The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe Read online

  Also by Hannah Moskowitz

  Sick Kids in Love

  Break

  Invincible Summer

  Gone, Gone, Gone

  Teeth

  Marco Impossible

  Not Otherwise Specified

  A History of Glitter and Blood

  Zombie Tag

  Gena/Finn

  Salt

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  In The Penalty Box, by Lynn Rush and Kelly Anne Blount

  Hear Me, by Dana Faletti

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Hannah Moskowitz. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  10940 S Parker Road

  Suite 327

  Parker, CO 80134

  [email protected]

  Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Edited by Lydia Sharp and Jen Bouvier

  Cover design and illustration by

  Elizabeth Turner Stokes

  Interior design by Toni Kerr

  ISBN 978-1-64937-049-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64937-050-1

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition June 2021

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Gale and Randy,

  who luckily will never read this.

  Author’s Note: The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe includes themes, imagery, and content that might be triggering for some readers. Scenes depicting alcohol consumption, drunkenness, drug use, and drug overdose appear in the novel.

  American Addiction Centers offers free and confidential guidance to those suffering from addiction.

  Call the hotline: (866) 929-9301 or visit americanaddictioncenters.org.

  If you or a loved one is experiencing a medical emergency, such as overdose, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. Do not call this hotline number for an emergency.

  September

  It’s just about midnight on a Friday night and I’m spending it the same way I usually do: trying to figure out whether a girl who could not be less interested in me is gay.

  She’s about five feet away from me, leaning back against the bar and tapping her nails—a little long—on her rocks glass in time to the music. Her hair is hacked off, but that might not mean anything. The fact that she’s here at Kinetic on a Friday night doesn’t necessarily mean anything, either. Providence doesn’t have a dedicated lesbian club, so Kinetic’s population consists of mostly gay guys, a lot of straight girls, and, every once in a while, a girl who doesn’t look at you like she thinks you’re going to rear up and bite her if you dare to say hi.

  Not that I ever do. There’s a lot of comfort in telling yourself that every girl who doesn’t immediately fall in love with you is straight. I’m good with staying in that comfort.

  Besides, there’s safety in numbers, and my friends have all abandoned me. Alyssa, who has about as little luck with girls as I do but with the addition of some inexplicable optimism, is over at the other end of the bar, buying drinks for a girl who’s definitely going to smile sweetly and kiss her on the cheek and walk away in a minute or two. Melody and Diana are the mate-for-life types and I can’t see them, but they’re for sure over on one of the couches in the back, making out like this is their only opportunity to do it. And Ivy…

  Well.

  Ivy is where Ivy always is, in one location or another: the center of everything going on, silent and calculated, moving so perfectly, it’s like the music is following her and not the other way around, locked in eye contact with the second-hottest girl in the room.

  Ivy’s hair is cherry-Coke brown in the bouncing lights of the dance floor, and she’s poured into a black tank dress that rides dangerously high up her thighs as she moves. She’s looking at the girl she’s with like she’s the only person in here—Ivy always does—but every-fucking-one else in here, including the maybe-lesbian I’ve been eyeing for the past half hour, is looking at her.

  Ivy has freckles and dimples and bright-green eyes, and with someone else’s energy, she’d be adorable, but there is nothing cute about Ivy. She is ice and hot metal and electricity. There is something about her where you know she could ruin your life in a word if she wanted to, and she always, always might want to. She is, without fail, the hottest girl in the room.

  I’m mostly here to drive her home. Usually with whatever girl she’s chosen for the night licking at her neck in the back seat of my shitty secondhand sedan. It’s actually my parents’. They just lend it to me. For this.

  Alyssa comes over, draining her cocktail down to the ice, the rim tapping against the nose of her glasses. She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans because she wants people to think she’s not trying too hard, whereas I’m wearing a T-shirt and jeans because I’m here half the nights of my damn life and the novelty of dressing hot for no reward wore off sometime in the first year. Besides, I’ve never been a real femme, like Ivy is, though I don’t have the commitment to go full butch, either. I just exist in this kind of gray area. But I have dozens of piercings and some big colorful tattoos, so it’s not like people don’t know I’m gay.

  Alyssa sighs and sets her glass down heavily on the bar next to me. She passes for straight, incidentally, and guys hit on her a lot because she has long eyelashes and dark curly hair and big tits, but she’s a whole six on the Kinsey scale and has, for whatever reason, never had much success with girls. It’s kind of a running joke at this point. But probably not all that funny to her.

  “No luck?” I yell over the music.

  “She had to go meet her girlfriend.”

  “Of course. Didn’t there used to be single lesbians in Rhode Island? Where the hell did they go?”

  “Not Boston,” Alyssa says. She’s about to start her sophomore year at BU, heading back up there on Monday. From what she’s reported back, last year wasn’t the wild queer utopian collegiate experience she’d been promised. It’s not like my townie time spent here working was any better.

  “Maybe they’re invisible,” I say.

  “Maybe we are.” She nods toward the dance floor. “Doesn’t look like everyone’s having trouble.” Ivy’s now lip-locked with her target, her fingers digging into her waist.

  I say, “Ivy having trouble picking up a girl, wouldn’t that be one of the signs of the apocalypse?”

  “I think it’s more like an urban legend. The Providence version of Sasquatch is Ivy Harlowe not getting laid.”

  I ask the bartender for a water—I have a fake ID, obviously; how else would I have been coming here since I was seventeen? But I have to stay sober enough to get Ivy home—and Alyssa opens up Tinder and starts scrolling through nearby girls. It feels a little like cheating at whatever the fuck it is we’re
all here to do, but it’s a good way to check who around you is a girl interested in girls.

  I can tell from the nonchalant way Alyssa keeps glancing up at one girl dancing with a group as she’s scrolling through at lightning speed that she’s looking for her specifically—which, of course, doesn’t mean she’s going to kill her chances with anyone else. She’s swiping right on everyone.

  All of a sudden, Ivy’s here. She leans across the bar and orders a whiskey, then returns to her feet next to me, stretching like a cat. Ivy’s tall anyway, almost my height, and in her five-inch heels she somehow walks in as easily as slippers, she towers over Alyssa like she’s a different species.

  “What are you doing here?” I say. “You’re wearing a lot more clothes than I thought you’d be next time I saw you.”

  Ivy shrugs carelessly, the strap of her dress incidentally slipping down one skinny, bronzed shoulder. “I lost interest. It was too easy.”

  “Too easy to bring a girl home with you,” Alyssa says, deadpan. “Something bad needs to happen to you someday. Nobody can be this lucky.”

  I give Alyssa a look—“lucky” isn’t a word I’d use to describe Ivy’s life—but Ivy either doesn’t hear her over the pounding bass beat or charitably pretends not to.

  “I need a challenge,” Ivy says, raking her fingers through her hair. She has that kind of wavy, shiny hair that always lays right and never tangles. “At this rate, I’ll get stale, and we can’t have that. If I’m going to be stuck in this shit town forever, I have to find a way to stay sharp.” Ivy’s in college, too, at the University of Rhode Island on full scholarship, but she commutes the half hour each day to campus from the crappy house that she shares with her mom, whenever she’s actually around.

  “Here lies Ivy, ruined by too much sex,” Alyssa says. “I don’t need to wish anything bad on you. You’re going to get struck down for blasphemy.”

  “Lightning strike in the middle of the club,” I say.

  Ivy retrieves her drink and takes a sip, scanning the crowd. “Where’s the married couple?” Ivy says the word “married” the way my mother says “Republican.” Always has.

  The couple in question is Melody and Diana, our resident polyamorous power couple and the last two members of our motley crew. We met them as a unit here a couple years ago. Alyssa’s been my friend since tenth grade algebra, and Ivy…well. We go way back.

  “Couches,” I say. “They’re not going to get off each other for hours. Melody scored some E somehow.”

  “That bitch never shares her shit. I’m so over it.” Ivy cranes her neck over my head at Alyssa. “Hey. What are you doing?”

  Alyssa holds up her phone.

  “Let me see,” Ivy says, and she squishes in close, snaking her arm around my waist. She smells like lemon and jasmine. “Oh God, not her. She has this awful girlfriend and they’re always trying to pull in some unsuspecting victim.”

  Alyssa hesitates but finally swipes left.

  “No,” Ivy says on the next one. “Way too filtered. Who knows what she actually looks like.”

  Left again.

  “Oh, she’s good. I slept with her last summer. Nice apartment. Gets a little clingy, but…they all do. Saw her in line for the bathroom about an hour ago if you want to track her down.”

  Alyssa swipes right. “No match.”

  “Hmm. That’s a shame.” Ivy raises her drink to her mouth, then lowers it and narrows her eyes when Alyssa swipes to the next girl. “Hang on. Who’s that?”

  According to the name at the top of the profile, it’s Dot. She has black hair, long and wavy, and, at least in her profile picture, pouty copper-red lips and big eyes with perfectly winged liner. She’s looking artfully away from the camera, one hand holding her hair back from her face.

  “She’s in here?” Alyssa says. “She is not twenty-one.”

  “Neither are we,” Ivy says, looking around.

  “And by the time we turn twenty-one, maybe she’ll be eating solid foods and sleeping through the night.”

  “Her profile says eighteen,” Ivy says. A year younger than us.

  “I will take a vow of celibacy if she’s eighteen,” I say.

  Ivy laughs. “And that’d be different from your current state how?”

  “Hey.”

  The song changes, the crowd on the dance floor shifts a little, and Ivy points across the room. “There.”

  I’m surprised Ivy recognized her, honestly. The girl standing on the edge of the dance floor with a death grip on her drink and a scared shitless expression on her face doesn’t exactly match the Tinder profile, but, you know, who among us ever did?

  Alyssa groans. “God, Ivy, leave her alone. She’s the dictionary definition of ‘baby gay.’”

  Ivy finishes her drink. “So she needs to feel welcome.”

  “That girl is not going home with you,” I say.

  Ivy gives me a brief kiss, and my whole world is peach lip gloss for a moment. “Famous last words,” she says, and she tweaks my nose and saunters across the dance floor, bodies parting for her like the Red Sea. She heads straight to Dot without faking any kind of nonchalance, and immediately she’s bending down a foot to say something in her ear.

  I always wonder what she says to girls. Maybe when you look like that, it doesn’t matter.

  Dot nods, and Ivy steals her drink and takes a sip—it’s some pink thing—then makes a face and sets it aside. She takes Dot’s hand and pulls her slowly out to the dance floor, and Dot follows without resisting, a look on her face I know way too well. I’ve seen it on every fucking lesbian in the state at this point. The wide eyes, the slightly parted lips. It’s the face you make when Ivy chooses you.

  “She is pretty,” Alyssa says.

  “Ivy likes older girls,” I say. “I don’t know why she’s pretending like she wants to teach a new dog old tricks.”

  “Imagine Ivy being your lesbian welcoming committee,” Alyssa says. “I can’t decide if she’d do more scaring off or converting.”

  “We could put her on recruitment and find out.”

  “Hmm, yeah. Send her to Boston.”

  I turn back to the bar—I really don’t need to watch Ivy’s indoctrination program; I’m an old dog and they are old tricks—and order something stronger.

  A guy comes up with his boyfriend and compliments Alyssa’s glasses, and she starts talking to him about face shapes and polarized lenses and online discount codes like they’ve known each other for years. Alyssa could find friends in a vacuum. I try not to look at Ivy and Dot, but every time I do, it’s like I’ve been fast-forwarding through a soft-core porno. First their hands are on each other. Then they’re kissing. Then Ivy is hiking her leg up to wrap around Dot’s little waist and pull her closer.

  They’re back over to me before my drink is finished, Ivy’s hand on the small of Dot’s back, Dot’s eyes on Ivy. “This is Alyssa and Andie,” Ivy says to Dot, her voice smooth. “We’re ready to go,” she says to me.

  I look at Dot. Her face reminds me of my brother psyching himself up for a roller coaster. I sigh. “Hi. Andie.”

  “I’m Dot,” she says.

  “Do you want to go home with her?”

  Ivy raises an eyebrow at me, but Dot takes a moment. She looks up at Ivy, and something in her eyes is…calculating. Like she’s seeing how the whole night is going to go from here, and I want to tell her that she has no fucking idea, that she’s in way over her head. Because who wouldn’t be, with Ivy?

  But what do I really know about it?

  “Yeah,” Dot says after a moment, and she turns back to me. “Of course.”

  Alyssa’s enjoying her new friends and eyeing a new group of girls who just came in and says she’ll catch a ride home with Melody and Diana whenever they release each other, so I leave with Ivy and Dot, spilling out of the club and toward the lot
two blocks away where I left my car. We’re up on College Hill, and the street’s covered with Brown and RISD kids standing in line for cheap pizza or stumbling back to their dorms. Dot’s a little slow in her high heels, and she lags behind Ivy, who snarks to me, “Do you really think I didn’t make sure she wanted to come?”

  “Can’t be too careful.”

  “I can rescue my own damsels, thanks. Or is this interrogation thing a new role you provide?”

  “What, you mean along with my taxi service? And only if they look like they were born during the Obama administration.”

  Ivy glares at me and slows down to take Dot’s hand.

  They get in the back seat together and are all over each other before I’ve even started the car. Christ. I roll my eyes and adjust the rearview mirror so I don’t have to look at them. “Yeah, you’re welcome for the ride,” I mumble to myself, wondering, like I always do, why the hell I always agree to do this shit.

  God, I don’t even agree. I volunteer.

  I weave us around the college kids, down the hill, into the lights of the city, and south to good old Elmwood, the neighborhood where Ivy and I have lived since we were little kids making pillow forts and mixing nail polish colors and teaching each other how to kiss. Or I guess she taught me.

  I don’t really wonder why I volunteer for this shit. I just wish I did.

  Elmwood’s one of the shittier parts of the city, and I kind of expect Dot to try to back out when she sees where we’re headed. She wouldn’t be the first prospective girl of Ivy’s to do it, and she doesn’t exactly look streetwise. But she doesn’t care, or maybe just doesn’t notice, with her face and hands otherwise occupied, feeling up my best friend in my back seat, and there’s no protest as I turn onto Ivy’s block.

  And then immediately stop, because her street is crowded with police cars, firefighters, and a bunch of people gathered on the sidewalk.

  “Ivy,” I say.

  “Mmm,” she says, her hands on Dot’s waist, their lips together.

  “Ivy.”

  She pulls away and shoots daggers at me in the rearview mirror. “What?”