Sasha
We went to the diner and ate like it was our last meal on earth. Egg sandwiches and pancakes and a side of sausage and a side of bacon and a Belgium waffle with strawberries and ice cream. “We are monsters,” Xavier said. And we just kept eating and eating. We growled like beasts, our faces slick with grease and sticky with syrup.
For the first time in a very long time, things between us seemed almost back to normal. Except I never once looked him in the eye. I felt like I couldn’t—I didn’t deserve to. And if Xavier noticed, he didn’t let on.
At the end of the meal, we got a chocolate milkshake to go, mostly as a joke. We knew there was no chance we’d have more than a sip. I drove Xavier back home. In the car, he was quiet again, and he had that same blank look on his face from before.
I went to work after dropping him off. It was a slow day. A guy copied flyers for his garage sale. A woman came to find out the price of getting a laptop case with her dog printed on it. A couple of kids stopped by and used the Internet.
Mostly I sat behind the counter and tried to keep myself awake, tried to keep myself from thinking too much. Just after four, I spotted Xavier through the big front windows. I felt a rush of joy. It had been a long time since he’d come to visit me at work. But when he got inside I saw his face. He looked even worse than before.
Now he knows for real, I thought. My entire body started to sweat.
He thrust his phone forward. There was a message thread on the screen.
It was a conversation between him and Gwen.
Gwen 3:46: Hey, have you heard from Ivy lately? She hasn’t texted me back since yesterday afternoon and I know she had plans with you and I’m getting worried
Xavier 3:46: I haven’t heard from her either
Gwen 3:47: You had plans though, right . . .
Xavier 3:47: She didn’t show up
Xavier watched me with bloodshot eyes. “What if something actually did happen to her? I mean, I get her vanishing on me, but on her best friend?”
I shook my head. “You know this is a thing she does,” I said. “She’s totally fine.” But what I was thinking was that she isn’t fine, she’s freaking out because of what she did and hiding from everyone now. And some tiny fucked-up part of me was happy to know that. But I didn’t want Xavier to worry. “I promise you, she is absolutely okay and there is nothing to be anxious about.”
“I don’t know.” Xavier looked down. “I know that what you’re saying is reasonable, but I just have a really bad feeling that something terrible has happened. . . .”
The shop was empty except for the two of us.
“That’s called being hungover,” I said. “Remember all the other times she did this? If she was someone else, or hadn’t done this a million times already, sure, we’d be concerned now. But she is who she is and she does what she does. That is the only thing going on here.”
He nodded at me. “You’re right,” he said. “I mean, I know you are. Of course you are.”
I asked him if he wanted to stay and hang out. “We can print our faces onto stickers and stick them on everything, like we used to,” I offered. But he said no thank you, he probably needed to go lie down, because he really was not feeling so great. And then he left. I watched as he walked out the door.
I checked Ivy’s Instagram, but still there was nothing new.
It didn’t matter. Ivy was fine, obviously. She was clearly freaking out and hiding. Or, hell, maybe she was off with another guy already and not even worrying about any of this.
I tried to stop thinking about it after that, tried to stop thinking about Ivy at all.
A man came in with baby announcements to print.
A lady and her daughter wanted to know if we could print customized softballs.
A couple in their early twenties asked about getting a photo shrunk down small enough to fit inside a locket. One of the women held up the necklace, a big pewter oval on a thick chain. “It’s an antique,” she said. “An anniversary present.” She smiled and waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, she shrugged. “You can shrink a photo, right? How much will it cost?”
But I wasn’t listening anymore. I reached up and clasped my neck. The locket. My locket. The one my grandmother gave me, the one I wore every day. The one I never took off. It was gone.
I closed my eyes. I remembered the feeling of Ivy’s hand on my chest, fist grabbing the neck of my shirt, pulling me toward her. Suddenly, I knew exactly where it was.
I looked up at the two women. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But we’re closed.”
“Your sign says you don’t close until five. We are literally inside the store talking to you. So you are obviously open.”
I felt the tears welling up. “Oh shit,” the one with the necklace said. She leaned in close to her girlfriend and whispered something. Then she grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the door.
And I headed back to the woods.
* * *
I know that the universe does not give a crap about what we do. There is no order, no such thing as fair—nobody gets what they deserve. But as I was making my way back to that spot between the trees, I could not help but wonder if perhaps the universe took my grandmother’s necklace because I did not deserve to have it. Not after everything I’d done.
As I walked toward the woods, I forced myself to think about my grandmother, even though I usually didn’t because it made my chest ache. I forced myself as if it was punishment. The last year of her life she was like a fire going out, the person I knew only appearing in brief flickering sparks. And there were fewer and fewer of them, until one day there was nothing left at all but a wisp of smoke, and then she was gone. My grandmother gave me the necklace after she was already in the nursing home during a rare lucid moment. She managed to get the necklace off with shaking hands and dropped it into my lap. I put it on my own neck, and it had been there ever since. Until now.
Going back to those woods was my only hope of finding it. I walked through the trees. I thought about my grandmother and how much I missed her. I thought and I walked far, far away from everything. How strange that less than twenty-four hours before, I had been on my way to the same place in these same woods. How different I had felt back then.
I stepped between the two biggest trees into the small clearing.
When I first saw the body, my brain could not process it.
Xavier and I had taken mushrooms together once. I was full of vibrating terror, felt like my skin was shrinking and that my skeleton would burst through and escape. I had thrown up, right onto the ground, saw little tadpoles swimming in it. Saw skull patterns in the sky, furious faces in the grass. Things that weren’t real.
Maybe this is like that, I thought.
Maybe someone had slipped me something, or maybe I was going crazy.
I blinked and shook my head and stopped breathing and started again, but no matter what I did, it was there. The body was still there.
I saw toes. Small and round, chipped silver polish on the nails. An ankle with a silver chain around it, a mosquito bite, a shaving cut. Thin calves, wiry dancer’s thighs. Frayed cut-off shorts. An oversize gray hoodie, hands sticking out the bottom of the sleeves. Dark hair blending in with the dirt. A tiny pointed chin. Big eyes, wide open.
Who takes a nap with their eyes open? Who takes a nap on the ground in the dirt? With dirt and leaves in their hair and flies buzzing around, landing on their face, and they are not swatting them away?
Ivy was fucking with me.
“Hey!” I said. My head was underwater.
I crouched down. “Ivy!” She was very good at not blinking. You need to blink, because eyes are wet balls rolling around in your skull, but there she was, staring and staring and not blinking at all. I hated her so much for doing this now. For lying there in the woods and seeming so convincingly like just a body. Like just a body that was not moving.
So very, very convincingly dead, so dead that she was not breathing or blinking, and her skin was not quite the right color, and her lips were so very dry—how the fuck? Howthefuckwasshedoingthis?
“How the fuck are you doing this?”
But Ivy didn’t answer.
I stood up and stumbled back.
Ivy was dead in the woods?
Is that what this meant? Is that what finding Ivy lying on the ground in the woods not moving or breathing meant?
She was so very small. I stared at her fingers, at her little tapered fingers, fingernails bitten down to the quick.
I closed my eyes and asked my brain for some answers. Nothing made sense at all. I only knew one thing: What seemed to be in front of me was not possible. What I was looking at had not happened and this was not possible. How could this possibly be?
Ivy’s fall.
I remembered then the sickening thunk of her skull against the tree. The way she looked as she lay on the ground. I remembered how shocked and terrified I felt. I remembered her sitting up and laughing at me because she was fine.
And I suddenly understood that she had not actually been fine at all.
People hit their heads, seem okay as their brains silently swell up and kill them in their sleep. Their brains bleed and bleed inside their skulls, and nobody knows it until their brains drown and they are gone. It happens every day. It had happened to Ivy.
My entire body was tingling.
Ivy was dead on the ground.
She was dead on the ground because I grabbed that rope.
And because, before that, I had tricked her for weeks, lured her out into the woods. Lured her here and threatened her and grabbed onto that rope.
And she fell backward and hit her head.
I looked down at Ivy’s toes. At my shoes. I looked at the trees, Ivy’s fingers, at the sky. I tried to remember anything else that had ever happened before this moment.
What did I need to do? Call an ambulance? Call the police?
I stood there, heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I was out there in the woods, alone with Ivy’s body. And the world was silent and still.
And then . . . there was music. That song Ivy had danced to at the party.
For one brief shimmering moment, I had hope. I teetered on the crystal-clear edge of it: if there was music playing now, maybe this wasn’t actually real. Not real in the way I had thought at first. This was a setup, a prank. This wasn’t really Ivy’s body, but a great replacement. A prop. Nothing that happened in movies was real, but it all looked real. Just like how Jake seemed to be real. But I’d made him up. The truth hardly even mattered. The world could make you believe anything at all.
How had this happened? It hadn’t.
As long as the music played, I could believe that it hadn’t.
But the music stopped. I turned around and looked to see who was watching me, who was out there in the woods playing that music. I couldn’t see anyone. And when the music started again, I was still alone.
Except for Ivy.
And this was real.
And that music was her phone, ringing halfway out of her pocket. A picture of Xavier was flashing on the screen.
Sorry, Ivy can’t come to the phone right now.
It started ringing again, ringing so loud someone was going to hear it and come find me standing over Ivy in the woods. Me alive and Ivy dead. I had to make the ringing stop while I figured out what to do next. I reached down, shuddered when I touched it. Ivy’s phone. The dead girl’s phone. The very same kind as mine. But there was no time for thinking, no time for planning.
I could not be there, standing over her in the woods, me alive while Ivy was dead.
But my limbs knew what to do and they were doing it without me. My hand held the phone, I rejected the call. The music stopped. My breath was stuck. My heart was beating in my ears. And then somehow Ivy’s phone was in my pocket and my feet were pounding against the earth, pounding against the dirt and the grass and the leaves, taking me away as fast as I could go.