First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

First published in the USA in 2017 by Simon Pulse,

an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

Text copyright © 2017 by Lynn Weingarten

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 4052 7158 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1494 5

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

SASHA

PART 1

SASHA: 3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

PART 2

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

SASHA

XAVIER

XAVIER

SASHA

XAVIER

1 YEAR LATER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Back series promotional page

SASHA

We were holding hands, palm against palm. I could feel his heart beating, his blood against my blood.

When I looked up, his smile was wide and real. “Ready?” he said.

I faked a smile back. I had gotten so good at faking things.

I thought: You brought this on yourself, Sasha. You will never get to stop pretending.

I thought: Protect those you love, no matter what the cost.

He squeezed my hand. This is exactly what I always wanted. And nothing I ever wanted at all. And there is just no taking anything back.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Road trip!” he said.

He couldn’t begin to imagine what this actually was. He had no idea what I’d done. What any of us had.

I turned the key. The engine started. We went.

PART 1

SASHA

3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER

On the eve of Xavier’s seventeenth birthday, I decided I was finally going to tell him the truth.

We were in his bathroom with a folding chair pushed up against the sink and I was dyeing his hair as his birthday present.

“I want it to look like a very deep part of the ocean,” he’d said a few days earlier, when he’d asked me to do it. “Like something a whale would drink.”

I’d taken this as a good sign: him wanting something, expressing wanting something. He’d spent the last month in his room wanting nothing but quiet and to sleep, or maybe his ex-girlfriend back, though we mostly didn’t talk about that part.

“The ocean isn’t any color,” I’d said. “It’s just water.”

“Then like the bottom of the ocean if somebody dumped a whole bunch of blue food coloring in it.”

I bought the bleach and a bottle of dye that looked like ink. I also got a bag of Swedish Fish, because that was our favorite candy, and it worked with the whole ocean theme. We were both really into the ocean back then.

I put the bleach on his hair while he sat on the chair. I had to lean in to do it, and that made my heart pound, and then I felt guilty for its pounding, because it was messed up to feel that way about him and be that close without him knowing. But I’ll tell him soon, I promised myself. I will tell him, and it won’t be a secret anymore.

The bleach burned our eyes and our noses as it turned his hair from black to coppery gold, and then from coppery gold to almost white. We drank whisky and ate the candy and watched part six of the eight-part ocean documentary series we’d been working our way through on his laptop. This episode was about whales and how sometimes a whale will go years in between seeing any other whales. It just floats along down there in the dark, all alone. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Xavier said. But I knew he didn’t mean it.

After the bleach, I put on the dye. Xavier had already thrown away the plastic gloves, and so I got the blue all over my hands, and then it wouldn’t come off. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” he said when he saw what had happened. But he was laughing, which meant it was worth it.

We poured more whisky into our mugs and clinked them.

The buzzer on my phone went off, it was time to rinse. “I’ll get in the shower,” Xavier said. I got up and started to leave the bathroom, and he said, “No, just turn around.” But it felt very wrong to be in there while he was taking his clothes off, considering, even if I wasn’t looking.

“I’ll go wait in your room,” I said. “So the steam won’t mess up my hair.” The water was already on, and loud.

And he shouted, “Since when do you care about steam on your hair?”

“People change!” I shouted back.

I sat on his bed and stared down at my blue hands and decided enough was enough was enough was enough. I wouldn’t just tell him soon, I would tell him tonight. But how would I say it? I’d tried to imagine a million times, but had never quite come up with the words. Xavier, I know this might sound like it’s coming out of nowhere, but . . . or Xavier, you know how I always say I don’t want to date anyone, well, the thing is . . . Maybe it would be better not to plan. Maybe it would be better to just be brave: take a deep breath, open my mouth, and let my heart climb right out of it.

A few minutes later he came into his room in a towel, and I pretended to need to use the bathroom. When I got back he was standing there, dressed.

“What do you think?” he said. His hair hung in thick wet clumps. The blue was way lighter than it was supposed to be, like jeans that had been washed a thousand times. “I haven’t even looked yet,” he said. “I waited for you.”

He bit his lip and opened his eyes wide, a caricature of a nervous person waiting for a reaction. My face grew hot – he was beautiful. How strange to remember that I actually used to find him very ordinary looking. It seemed impossible to me now.

“Oh God, your expression. Is it bad? It’s bad.” He went over to the mirror. Xavier was not someone who looked in the mirror a lot. It was possible he hadn’t even seen himself in a month.

“No, it’s good,” I said.

He ran his hands through his hair, frowned, smiled, made a duck face, made a fish face. “Are you sure?” he said.

“Stop fishing,” I said. “That’s a command and also an ocean joke.”

He grinned. “I guess it’s time to be a functional human being and go out somewhere?” he said. “Like you’ve been saying all along? For my, like, birthday or something?”

It was the first time he had wanted to go out in a month.

He poured some more whisky into one of the mugs I’d made for him at the print-and-copy shop where I worked. This one had a picture of him holding a mug with a picture of him holding a mug with a picture of him holding a mug on it.

I thought maybe he was pouring too much whisky, considering. “Don’t worry,” he said, watching me watching him. “I promise this is okay.” He motioned to the whisky. “I’m really not going crazy like that anymore.”

It was almost 8:30. Through the window, the sun was setting and the sky was pink and red. “Well, we should at least have some snacks if we’re going to drink like this,” I said.

I went to his kitchen and grabbed some string cheese and pita chips. I told him to open the chips and cheeses and eat them, and we made a game of me directing him around. “Pull off a string. Put it in your mouth. Chew, chew, chew,” I said. “Now swallow.”

“Isn’t it weird, because string cheese is not really string and not really cheese and yet somehow is both?” he said.

“Save it for open-mic night, pal,” I said. “And keep eating.”

He opened up the pita chips. “Pita chips, neither pita nor chip!” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Shoe yourself,” I said. “Become shod.” And I pointed to his Converse on the floor.

“Are you going to make all my decisions for me tonight?” he said.

“We’ll see,” I said.

“About time someone reasonable took over.”

We had another gulp of whisky each, then poured the rest into an empty Cherry Coke bottle, and it was time to go.

We walked to the train station. “Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot,” I said. We passed the bottle back and forth. The air outside was warm and soft. It was dark now.

The platform was mostly empty. Xavier and I leaned up against the wall. Our arms were touching. Now kiss me, I thought, but didn’t say it.

The train pulled up, we got on. We drank and drank while the trees rushed by outside. An old man was glaring at us over the top of his newspaper, and staring at my blue hands, which I’d forgotten about. Because I was a little bit drunk, I held my hands up like claws and bared my teeth at him. The man just shook his head.

“Thanks for being the world’s best friend,” Xavier said. “I love you.”

I turned toward the window. I felt my face getting hot. “I didn’t say speak,” I said.

He clamped his hand over his mouth.

“That’s more like it.”

But what I was thinking about was the last time he’d told me he loved me, eleven days before. And how different that I-love-you had sounded.

I’d gone over it in my head so many times. It was the sort of thing you make your best friend talk about for hours and hours forever, except I couldn’t because he was the only best friend I had. The only friend at all, really. We’d been at his house, sitting next to each other on his bed, watching part two of the ocean series. This one was about all the very crazy things down there, way at the bottom – creatures that were nothing but jagged, gaping mouths, worms that could turn themselves inside out, fish that mated by dissolving their bodies into each other.

We were drinking that night, too, but only a little, and Xavier seemed drunker than it made sense for him to be. Our legs were touching on the bed and for some reason neither of us pulled away. Xavier leaned in close and picked up the locket I always wore – a little brass book that had been my grandmother’s. It wasn’t even really my style, but I never took it off because I loved her, and the locket was all of her that was left. He opened it and pretended to read. “Once there was a girl named Sasha who was the greeeatest in all the land,” he said. Our faces were so close I could feel his warm breath on my lips. He stayed there, holding the necklace, then looked up at me. He mumbled something and I had to ask him to repeat himself. “I love you so much,” is what he said.

We said that sometimes as friends, so it’s not like that was particularly weird or anything. But there was something about the way he was staring at me that was not the usual way at all. It made me feel so good, it wasn’t even safe. Feeling that good could kill a person.

He let go of the necklace, then reached up like he was going to touch my face. I had wanted this for a very long time at that point. I had wanted it for so long and so badly that for just a second I let myself imagine it was actually happening in the real and normal way. But his eyes were all wrong, and I noticed then the prescription bottle on the windowsill. The top was off.

“I think you should get some rest,” I said. He nodded and lay down. I flapped his blankets out over him, then sat on the floor next to his bed. I poked him every couple minutes to make sure he was only sleeping and not unconscious.

Those fucking pills.

Xavier’s parents were good people, but they were also very serious and uncomfortable with emotions and had no clue what to do when Xavier’s girlfriend dumped him and he basically stopped leaving his room. So they sent him to their regular family doctor, who whipped out a prescription pad.

“I know brain drugs can help people, and that’s great. But maybe you should see an actual shrink or something, too,” is what I said when he first told me about the doctor. “Like a person who will, y’know, discuss some stuff ?”

“Nope, don’t need to,” he’d said. “These will fix me right up.” He shook his pill bottles like maracas.

There were two kinds of pills: pink sticks to take “as needed” that made Xavier loopy and forgetful, and little white oval sleeping pills.

I’d put my hand on his shoulder, then made my voice all dramatic, like I was in a cheesy TV movie. “There’s not a pill for a broken heart, Xavier,” I’d said. Because sometimes pretending you’re making a joke is the only way to say the thing you actually mean.

“Ah,” said Xavier. He had half-smiled, which was the most he smiled back then. “But apparently there is.”

I sat with him, waking him up every few minutes, thinking about how if he’d meant that I-love-you in the way it had sounded, it would change everything. How I wanted it to change everything.

But in the morning, Xavier had had no memory of the night before. The pills plus alcohol had switched his brain right off. He asked me what had happened. I told him he’d just seemed drunk, so I tucked him in and that was it.

Xavier hadn’t been convinced. He asked me again and again, “Are you sure I didn’t do anything terrible? Are you positive?”

“Well, if you really want to know, you can look at the video I put up on YouTube,” I’d said finally. “We’re getting soooooo many hits.” And only then did he drop it.

After that he decided to stop taking the pills, to drink less. He started getting out of bed more. He went running once even. It was a turning point and he moved past it. I was happy for him. Relieved, obviously.

But still I couldn’t stop thinking about that night. I wanted desperately to believe it had meant more than I knew it did. I googled “blackouts,” looking for evidence that in a blacked-out state people reveal only the true truth of themselves. But I knew I wouldn’t find any.

And I didn’t.

The train sped on. We passed the bottle back and forth. By the time we got to our stop, it was half empty.

“Now be a normal person for a while,” I said, playing our game.

“Don’t ask me to do the impossible,” said Xavier. He took my hand as we got off the train.

And I gave myself an instruction then, too: Tell him by the end of the night. Tell him no matter what.

I closed my eyes and breathed in, breathed out, and looked up at the moon. His hand was warm in mine, and the alcohol was warm in my belly.

I knew that night was going to change everything.

And it did, is the thing. It did.

Just not in ways I ever could have imagined.

SASHA

We walked toward the back of Sloe Joe’s Tavern. Technically you were supposed to be twenty-one to go there at all, but nobody ever checked or cared.

It was hot and crowded and loud, like usual, with dim lights and red walls and a huge falling-apart crystal chandelier hanging over the dance floor. There was a rumor the chandelier was left over from when Sloe Joe’s had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. There was another rumor that if you sat on the couch by the door, you’d catch crabs.

I loved everything about the place, especially the way all that sound drowned out all the thoughts in my head, rattled them around until I couldn’t even think them, and then there was nothing but the heat and the stench of sweat and the feeling of music thumping inside me, beating in my chest like a heart.

It felt good to be back there with Xavier. This place used to be ours. Back when we first became friends, we’d come here most weekends, back when weekends were ours, too.

Then he started dating Ivy and that changed. But I kept coming by myself after that. I liked going places alone. (Xavier was maybe the first and only person whose company I preferred to no one’s.) I liked to be anonymous and watch people. I liked that when you were surrounded by people you didn’t know, you could do and say whatever you wanted, and nothing counted.

I had a game, and the game was called Kiss a Stranger. The way you play is you look at a stranger and try to imagine what kissing them might be like.

And then you go and find out if you’re right.

I liked the feeling of a mouth on my mouth. I liked that you could have an intense time with someone, crushed together in the dark, then let them go and never think about them again. Xavier said he was both baffled by and jealous of my ability to do that, because he was completely the opposite. “There are rocks inside the middle of you,” he’d told me. He meant it as a compliment.

But in that moment with Xavier, I wasn’t thinking about all of that. I was trying not to think of anything at all. There was a band onstage, a dozen people playing every instrument at once. And it was time to dance.

“Dance like no one’s watching!!” I shouted at him, which was a joke we had about that corny saying you find on inspirational-quotes websites, superimposed over a picture of the ocean or whatever. Our joke was that it really meant dance while also picking people’s pockets, because when no one is watching is the best time to be a thief. The game always progressed from there. Dance like everyone’s asleep! Dance like this room is full of ghosts! Dance like you just landed on Earth from space and what the hell is gravity even??!!

But the thing was people always watched Xavier when he danced. It was something about the tallness, the broad shoulders, the sheer size of him, combined with the way he moved, rhythmic and graceful and lost in the moment entirely. In regular life he tried to make himself smaller, to take up less space, uncomfortable being a sweet introvert in the body of a big manly jock. But when he danced he seemed more sure of himself than he ever did in any other context. He seemed free.

Xavier bumped up against me and grinned that grin that he did when he was just a little bit drunk. The lights flashed. Xavier took the whisky from his bag.

Was it time to tell him? Even through all that alcohol the thought made my stomach twist. I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.

He cracked the top, took a sip. When he handed it to me, I gulped. The room shifted. We raised our arms and shook our hips. Another band went on. Cymbals and bells. More dancing.

Nsst nsst. Bzzz bzzz bzzz. We grinned, wide white teeth glowing in the dark. The room was packed, people on all sides pushing us toward each other, arms and shoulders, knees colliding. What was I ever worried about? I smiled up at him. But when he looked down at me he had this curious expression on his face, and maybe it was all the alcohol, but I swore he was staring at me in a very different way than usual. It was the same look I remembered from the night he’d forgotten.

I felt a delicate bubble of hope getting bigger and bigger inside my chest, terrifying and dangerous, but I could not even stop it.

Maybe this is happening, I told myself. For real this time.

A spotlight on stage lit up a singer all in glitter. She was enormous and gorgeous, like someone from another better planet. She leaned in toward the microphone. Her voice was a sex growl. “I wrote this song to be fucked to, but you could dance to it, too.” She leaned back, and shouted, “WE ARE ALL GODDAMN MIRACLES!” Music burst forth like confetti, the lights blinked on and off. I could feel Xavier’s breath on my cheek.

And we were really dancing like no one was watching.

Closer.

Closer.

Closer.

But then I looked up and realized someone was.

She was over by the bar when the lights flashed, but I swear a second before I saw her, I’d felt her, deep in my gut the way some animals sense an earthquake just before it comes.

Holy fuck.

Ivy.

“Xavier,” I said. The music was so loud. “XAVIER!” I grabbed his hand. He turned toward me, his mouth so close again. He was smiling, but I could barely see it, I could only smell the smell of him and feel his hard chest against my chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw motion near the bar. Ivy was making her way toward us.

My heart pounded and pounded. I felt like the building was on fire. Like the flames were about to swallow us whole. “Let’s go outside!” I said.

Xavier nodded.

Then he froze.

“Oh God,” he said. He’d seen her, too.

“C’mon!” I said. But he wasn’t listening to me anymore.

Somehow she was always smaller than I remembered her. She was tiny and wiry in black knee-length cutoffs and an army-green tank top. She had a million metal bracelets on each wrist like armor and hair clumped and cut short, big eyes with eyeliner caked around them that had maybe been on for a couple of days. She had a pointed chin like a bat, a wide mouth, and a space between her two front teeth. The fact that Ivy wasn’t conventionally beautiful made it worse. Power you get from being beautiful is cheap. But Ivy’s appeal just came from the her of her. She was a tornado, unpredictable and cracklingly alive. “She isn’t scared of anything,” Xavier had told me once with pride and awe. “Like literally not one single thing.” But everyone is scared of something is what I had thought, though I didn’t say it.

Ivy was right in front of us now. Xavier wasn’t moving. Her friend Gwen was next to her. Gwen and I shared a nod. In elementary school Gwen and I had briefly been friends, good friends even. But that was a very long time ago.

The song ended, and the band started playing something else, slower and softer.

“I’m going to get another drink,” Gwen said, then slipped away, as though maybe that had been the plan all along.

I stood there with Xavier and Ivy. The room swirled around us.

“It’s been . . .” Xavier said finally. They hadn’t been in contact at all since that day a month ago when everything happened.

“Too long,” Ivy said. She pressed her flat hand against his chest. I stared at Ivy’s short bitten nails and chipped silver polish. I imagined Ivy could feel Xavier’s big sweet heart thumping against her palm. “I need to talk to you,” Ivy said. I saw Ivy glance at my blue hands, then up at Xavier’s hair. “Give us a minute?” she said to me.

I turned toward Xavier. I knew I needed to stop this, whatever was about to happen. But when our eyes met, I realized it was already too late. “I’ll find you soon?” he said.

I froze, as everything I wasn’t saying bubbled up inside me. Ivy was a monster and would destroy him. And last time he just barely survived her. And this was supposed to be the night I finally told him the truth. I had waited so long for this.

“Sash?” Xavier said. He sounded so gentle and concerned. “Is that okay?”

Later I would think back to this moment, wonder if everything might have been different if only I’d given a different answer.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

I turned away, then pushed through the crowd. When I looked back, Xavier and Ivy had been swallowed up.

I got in line for the bathroom. I was a wild and desperate animal. I needed to do something, to stop this, to save him. But I had no idea what.

Gwen walked by, holding a drink. She gulped it down and put the empty glass on a table. She gave me a little wave as she headed toward the front door. I called out to her. “Gwen! Wait!”

Gwen came back. “Where are you going?” I said.

“Home,” Gwen said. She looked at my hands. “So . . . is that like a weird fetish thing or something?” She grinned.

I remembered when we were friends back in fourth grade, going over to her house. It was fancy and completely silent. Gwen lived there with her father, who was always at work, and her mother, who spent all day in bed. Gwen had said that this was because her mother was very popular and had a lot of friends who lived far away in other countries in other time zones and she stayed up very late at night talking to them. “That’s why she’s in bed,” Gwen said. “During the day she has to catch up on sleep. Also sometimes at night she goes to parties.” The story had seemed kind of strange to me at the time, but I had reminded myself my own mother did plenty of weird things. Who could really say why mothers did what they did?

Gwen’s mother passed away a few years after that. We weren’t friends anymore by that point, but I’d heard that she’d been sick for a long time, had spent years slowly dying. I understood then what the story had been about. The idea of my once friend inviting people over and then telling that lie to cover up what was actually happening made my chest hurt. I went to the funeral alone and sat at the back. I’m not sure if Gwen even saw me.

Standing there that night at Sloe Joe’s, I thought of Gwen’s silent house, her sick mother, of how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen.

“She came here looking for him, you know,” Gwen said.

“She did?” That made it worse. But I wondered why Gwen was telling me this. “How did she even know he’d be here?”

Gwen shrugged. “She just figured, I guess. Haven’t you noticed how good she is at that?”

“At what?” I said.

“Getting what she wants.” Gwen gave me a half-smile. “Have a good night, girly.” She turned and headed toward the door again.

I stayed in line, breathing hard.

If Ivy bumping into him here wasn’t an accident, it meant she wanted something from him. Maybe she even wanted him back.

But that doesn’t mean she can have him, I reminded myself.

I imagined leaving the bathroom and finding him. He would be alone. “So where’d you know that girl from?” he’d say. “She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. What was her name? Plant? Root?” And he’d grin, at his own dumb joke.

And he’d take the whisky out of his bag.

And we’d go outside and finish it.

And we’d play our game again.

And finally, finally, I would tell him the truth.

Only when I got back from the bathroom, he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the dance floor, wasn’t at the bar. Finally I headed out to the tiny concrete courtyard in the back where people went to smoke sometimes. There was a group sitting around a picnic table, passing a vaporizer. I turned toward the corner, and that’s when I spotted them. Xavier and Ivy, up against the wall, their eyes were closed. They weren’t kissing or moving or anything, they were just like that, holding each other tight.

I felt hot and sick, full of rage and terror.

I backed up quickly, before they saw me. I went through the bar, outside into the hot night, and then I was gone.

My heart pounded powerfully, painfully. I didn’t know then what I know now: be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.

XAVIER

They say guys make stupid decisions with their dicks, but Xavier knew the very dumbest ones he’d ever made were the ones he made with his heart.

Ivy held his hand as she led him through the trees toward that place in the woods, midway between their houses, where they always used to go. She squeezed tight like she was trying to keep him from running away. He probably should have run – some part of him knew that – but his stupid heart kept marching him forward.

When he’d seen Ivy at Sloe Joe’s, he’d tried to remind himself that he was supposed to be mad, but all he’d felt was surprised, and maybe a little bit scared, and mostly just very, very happy to see her.

She brought him outside to the courtyard, and instead of saying anything, she’d just wrapped her arms around him and stayed like that. And then after a while asked him, please would he please come with her to their spot in the woods, and he said okay.

On the train, she’d leaned her head back against his chest and nestled into him like the whole last month of them being apart hadn’t even happened. When he caught sight of them together in the reflection in the glass, he saw that he was smiling.

Now they walked in between the trees where there was no path, but they both knew the way blackout drunk with their eyes closed. They’d come here together so many times, starting back when it was still winter but the smell of spring was creeping in over the melting snow. “It’s the time of year to fuck against a tree in the woods,” is what Ivy had told him when she’d brought him the first time. And then she’d taken off his gloves and put his hands up under her coat and sweater onto her warm skin.

Now, the air was hot and thick in that late-July way. And as he followed her, he tried not to think about the last time they’d spoken before this. He tried not to think about how he’d gone to a party in a neighboring town to hear his friend Ethan’s band play on a night Ivy had said she was busy with a family thing. But then he found her there, out back next to one of the kegs, wrapped up in a skinny punk-looking guy with a septum ring and a leather cuff on each wrist. And when she looked up and saw him seeing her, she didn’t even seem surprised. Almost like she’d expected to get caught, or wanted to. “Oh shit, is this the chump you’ve been texting me about?” the punk guy asked. And he laughed.

Xavier tried not to think about how he’d waited to hear from her after that, assumed she’d come to him full of apologies, like she usually did after she’d done something messed up, only this time she didn’t. And he tried not to think about how a week after that he’d gone back to their place in the woods, because it was late and he couldn’t sleep and maybe some part of him hoped she might be out there missing him like he’d been missing her. And the crazy thing is, she was there. But she wasn’t alone. Turned out, she didn’t think of it as her and Xavier’s spot the way he did. He left as quickly as he could. They never heard Xavier running in those woods. They were making too much noise on their own.

He was trying not to think about that then as Ivy pulled him forward, twigs cracking under their feet. The moon was so bright, everything was glowing. The farther away from the rest of the world they went, the easier it was to tell himself that all of this was happening outside of regular space and time and didn’t count. That he could have this one night, whatever this was, and not even have to pay for it later.

Now they had reached the place where they always used to go, but there was something new: a tire dangling from a tree branch, connected to a rope that did not look thick or strong enough to hold it. Ivy pressed a button on the swing and a string of lights glowed yellow.

Ivy leaped up onto the swing, stuck one leg out behind her. She had taken ballet for years as a kid and could still move like that, like the air that surrounded her was different than regular air, thicker and thinner both. And when she smiled at him, everything else was wiped away, and the only thing in his mind and his heart was how very much he had missed her.

She lowered herself down, slipped both legs into the middle of the tire. “Wind me up, please,” she said, like a kid asking him to play. Ivy was so many things all at once. And so he held her hand and walked circles around her until the rope was high and tight and it seemed like it might snap. And then he let her go and she spun and spun as the rope unwound. She leaned her head back, and she opened her mouth like she was screaming, but no sound came out. When the spinning stopped she got off the swing and pulled him to her, and that’s when he realized she was crying.

“I am such a shit,” she said. “I’m an absolute horrible, awful shithead.”

His heart was beating so hard. “Wait,” he said. All he wanted then was for her to stop crying. When Ivy cried, it felt like the only thing in the world that mattered. “Please . . .” But as he searched for the right words, she raised her hand to his lips to quiet him, shook her head, and looked down.

“I deserve for you to hate me.” She looked up at him, blinked her big wet eyes. “Do you?”

And he told her what he’d always told her when she cried over something she’d done – that everyone makes mistakes. And of course he didn’t hate her. He never could.

She stood on her tiptoes and leaned in close.

Xavier had heard that the moment before an accident time slows down. One second feels like a minute, an hour, a month. That’s what it was like then, out there in those woods, her lips inching toward his so slowly, his heart racing, stomach twisting, like he knew this kiss would either kill him or save him.

“This is a terrible idea,” he said quietly, right before their lips touched. “This is definitely going to end in disaster.”

“Not this time,” she said. “I promise this time. Nothing bad will happen.”

Later he would look back at that night and remember how they’d both believed so much in the truth of what they’d said.

It’s just that only one of them was right.

SASHA

I stood at the station, waiting for the train, staring into the dark empty tracks, trying not to picture the things I could not stop picturing. Xavier and Ivy out in the courtyard, pressed together. Xavier and Ivy kissing. Xavier and Ivy, wherever they were now, her hand against his chest, reaching in, tearing out his heart, putting it into her mouth, and eating it.

Somehow I ended up with the rest of the whisky. I was sick and hollow and needed this to stop, so I sipped and sipped until it was gone. But it didn’t fix anything.

I closed my eyes and new images filled my head, ones that hurt as much as the others, maybe more: Xavier’s face so close to mine, his grin seeming to mean something I so desperately wanted it to.

It hadn’t always been painful with me and Xavier. There was a whole year before this when we were friends and only friends. Best friends. And that was it.

We were in the same English class and paired up for a project. I had assumed Xavier was just this regular guy, boring and normal. But the more I got to know him, the more I realized I’d been unfair. He was smart. And weird and silly. And so talented. One day I was eating Swedish Fish and I gave him one, and he stuck it to his notebook and drew an entire little world around it, strange and funny and beautiful. Another time he spent the entire class passing me a series of notes, each containing only a single letter, spelling out THIS IS A VERY INEFFICIENT WAY TO WRITE A NOTE. Another day he brought in a hollowed-out penny and showed me a magic trick he’d learned on YouTube. “My backup career idea is amateur street magician,” he’d said.

“What’s your non-backup career idea?” I’d asked.

“Sorcerer,” he’d said.

Eventually I got to know him well enough to realize this: he delighted in the small things, but also knew that in the grand scheme of the world, nothing we did or felt mattered at all. And he got how that was unbelievably terrifying, but also was the thing that made us free.

But even though nothing mattered and a person could basically do whatever they wanted, he was still kind. Not just nice, but truly kind, which is different.

He never judged anyone for anything or about anything. He was boundlessly forgiving. He was sensitive and didn’t know how to protect himself sometimes. He said I had an unshakable core and he envied me. “Being in love is a painful nightmare,” he’d told me once. “You’re lucky because your heart is too tough for it.” He thought it was true. So had I.

But he is how I learned I was wrong.

I remembered what he’d told me when we were first becoming friends. We were at his house, working on our English project, talking about dating people, and I told him how I didn’t really believe in it. “Make out and move on,” I said. “That’s my MO.” I did a corny grin.

He had told me he had a history of getting crushes on girls who always thought he was too normal to bother with at first (just like I had, though of course I never told him) – tough weirdos, girls who played drums, who pierced their own ears, who made robots in their basements, girls who wore shit-kicking boots and actually used them to kick shit. Girls who maybe he liked more than they liked him, who he never quite had even when he had them. And who always ended up breaking his heart.

“I guess maybe my MO is Mmmmm Optimistic,” he said. “Because every time, I always have lots of hope and think it’s gonna turn out great. Or maybe Moron, Obviously. Because . . . obviously.”

I remembered when he first told me the whole thing, I’d thought the girls he described sounded maybe a little similar to me. And I’d really hoped he would never like me as anything more than a friend – I would’ve hated to have to hurt his big sweet heart. He was not my type at all. The guys I usually liked were androgynous and pretty. And besides, I’d had no interest in dating anyone, anyway.

Back then I couldn’t have imagined what would happen later, how everything would twist around inside me. But that’s the thing about life. No matter how smart you are, you’ll just never be able to imagine any of what’s coming for you, not until it’s right there, standing on your throat.

It was after 2:30 in the morning when I finally got home, but the moment I walked into my room, the bone-deep exhaustion that promised to take me swiftly to sleep burned away. And there I was, alone, wide-awake, and drunk.

I took out my phone and texted Xavier. Hope you’re ok wherever you are . . .

I held my breath, waited for the texting dots, just in case. I imagined what he might write back: You won’t believe the ridiculous night I had . . . or maybe Is it too early for birthday diner breakfast? I stared at my phone. But no message appeared.

What could he be doing at that moment? I didn’t want to imagine. But I couldn’t help it. Maybe he and Ivy were still at Sloe Joe’s. Maybe they were dancing slowly in the corner out of time to the music. Maybe they were having full-on sex out back in the courtyard. People did that sometimes, I had seen them.

STOP!

I tried to remind myself that I would talk to Xavier tomorrow, and there was nothing I could do now. But I also knew that when a story grabs ahold of you, it won’t let you go until it’s ready.

Maybe they were on the train together. Maybe Ivy was falling asleep on him and he was gazing lovingly at the top of her head. Maybe they were at that spot in the woods, maybe she was sneaking Xavier into her house.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

All of a sudden, something occurred to me: if I really needed to know what was going on, I didn’t have to torture myself imagining. I could torture myself with real, actual information if I just checked Ivy’s Instagram.

Ivy’s awful Instagram.

Back at the very beginning when they first got together, Xavier checked it constantly. He’d get a hit of the Ivy drug every time she put up something new, which was multiple times a day. “She has a ton of random dude followers who comment on her pictures and stuff,” Xavier had said. “They are big users of that tongue emoji. They are always posting the tongue to her. But it doesn’t actually matter.” Xavier had told me that Ivy said she’d let any guy follow her so long as his avatar pic was of a real human being and he didn’t seem to be a bot. He’d said she thought it was funny to have all these random creeps commenting. When Xavier told me all of this, it sort of sounded like he was trying to convince himself, like he didn’t quite believe it was all so harmless, but really, really wanted to.

After they broke up, Xavier couldn’t stop looking. “Please help me,” he’d said. “Throw my phone out the window or remove my eyeballs or something.” He held up his phone. There was a supersaturated picture of Ivy in the foreground of the screen, a wiry male arm draped over her shoulder, a leather cuff wrapped around the guy’s wrist. Xavier squished his eyes shut and turned his head away while I clicked unfollow.

But now I went to her page. Ivy was on there under the name Twisted Tree, username TwistedTree16. The avatar photo was a close-up of a mouth with the tongue out and nothing more, so if you didn’t already know it was her, you’d never be able to figure it out. And the account was locked.

Of course it was.

Xavier said her parents were super nosy and tried to monitor everything she did ever since they caught her drinking with an older boy when she was thirteen. She had to make sure to log out of her computer every time she left the house so they couldn’t snoop through her email, and never leave her phone unguarded even for a second. “They’ve threatened to kick her out if they catch her doing one more ‘bad’ thing,” Xavier had said, back when he and Ivy had first started hanging out. “I think they’re this close to actually doing it.”

I stared at the mouth and the little closed padlock. I felt then a strange mix of disappointment and relief. I wanted to see what was in there, but also oh so desperately did not.

But this wasn’t about me. This was about Xavier. This was about the dark black pit he was finally, finally almost out of. This was about all the damage Ivy could do – would do – if I didn’t gather enough information to keep it from happening somehow.

At least that’s what I told myself.

I knew I should have stopped then. I knew I should have let it go, gone to bed, dealt with it in the morning.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

Because my beast of a brain already had a plan.

XAVIER

Xavier and Ivy stared at each other googly-eyed, kiss-drunk. “I really missed you,” she said. And then she held his face in her hands and looked right at him in this way that overwhelmed him with love. During moments like this, it was impossible to remember the bad things that had happened. This feeling was the real one. Everything else was just noise.

“I can’t believe I ever let you go,” Ivy said. “There is no one as kind or as sweet as you. Like literally no one on earth. I am garbage.”

“You’re not,” Xavier said. “Stop saying . . .”

But then Ivy did something, something he would think about later, something he would replay in his head over and over so many times, trying to understand it.

She took both his hands, brought them up to her face, held one on each cheek and looked him straight in the eye. Then she lowered his hands down to her collar.

“Do it,” she said.

Xavier didn’t understand. “Do what?”

“Choke me.” She tried to wrap his hands around her neck. She tried to get him to squeeze. It took a while for his brain to process what was even happening. He started to pull away. She wouldn’t let him.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“But I deserve it,” she said. “And you do want to. I can tell.”

Xavier realized then that they were both drunker than he’d thought. And that he really, really, did not like the feeling of his hands around her throat. He did not like how thin her neck felt, how easy it would be to break her.

“No,” he said. “Stop! I don’t want that at all!”

He tried to pull away again. This time she let him go.

“Just kidding,” she said. Then she buried her face in his chest. “You still smell the same. It’s very hard to remember a smell, but I swear I always could with you . . .”

And then she kissed him again, harder this time. She kissed him and wiped every thought he’d ever had out of his brain. She kissed him and pressed up against him, and when she reached into the hole in the tree for the big box of condoms she’d put there in the spring and there was only one left in the box, he tried not to think about what had happened to the others.

Xavier wondered if later he would regret this. He wondered if later he’d remember this moment and wish he could go back and drag himself out of the woods and stop whatever happened next. The problem with time is it only ever goes forward. And when you are careening toward disaster, you never know it until it is way too late.

SASHA

I knew what I was doing was fucked up, but if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. I picked a name too common for easy Googling (Jake Jones) and a location (a random town about thirty miles away) and wrote an innocuous bio line (“Some random guy”). I told myself my intentions were pure – I just wanted to see how much danger Xavier was in exactly. So I could figure out how to save him. If some part of me already had other more elaborate plans, well, at least I wasn’t aware of it.

I made up a new Jake Jones email address and an Instagram account to link it to, then got some fake followers by signing up for a free trial of some shady music streaming service.

I followed a bunch of accounts to make my following and followers numbers look normal. I uploaded a bunch of close-ups of the white wall of my bedroom, to give myself a reasonable number of posts. I was going to set the account to private anyway, so it’s not like Ivy would be able to see what my pictures were, she just needed to see that I had some, that I was real.

Now all I needed was a photo of a guy. One that didn’t appear online anywhere so it wasn’t reverse image searchable. A guy of about the right age, good-looking but not unbelievably so.

I went upstairs to my bedroom closet, dug around in the back until I found the little digital camera I’d had five summers ago when I got sent to a sleepaway camp that didn’t allow phones while my mom was dating a chef who hated kids. I got the charger, plugged in the camera, flipped it on, and found the perfect picture of a dude in his late teens with dark hair that stuck up in the front, a big pouty, almost feminine, mouth, and a swim-instructor body, which made sense because he was one.

I uploaded the photo, then cropped it so you could see only half the face, half a tongue, and one muscular bicep, and hit save. And then, just like that, Jake was real. My eyes were closing. It was almost four. So I did the thing this was all leading up to: I went to Ivy’s page again, and I clicked “request to follow.”

I took a deep breath. I stood up. The room shifted and I remembered how drunk I still was. I told myself that if I regretted it in the morning, I could just delete the account. I’d delete the account and no one would ever know, and it would be like none of this ever happened.

I got into bed then, and, too exhausted to torture me anymore, my brain was quiet. And finally I went to sleep.

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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