Sasha
We walked toward the back of Sloe Joe’s Tavern. Technically you were supposed to be twenty-one to go there at all, but nobody ever checked or cared.
It was hot and crowded and loud, like usual, with dim lights and red walls and a huge falling-apart crystal chandelier hanging over the dance floor. There was a rumor the chandelier was left over from when Sloe Joe’s had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. There was another rumor that if you sat on the couch by the door, you’d catch crabs.
I loved everything about the place, especially the way all that sound drowned out all the thoughts in my head, rattled them around until I couldn’t even think them, and then there was nothing but the heat and the stench of sweat and the feeling of music thumping inside me, beating in my chest like a heart.
It felt good to be back there with Xavier. This place used to be ours. Back when we first became friends, we’d come here most weekends, back when weekends were ours, too.
Then he started dating Ivy and that changed. But I kept coming by myself after that. I liked going places alone. (Xavier was maybe the first and only person whose company I preferred to no one’s.) I liked to be anonymous and watch people. I liked that when you were surrounded by people you didn’t know, you could do and say whatever you wanted, and nothing counted.
I had a game, and the game was called Kiss a Stranger. The way you play is you look at a stranger and try to imagine what kissing them might be like.
And then you go and find out if you’re right.
I liked the feeling of a mouth on my mouth. I liked that you could have an intense time with someone, crushed together in the dark, then let them go and never think about them again. Xavier said he was both baffled by and jealous of my ability to do that, because he was completely the opposite. “There are rocks inside the middle of you,” he’d told me. He meant it as a compliment.
But in that moment with Xavier, I wasn’t thinking about all of that. I was trying not to think of anything at all. There was a band onstage, a dozen people playing every instrument at once. And it was time to dance.
“Dance like no one’s watching!!” I shouted at him, which was a joke we had about that corny saying you find on inspirational-quotes websites, superimposed over a picture of the ocean or whatever. Our joke was that it really meant dance while also picking peoples’ pockets, because when no one is watching is the best time to be a thief. The game always progressed from there. Dance like everyone’s asleep! Dance like this room is full of ghosts! Dance like you just landed on Earth from space and what the hell is gravity even??!!
But the thing was people always watched Xavier when he danced. It was something about the tallness, the broad shoulders, the sheer size of him, combined with the way he moved, rhythmic and graceful and lost in the moment entirely. In regular life he tried to make himself smaller, to take up less space, uncomfortable being a sweet introvert in the body of a big manly jock. But when he danced he seemed more sure of himself than he ever did in any other context. He seemed free.
Xavier bumped up against me and grinned that grin that he did when he was just a little bit drunk. The lights flashed. Xavier took the whisky from his bag.
Was it time to tell him? Even through all that alcohol the thought made my stomach twist. I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.
He cracked the top, took a sip. When he handed it to me, I gulped. The room shifted. We raised our arms and shook our hips. Another band went on. Cymbals and bells. More dancing.
Nsst nsst. Bzzz bzzz bzzz. We grinned wide white teeth glowing in the dark. The room was packed, people on all sides pushing us toward each other, arms and shoulders, knees colliding. What was I ever worried about? I smiled up at him. But when he looked down at me, he had this curious expression on his face, and maybe it was all the alcohol, but I swore he was staring at me in a very different way than usual. It was the same look I remembered from the night he’d forgotten.
I felt a delicate bubble of hope getting bigger and bigger inside my chest, terrifying and dangerous, but I could not even stop it.
Maybe this is happening, I told myself. For real this time.
A spotlight on stage lit up a singer all in glitter. She was enormous and gorgeous, like someone from another better planet. She leaned in toward the microphone. Her voice was a sex growl. “I wrote this song to be fucked to, but you could dance to it, too.” She leaned back, and shouted, “WE ARE ALL GODDAMN MIRACLES!!” Music burst forth like confetti, the lights blinked on and off. I could feel Xavier’s breath on my cheek.
And we were really dancing like no one was watching.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
But then I looked up and realized someone was.
She was over by the bar when the lights flashed, but I swear a second before I saw her, I’d felt her, deep in my gut the way some animals sense an earthquake just before it comes.
Holy fuck.
Ivy.
“Xavier,” I said. The music was so loud. “XAVIER!” I grabbed his hand. He turned toward me, his mouth so close again. He was smiling, but I could barely see it, I could only smell the smell of him and feel his hard chest against my chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw motion near the bar. Ivy was making her way toward us.
My heart pounded and pounded. I felt like the building was on fire. Like the flames were about to swallow us whole. “Let’s go outside!” I said.
Xavier nodded.
Then he froze.
“Oh God,” he said. He’d seen her, too.
“C’mon!” I said. But he wasn’t listening to me anymore.
Somehow she was always smaller than I remembered her. She was tiny and wiry in black knee-length cutoffs and an army-green tank top. She had a million metal bracelets on each wrist like armor and hair clumped and cut short, big eyes with eyeliner caked around them that had maybe been on for a couple of days. She had a pointed chin like a bat, a wide mouth, and a space between her two front teeth. The fact that Ivy wasn’t conventionally beautiful made it worse. Power you get from being beautiful is cheap. But Ivy’s appeal just came from the her of her. She was a tornado, unpredictable and cracklingly alive. “She isn’t scared of anything,” Xavier had told me once with pride and awe. “Like literally not one single thing.” But everyone is scared of something is what I had thought, though I didn’t say it.
Ivy was right in front of us now. Xavier wasn’t moving. Her friend Gwen was next to her. Gwen and I shared a nod. In elementary school Gwen and I had briefly been friends, good friends even. But that was a very long time ago.
The song ended, and the band started playing something else, slower and softer.
“I’m going to get another drink,” Gwen said, then slipped away, as though maybe that had been the plan all along.
I stood there with Xavier and Ivy. The room swirled around us.
“It’s been . . . ,” Xavier said, finally. They hadn’t been in contact at all since that day a month ago when everything happened.
“Too long,” Ivy said. She pressed her flat hand against his chest. I stared at Ivy’s short bitten nails and chipped silver polish. I imagined Ivy could feel Xavier’s big sweet heart thumping against her palm. “I need to talk to you,” Ivy said. I saw Ivy glance at my blue hands, then up at Xavier’s hair. “Give us a minute?” she said to me.
I turned toward Xavier. I knew I needed to stop this, whatever was about to happen. But when our eyes met, I realized it was already too late. “I’ll find you soon?” he said.
I froze, as everything I wasn’t saying bubbled up inside me. Ivy was a monster and would destroy him. And last time he just barely survived her. And this was supposed to be the night I finally told him the truth. I had waited so long for this.
“Sash?” Xavier said. He sounded so gentle and concerned. “Is that okay?”
Later I would think back to this moment, wonder if everything might have been different if only I’d given a different answer.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
I turned away, then pushed through the crowd. When I looked back, Xavier and Ivy had been swallowed up.
I got in line for the bathroom. I was a wild and desperate animal. I needed to do something, to stop this, to save him. But I had no idea what.
Gwen walked by holding a drink. She gulped it down and put the empty glass on a table. She gave me a little wave as she headed toward the front door. I called out to her. “Gwen! Wait!”
Gwen came back. “Where are you going?” I said.
“Home,” Gwen said. She looked at my hands. “So . . . is that like a weird fetish thing or something?” She grinned.
I remembered when we were friends back in fourth grade, going over to her house. It was fancy and completely silent. Gwen lived there with her father, who was always at work, and her mother, who spent all day in bed. Gwen had said that this was because her mother was very popular and had a lot of friends who lived far away in other countries in other time zones and she stayed up very late at night talking to them. “That’s why she’s in bed,” Gwen said. “During the day she has to catch up on sleep. Also sometimes at night she goes to parties.” The story had seemed kind of strange to me at the time, but I had reminded myself my own mother did plenty of weird things. Who could really say why mothers did what they did?
Gwen’s mother passed away a few years after that. We weren’t friends anymore by that point, but I’d heard that she had been sick for a long time, had spent years slowly dying. I understood then what the story had been about. The idea of my once friend inviting people over and then telling that lie to cover up what was actually happening made my chest hurt. I went to the funeral alone and sat at the back. I’m not sure if Gwen even saw me.
Standing there that night at Sloe Joe’s, I thought of Gwen’s silent house, her sick mother, of how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen.
“She came here looking for him, you know,” Gwen said.
“She did?” That made it worse. But I wondered why Gwen was telling me this. “How did she even know he’d be here?”
Gwen shrugged. “She just figured, I guess. Haven’t you noticed how good she is at that?”
“At what?” I said.
“Getting what she wants.” Gwen gave me a half smile. “Have a good night, girly.” She turned and headed toward the door again.
I stayed in line, breathing hard.
If Ivy bumping into him here wasn’t an accident, it meant she wanted something from him. Maybe she even wanted him back.
But that doesn’t mean she can have him, I reminded myself.
I imagined leaving the bathroom and finding him. He would be alone. “So where’d you know that girl from?” he’d say. “She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. What was her name? Plant? Root?” And he’d grin, at his own dumb joke.
And he’d take the whisky out of his bag.
And we’d go outside and finish it.
And we’d play our game again.
And finally, finally, I would tell him the truth.
Only when I got back from the bathroom, he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the dance floor, wasn’t at the bar. Finally, I headed out to the tiny concrete courtyard in the back where people went to smoke sometimes. There was a group sitting around a picnic table, passing a vaporizer. I turned toward the corner, and that’s when I spotted them. Xavier and Ivy, up against the wall, their eyes were closed. They weren’t kissing or moving or anything, they were just like that, holding each other tight.
I felt hot and sick, full of rage and terror.
I backed up quickly, before they saw me. I went through the bar, outside into the hot night, and then I was gone.
My heart pounded powerfully, painfully. I didn’t know then what I know now: Be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.