I don’t remember how I got home. I don’t remember leaving Ivy’s house. The last thing I remember was not knowing where my body stopped and hers started. I remember anger turning into passion into anger again. I remember claws and teeth and broken skin. I remember sleep seeming like an impossible lie. I remember thinking I was having a heart attack.
But somehow I sleep for fifteen hours. That’s what Daddy says. I wake to fresh fruit and a pile of scrambled eggs. I have never been so hungry and thirsty in my entire life. I drink three glasses of water. I eat half a dozen eggs and almost an entire cantaloupe.
My nose is raw and starts bleeding while I’m brushing my teeth. I wonder if I’ve done permanent damage. I wonder if I’m one of those people who have no cartilage left in the middle of their nose, if I burned it all away and now have only one nostril. I reach into my nose to check. I pinch the space in the middle, and it is solid, but it stings so bad, my eyes water, and now my fingers are covered with blood.
It hurts to breathe. I feel like I’ve spent the last ten days inhaling tiny shards of glass. My body aches in all kinds of weird places, and my foot has gotten worse. The swelling and weird purple discoloration have spread and my pinkie toe looks like a fat, inflated grape. Parts of my brain are missing and have been replaced with clouds of smoke. The world is flat and gray where there are supposed to be curves and color. I think I died a little over the last two weeks.
“I think you need to stay home today,” Daddy says. There is something almost stern in his voice. This is the closest he has ever gotten to “You’re grounded.” But instead of being mad, I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of relief. He is saying no so I don’t have to.
Before I settle into bed with my laptop cued to binge-watch mindless shows, I text Ivy just to make sure she’s okay.
You alive? I text.
I think so, she texts back. Just barely.
Then a few minutes later: I think I’m going to call my therapist today.
That’s a good idea.
I think maybe I will call Lily too.
We have family dinner, but it feels like a lie. My fathers want to talk about college, but I cannot think beyond the fork scraping at my plate and the throbbing in my sinuses. The future seems so far away, impossible. A dark cloud fills our awkward silences. I’ve never had to keep secrets before, and now that I have them, I can’t meet my fathers’ eyes, and the cloud grows thicker and they are miles away and no amount of small talk will ever help us cross that chasm.
After another night of sleep, I feel almost normal. I blow my nose and scabs come out. That means my body is healing. That means I am growing new skin.
I look at my phone and there is a text waiting for me.
Come over, Ivy says.
I get dressed quickly, grab a mask from the hook by the door, and walk to her house, barefoot. I close my eyes to keep the smoke out, feeling my way down the hill. I am pure instinct. I am a wild animal. My body tells me where I need to go.
Ivy’s mom is home, but she doesn’t even notice me as I enter the house. I crawl into bed with Ivy and wrap my arms around her. I bend my leg between hers and pull her close. She closes her eyes as I kiss her neck, her collarbone, and I can feel something new inside her, a different kind of pulse, something that wasn’t there before she left. Her body is hotter. It is getting ready to explode. Implode. It is ready to collapse under its own weight.
“Do you ever think about how fucked up it all is?” she says.
“How fucked up what is?” I ask. Ivy lifts her arms as I pull her thin tank top over her head. She is pliable. Compliant.
“What people get away with. The people who look the other way.”
“Uh-huh,” I say as I brush my lips across her breasts.
“What if we could hurt them back?” she says.
I don’t know who this is that’s driving my body. I don’t know when I became this girl who wants, and gets, and takes.
“Are you even listening to me?” Ivy says. But I am lost inside her legs.
And then pain shoots through my scalp as Ivy pulls me up by the hair. It pulses through my whole body and turns into something else as she pushes me onto my back, and I moan as she pins me down, her legs straddling me, her hands tight around my wrists.
There is a fine line between pain and pleasure. Sometimes they smash into each other. Sometimes the line breaks.
Does she know what I did with Ash? Is she punishing me?
We are animals. We are ruthless. We are tired of being prey.
Her nails tear into me.
Punish me, Ivy. Do whatever you want.
Imagine justice. Imagine revenge.
There is a fine line.
Her teeth break skin.
She is drawing blood. She wants to hurt a body and mine is the only one that’s here.
I deserve to be punished.
These sheets will have to be bleached. They will have to be burned.