White Ivy(6)

“Look what you did!” she yelled, but he only sneered in his usual condescending way. She licked her thumb and dabbed at the stain. “It’s Grove Academy’s uniform,” she snapped, knowing instinctively this would hurt him. “I go there now. Over in Andover.”

“Your family win the lottery?”

“I tested in,” she lied, “on scholarship.” She’d read plenty of novels about scholarship students at fancy boarding schools conquering the social chasm through a mixture of grit, charm, and beauty (most of all beauty), to find love among the heather and horse stables. Up to then, she had been perfectly content imagining herself at the local public school, like every other kid in Fox Hill. Now it was beneath her.

She tried her best to avoid Roux after that, sensing the growing divide between them, but he who was so astute at sniffing out her embarrassment was surprisingly dense when it came to her intentions toward him, mistaking her reticence for timidity. He didn’t get the point until the day he’d asked her, for the fifth time, to hang out with his “boys”—the same boys he’d once called fart-knockers—and Ivy finally exploded.

“I would never hang out with those people.”

“Aw, they’re not that scary.”

“They’re poor trash.” Nan’s words. How far Ivy had already come.

All color drained from Roux’s face except for the ears, which turned a scalded pink. She could see the film of sweat over his upper lip where the faint shadow of a mustache was starting to grow.

“When’d you become such a stuck-up bitch?”

“When’d you become a total loser?”

He raised one hand—Ivy instinctively shielded herself—but he was only reaching into his back pocket. He threw something at her, yellow and small, it hit her squarely on the chest and bounced to her feet. She picked it up. It was an old photo of herself in a threadbare blue dress, clearly one of Meifeng’s yard sale finds, with a cheap costume-like sheen over the balloon skirt. She couldn’t fathom where Roux had gotten the photo until she turned it around and saw the dry patches of glue—and then she remembered her old scrapbook, the magazine cutouts, the first time she’d discovered the empty gap between Stacey and Kristy, where she assumed her own picture had somehow come loose and was lost.



* * *




WITHOUT ROUX, IVY had no friends whatsoever. She was lonely but what she craved wasn’t friendship. Girls and boys “hung out” at school but real progress was made outside of school, at parties, and Ivy was never invited to any parties. She’d learned (in theory) the mechanics of popular games like suck and blow, spin the bottle, seven minutes in heaven, apple biting, wink, the classic truth or dare, and other acts that were not games but real life. In the girls’ locker room, she heard Liza Johnson tell the story of when Tom Cross had unzipped his fly and guided her hand to his crotch—“while my dad was driving in the front seat,” Liza said with fake horror. Ivy wondered if Gideon did such things as well. He and Tom were best friends; they did everything together. Ivy wondered what she would do if Gideon were to grab her hand and guide it to the mysterious, slightly grotesque manhood underneath his shorts, or lean over and kiss her with tongue the way Henry Fitzgerald kissed Nikki Satterfield in her cheerleader uniform at the last pep rally, one pom-pom dangling from Nikki’s hand like a shower of blue-and-white confetti. But Ivy had never even held a guy’s hand, let alone kissed one, and the only time she ever felt desirable was when she looked at the photo of herself in her childish blue-sheen dress (why had Roux kept it all this time?) and then a restless longing would throb throughout her entire body, keeping her tossing into the night, waking with bruised tender eyes, so that Meifeng would feel her forehead in the morning for fever.

Then one morning, two weeks into summer break, Gideon Speyer telephoned and invited her to a small gathering to celebrate his fourteenth birthday—“just a sleepover with friends”—and amidst all of Ivy’s stammers and high-pitched giggling, she somehow managed to choke out that she’d be there. Afterward, she stormed to the bedroom she shared with Meifeng (“Where are you running off to now?”) and stuffed her face underneath her pillow until her mouth was full of cotton, muffling the screams of panicked happiness. That night, she wrote in her diary: Everything will be different now.

But there was the problem of getting permission from Nan. Ivy told her mother she was invited to spend the night at her classmate Una Kim’s house. She even used the line she reserved for emergencies: If you’re not going to let me make friends, then why even send me to this rich-people school? It was sheer luck that Una lived three blocks down from Gideon in the new homes over in Andover. Nan’s expression had been a scowl, she didn’t say yes or no—a bad sign as Nan’s thoughts typically turned more paranoid over time.

In preparation for the party (Ivy had determined she would sneak out of the house if it came down to it, Meifeng was a sound sleeper), she pierced her ears with a sewing needle, having stolen a pair of dangly heart earrings earlier that week and hidden them underneath the pile of underwear in the bottommost drawer of her dresser. It was hard to get the earring hook exactly straight through her new earhole and she winced with pain as she dug the metal this way and that, trying to find the outlet in her flesh on the other side. When she finally got both earrings on, her earlobes were hot and tender to the touch. She was delighted.