This hinted-at invitation, so carelessly tossed, sent Ivy’s heart racing with a longing so acute she felt dizzy. “I’m Ivy,” she whispered.
“Like the plant,” said Sylvia.
“Dad knows about the penholder, Sib,” said Gideon, “so you should put it back soon.
Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Puh-leease. He has a six a.m. flight tomorrow. He won’t notice a thing.” She floated upstairs with soundless footsteps, a pristine maid doll in her pressed black skirt and servant tray. Her perfume lingered in the air: something tangy, like lemons, and the ocean.
No one acknowledged Ivy when she descended into the basement, at least not overtly, only in side glances and cool smiles. This was a sign of welcome. To fuss over her would have been to state that she didn’t belong. Gideon showed Ivy the area with the sleeping bags and told her she could leave her things there. Tom Cross snatched the gift bag from Gideon’s hands—“What’s this?”—and proceeded to read Ivy’s card in a long, drawn-out tone—I hope we have some classes together next year, Gideon… Tom was a performer: chestnut curls, so many freckles he looked as if he had a year-round tan; he always had an audience. When he was done, he tossed the binoculars in the pile of pillows. “Doesn’t your dad have something like this?”
“Yeah, but I don’t,” said Gideon.
“Where’s my birthday present?” Tom asked Ivy.
“When’s your birthday?”
Tom’s eyes widened. “She speaks!”
Only Una Kim looked furious to see Ivy. They had actually been sort-of-friends once: two Asian loners, Ivy the quiet and poor, Una the rich and chubby. Then Una went to Korea the summer before seventh grade and came back fifteen pounds lighter, with permed hair, contacts, and a higher nasal bridge. She had lost no time in casting Ivy away, the feckless barnacle, by tattling to Liza Johnson that Ivy had called her “a dumb cow” (untrue) who “couldn’t pronounce words longer than five letters” (true). The most infuriating part of this entire thing was that Ivy had been contemplating casting Una off, had even planned where she would sit at lunch instead (at the fountain, reading books with a sophisticated air of mystery), but Una had beaten her to the punch. From this experience Ivy had learned a critical lesson: timing was everything.
Liza and the twins left the boys and came over to Ivy. Una reluctantly followed. They sat in a circle. Violet Satterfield offered to crimp Ivy’s hair. Ivy saw that, indeed, the other girls’ hair was all in various states of aggressive squiggles, as if they’d been electrocuted. “Okay,” she said gamely. Now was surely when Violet would torch her hair on fire, or shear her head bald. She hid the slight trembling in her lips by blowing bubbles with her stale gum.
Violet returned with the crimper. She snapped at Una to scoot over. Una said, “You scoot over,” but she did as she was told, angling her body to the left until she was slightly outside the circle. Una, Ivy saw, was not wearing a bra underneath her dress. The imprints of her nipples rose up through the thin cotton fabric, the size of quarters. Henry Fitzgerald and Blake Whitney tried to find out if Una was ticklish and they took turns squeezing her ribs, mesmerized by her voluptuous breasts, bouncing like water balloons.
“What’s that monkey called,” Liza asked no one in particular. “The one with the pink face?”
“A baboon?” suggested Henry.
“That’s the one! Una looks like a great big bouncing baboon.” In that moment, with her translucent skin flushed pink with shame, Una really did. That was when Ivy realized why Liza and the twins were being so nice to her: they were punishing Una for her breasts. This discovery filled Ivy with hope. It was the oldest law in physics: the system itself can never change, it can only be rearranged.
* * *
AFTER WASHING HER hands with the Speyers’ mint-scented hand soap, Ivy took her time tousling her hair, fixing her shirt, squeezing her cheeks so they appeared more flushed. Idly, she opened the mirror cabinet and inspected the contents: Advil, cotton balls, extra hand soap embedded with exfoliating suds. In the back corner, she noticed a half-empty bottle of a French perfume. She spritzed some on her neck, her wrists. Deeper in the cabinet, she pushed aside a box of Band-Aids to discover an old hair tie, threads of silvery gold hair knotted around the black elastic. Ivy slid it over her wrist. “Hey, Gideon,” she whispered, attempting Sylvia’s ethereal gaze. She closed the cabinet door and went back downstairs.
At nine o’clock, Gideon’s parents came down with four boxes of pizza, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and two tubs of vanilla ice cream. You can know everything about a person by looking at his family, and Ivy felt as if she had discovered the key to Gideon’s makeup: in his youthful mom with her cropped khaki trousers and green sleeveless blouse that revealed two luminous, white arms; his dad, a Massachusetts state senator, who was dignified and trim and knew all of Gideon’s friends by name—“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” he said, enveloping Ivy’s hand in a hearty handshake. At her look of glowing adoration, he added that she was welcome at their house anytime.
Around one o’clock in the morning, Gideon dimmed the lights and put The Hackridge Murders on the video player. Ivy waited until he picked his spot on the sofa before hurrying to seat herself next to him. The world outside of that sofa evaporated entirely. She was only conscious of Gideon’s breath, the small shifts in his body, the soft kaleidoscope of light flickering over his upturned face. During a particularly gruesome murder scene, she made a show of covering her ears, purposely knocking into his elbow. He said “whoops” and reached his arm over the back edge of the sofa. If she leaned her head back, the hair on his forearm would graze the back of her neck. “Do you like the movie so far?” she whispered, closing the gap between their heads, close enough to smell the popcorn on his breath. “It’s kind of predictable,” he whispered back.
The movie plodded onward—dark woods, abandoned sheds, blood dripping out of the bathtub. Liza, Una, and the twins took enormous pleasure in clutching at the guys in the room each time the man with the chain saw appeared. Ivy didn’t dare clutch at Gideon, but she imperceptibly shifted her weight toward him, until the sides of their knees met. A hot current shot through her entire body. In response, Gideon pressed his leg against hers, warm and heavy, touching thigh to ankle. This was it! The moment she’d been fantasizing about for three years. She kept her eyes glued to the screen, wanting to remain casual and not embarrass him by looking over. Once in a while, she felt his leg twitch slightly and press back into hers, as if reminding her of its presence. She returned the pressure to show she understood. Like this, they remained conjoined for the last hour of the movie.
When the credits rolled onto the screen, Ivy, red-faced, peeked over at Gideon, wondering what she would say. Her jaw dropped. Gideon’s head was tilted back on the sofa; his eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. He was fast asleep.
* * *
NAN WAS AN anxious woman. A light sleeper, prone to insomnia. Her two obsessions were money and her family’s health. All night, she’d been tormented by fears of Ivy licking germs off dirty chopsticks, fed stomachache-inducing ice cream, shivering with cold under too-thin blankets in an overly air-conditioned house. It would have shocked Ivy to know that she’d inherited her overactive imagination from her mother.