Jason goes to answer the doorbell, bowl of spaghetti in hand. Ivy guesses he doesn’t dare put it down or his mother will clean it away. He looks like he never gets enough to eat.
A boy he calls Orion comes back with him. Orion is courteous, explains himself: sent to escort Ivy to the drama party. He must be one of them. Touchingly good-looking, in an unfinished, over-exposed way. Flax-blond hair cut over his ears to odd effect. A princeling.
“Orion, like the constellation?” He nods, politely patient, and Ivy is sorry she asked. She might have joked about his belt; that would have been worse.
All the boys are tall these days, she feels like a pigeon walking among them. But having recently realized, at the age of forty-six, that she looks like Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, she decides to feel good about that. A jewelled pigeon on a mild strut.
Jason tells his mother, “We’re supposed to help at Pink’s for work experience.”
“Oh.” Ann looks put out. “I guess. I’ll pick you up at nine.”
“Might be later. Elle’s going too.”
“You have a bio quiz tomorrow.”
“Ten.”
Ivy finds this telegraph bargaining fascinating: the longest stretch of words she has yet heard them exchange. Ann concedes. Her head bows over her spaghetti. She twines two strands on her fork, threading round, round, round, without lifting it to her mouth.
Jason flies up the stairs. Ivy follows, needing a better coat. Not for warmth, for armour. Ansel Burton doesn’t like her, and besides, he’s crazy, maybe even psychotic. Newell is kind, but only an acquaintance. Not a night she’s looking forward to. Not a month she’s looking forward to. But the four thousand bucks, yes—more godsend than windfall. And the solitude. She could stay up in the empty room, say she’s sick. A migraine. She closes the closet door on her few things and looks around at the nothing that is not there. The nothing that is.
Three teenagers fill the car, a battered Civic hatchback, pretty much to bursting. Jason gives her a quick glance as she opens the door; the other two stare straight ahead. The young know: eye contact contaminates.
“Perfect—so, I think I’ll take my own car,” Ivy says. “I’ll follow you.”
All three of them nod. Then the girl in the front (Elle?) unfolds herself, plucks a bag from between the seats, and scrambles out. “I’ll go with you, so you don’t get lost.”
More good manners. Ivy is a bit surprised, but nods. “I’m Ivy Sage,” she says.
“I know,” the girl says. “I’m L. The letter L.” She looks around for the car.
Ivy points to her very old Volvo, slumped beside Ann’s new Subaru. “Are you wearing anything precious?”
L looks down to check her clothes. “Guess not,” she says. But she is in unrelieved black.
“Because the dog hair is dreadful. I have to get it cleaned out. I was dog-sitting all summer and I still haven’t faced up to it.”
After a look at the fur-snowed seat, L takes off her black wool coat and puts it on inside out, cream satin lining gleaming in the streetlight. She waves to the boys and slides, or satin-glides, in beside Ivy.
“The letter L, that’s unusual.”
L looks blank. Bored? Ivy can’t tell. She snaps her seatbelt buckle, waits for L to snap hers. They trundle off in convoy down the street, and L’s nice manners reassert themselves. “My mother—her name’s Della—called me Ella, as in Cinder, but that seemed like an error in judgement, so then for a while she said I was named after Elle Macpherson. Which is crazy. I used to say it was El, short for Electra.”
“At least in the morning,” Ivy quips. Then, at L’s raised eyebrow, “Mourning Becomes Electra, a play I did when I was young. Never mind.” Sad to be old, Ivy thinks. Nobody gets her jokes. Well, they are not good jokes. She drives.
L points. “Down here, left at the lights—so anyway, my mother’s crazy.” She gives an indulgent hoot for her crazy mother. (Ivy laughs too, in honour of her own.) “So we sent away to have it changed officially, but it turns out she never registered me properly at the hospital, so I’m Baby Girl Belville. Talk about a stripper name. I’m tempted to leave it like that.”
“Well, yes! Are you in drama?” she asks L.
“Orion is. Jason and I are painting the sets. We’re in visual.”
Too bad. Ivy needs a few friends. Burton is such a weasel. Four thousand bucks.
“That’s the house,” L says. A big old pillared place, front porch bulging out. Too many cars already parked along the street. Orion zips the Civic into a dubious spot, half-over someone’s driveway.
Ivy pauses for L to hop out, saying, “You go in with the guys. I’ll find a spot.” She drives happily down the block into the dark. A few extra minutes before she has to be public.
“Maybe she needs to toke up or something hippie,” Orion says, watching the tail lights of the Volvo diminish. “Chew nicotine gum. Chant.”
“Light a sweetgrass, do a mantra, man.”
The boys think they are very funny. “I like her,” L says.
“Ivy, though?” Jason says. “Like, Soulcalibur.” Orion laughs, loud in the darkness.
L bats at the dog hair on her coat lining and turns it right side out. Black again, she climbs the half-moon porch steps, not kicking the pumpkins all to hell, though that would feel good.
Orion and Jason trip along behind her on big feet, gawky. L is so glad not to be male.
Newell Fane is coming, he’s probably already there. She doesn’t want the flutter in her belly when she thinks about him, it’s juvenile. She’s always known him, he’s best friends, like, brother and sister with her mom and Hugh; there’s nothing to flutter about. There he is, Newell, haloed in the hall light. His hair. But it’s his eyes, tired and kind, that kill her. Knows all your flaws and loves you anyway. He’s like thirty years older than she is, plus actually gay, everybody knows, although he doesn’t make a public deal of it. But that doesn’t always—look at Orion. Gay, except that Savaya experiment. And look at Savaya. It’s a continuum, a spectrum, a raiiin-bow connection, right. Anyway she herself probably likes Nevaeh best of anybody, but that doesn’t mean you don’t flutter flutter flutter. The problem of love. She starts a butterfly thing in her mind, a paper thing, mobile, to work with the ladies in pots from the Voynich, fluttering from their chrysalides to the light-haloed, shadow-eyed face of him.
Hugh’s hanging around on the veranda, as if he didn’t want to go in. But it’s cold. Hugh hugs her, then Jason. He salutes Orion, who’s been in pretty much every art class Hugh ever gave. Jason too, and L, because of not taking her mom’s classes. Every class for ten years, ever since Hugh came back from wherever, some other life he’d been living. He is probably her mentor, if you have to give it a name. But she has not shown him the Republic.