White Ivy(13)

She disliked that it had been Roux, she would have preferred Gideon obviously, but even a stranger would have been a better choice: clean, no awkwardness, a onetime mistake you could erase. But in the end, it didn’t matter. All she remembered from the event itself was the intense pressure, as if someone were trying to plug up a hole in her she hadn’t known existed, and the feeling of sweaty skin on skin, a sharp whip of pain. The health teacher said that in such moments there might be blood, but she hadn’t bled. Even this proof of innocence had been denied her.

Afterward, Roux asked if she’d done this before.

“Yes,” she lied.

“With who?”

“Someone from school.” Before he could press her, she said, “What about you?”

“You’re the proud owner of my V-card.”

“Liar.”

“Seriously.” He pulled out a pack of Camel Blues from his desk drawer and lit up beside the window.

“Can I have one?” she asked.

He handed her the pack without speaking. She pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and held it between her index and middle finger as she’d seen her father do. She inhaled. Almost immediately she was seized with vertigo and had to lean back on Roux’s crumpled gray pillows as the room spun and spun…

“What happened to your head, anyway?” Roux asked. “It’s turning a nasty puke color.”

“I walked into a pole.”

Their eyes met. His gaze was full of knowing. She hated him in that moment. He looked away. “You hungry? There are Hot Pockets in the fridge. I have vodka, too. I’ll mix it with some Tropicana. You’ll like it.”

That’s when Ivy heard it—the unmistakable sound of ownership.

Why was it that in Gideon’s voice, it had such an admirable, dignified quality, but in Roux’s, it sounded dirty, like something unearned? But this wasn’t fair because if anything, it was the opposite: Gideon had been born rich and cared for, he’d done nothing to earn his big house, his private education, his ten years of speech therapy; whereas Roux had a whore for a mother and a father in Romania who may or may not be dead or in jail, and a part-time job at Kmart. Gideon had done nothing to earn her love. Roux had given her forty dollars. That was how much her virginity had been worth. Forty dollars.

Ivy deposited her cigarette butt in a half-empty Dr Pepper can. The impulse for destruction had passed. She had moved on to regret.

“Where you going?” said Roux.

“Home.”

“Are you going to come over later?”

“Don’t know.” She crawled back out the window even though she could have used the front door.

Meifeng was stir-frying meat on the wok when Ivy slipped in, the apartment smoky with the fragrance of garlic and scallions bubbling in oil.

“How was the library?” Meifeng asked.

“Fine,” said Ivy. She lingered in the doorway until Meifeng glanced her way. In some perverse, repentant way, she wanted to be caught. She was sure her shrewd grandmother would see through her, she would know that her granddaughter was not the same person as before. But Meifeng only told her to wash up before dinner and to take off that ridiculous hat.

Down the hall, Ivy saw light from underneath Nan and Shen’s closed door and heard their low voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying over the sound of the exhaust fan. She headed directly to the bathroom.

She took her time examining herself in the mirror, thinking how lovely her lips looked all swollen like that. Then came the disgust. She slapped her reflection to prove how deplorable she felt. But upon meeting her own clear, unflinching eyes in the mirror, the disgust turned into astonishment. Goose bumps rose up her arms. She was further gone than she’d thought.

When she came out from her shower, she heard the sound of a basketball game playing on the television. Her parents had come out of their bedroom. She went to her bedroom and closed the door. Soon, she heard Austin ask Nan if Ivy had come back yet. “Leave your sister be,” was Nan’s response. “She’s unwell.”

“She looked fine to me this morning,” said Austin.

“She’s sick on the inside,” said Nan.

Ivy beckoned her brother inside her room, pressing a finger to her lips. “Can you go to Mom’s room and find something for me? I don’t know where it is so you’ll have to look around.”

“What is it?”

She described the brown leather binding, the little gold clasp. “You’ve seen me writing in it—you remember.”

Austin said he knew what it looked like and scampered away. Ivy lay back in her bed, waiting. It only took a few minutes. “It was on the side table,” he boasted, handing her the diary. “It wasn’t even hidden.”

She tugged his earlobe in affection and told him to leave before their mother saw him talking to her. Alone, she looked at the diary, once her most prized belonging. Now it was only a liability.

She cut the spine open and splayed out the pages on the carpet. One by one, she shred each page into thin strips, then placed the strips into the large plastic basin Meifeng used to soak her feet in each night. She filled the basin with hot water. The pile of confetti disintegrated into a glob of gray mush, like old mashed potatoes.

She would be reborn. High school was a big place. In September, she would turn up the collar of her shirt, try out for cheerleading or lacrosse, wear her hair in a French braid with a ribbon, crisp and sweet-smelling, like autumn leaves. She would stop stealing. Also—she would never speak to Roux again. Both were not just sources of shame but liabilities, especially the latter. She would purge these memories from her mind, locked behind walls of steel, never to be reexamined. In later years, in high school and even into college, driven by heedless urges into the backseats of middle-class cars, cocooned inside tube slides in playgrounds, fucking soundlessly while her roommates pretended to sleep facing beer-splattered walls, she would tell the opposite lie of the one she’d told Roux: It’s my first time, I’m a virgin, I’ve never done this before. Everyone would believe her. She had long ago realized that the truth wasn’t important, it was the appearance of things that would serve her.