The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe

by Hannah Moskowitz

  “Okay,” Dot says. “Take a look.”

  Libby looks at herself in the mirror. “Girl. They should hire you.”

  Dot beams and goes over to a chair next to Ivy and flops herself down, pulling her hair down from a messy bun and starting a French braid instead. She looks over Ivy’s shoulder to see her phone, and Ivy notices her and angles it toward her, and Dot giggles at something.

  Ivy glances up at her and then back down, the tiniest bit of a smile on her face. Dot takes out her phone, too, and it’s obvious from their reactions that they’re texting each other, which is ridiculous, since they’re sitting right next to each other, but hey, at least this way I don’t have to listen to them flirt. I get back to work.

  Just a few minutes later, though, just after Libby’s left to get the bachelor party started, Dot says, “Oh my God.”

  “What?” Ivy says.

  Dot says, “I…uh. I got into Columbia.”

  “Huh,” Ivy says.

  I say, “Wait. Like, Columbia Columbia? New York Columbia? Isn’t that a really good school?”

  Dot shrugs, looking at her phone.

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “She got a 1520 on her SAT,” Ivy says. “Does Columbia even have an art program?”

  “Of course,” Dot says, still sounding a little dazed. “But I wouldn’t… If I’m going to do art, I’m going to go to RISD.”

  “Then what’s Columbia?” Ivy says.

  “Pre-law. My parents, you know. That’s what they want me to do.”

  Ivy’s staring at Dot like she’s talking about growing an extra arm. “You’re an artist.”

  “So were you,” Dot says vaguely, scrolling down on her phone.

  Ivy’s quiet, then says abruptly, “I might be moving to California with my mom,” and I almost fall out of my chair.

  …

  “I don’t think she’ll really do it,” I say to Elizabeth a few days later, when I’m recounting the whole sordid tale as we walk back to her apartment from lunch. “I mean, she spends forty-eight hours with her mom and they both want to kill each other. Can’t imagine how she’d last without my house five minutes away to run back to.”

  “So you’re not worried about it?”

  I shake my head. “But now I am sort of worried she’s going to go off the rails if Dot leaves. We’d all just assumed she’d stay local, and it sounds like she’s really considering this Columbia thing.”

  “I thought she was totally committed to being, you know, a YouTube celebrity.”

  “Yeah, so did I. I don’t know. Maybe she’s growing up. She’s seemed different the last couple of months.”

  “Or maybe you’re just getting used to her.”

  “I hate that you’re probably right.”

  We’re at her apartment building now, but Elizabeth stops and takes my hand instead of unlocking the door. “Listen,” she says. “While we’re on the subject of…all of this.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re moving to California with Ivy’s mom.”

  She laughs a little. “Not California.”

  My chest feels cold. “Oh.”

  She squeezes my hands. “Sorry. I haven’t decided yet or anything. But you know I’m graduating in May and I got this job offer in Boston that sounds really good.”

  “Boston.” Okay. Boston’s not that far.

  “It’s doable, right?” she says. “I know it would suck, but…”

  “Yeah, it’s just a train ride.” I take a deep breath. “It’s okay.”

  “Like I said, I haven’t decided,” she says.

  “No, you should do it,” I hear myself saying. “It’s this big opportunity, and I don’t want you to stay and resent me.”

  “I would never resent you,” Elizabeth says. “And they don’t need a decision from me until April. I just wanted to keep you in the loop.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

  I follow her up the stairs to her apartment and try to calm down. Because she’s right; Boston is doable, and it’s not the end of the world. But it’s just…Ivy, and now Elizabeth, and fuck, even Dot, everyone’s got these opportunities and these other places and these futures, and I’m what, exactly? Going to be living in my parents’ house, running their strip club forever? Is that really all I have to offer the world? All the world has to offer me?

  God, I think it might be.

  …

  It’s been a long week for all of us, so we decide to just meet at Mama’s and relax there instead of going to Kinetic. Dance Machine Dot is, of course, indignant, and leaves us at the table and hits the bar’s tiny dance floor with a bunch of gay guys who fawn all over her. Being that good-looking is just a different world.

  “So wait,” Diana says. “Where in California?”

  Dot flits over to our table for a sip of her drink, and Ivy kisses her before shoving her back to the dance floor. “Santa Monica,” she says to Diana. “All beaches all the time.”

  “God, that sounds amazing.”

  “You’re not actually going,” I say.

  Ivy ignores me and shows her phone to Diana. “That’s where we’d be living.”

  “Holy shit,” Diana says.

  I say, “And where will you be living after the jewelry scammer goes to prison?”

  Ivy throws her hair back. “I don’t care about that. I’m not going out there to join some jewelry venture. I’ll fake it until my mom gets bored, but it’s a plane ticket and a change of scenery and a chance to be a buyer in Hollywood.”

  “What about school?” Melody says. “And your job?”

  And us?

  “I haven’t decided anything yet,” Ivy says. “It’s just on the table, that’s all.” She nudges Diana. “How’d that German exam go?”

  “Oh God, I forgot to tell you,” Diana says, and she launches into a story about her German professor forgetting their exam date and showing up fifteen minutes late in his pajamas, and it’s a pretty funny story, but Ivy isn’t paying any attention. “Why do you even ask?” Diana asks her when she’s finished entertaining the rest of us.

  “Students at Columbia are really unhappy,” Ivy says without looking up from her phone. “I have statistics.”

  “And what are you going to do with those statistics?” Melody asks patiently.

  Ivy’s already typing. “Text them to Dot.”

  “How the hell does she put up with you?” I say.

  Ivy laughs. “There’s no one like me.”

  She’s right, too. That’s the problem.

  …

  We head home fairly early, much to Dot’s dismay. I sit in the back seat while she and Ivy bicker over the music like they always do, but with a little more tension than usual. Dot’s pissed because Ivy pulled her away from this girl she was hooking up with because she was ready to go home. Ivy’s pissed because…who knows.

  “Columbia’s not even one of the good Ivies,” she says. “If you’re gonna go to one, go to Harvard or some shit—”

  “Great advice, thank you,” Dot says. It’s weird seeing her cut Ivy off like that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do it before. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do it before. I always just let her go until she gets bored and moves on to something else.

  “Stop pouting. That girl was too old for you anyway.”

  “Trust me, I know too old for me. And I am so not the one pouting!”

  Dot’s mom is at the kitchen table when we come in, laughing with my mom. Dot kisses both their cheeks and goes to the fridge for a bottle of water.

  “I can’t stay,” she says to Ivy. “I have to go home and edit that video I recorded yesterday.”

  “The skin care one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mmm,” Ivy says. “Think you’ll still be able to do videos when you’r
e a law student?”

  Dot sucks on her teeth. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m just saying, all that homework, all the study groups, all the time spent convincing douchey frat guys you belong there—”

  “Oh my God, Ivy, back the fuck off,” Dot snaps.

  We all kind of stop and stare—me, my mom, Dot’s mom. Everyone except Ivy. “I know I’m right,” she says simply with an overly casual shrug. “If you don’t want to listen to me, that doesn’t change. I still sleep like a baby.”

  “In California,” Dot says.

  Ivy holds eye contact with her. “Yeah. In California.”

  Dot leaves with her mom pretty soon after that, and my mom wipes down the kitchen table while I start the dishes and Ivy sorts recycling. “What was that about California?” she says.

  “I’m thinking about moving,” Ivy says. “My mom’s headed out there. Would be a nice change of scenery.”

  Okay, here’s the part where my mom tells her that’s crazy, and that Ivy’s mother is a disaster, and that she doesn’t know anyone out in California, and anyway what about Andie? In three, two…

  “I think that could be really great for you,” my mother says.

  I really should have seen that coming, since this whole month has been some sort of study in irony.

  “You think?” Ivy says.

  “You’ve been wanting something bigger for a long time, honey,” my mom says. “And you’ve got some money saved up now. Maybe it’s time to strike it out on your own, ’cause Lord knows that’s how you always end up when you’re with your mother.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  My dad walks in from downstairs, his glasses on top of his head, and says, “We’re talking about getting rid of Ivy? Finally.”

  Ivy kisses his cheek on the way to the trash can.

  “Ivy’s acting like she might move to California,” I say to him.

  “I like California,” my dad says.

  “Now you have an excuse to visit,” Ivy says.

  “Or to stay far, far away,” Dad says.

  Ivy considers this. “Definitely one of the two.”

  “Lord, I miss traveling,” my mother says with a sigh. She kisses my dad. “Someday you’ll win the lottery and we’ll finally take Andrea to Italy.”

  “This is my responsibility?” Dad says.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What the fuck is going on here?” I burst. “Ivy’s lived here since she was born. Her entire life is here. She has a job. She has school. And now one conversation about possibly moving to California and everyone’s on board? Your mom’s probably not even going to go! She’s going to flake out and end up in Toledo or fucking West Virginia.”

  Ivy rolls her eyes and takes a bag of trash out the back door without a word. My parents are too busy exchanging looks with each other to be helpful, so I follow her out to the back porch.

  I stick my hands under my arms to keep them warm while Ivy throws open the lid of the trash can. Tiny snowflakes glisten in the air, and they make everything sound muffled, fake.

  “Are you really going to make me say it?” I say.

  She doesn’t look at me. “Say what.”

  God. God. “What about me?”

  She sighs and closes the lid of the trash can. “What about you?”

  “I thought this was just some hissy fit because your girlfriend was leaving.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” she says. “And she’s not leaving.”

  “But now you’re actually going to do it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And I get that this is you, that you can just watch your literal fucking home burn down and think it’s a good excuse for a fresh start, I get that, I know you, but I always thought…look, fuck school, fuck work, fuck the girls and fuck Dot and fuck everything that’s familiar, but what about me?”

  We were supposed to go to Paris.

  Ivy comes toward me and cups my chin in her hand and kisses me, right here in the backyard with the trash. It’s longer than our usual kisses, and I hold on to her hips and feel her so, so, so close to me. Like we’re almost one person. We’re so close.

  “Come with me,” she whispers.

  Her lips are so soft. Her hand in my hair. Oh God. Oh God.

  I imagine it. In that moment, I see all of it. How fucking beautiful it would be.

  “No,” I say.

  “Come to California.” She tucks my hair behind my ears. “We could rent bicycles. Sell snow cones. Whatever the fuck.”

  I think about my dad just out of the hospital, and Max and the club, and how warm the sun must be from the Santa Monica pier. “I can’t,” I say. “My family needs me.”

  “Yeah.” Ivy takes a step back and looks down at the ground. “Yeah, they do.”

  We’re quiet for a minute, our breath fogging in the air.

  Eventually Ivy turns her face up to the sky. “I have to get out of this town, Andrea.”

  “I know,” I say, even though I don’t want to.

  “I’ve been just stuck for so goddamn long now. There has got to be more out there than this. This can’t just be…this can’t be it. There has to be more of a reason to fucking get up in the morning.”

  I thought we were enough. I thought I was enough.

  “What about me?” I say again, when I can’t not say it anymore.

  She looks at me, then back up at the stars.

  “There has to be more,” she says softly.

  We go back inside after that, and Ivy heads upstairs and to her room without saying anything. My mom’s gone up to bed already and my dad’s watching TV, and I stand in the kitchen and look around this tiny house I’ve lived in my entire life and feel like the walls are getting smaller and smaller.

  The TV shuts off. “Andie?” my dad says. “Are you okay?”

  I say, “Do you ever feel stuck?”

  He watches me, his eyes sad. “I have. Used to a lot.”

  “Does anything help?”

  “My dear,” he says, “everything helps.”

  …

  I’m back at the strip club the next day, figuring out the new bartender’s schedule and mopping the floors and moping, basically. I’m also checking my phone every ten minutes, because Elizabeth’s been texting me about the Boston job, and I’m pretty sure everyone in the state of Rhode Island is going to leave besides me. I must look about how I feel, because Max ruffles my hair as he walks by me. I bat him away.

  I’m in the dressing room while Melody’s getting ready, fixing her tits and dotting lipstick on her mouth. “What’s with you?” she asks me.

  “Do you want to leave Providence?”

  “Ooh, let me guess who this is about.”

  “It’s not just Ivy.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s not,” I say. “It’s Ivy, and it’s Elizabeth, fuck, it’s Dot. It’s all these people who are going to move on and get these big new lives and just… Do you ever feel like you’re trapped here?”

  “What, like in the club?”

  “No, just in your life. That you’re supposed to be bigger or doing more or meaning more or something. Like there’s something that you’re supposed to be doing and you don’t know what it is, but it’s not this. It can’t be this.”

  “Come here,” Melody says.

  She pulls me up out of my chair and over to the door that leads backstage. From here, we can just barely see Tara onstage, dancing for a crowd. She’s wrapped around the pole, doing moves that, even after seeing them a thousand times, I will never figure out the physics for. She’s stretched and shiny and beautiful, and glitter pours down on her and catches on the purple lights on the stage. The music blares. People cheer. Everything looks like what I picture when I imagine a galaxy.

  “What’s big
ger than this?” Melody says, and right then I don’t know. I squeeze Melody’s hand and kiss her cheek and bask in the lights like they’re on me.

  My family made this.

  …

  I’m at home midday on Monday when Ivy comes home from class. She studies me. “You look forlorn.”

  “I was going for despondent.”

  She checks her phone. “I have to pick up the ward. Do you want to come?”

  “Yeah.” Might as well soak up as much time with her as I can.

  We drive over to Dot’s school, and I get out and climb into the back seat when Dot walks up by herself. “Where’s Natalie?” Ivy says, which I guess is the name of that blonde girl who’s usually with her.

  “Out sick today, but I think she’s just hung over.”

  “It’s wild that your mom thinks I’m the bad influence,” Ivy says. “You were a mess before I even got here.”

  “Eh, prove it.”

  We pull away from the school while Dot messes with the music.

  “So,” Ivy says in her fake-casual voice that she must still think fools someone. “Where’s Natalie going to college?”

  “Brown. She got in early.”

  “What’s she studying?”

  “She doesn’t know yet.”

  “What’s she good at?”

  I see Dot shrug a little. “Flute.”

  “So why not music?”

  “When did you become such a fucking idealist?”

  “And when did you become a cynic?”

  “Guess I’ve been hanging out with you too much,” Dot says.

  “Yeah, back atcha,” Ivy says. I feel it would be in bad taste for me to chime in.

  Dot puts her feet up on the dashboard. “I have done so fucking much to my parents,” she says. “My mom has basically been forced to accept that I’m sleeping with girls in a matter of a few months and she’s doing a damn good job of it, but it’s hard. And my dad still barely talks to me. They fight about me all the time. Why is making you happy more important than making them happy?”

  Ivy snorts. “This is not about making me happy,” she says.

  “Well, good to hear that, since it wouldn’t make any fucking sense, since you’re leaving anyway. What the hell do you care whether I stay local or not?”

  “You think this is about what state you go to school in?” Ivy says. “I don’t give a shit where you go. Go to SCAD. Go to Pratt. Go to the Art Institute, I don’t care, but you cannot be a fucking lawyer. You’re an artist. You have something. You can’t give that up.”