Thinking it over for a moment, quickly going through memories, I finally shake my head. I can’t think of one moment she lied to me. She’s always been there for me, through thick and thin, and she’s always,alwaystold me the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it. Even when I was a love-struck, nerdy teen, too blinded by the fact that someone was looking my way to see that the football player I was dating was an asshole.
“See? I’m telling you the truth. You’re a hot chick who has something to grab onto. Don’t be ashamed of it.”
I hear her words; I feel her truth, but it doesn’t sink in.
Instead of glancing at my body in the mirror like I want to, I leave my room and head across the hall to the bathroom where I start brushing my teeth. Ivy follows me, and I get the feeling that she knows I need the company. I do. She isn’t wrong.
I study her in the mirror as she moves her tea bag around in the mug and leans against the doorframe.
Unlike me, who started college right away, Ivy took two years off to work. Her parents wouldn’t help her pay for college, so she had no choice but to be responsible. Me? I paid for college in other ways. Ways that include a photoshoot that Neil never learned about. It included me in a bikini, posing for a camera issued for a men’s “sports” calendar of some kind. At the time, I had a body that was sure as hell not this one, and I flaunted it for the money. I didn’t think twice about it, and I had no problems keeping the secret from Neil, but I couldn’t keep something like that from Ivy.
Right before I left for college, when the calendar was mailed to me, she found it on my childhood nightstand and stole it for herself so that she could keep it for moments of reminiscing when we’re old and senile. I didn’t argue with her. We have every intention of raising hell in a nursing home together, and if that includes showing all the old men’s love interests of me in a two-piece swimsuit, then let the hellraising begin.
I briefly wonder what she did with it. I even pause in scrubbing my teeth to ask her, but then I think better of it. She probably has it tucked away in a sentimental box somewhere.
“I wonder, if you described him to Dustin if he’d be able to identify him,” Ivy says absentmindedly.
I groan as I rinse my mouth and spit. “Just drop it, Ivy.”
“Absolutely not. No one ditches my best friend.”
Exiting the bathroom, she follows closely behind as I make my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. “I am not going to describe him to my brother.”
“Why not?”
I fill up a cup of water and down it as quickly as possible. Wiping my mouth, I set the empty cup down and turn to her. “Because then I’ll have to tell him that I got laid. You know how he got about Neil. He hated him as much as you, and he was ready to go across the country to kick his ass when he found out what Neil did to me.”
“Exactly.” She curtly nods. “You should tell him.”
I shake my head. “Definitely not. He’ll hunt the guy down.”
“He’s just being protective.”
“I don’t need him to protect me. I just need him to be my brother.” And nothing could be more true.
Dustin and I weren’t always this close. When we were younger, I did something unspeakable to him that caused him to not talk to me for a year straight. Living in the same house, eating at the same table, riding in the same car, and not one single word, no matter how hard I tried to apologize. And then one day, he started talking to me again. Little words here and there that eventually grew into sentences that eventually turned into conversations.
I would do anything -anything- to make sure that my brother doesn’t pretend that I don’t exist again. That year washell on me. I still carry the shame of what happened that made him shun me to begin with.
She considers me carefully. “I still think you should talk to him about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Well, do you want to see this guy again?”
Shrugging, I cross my arms over my chest and lean a hip against the counter. “I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, what would it matter? I shouldn’t be focusing on men anyway.”
“Oh, it matters. You can be all nonchalant about it, but I can tell…you like him.”
“I don’t know him.”
She points at me. “But you want to.”
I frown at her for seeing right through me and pointing it out. “What’s this have to do with my brother?”
“Well, if you don’t want to see him again, you can make sure that he doesn’t invite him to any more parties. He would in a heartbeat, you know.”
Waving a hand dismissively, I push off the counter, head to the living room, and plop down on the couch. The nail polish is already out on display on the coffee table, and as Ivy follows me, she sits down next to me and picks up her red polish. “I know he would, which is exactly what I don’t want him to do.”
