The parties are over. Cars show up to a locked gate.
It’s getting hotter. Pine needles are turning brown and falling shriveled to the ground. The lake in the center of the island is shrinking. The earth is cracking.
I have not heard from Ivy in days. She has been too busy with Ash. They have been locked inside her house.
Socialites wander up and down Olympic Road, dressed for a party that does not exist, not quite sure what they’re looking for—a secret entrance, a portal, a clue, any good reason why they took a boat and drove miles around an island to get to this nowhere place, why they’re wobbling in heels on a rural road with no sidewalk or streetlights and no one to see how good they look.
People are saying she went off the deep end again. A breakdown. An overdose. A suicide attempt. People are saying she’s not eating. She’s strung out on a dozen different drugs.
But I know the truth. It is far less interesting than all that.
Ivy’s mother swishes down the driveway with a picnic basket just like Daddy’s, full of snacks and a thermos full of gin and tonics. She is one of those drive-in waitresses you see in black-and-white movies, the kind on roller skates that come to the window of your car to take your order. She goes car to car, charming the men here to make money off of spying on her daughter. She is on the hunt for the most handsome, the most bored.
I should be at work selling more fake antique watering cans to tourists. But I quit that job, and those watering cans are just for decoration. We’re in a drought and not supposed to be watering anything.
Ivy has a story to try to salvage. I wrote the introduction, but I am no storyteller.
She is trying to make a fairy tale out of parched skies and scorched earth. She is trying to breathe life back into something dormant and almost dead.
There is a fine line between brave and foolish.
The paparazzi sit outside in their cars, seats reclined, windows open, breathing in the salt air, drowsy from their afternoon drink, waiting for the gates to open, waiting for a glimpse of the star, the waif, the junkie, the lunatic.
How do you make something real out of a secret?
I pick up my phone to text Ivy. I type a million things and erase them. There is no right thing to say.
I settle into my yearning and turn it into a prayer.
The paparazzi don’t know about Ash’s running trails through the forest, his feet as silent as a deer’s. They do not know his stealthy, hidden path to Ivy’s house, do not see him as he leaps across the road into the patch of trees that separates her property from the neighbors’, as he scales the wall into her compound.
The forest fires in the north have spread, and now there are new ones popping up in the Cascades two hundred miles to the east. The sun hangs a sickly, bloody red in the hazy sky.
Lily keeps calling but I don’t call her back.
If Ash is a deer, what does that make Ivy? What does that make her mom?
Tami keeps texting.
I tell her I am busy. I do not tell her that her boyfriend is a deer. That he has wandered through the forest away from home.
Hunting is forbidden on Commodore Island.
I sit at home at night, binge-watching The Fabulous Fandangos, binge-watching The Cousins. I listen to This Is Me on headphones while I wash the dishes. It is Ivy but it is not Ivy.
I try to see what everyone else sees, from the outside—first the precocious little girl, then the beautiful and mysterious teen, then the slightly edgy pop star still wholesome enough to fit the A-Corp brand.
The story of Ivy Avila, according to the world. But it is the wrong story.
Papa gives Daddy a look that says, “I’m not sure this is healthy.”
What I want to say is, “If your friend wrote a book, you’d read it, right? What’s the difference?” It is a sound argument.
If Ash recorded an album, I’d listen to it.
There is an episode of The Cousins where Ivy’s character plays a game at a party where she’s supposed to make out in the closet with a boy who turns out to be gay. The Coming Out Episode. That’s the season the show won all those Emmys. Every award-winning show has to have a Coming Out Episode.
I wake up in the forest in the middle of the day. My eyes open to the canopy of leaves and pine needles, the mottled light seeping through. I do not know how I got here.
Tami texts, Come with me to the city tonight to see Vaughn. It won’t be as weird as last time. I promise.
She wants me to be a witness to her secret. She wants me to make it real.
But I climb my tree instead. I am an eagle. I can see miles and miles and miles. Through the trees, on display behind glass walls, I watch the silhouettes of Ivy and Ash become a single shadowed thing, and I fly through the air to meet them.