Ivanna & Annie

the story of them

Ivanna had never liked goodbyes. She thought they were too dull and final and they spoke of endings, and Ivanna hated those. Instead, she would say, "until we meet again." This was the first thing Annie learned about her.

From the day that they met, the two girls were inseparable, nearly attached at the hip. They went to the parks when it was lovely outside, and coffee shops and bookstores when it rained. They talked through to the early hours of the morning, and though they never had pauses in their conversations, sometimes, they enjoyed the silence, hearing nothing but the faint sound of each other's breath down the phone line, rising and falling with the beat of their hearts.

Annie's parents used to call them Ivannie. "A matching set, the two of you," her mother would say. "Never one without the other." And Annie would blush and say that they were embarrassing her, but secretly she enjoyed the constant reminder of it; the idea of being without Ivanna didn't sit well with her.

It had been beautiful that day, with the wind pressing kisses into their skin and sprinklers nearby showering them with light droplets, when Ivanna first admitted it. They lay on their backs, feeling the soft itch of the grass beneath them prick at exposed flesh.

"You have something to say," Annie had said. She had always known how to read Ivanna when she was too quiet.

"I have something to tell you," Ivanna had replied, looking deliberately away from her face. Instead she looked up to the sky and studied the fine, curling movements of the clouds in the breeze and pretended her next words were nothing compared to the immensity of the universe above. "I think I'm halfway in love with you."

There was a long pause where neither of them said anything, but when Ivanna finally looked back down, Annie's eyes were the stars that hung like pendants in the sky. "I'm halfway in love with you, too," she said. And Annie had reached over and pulled her lips to her own; she cupped Ivanna's cheeks in the palms of her hands and they inhaled each other like the end of the world was upon them, and it was full of avidity and fervor and a little bit of the desperation that comes with being teenagers in love.

Every kiss after that was the same as the first, and they never tired of it. Ivanna liked tracing patterns into Annie's dark skin, was fascinated with her excess of olive curls. She would run her hands through the frizzy mess, coiling ringlets around her fingers and burying her face in it. Annie would laugh whenever she did this, and pull teasingly at Ivanna's own hair. She liked when Annie's posture righted itself at the mere mention of Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, liked to sense the thrum of the strings under Annie's bow, and the violin's melody would send out vibrations so proud and beautiful that the room would throb with the sound of it.

Annie adored Ivanna's body, though she knew Ivanna herself hated it. She saw doughy fat rolls where Annie saw appealing curves, she saw ugly slashes against the stark paleness of her thighs where Annie saw proof of her years on earth, she saw a mottled, splotchy face while Annie could only see the brilliant gleam of her teeth when she smiled.

She liked to watch Ivanna read, watch her mouth the dialogue silently and imitate the expressions in the book. Sometimes she would mumble the words out loud and startle herself, and Annie thought it was adorable. She used to ask Ivanna to read to her, and she would pull out felt-tipped markers and doodle on her jeans as she listened to the story flow around her until that world swallowed them both whole.

Ivanna loved Annie, and Annie loved Ivanna.

But Ivanna's parents didn't approve; they were too blinded by their disgust and hatred to see how happy their daughter was, and they were furious when they found out. Ivanna was forbidden from seeing 'that dirty girl' again, and the only sights she caught of Annie were the faint glimpses in grocery stores and shopping malls, so brief that Ivanna could never be sure if she had really been there at all, or if she had simply wanted it so badly she'd willed herself to believe anything. Her parents' tight hold on her was like a leash around her throat, and for those torturous months she wanted nothing more than to choke on it. Then the choice was made for her, and Ivanna was being sent away.

"To cure you," her mother said. "You're sick, honey."

"It's for you own good," her father said. "We're only trying to look out for you."

They weren't completely heartless. They let her see Annie once more, in what Ivanna saw as their final mercy and the only thing stopping her from hating them with every rage-filled pore of her body, though she knew she would never forgive them.

Ivanna and Annie stand facing each other with their barriers up, stiffly like they are strangers. They stand as if they have not spilled every secret under the sun to the person in front of them, as if they have not tasted the nectar of the other's lips pressed against their own, knowing that nothing would ever be sweeter again, as if they have not loved more deeply than the entire universe could dream to imagine.

"You're leaving," says Annie. You're leaving me is implied.

"Yes," says Ivanna. She wants to hold her hand, touch her skin, kiss her face, but she dares nothing more than a whispering touch of Annie's forearm. It is worth more than anything else she could say, especially with her parents' withering scowls searing holes into the back of her head and like hot metal, they brand their mark upon her skin.

"I wish you would stay." Stay with me. Annie makes the desperate effort to look Ivanna in the eye; she has always been the bravest of the two.

"So do I." Ivanna has to fight back the nauseating bile growing in the pit of her chest, and her tongue fumbles around her words.

"This is it, then," says Annie, "until we meet again."

"No," says Ivanna, "goodbye."