Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter To The World

Mom stored Ivy’s great-grandmother’s hope chest up here in the attic, which became Ivy’s room a few months ago so the twins could have their own space. It sat at the end of her bed and smelled like cedar and old stuff. Inside, ancient pictures and clothes and knickknacks were tucked away like secrets. There was even an old wedding dress in there, which Ivy thought was sort of creepy. When she asked about it, her mom told her that way back when, a hope chest was where a girl collected things she would need when she got married, hoping for the right boy to come along so her real life could start. Then her mother went on and on about how marriage had nothing to do with a girl’s real life and how Ivy should hope for lots of different things, not just a boy, which was a relief.

She kept her real dreams in a notebook, where everything was a complete secret. Her hope chest was securely hidden away and guarded.

Ivy aimed the headlamp’s beam at the purple-and-white cover of her notebook. It was one of those Decomposition notebooks, and she got it from her language arts teacher at school. She liked thinking about her notebook like that-decomposition. That’s what it felt like to her, anyway: taking things apart in her head and putting them down on paper so she could figure out how they worked.

Outside, the thunder and lightning snapped right alongside each other, perfect secret drawing weather. Ivy flipped through the crinkly pages and caught a glimpse of a drawing she’d abandoned a few months ago as a hopeless case. She narrowed her eyes and glared at her family sitting on the grass in a large field. The grass in this field wasn’t green, it was silver and pink with a border of blue-leafed trees. There were Mom and Dad, their eyes shining and their mouths happy, holding Ivy’s new twin brothers, Aaron and Evan, in their arms. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Layla, was right where she should be-sitting between their parents, grinning at Evan while Aaron wrapped his tiny hand around her finger.

Ivy scanned the page for inspiration. There was one person missing from this family portrait, and she couldn’t figure out where to put her.

Where to put Ivy.

She glowered at the picture and flicked the page over so hard, it tore right out of the notebook. She nearly balled it up and tossed it toward her garbage can, which was already overflowing with other drawings gone awry. But it felt weird to throw away a picture of her family, even if she wasn’t in it. Instead, she folded it up and stuffed it into her swirly blue pillowcase.

It wasn’t the picture for a night like this anyway. This night needed one of her stormy pictures, like the one she was so close to showing Layla just a couple of weeks ago. The one she wouldn’t ever, ever show her now.

She found the most recent drawing she’d been working on. There were dozens just like it in her notebook. Each one had some sort of house snuggled up in the branches of blue trees, trees on fire, trees made of gold, trees under the ocean, and trees at the tippy top of the highest mountain.

All of them had a girl with curly hair inside the house… and she wasn’t alone. Another girl was in there with her. Sometimes they were standing, looking out at flame-colored hills in the distance. Sometimes they were lying down, tucked into sleeping bags that glowed because they were covered with tiny fireflies, like a hundred little night-lights. Sometimes they were reading or, like this one, facing each other and smiling.

Ivy didn’t know who the girl was, but she wasn’t Layla, and she wasn’t her best friend, Taryn, or any of the other girls at school, who lately only wanted to talk about boys. Ivy was twelve years old and had never had a crush on a boy before, but maybe she just hadn’t met one she liked. Or maybe she couldn’t even get crushes. That was her: Uncrushable Ivy.

But that didn’t feel right either, so really, Ivy had no idea what she thought about crushes at all.

Which was exactly why the thunder outside was perfect for this picture. When Ivy looked at it, she felt a storm in her stomach. She felt a storm in her head. She felt a storm fizzing into her fingertips and toes.

Because in every single picture Ivy drew, she and that girl were holding hands. And they weren’t holding hands like she and Layla used to hold hands when they ran down the street to play in the park. It wasn’t the way she and Taryn used to hold hands when they ran through the sprinkler in Ivy’s backyard, before Taryn got too cool to run through sprinklers and Ivy told her she was too cool for sprinklers too.

Ivy stared at the picture, chewing on her lower lip. Maybe she should rip them all out, starting with this one. She liked storms, but storms could be dangerous. And if Ivy had shown one of her stormy pictures to Layla, maybe her sister would’ve looked at her like she was weird.

She should definitely rip them all out.