The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [79]
Ivy acts out the little scene for Ursula, giving the finger to a nearby sightseeing senior-citizen couple in place of Chas. Ursula leans forward, seeing her sister anew through Chas’s eyes: a brazen, whip-smart, beautiful girl, fresh to the city. She has never imagined Ivy could act like that, could be so assertive.
“What happened then?” she asks.
Ivy smiles to herself, arranging her hands on the table. “He showed up the next day, when I was working,” she says. “He had a big white box. It had a bright-red ribbon. After the shoot I took it from him and got in a cab and took off. I opened it in the cab. There was nothing in it but a little note at the bottom. It said, I’ll kill if necessary, to see you again. With a little smiley face. And a phone number under the smiley face.”
Ivy stares off happily into her memories. Ursula waits, so eager to learn more of the secret of Ivy’s power over men that she finds herself actually holding her breath.
“We had the future,” Ivy says. “That’s what we had in common.”
“What do you mean?”
Ivy lights another cigarette. “We both knew it. We both knew the future.” She crosses her arms over her chest, as though the room had grown suddenly colder. “At first just Chas knew it, and he told me about it. The telling went on and on, day after day, week after week. He told me all about the Dark Age that was coming, and the more he told me, the more I realized I already knew it. It was exactly like the place I’d been seeing in my head for years. And then I realized that the place in my head was a memory, and that I’d been there. I’d been to the future. I didn’t remember how or why I’d been there yet, but I knew I’d been there. And then I started telling Chas about the future, and the more I told him, the more I knew I was right.”
She catches herself.
“Don’t worry.” She puts her hand over Ursula’s. “I’m not crazy again. I’m so beyond that now. I can be crazy or uncrazy. I can sit here and be from the past and the future or be your sister and the bitch Gwennan’s daughter, and that’s fine, too. It’s all the same. Every story is a cover story. That’s one thing you learn.”
Every once in a while Ivy will say something like this, reminding Ursula that her delusions are not gone but rather just partitioned somehow, kept off to the side. But she’s so functional now—more than functional, she’s positively thriving—that Ursula has been having a hard time regarding this as a serious health concern. After all, she’s begun to think, if Ivy can create a personal mythology for herself that gives her power, why should anyone try to stop her? Shouldn’t we all have the right to tell ourselves the story of who we are in our own way?
“So what did you tell Chas about the future?” she asks.
Ivy purses her lips and blows out a long, slow stream of smoke as the waitress sets down their food. “Like, let’s see. Like the sloganitions. I told him in the future every word has a sloganition. He loved that so much. He couldn’t stop testing me.”
“Testing you?”
“Like one morning I woke up and he was lying there looking at me, and he said, ‘Awake.’ And I thought about awake. I was pretty sure I had computer chips in my head that did the thinking for me. The chip in my right brain thought awake, and it thought, Sunshine, breakfast with Daddy at the kitchen table, softball games, picnics, your first kiss, your senior prom—you know, like all the things that are supposed to happen when you’re awake? Then the chip in my left brain crunched all the data into the