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 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.