There are three rafts in the pool now. We make an island, hands clasped. Three is the strongest number in nature.
Ivy dresses like she’s at the beach, eating nothing but tropical fruit. She’s stocked the outdoor bar with a blender and fresh juices and coconut cream and tiny paper umbrellas. She flits around, bringing things to Ash, earning his kisses.
“I have this fantasy,” she says, sipping something fruity. “Where everything turned out different. My mom actually listened to me when I told her I didn’t want to move to LA and quit school. Or sometimes she isn’t even my mom at all. She dies in a car crash and I get adopted by some really nice family, and we go to Disneyland and they help me with my homework and I’m on the school soccer team or something.”
Ash laughs. “I’m picturing you in a soccer uniform running around with a swishing ponytail. It’s pretty hot.”
“Shut up, I’m being serious.”
“I know.” He rolls off his raft and pulls himself up to sit on the side of the pool, where he dries his hands on a towel and starts rolling a joint.
“But even my fantasies turn to shit eventually,” Ivy says. “I’m some character whose grandma dies and she goes into a deep depression and starts acting out. She starts shoplifting for some reason. She sleeps with a teacher and gets pregnant and it’s this big scandal. Something stupid happens and she loses everything. That’s where my thoughts always go. It’s like I can’t even imagine what a happy, normal life looks like.”
“That’s tragic,” Ash laughs, sucking on the joint.
“It is!” Ivy says, pulling the joint out of his fingers.
“Stop, you’re going to get it wet,” he says, half-playful, half-irritated.
“I don’t care,” she says, trying to inhale, but the whole thing is drenched. The ember has gone out.
I smell something too sweet, almost rotting. It must be those drinks Ivy keeps making. The sugar and alcohol are seeping out of her skin.
I think about Vaughn. I think about Raine. What are they doing now, as we laze around a waterfront pool getting drunk in the middle of the day?
Ivy is sparkling, as usual. Small, shiny objects stick to her skin. They jingle as she stands, like tiny bells. She doesn’t even seem to notice. Neither does Ash. He is solid, impermeable, all tendon and bone and muscles that always seem flexed.
The problem is we are too sober. It is too bright out. I can see it in Ash’s face; he can’t quite relax. Does Ivy see it? Is she just pretending everything’s okay? Does she think if she acts hard enough, we’ll believe her?
“Have another drink, Ash,” she says.
“I’m tired. Let’s go inside. It’s nap weather.” And then his smile is something different than his usual smirk. Then there is the briefest of openings, and Ivy takes it, and they are gone, and I am left floating in the pool, on the verge of sunburn.
Maybe I stay here. Or maybe I turn into a ghost and go inside to watch them, unseen. Either way, it is not my body being touched.
Days and nights pass. There are times when even Ash must go home. He must tend to Tami. He must not be too conspicuous. But Tami has her business too. Her secret lets him have his.
There are times when I must go home. Must turn back into my fathers’ daughter.
The news says something about the gray whales that keep washing up on the beaches. The whole Pacific coast smells like rotting flesh.
The white supremacist separatists in Alabama have expanded their territory to five counties. Several towns are now under their rule.
More protests about A-Corp private prison labor. Another chemical spill in the Midwest. Another oil spill in the Arctic Circle. Another shootout between militias in Montana.
More refugees piling against our border walls even though they know no one’s going to let them in.
The protests in Seattle are getting more violent.
Papa and Daddy watch me while I eat. They look at each other and say things with their eyes.
I don’t tell them where I’ve been spending my days. I don’t tell them I quit my job.
I sit in my tree and wait for my turn to come again.
It is getting harder to stay in my body. I feel more comfortable without skin, floating, watching from above. I have to make the conscious decision to return to the ground, and sometimes I don’t want to; sometimes I wonder if I could just stay here forever, without form, just observing, not participating. I think I go whole hours without speaking. Just listening. Just watching. IvyandAsh. AshandIvy.
Lily leaves me voice messages. “I’m worried about you, Fern. I’m afraid something bad’s going to happen.”
I don’t care what Lily thinks anymore.
“See,” Ash says. “I brought it, just like you wanted.” Ivy has been nagging him to bring his guitar, said she wanted to hear his new songs, said she wanted to sing them.
Did she not notice the way he kept avoiding the issue, kept weaseling out of it, changing the subject, kissing her to shut her up?
It is not just alcohol and weed tonight. More magic needed to be conjured.
Ivy’s knee is bouncing and Ash is even harder than usual. He is leather drawn tight and she is a top, spinning.
He plays. His dark hair hides his eyes as he bends over the guitar, as his fingers pick the strings in impossibly beautiful arrangements. He lays his notebooks of lyrics out like flower petals. These are not the songs of the gangly thirteen-year-old boy I used to know. The lyrics are poetry, dark, full of metaphors I don’t quite catch but am certain mean something important. His voice is gravel and Ivy’s is moss. Gritty and soft. Made of the earth.
Ivy is radiant. I have listened to her album a million times, but she never sounded like this, not like someone with weight, with gravity. She has only ever been a puppet.
But is this any different? She is still twisting herself into someone else’s melodies, someone else’s words. She is still the shape of the script she’s been given. The only difference now is that she’s been given a better script.
“It’s beautiful,” I say when they take a break, but she and Ash only smile at each other.
I want to believe that this is some kind of intimacy, that I have witnessed some great reveal, but I feel further from them than ever.
Maybe this is the curse of all artists. Maybe they all desperately want to be understood, but they only know how to communicate in riddles.
Or maybe they can only ever understand each other.
A sweet smell fills the air, like something overripe, on the verge of turning.
We have two weeks while Ivy’s mom is gone. We are somewhere near the middle now, but I’m not sure where.
Daddy says he’s starting to worry I’m staying out too late. Have I been eating? Have I been taking my supplements? Have I been drinking enough water?
I have no idea what day it is, what time. My phone ran out of battery days ago and I haven’t bothered to plug it in.
Ivy is always talking, eating, drinking, smoking, laughing. I watch her lips, the things that go in and the things that come out. There is a science to her mouth.
She won’t stop talking about Ash’s music. She won’t stop talking, period. This new drug has sped everything up.
“It’s only real if it punctures your heart,” she says. “That’s how you know you’re alive.” She’s hunched over a mirror. She goes tap tap tap tap, organizing the white powder into tidy rows.
Daddy would remind us we’re not our thoughts and feelings. There is no permanent self when our perceptions are constantly changing. There is no isolated self when we are connected to everything.
“It’s only real if it threatens to kill you,” Ivy says.
The only sure things are loss and death.
She inhales. She passes the mirror to Ash.
“I’m reckless when I’m with you,” he says, bending over with a straw in his nose.
“Not reckless,” Ivy says. “Free.”
“You make me weak. You make me do things without thinking.”
“Why is that a weakness?”
And then there is no space between them, and I feel myself squeezed between their bodies, and I slide out and begin my retreat into the shadows. They are arms and lips and torsos, and I am mostly mist now, suspended droplets of liquid, tiny particles of myself.
But then Ivy removes her mouth from his, whispers something, and I am made solid again as she reaches out her hand. She does not need to speak for me to know when I am beckoned.
Somehow, I know how to do this. I have not had much experience, but it is like my body holds all of Ivy’s knowledge. I know because Ivy knows.
She touches Ash and I feel him in my fingertips. Her lips kiss and I feel his tongue in my mouth. His hands, her breath, on me, on them, everywhere. There is not a part of me that is not touched.
There are four legs entwined, then six, then four, then six again. There are arms at all angles, hands finding the darkest places, a hand finding me, and I gasp and arch my back, and I hear her laugh from far away, and Ash is on top of me, his perfect chest with all its ribs and muscles and smooth brown skin, the musk that I inhale. Someone bites my shoulder and I call out. We are consuming each other. We are ravenous. Every cell in my body is on fire. I want to feel everything.
The earth shakes but none of us notice.
This is exactly what I wanted.
And then silence. Then all of a sudden, I can’t feel my skin being touched, or touching. I am in the sky looking down at the pulsing, entwined bodies, and I am gone, all the pieces of me turned into tiny porcelain replicas—an elbow, a collarbone, a toe—the hard parts of me transformed into beads that Ivy has strung with strands of her own hair and now wears in a bracelet dangling around her wrist. Her naked body glitters with all its adornments. I am mesmerized, watching, as she makes love to a shadow, a mirror, and then a shadow again.
I wonder: Does this mean they’re mine?
At home, a few brief hours in my own bed.
I get a text from Ash: Are you awake?
I double-check. It is not a group text with Ivy. He sent it just to me.
I can’t stop thinking about you, he writes.
I miss you, he writes.
It must be a mistake.
I miss you too, I write back.
It is night. I don’t know which one. My body is sore in brand-new places. We are on our backs, spent, lying naked on a blanket on the dry, brown grass in Ivy’s backyard, between the water and her house with all its decks and patios. We are concentrating on the sky, waiting for shooting stars. But the lights of the city are too bright and the haze from new fires is pulling everything out of focus.
“My mom is having a meltdown about not being able to water,” Ivy says, sitting up. She never stays down, or quiet, for long. “She’s like, ‘Why’d I pay all this money for a garden I have to let die?’”
“She could put in a rock garden,” Ash says. “That’s what people are doing.”
“A rock garden is not a garden. It’s a bunch of fucking rocks.”
Ash looks at Ivy and laughs lazily. “Your mom is something else,” he says.
“She wants us to get married,” she says, then looks at Ash, sees him closing. “Isn’t that crazy? Marriage, at our age?” she says quickly, her voice tight with an attempt at a laugh, but it is too late.
And just like that, Ash turns into something already burned, like coal. “Don’t say things like that,” he says.
How did we get here? How can everything shift so quickly?
“You’re alive when you’re with me,” Ivy says. “You’re free. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
Is it? I’m not so sure. Freedom is full of choices. Maybe things are easier when no one has to decide anything.
“You’re not free when you’re with Tami.”
“I am not going to talk to you about Tami,” Ash says. “That was the rule. You promised.”
“But she doesn’t even want to know who you really are.”
But maybe that’s safer than freedom. Maybe that’s the exact reason he stays with her. Maybe that’s the reason no one’s heard his music but me and Ivy.
“Ash,” Ivy says. “She’s seeing someone else.”
He turns on his side and faces her. She thinks she’s used her secret weapon, that she can hurt him into choosing her, but he just sighs. “I know. I’ve always known.” He doesn’t seem upset by this. Just tired. Just numb. “We don’t talk about it, but we have something like an understanding.”
What I want to say is, “How can you have an understanding about something you don’t talk about?”
What I want to say is, “Ivy wants to be more than your side piece.”
But I say nothing. A ship’s horn blows somewhere in the distance, and it’s the loneliest sound in the world.
“I don’t think we’re going to see any shooting stars,” Ivy says.
“Nope,” Ash says.
“Let’s swim,” Ivy says, jumping to her feet. “Let’s swim in the ocean.” Sitting still is death to her. She’s like a shark that must keep moving to breathe.
“It’s the Puget Sound, Ivy,” Ash says. “Not the ocean.”
“Come on.” She takes his hand and pulls him to his feet, pulls him to her naked body, presses her mouth onto his. Her kiss will erase her questions. She will not be too difficult, too demanding, too high-maintenance. She will make him stay.
“I want to show you something,” he says. And just like that, he is back.
As we run down a small hill to the dock, the dry grass and plants seem to shrivel a bit more. What little color I can see in the darkness seems to drain out as soon as Ivy passes by, as she absorbs it and adds it to her collection. She leaves a graveyard of decimated things that used to be beautiful.
Ash collects rocks along the way and Ivy is full now, completely covered. Her shiny things have run out of room. They start cracking, falling off, leaving a trail of shattered glass and porcelain. I step on a shard and feel a sting deep in my foot, feel a warm wetness seeping out. I look behind me as we walk and see a trail of bloody footsteps, and I feel a strange, twisted pride that there is now proof that I have been here.
We sit on the dock and Ash deposits his pile of rocks. “Look at this,” he says. “We can make our own shooting stars.” He throws a rock into the water and an explosion of light follows it down as it sinks.
“Holy shit!” Ivy says. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s bioluminescent plankton. There’s a bloom right now. It lights up when it feels movement.”
“Can we swim in it?” Ivy says.
He grins. “Yeah.”
My splash is silent. I feel the shock of cold water all the way to my bones. Everything is sharp, in focus. We yelp and laugh as the glow of millions of microscopic organisms define the outlines of our bodies as we move, as they mark our existence, as they make us shooting stars.
We emerge, sticky with salt water. Ash’s skin sparkles in the moonlight. I don’t know if it’s Ivy or me who licks him, but I can taste the salt on his skin along with something metallic, like blood, and I imagine the tiny glowing creatures inside me, lighting me up. Is this what Ivy tastes when she consumes people the way she does? Is this what it feels like to be made out of hunger?