Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

  THERE in the BLUE SCRIPT. RIGHT THERE in the reflection of that shiny table with the sad chipped vase and the worse-than-dead flowers. There were now letters that I SWEAR WERE NOT THERE BEFORE. The letters on the TABLE said LETOM YAWAEDIH DIAMREM EHT. And I thought, well HMM, WHAT LANGUAGE IS THAT IN. I thought, IS THIS IN ANOTHER COUNTRY and WHERE ARE THEY. And I stared and stared at those letters, and then I realized they were a REFLECTION, so they were BACKWARD. And then I looked at them, and I made them forward with my eyes, and I did an Internet search, and the ANSWER was right there WAITING FOR ME.

  And I started to drive.

  Xavier

  Xavier knew he had no right to be jealous. It was his own fault for being so slow, so hesitant, so unsure for so long. But when had jealousy ever listened to reason?

  “Not after everything . . . ,” she’d said. The truth uncurled in his belly, climbing up his throat, and Xavier was choking on it: she meant, not after Steph. Xavier suddenly realized that the past few days, every strange moment that Xavier didn’t understand—her leaving home in the first place, lying awake in that tent all night, running out now—it was about Steph. All of it was because of him, Steph was who she cared about now, who was at the center of her mind and heart. If Xavier ever had a chance with her, it was gone. He was too late.

  He sat on the bed they had been in together only moments before. Nothing seemed real. Xavier pictured Steph’s blandly handsome face, his broad shoulders, and solid arms. He pictured those arms wrapping around Sasha, squeezing her tight.

  Xavier was still half naked. He gathered up his clothes, put them on slowly. Should he follow her? Should he wait for her to come back? Would she come back?

  Xavier could not sit in this room without her. He bent down to slip on his shoes, and that’s when Xavier saw the phone. Sasha’s phone on the floor, which must have slipped out when their clothes were coming off.

  Everything he’d been wondering about this whole trip, the answers were in there. Xavier knew he shouldn’t look—he knew that—but he couldn’t help it.

  Xavier picked it up.

  He glanced at the last text Sasha had gotten. But it wasn’t from Steph. It was from . . . Gwen? Xavier turned away without reading it. He knew they’d been friends once a long time ago, but it certainly seemed strange that Sasha would be texting with her now—and not even mention it to him. Not that Sasha owed him an explanation, of course, she didn’t, but . . .

  Xavier looked back at her phone.

  Ivy, is something up?

  Ivy? Xavier stared at the phone, with the message from Gwen on the screen, a little crack in the corner.

  The little crack in the corner from when someone had dropped it at a party.

  This wasn’t Sasha’s phone at all.

  They say in a sensory-deprivation chamber, eventually a person starts hallucinating. Their HEAD fills their BRAIN with pictures that are not there. The thoughts COME and KEEP COMING and no one can STOP THEM. WELL the SAME goes for driving. After a certain amount of driving alone, a person starts to go a little crazy maybe.

  I told myself stories to fill up the time, to keep the thoughts I did not want to come from coming. I told myself stories to drown out the other ones.

  There once was a girl named Ivy who went into the woods to cheat on her boyfriend. She went to cheat with a guy named Jake. He was handsome and funny and strange in just the right ways. Strange in just the ways she liked. She met him there in those woods, but he did not stay long. He did not stay long out there with her in those woods.

  Ivy had had plans with her boyfriend, Xavier, that night, but she decided they didn’t matter when she made her plans with Jake. Or maybe they DID matter and her broken plans were kind of the point. Maybe she wanted to get caught, was hoping to all along. Maybe she liked Xavier best when she could sense the needy, hungry panic, liked him best when he was jealous and would do anything on earth to keep her. She liked him best when he was a wild animal, and she had made him that way.

  So she went to the woods. She saw Xavier’s many messages and ignored them. They kept coming, those messages, buzz buzz buzzing . . . she watched them and waited to see, each one more panicked then the last. And the crazier he went, the more she smiled. The more she felt finally complete.

  She was alone by then. She waited in the woods alone, smoking a joint, sitting in that tire swing and spinning around. She planned to text Xavier eventually, but she lost track of time, the woods were so nice right then.

  She stayed and she waited. And then just like that, Xavier appeared.

  He was drunk and crazier maybe than she’d ever seen him. He was furious and wild.

  His eyes did not look right.

  She decided she was glad he was there. She thought that maybe he’d finally fuck her in that angry way she liked, in that angry way she had gotten others to do. But never him, never sweet, gentle Xavier, who genuinely did not seem to want to grab her by the throat and slam her against a wall like some other guys did. She thought maybe this time finally he would.

  They started kissing. She got him to put his hands around her throat. She got him to put his hands there, and squeeze and squeeze.

  But then he would not stop.

  She grabbed his hair, tried to push him off her. She couldn’t breathe. And she needed to breathe. What she needed more than anything she’d ever needed before in her life was to breathe. But he did not let go.

  And so she did not get to.

  Xavier

  Xavier went outside and stood in the parking lot. He waited and waited for Sasha. And then there she was, walking up from the road, face flushed. Their eyes locked and neither of them smiled.

  Forty minutes ago they had been up in that hotel room, clothes everywhere, hands everywhere, and he’d almost told her he loved her. But the two people in that room did not exist anymore.

  Xavier held out the phone.

  “How did you get that?” she said.

  “You left it under the bed.”

  She stared at him like she was barely even on earth anymore and said nothing.

  “Why do you have Ivy’s phone?” he said.

  She took a deep breath. “I think I have to say it now,” she said. “I finally have to.”

  And his stomach twisted with those words, with the finality of them. This was what everything had been leading up to, suddenly he knew that. Maybe all along, it wasn’t Steph or secret sadness over some undetermined thing. No, it was guilt.

  “Did you steal her phone?” Xavier couldn’t process what was happening.

  Sasha didn’t answer, which was all the answer he needed.

  And the events of the last few days started to make a different kind of sense. All the hiding and sneaking around, texting, texting when she thought he couldn’t see. This was what all of it was about.

  “Does Ivy know you have it?” He was starting to feel scared of the way Sasha was looking at him. Or maybe scared of Sasha herself.

  Cars zipped by behind her. Sasha didn’t answer. Something occurred to him then, something he didn’t want to even consider, but he couldn’t help it. The text Ivy had sent, the one breaking up with him that hadn’t even sounded like her at all. “Have you been . . .” Xavier could barely bring himself to ask. “. . . texting as her?”

  Sasha nodded.

  Oh my god.

  “So when Ivy sent me that text breaking up with me,” Xavier said. He was speaking so slowly. “Was that . . . you?”

  Sasha nodded again.

  “But why?” Xavier said.

  They stood there, cars rushing by. Xavier wanted time to stop, to freeze in this moment so he didn’t have to know what she’d say next, what he’d say next. He didn’t want to know what was about to happen.

  Ivy’s phone buzzed in his hand. Another message popped up on the screen. Gwen again. You haven’t written me back in hours. I’m getting worried. . . .

  In hours? Sasha was texting Gwen as Ivy, too. Xavier held the phone up so Sasha could see. “Gwen
’s worried,” he said.

  “I know,” Sasha said. She paused. “And she’s right to be.”

  His heart was pounding so hard. “Why is she right to be worried?”

  “Something very bad happened.” Her voice broke. It broke and her entire body started shaking. “Something very bad happened to Ivy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Xavier said. He felt suddenly very sick.

  “Ivy . . .”—Sasha exhaled slowly—“was killed.”

  But of course the words she was saying weren’t true. How could they be true?

  “What are you talking about?” Xavier said.

  “Ivy is dead,” Sasha said. “She was killed in the woods four days ago. I didn’t want to have to tell you. I tried my best to protect you. I . . .” Tears were on her cheeks, streaming down her face. “I tried my best not to have you know, to keep it from you. To keep it from everyone. But I can’t anymore. I have to tell you what happened.”

  Xavier’s body was freezing cold, then burning hot, and he was outside of time, standing there in that Florida parking lot as Sasha said those words to him, words he could not begin to understand. Xavier just stared and stared, then opened his mouth as a question bubbled up out of him. A question that Xavier wasn’t even sure he could bring himself to ask. “Did you . . . ?” he started to say. But Sasha stopped him. She shook her head, took a breath.

  “I didn’t kill her,” Sasha said. She looked him straight in the eye. “You did.”

  Sasha

  Each time I heard myself repeat the story, it seemed less and less possible it could be true. I explained everything, right from the beginning from that first night when I created Jake, up until that moment together in the parking lot.

  “I don’t understand,” he said over and over. “Please tell me again?” And with each retelling his eyes grew wider. He asked question after question. And then the story came back out of him in dribbles and bursts.

  You did.

  I did.

  She did.

  You did.

  Those pills.

  Blacked out.

  I almost.

  We almost.

  We did.

  And then she was.

  Her body was.

  And now she is.

  Her body is.

  And you.

  And I.

  All along.

  I saw his face change when he finally got it. A second later he ran to the side of the parking lot and began to vomit.

  I watched him, didn’t follow. Down at the road, trucks zipped past under the bright summer sky. He was a wild-eyed animal. I thought at any moment he might start running—into the woods, into traffic, straight off the edge of the goddamn Earth. Or maybe I’d do it first.

  Xavier staggered back. He sat down on the curb, leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I looked through the big plate-glass window into the empty lobby. He coughed and spat bile onto the pavement. “This can’t be real,” he said. But even then, I knew he already understood: things that don’t seem possible happen all the time. He looked up at me.

  “What happens now?” he said.

  “You have to hold it together,” I said.

  His eyes did not look right. He was about to lose his fucking mind. And once that happened, there would be no going back.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said.

  But of course, we are all capable of both more and less than we ever could have imagined.

  “You need to keep it together now, until I figure out what we are going to do next,” I said. Only it was already clear what we had to do—it was what I should have done the moment I first found her in the woods. We had to go to the police and turn ourselves in. Both of us.

  He was hunched over, shoulders shaking, in a place beyond tears. He slowly turned and looked up at me. “Why did you try to protect me?” he said. “Why did you try to help me? Why did you . . .”

  “Because—” I paused. I raised my hand to my chest, pressed a flat palm against my heart. I closed my eyes. I breathed in deep.

  I imagined our entire relationship stretching out behind me like rope, thick and strong, going through my chest into the center of me. I thought of all the things I’d wanted to say for so long but was scared to say, what I had convinced myself not to say. I thought of everything that had led up to this moment, the previous weeks, but also months. I thought of Xavier’s face, sweetly shy, when he turned toward me in that class our sophomore year and asked if I wanted to team up for a project. I thought of the words that had been sitting hot inside my mouth, about how many times I’d imagined saying them, how desperately I’d wanted to and how scared I’d been to do it. “I was in love with you,” I finished.

  And suddenly all the racing around stopped. He nodded, then looked at his hands, looked at me. He closed his mouth. Opened it again. “I think I was in love with you, too,” he said. “Maybe for a long time, but I was too terrified to admit it even to myself.” And I pressed my lips together so no sound could escape.

  It was the thing I wanted more than anything in the world. The thing I thought would make me whole. The thing I thought would save me.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. And he stared out at the road and was silent.

  The PROBLEM with STORIES is that only some of them are true. And even if you can tell one that sounds good, sounds VERY BELIEVABLE, even if you MADE IT SEEM like someone was IN THE WOODS who was maybe NOT EVER EVEN THERE it doesn’t change what is real, it does not change what ACTUALLY HAPPENED, no matter how much you might want it to.

  Once upon a time, there was a girl who found a best friend against all odds. And the best friend was sometimes kind of a terrible person, not ALWAYS but SOMETIMES. But the girl was used to taking what she could get. She was used to taking the scraps and the shit and she did not care about anything anyway. Shit is no different than gold if you don’t give a fuck about either.

  Let’s call the girl Gwen. Let’s call her best friend Ivy.

  Sasha

  Together in that room and nothing was real and we were outside of time and off of Earth. And my brain was ping-ponging around in my skull, as I tried and tried to figure out any way out of this, tried to figure out any answer but the one I kept coming back to.

  You can’t stop time, I know that. But I tried my very best to pause it.

  I told Xavier we would go to the police in the morning and tell them everything, tell them the full truth of what had happened.

  We sat in the room in that hotel, on the bed, then lay back, side by side. Not touching. Frozen as the world moved on without us. I did not know how many hours had passed, but when I looked up, it was dark out the window, and it seemed like it would be dark forever.

  Ivy was bewitching and greedy. She said she loved Gwen very much, but she didn’t always act like it. What good is love that doesn’t FEEL like love? That is what Gwen wondered sometimes.

  Gwen was Gwen was Gwen was Gwen. What was there to say? Her life was her life, there were sad things and happy things. Gwen was no better or worse than anyone else. Smarter in some ways, but in other ways a real fucking dummy.

  One day, Ivy got back together with her ex-boyfriend, Xavier. She MOSTLY DID IT because she SAW him with his BEST FRIEND. Ivy was VERY JEALOUS of that best friend, though she would never admit it. Whatever you had, Ivy would take from you. She only liked things if someone else wanted them. Keep that in mind. That part is important.

  Ivy had a tendency to mess things up. She would mess things up with that boyfriend. He was so SOLID and LOYAL and SWEET and THERE. Ivy loved him for it. But she hated him for it, too. Not that Ivy ever said that. Gwen could just tell. HE FUCKED LIKE A FUCKING CHAMPION is what Ivy had said instead.

  Having Xavier there to fawn over her distracted Ivy for a full few days, gave her the attention she wanted and craved. She got it from a lot of places usually, like from guys who’d heart-eyes and tongue-out emo
ji all her Instagram posts and would sometimes start DMing her. She’d let Gwen sign into her account and write them back if Gwen wanted, they were mostly dumb idiots . . . but they were fun and writing to them let Gwen get to see what it would be like to be Ivy and have everybody want you that much. Even in real life, Ivy always sucked up all the love in the room. It didn’t make sense, it wasn’t FAIR. But anyone who thinks life makes sense or is fair, well you can’t even reason with a person like THAT.

  Ivy was back with Xavier. And there was Gwen, alone again, alone as EVER.

  And then all of a sudden, there was Jake.

  HE JUST APPEARED. JUST LIKE MAGIC. He wrote Ivy a message on Instagram. Gwen was WITH her when she got it, Ivy and Gwen were TOGETHER late at night on her ex-now-not-ex-anymore boyfriend’s birthday, after Ivy and Xavier had fucked in the woods and Ivy made him take her back. Ivy was forcing Gwen to HEAR about it. Then the message came through. Ivy was like OH GOD ANOTHER ONE. And pretended to be annoyed and handed her phone right over to Gwen, the way she liked to do sometimes. They’d done it before, a million times. Ivy didn’t even WRITE ANY of those messages herself.

  TAKE IT IF YOU WANT IT, she said, so casual, take IT like he was the last piece of cold pizza and she was already full. But he was NOT pizza or COLD or ANYTHING he was JAKE and he was perfect.

  GWEN HAD TO HIDE HOW PERFECT SHE THOUGHT HE WAS.

  Ivy was jealous of everyone. But ESPECIALLY, IVY was JEALOUS of ANYONE when it came to Gwen. As in: she didn’t want Gwen to have ANYBODY ELSE. And if Gwen ever did, she tried to RUIN it. And even though Gwen KNEW this, it didn’t MATTER, it didn’t HELP.

  On the night Gwen and Jake planned to meet, Gwen was VERY EXCITED. Gwen went to find him at the diner he promised to be at, BUT HE DID NOT SHOW UP. She SAT there and SAT there and thought that maybe he had come in and seen her and LEFT when he saw her. She was so embarrassed she did not even TEXT him. But then she signed into Ivy’s Instagram just in case maybe his PHONE HAD BROKEN and she saw the messages between JAKE and IVY, and suddenly she understood what had happened. She understood what Ivy had done.