“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.”
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.
Xavier
“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.
Sasha
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 year prior, 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 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 pose
s 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.
Bad Girls with Perfect Faces Page 3