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 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