Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

XAVIER

“Come to my house. I promise we won’t get caught,” she said. “I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise.” She said it until the word “promise” was nothing but mouth sounds and Xavier was laughing.

“We’ll have to be very quiet once we get inside,” she said. “Until tomorrow morning when my parents go to the marriage counselor they think I don’t know they go to. Good thing you already made me scream.”

Tomorrow this will be done, he told himself. Tomorrow he would do the smart thing and cut this off, if she hadn’t already. He’d just let himself have one night of this, and then be finished again. For good this time.

That’s what he told himself. But even then, he knew he was lying.

SASHA

I woke up to my mother standing in my bedroom door, a pair of Minnie Mouse ears on top of her head. “We’re back and we brought you a lil’ present, sleepyhead,” she said, all charming and folksy, as though that was actually the way she talked to me. Which I guessed she did now, ever since Marc came around. She took the ears off her head and tossed them onto the bed.

If I have any natural skills as a liar, she’s how I got them. With every new boyfriend, my mom “reinvented herself,” which is what she would have called all the lying if anyone ever confronted her about it, which no one would have, because I was the only one who knew. I saw the way my mother twisted herself around, as though the facts of one’s past and one’s personality could be slipped into and out of like a coat. I saw how easy it was to make fake things seem real.

I sat up in bed. “Aw thanks!” I said, loud and cheery. “Welcome home!” I always played along. It was easier that way.

“You girls sure do have fun,” is what Marc had said once. Girls, both of us.

They’d been together a year and a half now, my mom and Marc. She met him around the time I met Xavier. The version of herself she was with him was very different than the one she’d been with the last two guys. With Edwin she’d been aloof and frosty, and for a brief period had suggested I call her “Caroline” instead of “Mom.” With Richard she’d taken an interest in my schoolwork and kept trying to cook for me, which I actually didn’t mind because she’s good at it. But it only lasted three weeks. With Marc, Mom was boisterous and friendly, as much as she could be, and almost never around. Which was how I liked it.

My mom was better with a boyfriend. I guess that sounds sad, but it was also just true. On her own she was restless and angry. She thought everything in the whole world was bad and everyone was bad, and everywhere she looked she found evidence to support this. It got worse after her mother, my grandma, the one whose locket I wore, died two years before, even though I knew my mother hadn’t really liked her. My grandmother had gotten terrible dementia the prior year, and my mother was the one who found the nursing home, the one who made sure Grandma was getting good care. She’d been the only one of her siblings to visit regularly. I knew she resented it, but she also seemed to secretly like it, too, because it confirmed her belief about how selfish they were. My mother likes to be right, even about bad things. Maybe about bad things especially.

Marc is twenty-three years older than my mother and the owner of a large chain of budget two-star hotels in popular vacation destinations. He spent all his time traveling between them, checking their quality. Since they’d gotten together, he took my mother along with him.

She actually seemed kind of happy. And I was glad for her. I was also glad when she was gone. He left stacks of cash for me “for food and stuff ” when they went out of town, but it was always way too much, like two hundred dollars for a three-day trip when there were already groceries in the fridge. At first I tried to refuse it – it felt weird taking his money like that. But it made my mother upset when I didn’t. “Sasha, stop it. Marc will feel bad,” she said once, when I deposited the pile of twenties back on the kitchen table. As if keeping Marc happy was our shared goal. So I kept it after that, never spent it, let it build up in a pile in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

“Come down and say hi,” my mother said. And I nodded. When she shut the door my phone buzzed. A text from Xavier.

Happy Birthday pal!! he wrote. He was doing the joke we always did.

Thank you, so kind of you to remember, I wrote back. I was definitely born, there’s no doubt about that.

Funny that you were ever a baby, he wrote. You are waaaaaaay bigger now.

There was a pause then. Dots appeared. Stopped. Came back.

I know how sorry you are for going off last night, so don’t worry . . . I forgive you, he wrote. I wondered what he (as me) was forgiving himself for. Just the stuff with Ivy? The moment before? The almost kiss?

Thank you You’re a true pal, I wrote.

You are too, he wrote back.

So . . . what happened with Ivy? I wrote. I was breaking the joke. I hated having to ask.

There was a pause then, texting dots appeared and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. My heart pounded. I wondered how many heart attacks each year are caused by those little hell dots. Finally a message:

Will tell you later. Don’t worry, everythings good ☺

What did that mean?

It was then that I remembered what I’d done the night before, the person I’d created.

I went to Instagram to see if “Jake” had been granted access.

He had.

Suddenly Ivy’s feed was right in front of me, hundreds of perfect little squares in full-saturated color. The most recent picture was of Ivy and Gwen from the night before, faces pressed together. WINESTAINSMILE was the caption. There was nothing new of Xavier. Maybe “everythings good” really did mean that he was being smart this time. They had a drunken hug, shared a nostalgic moment. Maybe they’d talked, she’d apologized, and then that was it.

But there were so many more pictures, so much more to look at. I knew I shouldn’t, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself.

There were a few photos of her wearing ballet shoes with regular clothes, doing crazy ballet poses in everyday situations, one of her in full makeup, devouring a meatball sub, a close-up of a Popsicle-stained tongue, a looped video of her rolling back and forth on a pair of roller skates, a few pictures of a very fluffy dog.

I scrolled back a few months, looked at the ones from right around New Year’s. There was a shot of a guy from far away. He was running up a hill in the snow in a T-shirt and shorts, the slanty winter sun setting behind him, surrounding him with light. This was Xavier from the first time the two of them had met.

Xavier had told me the story, and I’d thought about it so many times, I felt like I had been there myself.

He had been out running on a Sunday afternoon, the last day of winter break – he loved to run in the winter, outside in the freezing cold with nothing in his ears but the wind. They lived not too far from each other, Xavier and Ivy, though he hadn’t known that at the time. He was running by her house and she was standing at the end of her driveway, while he made his way up the hill, just standing there watching him. When he got close, she’d yelled, “Hey, I’ll be your alibi if you want.” He stopped, confused, asked her what she meant. “For whatever crime you’re fleeing the scene of,” she said. “That’s the only reason a person would be out running in this. If anyone asks what you were doing, I’ll tell them we were fucking.” And she stared at him and didn’t even crack a smile. Then invited him to come inside her house. He said the whole thing had been so strange and confusing he didn’t know what to do but say yes. And that’s how it started.

Just then a new picture appeared in Ivy’s feed. There was a face out of focus in the background, a shock of blue hair behind one ear, mouth half open, smiling, eyes closed. In the front of the frame was a spoonful of vanilla ice cream with Froot Loops stuck into it. This had been Xavier’s favorite special-occasion treat as a kid. He had asked for it every birthday growing up. It became a tradition for him even after his parents stopped doing it.

Last year, I was the one who got it for him.

XAVIER

The morning of his seventeenth birthday, the first thing Xavier felt was a body sliding up against him, and then a kiss on the cheek, and hot breath near his ear. “Eyes closed, mouth open,” Ivy said.

Then she fed him something. Xavier was smiling before he even swallowed.

She remembered.

He felt her get up off the bed. He opened his eyes. She was across the room, back to him, walking to the bathroom. The summer sun was coming through the window and her sheer curtains. She was naked and unselfconscious in a way he couldn’t imagine ever being. It didn’t feel safe to look at her. It didn’t feel safe because of what it did to him.

Don’t let this happen again, Xavier told himself. He couldn’t believe he was there. He thought about the night before, after all the stuff in the woods, Ivy convincing him to come stay over. She promised they wouldn’t get caught, as though that was the only thing to be concerned about.

“That’s maybe not the best idea . . .” Xavier had said.

“But the maybe-not-the-best ideas are the best ideas, aren’t they?” Ivy had smiled that smile that meant she knew there was no way Xavier could resist her.

And she had been right.

Xavier had texted his mom that he was staying at Sasha’s. His parents trusted him so much that it would never even occur to them that Xavier could lie. Which made him feel especially guilty when he did.

Xavier stared at Ivy’s back, then forced himself to look away. He reached for his jeans on the floor, took his phone out of the pocket, and for a moment Xavier was back in the real world. He saw the text from Sasha sent late the night before.

Sasha.

Xavier thought again about the great birthday time they’d been having. It was the first real fun Xavier had had in so long. And he thought of how for a moment it had seemed like . . . well, Xavier didn’t know exactly. It seemed like the air between them had shifted or something. Like things were inching in a strange direction. Xavier wasn’t even sure if he had been making it up or not. And then Ivy appeared.

But here, in Ivy’s room on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, he felt certain he’d imagined all that Sasha stuff. Which Xavier knew was a good thing, for a bunch of different reasons, not least of which was the fact that Sasha was his best friend on earth.

Now, in the bright light of day, he felt weird that he’d left Sasha and gone off with Ivy. Not that Sasha would care about the being alone part – she liked to be alone – but because she might care about who he’d gone off with.

He found himself defending his decision to Sasha in his head. Defending Ivy. She wasn’t all good or all bad. She was human and complicated and confusing, like all of us. True, she made messes sometimes. But she never meant to and she always felt awful about it after. And Xavier didn’t quite understand her, but then again, could you ever really understand anyone? He didn’t understand Sasha either. Sasha who was always so strong. Who only ever did what was right. She was solid and secure and never needed anyone. But Xavier wasn’t like that.

And besides, Sasha hadn’t heard Ivy apologizing in the woods, and hadn’t seen the look on Ivy’s face this morning when she’d kissed him. Ivy had done some not-so-great stuff, but Xavier didn’t blame her, and maybe it was dumb and naïve not to, but he just didn’t. Life messes us up in so many ways, messes all of us right the hell up. And when we fumble and bumble around, crashing into one another, stepping on toes and hearts, it’s not on purpose. Being a person is nearly impossible.

He heard the toilet flush and Ivy’s bare feet padding back across the shiny wood floors. And then she was back in the room and Xavier forgot everything else. She stood by the door, watching him, one arm raised up against the frame, dark hair sticking straight up.

Xavier started to get out of bed. She sprang forward and then her hands were over his eyes and her mouth was against his ear again.

“Not yet,” she said.

For the next hour, Xavier was just a body. Lips. Hands. Skin. A beating heart. And when they were done, they were wrapped together in her sheets, and Xavier was full of all the chemicals, those love ones or the post-sex ones that are impossible to distinguish between. She grabbed her hairbrush, which she hardly ever used herself, and started pulling it through his hair with long, smooth strokes. She did this all the time when they were dating. “You’re like the doll I always wanted as a kid,” she had said once. Xavier took it as a compliment at first. He was the thing she’d always wanted. After they broke up, Xavier told Sasha the story and she had raised one eyebrow in that wary way she didn’t know she did.

“It’s kind of fucked she said that to you,” Sasha said. “As though you are just a thing.”

That’s not how she meant it, Xavier had wanted to tell her. He wanted Sasha to understand, but he was so tired back then, he could barely speak at all.

Now, that morning in Ivy’s bed, Xavier was trying not to think of anything at all as she brushed and brushed. But then Ivy’s phone vibrated, and she reached for it, and the corner of her mouth twitched up into a special kind of smirk. His stomach was immediately tight. Xavier knew that smirk. But Xavier also knew it was ridiculous to be jealous. He and Ivy weren’t actually together. They weren’t going to be. This was just for today.

But Xavier was wrong about the smirk and what it was, because she turned her phone toward him. On the screen was a guy’s Instagram account, locked. The guy was maybe a couple of years older than they were, though it was hard to say, because the picture was cropped so you could only really see half of him, half a handsome face, one muscular arm.

“Look,” she said. “An arm followed me.” She stuck her tongue through her teeth, then tossed her phone onto the nightstand. She slid close to him. A second later her phone buzzed again. This time, after she looked at it, she frowned and pulled away.

“My parents are on their way back. You have to go now.” Her tone was totally different then, all business. It was something he’d almost let himself forget about her, how quickly she flipped from one thing to another. “This was fun. It was good to see you.”

Xavier stood, gathered up his T-shirt, jeans, the one sock he wasn’t wearing. Adrenaline was coursing through him. This was fun. It was good to see you. Those were ending words – those were the words of this being done again. Of course, he told himself. That was the plan all along, one night and that’s it. He knew it was for the best, but in that moment it really, really did not feel that way.

Suddenly Xavier was filled with dread at the idea of going home with this finished again, returning to the hard work of getting over her, made all the harder now that Xavier remembered so clearly what being with her was like. Because what is getting over someone if not a slow, excruciating forgetting? Ivy was very, very hard to forget.

He started getting dressed, putting his clothes on in reverse of the order Ivy had taken them off him – underwear, T-shirt, jeans. Xavier imagined himself in a video playing backward, the love Xavier poured out at her being funneled back into his chest, the taste of her lips leaving his, walking backward out of that room, shutting closed his heart.

He walked toward the door. He turned to wave.

“Wait,” Ivy said. “You forgot something.” She ran toward him, then jumped up, wrapped her legs around his waist. “This isn’t over,” she whispered. “I won’t fuck it up this time. I mean it.”

SASHA

A good girl would have played it different.

Good Girls do not scheme or plot. Good Girls do not twist and sneak. When their best friend calls them on his birthday and says in this shy, squirrelly, embarrassed way, I know this is going to sound stupid, but I think we’re kind of seeing each other again, maybe, I don’t know, Good Girls say, Xavier, listen and Xavier, I’m concerned. And when their best friend says, We’re going to take things slow, and I promise to be careful, but they can hear in his voice that he is already long gone and is only trying his best to sound reasonable, but he is far past reasonable, like someone who has newly been recruited into a cult, Good Girls calmly say their piece, and step back, as he does not listen, does not listen, does not listen, and makes the same mistakes, only worse this time. Good Girls say, Well, I tried my best and it is not up to me and you have to let people make their own choices, and then they watch as his once-ex-now-current-girlfriend wraps herself around his neck and chokes him until he’s dead.

But Bad Girls know it’s never that simple.

Bad Girls know everything is gray. Everything is messy and complicated. And sometimes you have to do some fucked-up stuff to make things okay.

Bad Girls sink in their teeth.

Bad Girls use every weapon they have.

Bad Girls know there is no right and wrong. There is just what you’re willing to do. What you need to do.

Here is what I did.

July 21 11:24 p.m.

JakeJones1717:

Well, having scrolled through your Instagram photos, I’ve come to the conclusion that if there’s an infinite number of parallel worlds, there’s at least one in which you and I are already best friends

JakeJones1717:

oops, sorry. That was a typo

JakeJones1717:

I meant fucking

July 21 11:35 p.m.

TwistedTree16:

In how many of the infinite worlds do you think I just punched you in the balls?

JakeJones1717:

92300329 where I deserved it. 3 where I didn’t

TwistedTree16:

TWO WHERE YOU DIDN’T

JakeJones1717:

Fair.

TwistedTree16:

But in those 2 you probably liked it, I can tell your type. Perv

JakeJones1717:

Okay, but seriously I’m not actually a creepy perv. Just messing around on here and I guess if we’re being totally honest, looking for cute girls to talk to because everyone I know in actual life is boring as hell

JakeJones1717:

I like your pics, your dog is really fluffy. What’s her name?

TwistedTree16:

Dog talk is boring. Maybe YOURE as boring as the people you know. I liked perv you better

JakeJones1717:

If you want perv, I can do perv

TwistedTree16:

I just said I liked it BETTER than boring dog talk

JakeJones1717:

Okay fair. What do YOU want to talk about?

TwistedTree16:

You wrote me first. I might not want to talk about anything

JakeJones1717:

But you’re answering me aren’t you . . .

TwistedTree16:

Maybe I’M just bored

JakeJones1717:

Okay, good point. In another one of those worlds we are having this exact conversation, but it’s going better

JakeJones1717:

Can we try again?

TwistedTree16:

If there’s an infinite number of parallel worlds, there’s one in which you and I are already fucking

TwistedTree16:

oops, sorry. That was a typo

TwistedTree16:

I meant “dead”

JakeJones1717:

I think you probably meant *in love*

July 22 10:13 a.m.

JakeJones1717:

In how many of the parallel worlds am I as hungover as I am in this one, do you think? Serious question

TwistedTree16:

Maybe like 4

JakeJones1717

Oh god . . . that’s not many if we’re talking about infinity. Though it is impossible to imagine anyone more hungover than I am right now . . . so maybe 4 is good?

TwistedTree16:

If it makes you feel any better, in like 6 you just died of alcohol poisoning

JakeJones1717:

Dark. At least those other Jakes are out of their misery

TwistedTree16:

Parallel worlds are no kinder than this one

JakeJones1717:

I’m going to go try and flush my own head down the toilet now

TwistedTree16:

Are you trying to talk dirty to me?

TwistedTree16:

But really . . . let me know how it goes. Most people who show up in my DMs are dumb boring idiots. You seem fun

JakeJones1717:

Awww, are you flirting with me, Twisted?

TwistedTree16:

Well I’m not NOT not not NOT NOT not not flirting with you. If you see what I’m saying

JakeJones1717:

Oh god. That is really confusing

JakeJones1717:

Hey . . . so I don’t mean to be presumptuous or anything, but can I have your number? Maybe I’ll text you sometime . . . and when I do I WILL be flirting

TwistedTree16:

_ _ _ -_ _ _ - _ _ _ _

JakeJones1717:

What’s that?

TwistedTree16:

Have you ever played hangman?

JakeJones1717:

Yeah . . .

TwistedTree16:

That’s hangman for my phone number, if you guess it, you can text me . . .

JakeJones1717:

Are there any A’s?

TwistedTree16:

It’s a phone NUMBER?

JakeJones1717:

I stand by my question . . .

JakeJones1717:

*s??

TwistedTree16:

Oh my god. Okay. 914-555-7278. That either IS or IS NOT my phone number. Text it and find out

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