Xavier
Xavier went back home late in the morning of his seventeenth birthday, still smelling like Ivy. He was hungover and had barely slept, but somehow he was wide-awake.
And he had no idea what to think or how to feel.
Back in his room, outside of the bubble of the woods, of Ivy’s house and bed, everything from the night before felt like it had happened to someone else a very long time ago.
He knew he should call Sasha then. But the idea of trying to explain it all, of somehow trying to justify this . . .
He remembered when they had first become friends. They were in the same English elective but they’d never really talked before. Xavier could tell she was smart from the things she’d say in class. And he could tell she was tough because she didn’t ever look nervous when called on, and because she was always alone in the halls but did not seem to mind it. He liked the necklaces she wore—a little metal book that she was often fiddling with, and sometimes other ones too, like a homemade thing made from knotted twine, or a cat collar with a tiny bell on it.
One day they needed to get into groups of two for a project and even though he was usually shy about things like that, he asked her to team up. And she said yes. And then there they were trying to come up with an idea for what to do for it, and one popped into his head. Xavier probably wouldn’t have even said it to most people, but, for some reason, with Sasha he didn’t even hesitate. “How about we do a thing about a guy who has an adult human body, and the head of a baby. But with a regular adult brain inside. Only because he is a baby, all he can do is cry and cry and cry. Which, like, isn’t that what most people want to do all the time, anyway? Because of how life is often very confusing?”
And then Xavier had drawn a little sketch in the corner of his notebook of what this baby-head guy might look like and showed her, and she stared at it and then at him as though maybe they knew each other from a very long time ago and she’d just recognized him. “Yeah,” she’d said. “I think that’ll work.” And when she smiled at him, he felt like he recognized her, too.
The comic they ended up making together was called The Adventures of Babyhead. It was basically about how the world is wonderful and terrible, how we are going to die and nothing matters, but it is also beautiful and everything does. That was the theme of their friendship, eventually, the theme of their everything, the underlying current of every interaction they had. Maybe the only thing they were both sure was true.
Xavier thought about all of this, sitting alone in his room on his birthday. He thought about his best friend and how she had been there for him for the whole last horrible month, during which he felt like his chest had been ripped apart by wild animals, or maybe a shark, and that maybe there was no point in leaving his bed ever again. It had surprised him how bad he had felt, how bad he was capable of feeling. But Sasha had not seemed surprised or weirded out or anything, which was another thing he loved about her. She showed up for him, calm and undramatic. She didn’t try and make him talk about Ivy, or anything at all. She just came and hung out, even though he knew he was incredibly boring to be around, and he’d say, “Seriously, you can just go home. I am sludge.” And she’d tell him to shut his mouth-hole, but always so kindly. She brought him funny mugs she made at her job and they watched all those ocean movies. And she acted like she wasn’t even doing him a huge favor, but Xavier knew it took energy to be there for someone like that. So what right did Xavier have to just go back to Ivy? To go back to the very person Sasha had saved him from?
He called Sasha. He felt embarrassed and weird and like, without totally meaning to, he was downplaying things, sort of hiding from her a little.
Sasha did not sound happy. And he could tell she was hiding something from him, too, though it was no mystery what it was—she thought he was an idiot. And he wasn’t even sure he disagreed with her. He probably was one. He just felt powerless to do anything about it.
When they hung up, his head was kind of spinning. Xavier felt disoriented and strange, and full of energy. After so long of not doing much of anything at all, the idea of sitting still seemed impossible.
He decided to clean up his room. He did laundry and put away all his clothes, swept the floor, made his bed. Then Xavier took out his notebook and drew a picture of some new kind of undersea creature, a cross between a sea lion and an anglerfish with a fancy hat on. Usually Xavier would have taken a photo of it and texted it to Sasha so she could write back some funny caption for it, but somehow in that moment it would have felt wrong, like he would be pretending things were normal between them when they both knew they weren’t. That was the problem with being so close to someone, you couldn’t bluff your way out of weirdness like that.
* * *
When his parents got home, they all sat down to dinner. They gave him a new Moleskine, which they did every year on his birthday, and a gift card for the art store. His dad made tequila chicken tacos and his mom made a spinach salad. His parents were not big talkers, so dinner was mostly quiet, but Xavier could tell that they were glad to see him up and out of bed. There was ice cream for dessert.
Xavier had sort of assumed Sasha would come over to hang out after dinner. They hadn’t talked about it, but he’d just figured, because that’s what it had been like most of the summer so far. But then Ivy texted him around eight. Come to the woods. That’s all she said. And Xavier felt a little bit weird about it, for a couple of reasons, but Sasha and Xavier hadn’t actually had plans. So Xavier went.
* * *
This time, Xavier was sober on the walk there and so it was harder to squash down all the thoughts about why he maybe shouldn’t be doing this. But then Xavier stepped into the clearing, and there she was, waiting for him on top of a plaid picnic blanket wearing nothing but underwear and boots and leaning back drinking something from a bottle, which she handed to him, and all his concerns vanished. He looked at the label, it was birthday-cake-flavored vodka. He took a sip. Ivy was watching him. She didn’t say “Hi” or “Happy birthday” or anything. Just raised her eyebrows, and said “It’s cold out here,” and then, “Come warm me up.”
And so he did.
Afterward she took his face in her hands and she looked him straight in the eye and she said, “Can we please do this for real? Us this? I want to be your girlfriend again.”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. He wanted to ask, What’s changed? Why now? But somehow instead he just felt his head nodding yes.