THREE | IVY

AT HOME I TURNED off the house alarm and jumped in the bath while it was still filling up. Our tub is deeper than most, and by the time it was full I was almost floating. My dark hair spread out like Ophelia’s in the bath water. I clasped an imaginary bouquet in front of my nakedness and then smiled at my own melodrama. I would never drown myself over Jeremy, although it would be an excellent way to ruin his summer.

The water went cold while I was thinking about us, and I started to shiver, which called for more hot water and cinnamon twist bubbles to go with it. I didn’t have any plans to get out. There was too much to remember. The last time I was over at Jeremy’s house I’d helped his eleven-year-old half-sister, Hannah, put in Fuschia Shock Manic Panic, and she wanted to dye their dog, Nanook, too, but Jeremy wouldn’t let her. He was the only one in the family who ever said no to her, so she made him say it all the time.

His older sister, Sarah, had a townhouse, and when we both decided we were ready to lose our virginity she let him take me over there and use her spare bedroom. She even went out for the evening, leaving us a bottle of red wine for the occasion. We ordered Chinese food and drank half the bottle while we were waiting. I told him I didn’t want to have any more so I wouldn’t feel numb while it was happening, and it did hurt some but I hardly bled.

Jeremy watched my eyes through most of it, and at one point he asked how it felt. I couldn’t explain properly, except to say that I felt kind of raw and rug-burn like and how did it feel for him?

“Warm,” he said. “And squishy.”

We started to laugh because warm, squishy, and rug-burn raw didn’t sound like descriptions of mind-blowing sex. After a while we went back to the kitchen and finished the rest of the wine and Szechuan noodles and Jeremy said, “So I guess we’re not ready for advanced locations like the dining room table.”

Then he gathered my hair between his fingers and held it back behind my head like a ponytail. He pressed his lips gingerly against my forehead. “Sometimes I think you must be a figment of my imagination. How can this Ivy girl be so absolutely perfect for me?” He pulled back to look at me. “Ivy. Even your name is perfect. Natural. Free.”

A few minutes later we went back upstairs and had more squishy, warm sex. Within a week the rawness was replaced by something that made me smile. I told my mom, and she took me to a doctor who wrote out a prescription for the pill. Mom was fond of Jeremy and didn’t have any problem with us having a sex life. She told me she was happy that I’d found “someone nice to discover that aspect of life with.” My father didn’t know and didn’t ask, which was perfectly in keeping with his approach to most aspects of my life.

My best friend, Betina, gushed about how lucky I was to have not only an amazing boyfriend but also a mother who didn’t lose her mind about me sleeping with him. I didn’t think about the luck ending. I met some really terrific peer mentors and the kids they were empowering. I learned about sports and physical activity programs designed to keep young people interested in positive things. One time I even did an interview with the mayor about his ideas for combating violence in the community. All through that there was Jeremy. Sometimes we couldn’t see each other as much as we wanted, but we both understood that too. Life is a lot of things, not just the person you’re sleeping with.

When there was time we took it, and when there wasn’t we looked forward to a future where there would be. It was simple.

The longer I stayed in the bath the sadder I got. I stared at my wrinkled fingers and thought about the times we’d talked dirty to each other on the phone. I’d listen to him come, feeling happy as I visualized him touching himself.

“This isn’t fair,” he’d complain. “How come I can never make you come over the phone?” He’d been happy as he said it, though. We were happy.

I thought we’d be happy for a long time.

And when Jeremy had confessed about his claustrophobia and then taken it back just as hastily, it’d been easy to believe he hadn’t meant it in the first place. No one could spend so many hours lying with his arms around you, stroking your hair and listening to you sob over your dead grandmother, and not love you the way that you loved him.

I worked the plug free with my big toe and watched the water drain. It was cold again anyway. I knotted a towel under my arms and shuffled leadenly across the hall to my bedroom to call Betina. Someone had to help me make sense of this.

“What?” Betina squeaked into my ear. “You’re not serious? I don’t understand. What did he tell you?”

I repeated our brief conversation from the hallway as Betina grew steadily more indignant on my behalf. “He said this to you in the hallway? I can’t believe he’d be so insensitive as to break it off in the school hallway before your final.”

She made hallway sound like a swear word in itself. I chewed on my molars, feeling like I’d wimped out by running home. Maybe I should have waited and shrieked at him as he left the science lab, dragged him back to the car and made him regret me.

“I’m sorry.” Betina lapsed into silence. “Maybe he’ll change his mind. Not that you should take him back, anyway, but I can’t believe he’d drop that on you from nowhere and just let it lie. He must be having, I dunno, some kind of personal meltdown.”

“I don’t know either,” I said. “I didn’t see it coming. I feel like such an idiot.”

“No one could’ve seen it coming,” she told me. “There weren’t any clues.”

I’d never mentioned the claustrophobia to her before. Of the two of us I was the one who usually had my love life together, and I suppose I hadn’t been ready to face facts back in December, the same way Betina hadn’t wanted to face reality when she told me about Indiana Vaughn.

Twenty-five-year-old Vaughn was her grandparents’ neighbor, and every time Betina went down to Indiana to visit them he’d be hanging around, doing odd jobs for them like some creepy movie character who, unfortunately, happened to possess copious amounts of sex appeal. Betina was sixteen when he first felt her up and seventeen when they had sex. She didn’t even tell him she was a virgin, in case it changed his mind, but I’m positive he suspected.

When she told me about her first time she seemed giddy, but the moment I started badmouthing Vaughn as a pervert who tested her sexual limits with every visit she started to cry and couldn’t stop. “You don’t understand how someone can talk you into these things,” she said. “It seems okay when you’re doing it. Almost good, even.”

“You’re always telling me that you hate how he barely speaks to you and goes straight for the physical, yet you fall for it every time.”

“Just because it’s only physical doesn’t mean it’s bad.” Betina sniffled.

“Then why do you always come back crying? It’s not that I don’t want to be happy for you …” I stopped short of mentioning some of the more disgusting things Vaughn had suggested. “But I don’t think it’s right that he’s always trying to talk you into things, like dipping or last time when he —”

“Shhhh,” Betina commanded. “I don’t want to think about that stuff anymore. Maybe if you met Vaughn you’d understand, but you haven’t and you won’t, so forget it. Forget I said anything.”

It was unlikely that I’d forget about some creepy older guy using my friend as his personal Lolita, but I tried not to mention him unless Betina brought him up herself. Every time she went to Indiana, Vaughn had some new thing he wanted to try out, and over Easter he went so far as to suggest a threesome with his ex. I cheered when Betina told me that she’d dumped him, and she seemed genuinely happier these days — happier than me.

“There were clues,” I admitted. “I just wasn’t looking at them.” I thought about how I didn’t really know anyone aside from her and Jeremy anymore, but I kept my mouth shut. Betina would only deny it, tell me I had lots of friends and mention journalism and the AVL. Then I’d be forced to agree so I wouldn’t feel like an even bigger idiot who’d let her friends slip through her fingers while she was writing AVL updates and getting Jeremy off over the phone.

“He must be more immature than we thought,” Betina said, as though the three of us were in this together. She commiserated with me for over an hour, but most of the specifics of our conversation hurtled right by me, and it wasn’t until we hung up later that it occurred to me that she’d never offered to come over. Maybe she thought I wanted to be alone.

I had to get used to that now. Single people spent time alone.

I tugged off my towel and looked at my newly single naked body in the mirror. I was just curvy enough to look right in a bikini, and I liked what I saw, but the view made me miss Jeremy more. The last time we were together I’d had no idea that it would be the last time. If I’d known I would have paid extra attention to the tiny details. I never took a close look at his legs. I knew they were hairy, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to pick them out of a police lineup.

I changed into my clothes and combed the tangles from my hair, desperately trying to summon a vision of Jeremy’s legs that wouldn’t come. My failure seemed ridiculous. I wanted to feel outraged like I had outside the science lab. His legs shouldn’t matter. He’d broken it off five minutes before our final like it was something to check off a list. Dump Ivy. Ace final. Meeting with Amara.

Nothing about Jeremy should’ve mattered, except what he’d done to me earlier that day, but I couldn’t stop caring at the drop of a hat. The truth was that I wasn’t even mad at him. I was still wholly, completely in love.

It was two days before I told my mother. I was supposed to be starting my summer job at the Ainslie estate museum, dividing my time between answering historical questions in the old post office (built circa 1841), serving watercress sandwiches in the tea room, and selling postcards in the gift shop. Mom stood over me, blocking the sun and asking whether I ever intended to turn off my alarm and “greet the day.” I’d slept approximately three hours out of the last forty-eight, and I stared dimly at my clock radio and listened to her say, “Didn’t you tell me you had to be at the museum by nine-thirty?”

I nodded into my pillow, wanting to get up, wanting to do anything that didn’t involve indulging in Jeremy Waite memories, if only I weren’t bone exhausted.

My mother never had to wrestle me out of bed. It didn’t take her long to figure out something was the matter, and when I mumbled a highly edited version of the truth she sat down on my bed with a sigh. “Sweetie, why? You two are so close.” She couldn’t form a line between her eyebrows, because of her recent Botox injection, but the sympathy sagged around her mouth.

I skipped the part about Jeremy wanting to sleep with someone else and told her he didn’t believe a long-distance relationship would work in the long run.

“Sweetie, I’m so sorry.” One of Mom’s well-manicured hands brushed hair from my face. “You haven’t been sleeping well, have you? Do you want me to call the museum and tell them you’re not well? Just this once?”

I was asleep again within minutes and slept on until my cell rang at noon. Mom checked up on me. Betina checked up on me. Dad didn’t realize there was anything to check about, and Jeremy was obviously too busy out on the prowl to consider calling his all but forgotten ex-girlfriend.

Later that night Betina insisted on dragging me out for pizza. We ate three-cheese toast, chicken wings, and garlic prawns but no actual pizza. Betina wanted to go to the movies afterwards, but my esophagus hurt from belching so we sat in my backyard listening to the sounds of my neighbors’ house party.

“I’d suggest we crash it only the music sounds hideous,” she said.

Crooner music. The neighbors were older than my parents. I started talking about Jeremy as we nursed our diet sodas. Betina blinked heavily, like she was considering changing the topic for my own good. “I know,” I said. “There’s no point dredging up all our good times, especially when so much of that must have been a lie. If we were so perfect together he wouldn’t need to be with someone else, would he?”

I knew that wasn’t true, and I instantly tried to correct myself. “If he was so perfect he wouldn’t need to be with someone else.” But that wasn’t right, either.

Betina folded one hand under her chin and stared down at the can in her other. “If you think it through, maybe he was right. Most high school couples don’t make it through freshman year of university together.”

My nails pecked at my soda. My jaw clenched, and my right cheekbone was throbbing. I couldn’t believe I was part of one of those couples, a leftover person who got tossed away like an old T-shirt, and that Betina couldn’t understand the enormity of that. Maybe it was because she’d never been serious about someone, but that was no excuse.

Guys hadn’t started to notice Betina until early last year, when she’d swapped her glasses for contacts and taken to making suggestive comments while wearing body-hugging black clothes that dipped into her compact cleavage. Her adoptive parents, who’d brought her over from China when she was a year old, detested Betina’s new image, but underneath the sexy look and attitude she was still a future Surgeon General or microbiologist-in-chief.

“I’m not saying that it’s not terrible or that he wasn’t a prick about it,” she added hurriedly. “But it could be good for you, too. You won’t feel like you’re being held back while you’re in Ottawa. You can do whatever you want whenever you want with whoever you want.”

“I think the point you’re not getting is that I don’t want to.” I crumpled my can and let it fall onto the grass. “I was happy with Jeremy. I thought …” I shook my head and spooled a strand of hair around my finger. I couldn’t bring myself to say it — that I thought I’d never really be alone. I don’t mean alone in the house or alone in Ottawa but in the way that really counts, the ultimate aloneness, alone in life.

Betina swung her arm around me as we listened to the strains of “It Had to Be You” from my heartbroken little corner of the universe where the worst thing that had ever happened to me was losing Jer.

Sunday afternoon was my second scheduled shift at Ainslie estate. I’d phoned my boss, Pauline, the day before and left a message assuring her I’d be in. I was up and ready with hours to spare, almost excited about delivering watercress sandwiches and watching people sift through historic letters written by shipbuilders, apothecaries, and merchants. The thought had me visualizing a uniform for myself, a Little House on the Prairie–style dress and bonnet. But the novelty of that would probably wear off quickly.

My cell rang as I was slipping on my flattest, most comfortable shoes and …

My heart jumped sideways, aiming to escape. Four days after breaking up with me, Jeremy was finally calling. I let it ring one more time before answering. “Hello?”

“Ivy.”

I didn’t help him out by responding right away. That wasn’t my job anymore.

“Ivy,” he tried again. “I know I let you down. I’m sorry that I wasn’t … that I couldn’t be that person you wanted me to be.”

Inside I was screaming at him, pleading with him. “Were you ever?” I asked.

“I …” He made ambiguous noises into the phone. “I thought I was. I don’t know.”

“That sounds really conclusive, like you’ve got it all figured out.” Sarcasm’s better than an automatic weapon any day. No end of ammunition.

“I know,” he said sadly. “I don’t have it figured out at all. I just want you to know that I’m so sorry. You’re the best. The minute you walked away I wanted to take it back.”

“You could’ve.” My heart lurched with hope. “You could.”

“But wouldn’t it be … I don’t know, Ivy. I think I would mess things up, and I don’t want to do that to you.” He paused. “I miss you so much already.” The catch in his voice slipped down my spine and made me shiver. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I wanted to make sure you were doing all right, and I’m screwing up again.”

“I don’t get why you’re doing this if you’re so confused.” I was analytical about it, sympathetic. I could win him back, but I had to be smart about it. Tiptoe back inside his head without alerting him to the possibilities and scaring him off.

“I’m so confused,” he confirmed. “I hate that I’m dragging you into it.”

“I’m already there, babe.” We only called each other babe when we were kidding around, but saying it made me feel closer to him. “Are you at home? Why don’t you come over so we don’t have to muddle through this over the phone?”

“You wouldn’t mind?” His apologetic tone had me in goosebumps. The past few days had only been another blip, like Christmas. They could easily recede into the past.

Ten minutes later Jeremy was ringing my doorbell. My dad had gone golfing and Mom was over at her friend’s place, checking out her new kitchen cabinets. The privacy made it all the more difficult not to throw my arms around him when I opened the door. He was wearing long black shorts, and my eyes dropped to his hairy legs. Lean and well-muscled, they’d look like a cyclist’s legs if he’d shave them. Once upon a time he’d have let me. Maybe he still would.

“Ivy, hey.” He bowed his head. “You look great.”

“You look confused.” I smiled crookedly. The atmosphere was completely different from last January, but maybe that had been because of my grandmother’s passing. Maybe it would have been exactly like this, civil discussions instead of dramatic eruptions.

“Profoundly,” he said, venturing a return smile. “I’m surprised you even wanted to see me after how I acted the other day.”

“You handled that pretty badly. I was really mad at you.” The truth crouched under my words. We’d inch our way towards it without ever touching it directly.

I motioned for him to come inside. We walked through to the living room, where Jeremy watched me with heavy eyes and said, “I’m sorry about that. I looked for you after the exam, but you’d left, and I don’t think I’d have known what to say to you anyway.” He grabbed a fistful of his curls at the back. “I still don’t. I don’t know what’s real anymore. It’s like I’m going through the motions, doing what I think I should be doing.”

“You mean with us or with everything?” I sat on the cream leather couch my mom was planning to replace. She’d grown bored with contemporary and wanted to go traditional.

“Maybe I’m having a pre-life crisis,” he theorized, sitting down next to me. “Maybe it’s just graduating, leaving this chunk of our lives behind.”

The prom had been last month, we’d written our last final on Wednesday, and the graduation ceremony was only days away. Maybe the finality of those rituals was weighing on him too heavily. Nobody considered that award-winning students got spooked too.

“It’s freaky,” I agreed. “Everything’s about to change.” My elbows pointed into my knees as I turned to stare at him. “What I don’t understand is why you think that means we have to change too.”

“I know.” His fingers slid down my arm before he remembered they shouldn’t and pulled them away. The goosebumps burst out of my skin, trying to outdo themselves.

I licked my lips, holding my breath squarely between them. My hand slid towards his thigh. I wrapped my fingers around it and squeezed before skimming my hand over his shorts and refocusing my attention. He grew under my palm, a quiet thrill in his eyes as he watched me. Neither of us spoke. We sprang towards each other on the couch. I had too many buttons. He broke one off, and we laughed.

“Oh. God.”

“You have no idea how much I —”

“I know, I know. Me too.”

“Just, here … right. Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“This is …”

“Fuck.”

Jeremy stretched his hand playfully over my mouth. “You don’t swear.” He grinned as he thrust inside me.

“Fuck,” I repeated happily. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Jeremy flung my right leg over his shoulder as we rode ourselves into a groove. Wild and familiar but shiny brand new too. Achingly new and powerful. I wanted to stay in that perfect, unpredictable moment forever, but it was already ending, the both of us coming in relief, grabbing greedily onto each other and laughing in surprise.

“Crazy.”

“Christ, yeah. Yeah.” His teeth peeked out from between his lips as his smile swelled. “How did I ever think I’d be able to stay away from you?”

“Crazy,” I repeated breathlessly, and all was well with the world.