here, in Ivy’s room on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, he felt certain he’d imagined all that Sasha stuff. Which Xavier knew was a good thing, for a bunch of different reasons, not least of which was the fact that Sasha was his best friend on earth.
Now, in the bright light of day, he felt weird that he’d left Sasha and gone off with Ivy. Not that Sasha would care about the being alone part – she liked to be alone – but because she might care about who he’d gone off with.
He found himself defending his decision to Sasha in his head. Defending Ivy. She wasn’t all good or all bad. She was human and complicated and confusing, like all of us. True, she made messes sometimes. But she never meant to and she always felt awful about it after. And Xavier didn’t quite understand her, but then again,