I Wish

Chapter 56

Ivy was sitting on the couch, leaning forwards with her hair hanging down around her in pretty waves. I sighed just looking at her, wondering if the individual parts that made her up would ever stop catching me at random times. Making me all gooey, and stare at her like she was a pan of triple choc brownies fresh from the oven. Her arms were holding up her head, resting elbow down on her knees, with her head resting on her hands. The expression in her eyes was odd, baffled as she stared at the TV. I’d thought it was funny when she wanted to watch ABC kids, but the longer we sat there the more I realised that she was looking for something. Something particular, and it was weird but I couldn't figure how it could be anything that could possibly be worth interrogating her about it. We had sun today, and it streamed in through the windows while I played with the ends of her hair. Losing the fight with my fixation with it, and let's face it I did have a fixation. Any opportunity to play with her hair and was going to take it. The expression on her face was hilarious. There was a look of deep and loathing revision as she sat through an episode of In the Night Garden. Her eyebrows scrunched up and the pout on her face was epic… great now I was obsessing over how kissable her lips were. Do you have any idea how hard it was to quit that downward spiral that left me wanting another go around of sans clothes. There were a couple of other shows we watched together, and some of them made her giggle. We both agreed that Pepper needed to be bacon though, and Thomas needed to be melted down in a scrapyard somewhere the sooner the better, and Hoopla doopla had her in hysterics. She was leaning on me to show herself upright, and while it wouldn’t have been that funny without her I couldn’t help laughing along with her. She liked the songs though, ‘It’s because we love you,’ and the ‘We are Australian,’ cover that they did. Her smile was so bright when they played, and she leaned into me like it was date night. She liked those, but the rest really seemed to disturb her. 

“And is this acceptable for children? This is what is preferred for them to watch?” she asked, looking at me more unsettled than any horror movie that had come before had managed. I didn’t get it, this wasn’t just normal kids shows. Sure they were a lot more… eh, the censorship fairy might have come in since I was little, but they were just normal kids shows.

“That’s what we’ve got,” I confirmed brightly, not seeing anything wrong with them. Yet, Ivy would fix that. Not that I was going to let it go without a fight. Nobody liked having their childhood attacked, as far as I could see it was fine. A little overly appropriate, for small children anyway, for an adult this was all the kinds of wrong.

“Then no wonder humans grow up to be stupid so often,” Ivy said barely even blinking as she did so, and it was so blasie. You would think that she was talking about the weather, instead of attempting to shame an entire f*****g speices. Okay, so it was more like an entire continent. Still, that was my continent and I would get offended if I wanted to. My first thought was um, excuse me? These things are specially designed to help children learn, and if must have shown on my face. The annoyed confusion of someone who was feeling triggered for reasons that they couldn’t quite pinpoint.

“What are you talking about?” I asked her flatly and unimpressed, twisting to face her. She wore the oh s**t look of a person that had just realised that the person that they are talking to believes something that is really wrong, and now she’s going to have to correct that.

“Well... are they supposed to be able to think for themselves, or are they just supposed to wait for information to be spoon fed to them? There is very little in the way of subtext or depth,” she lectured with a sad sigh, “It’s like whoever designed these things was setting up people who need to be told things, and an inability to validate that information. I’m just curious? What are you programing the children for exactly?” I wanted to argue, really I did, but it was such a baffling complaint that I would actually have to stop and think about it for longer than I’d be able to and still bring it up during this conversation. People have been complaining for decades that it was called TV programming because it was actually programming us, but for someone who’d never clapped eyes on a TV to pick it up in a couple of hours from kids shows? Maybe there was a little more weight to the theory than I’d thought. Which was rubbish because I wanted to think that the people who believed that were the crazies. 

“Why did you want to watch it anyway?” I asked her and her face scrunched even further. A tiny nagging voice piped up with the suggestion that maybe she’d been fishing for tips on how to be more manipulative when she felt the situation call for it. I tried to quash it, because although I was doing my best to ignore the possibility.

“The song, with the kids, someone said I never believed where it came from and they were right,” she said shaking her head with a fond smile, and I was really beginning to hate this mystery best friend of hers. She hadn’t even mentioned her name, and I’d been thrown out of the room while she and Candice talked. I didn’t want to know the kind of threats they’d probably spat in each other's directions while I wasn’t present. “She pulls things from the weirdest places, and if it wasn’t so funny I’d be questioning their sense of humor. Those creatures with the TV’s on their stomachs? They are not right. At all, and don’t get me started on… actually any of it, it’s all very disturbing,” she said overdramatically, “Why is the song on there?” See I would have answered, with a simple answer to because it was simple, but I was too busy trying to figure out where on earth she’d ever heard ‘We are Australian’? Jealousy was for petty people I told myself… annnnnd apparently I was petty. I was really really petty, because I hated this b***h.

“You’re pop culture knowledge is freaking me out,” I growled in response because that tiny bit of dislike refused to be contained, “Could you not have had some semblance of rhyme or reason to any of it?” And not for no reason at all, but most likely because I’d said the words rhyme and reason, I was suddenly thinking about ‘The Phantom Tollbooth.’  Even that place seemed saner than my life some days lately. Ivy cracked her head around to face me so fast that I was worried that she was going to snap it off. Building and visible frustration layering every bit of her and flowing off her body like angry waves.

“I know,” she ground out, as if this were a frustration that I was personally responsible for, and rolled her eyes, “I know. If you don’t think for one single second that I don’t spend a frankly alarming amount of time worrying about how ridiculous, and ridiculously unhelpful, the information I have is? I couldn’t have learned anything relevant. It’s times like this that I think that my human’s-person was taking the mickey.” Considering that she’d just called me a human’s-person like she was a Boov from the movie Home, I was going to say that they were. Made me hate them a little less, because someone needed to mess with this girl. Ivy would definitely become too big for her britches if she was left to her own devices. Silver lining for everything, right? Yeah no. Still hated her.

“See,” I pointed out, throwing my hands in the air with frustration, “That! That there! Where did you learn that expression, ‘taking the mickey’? Why on earth would that be something you’ve picked up over literally everything else. Anything else, that's so pointless.”

“I know. Trust me, you can deal with the person responsible because I thought that they were helping,” she said almost gritting her teeth just thinking about it, and the word helping was dripping with so much disgust that I couldn’t tell if she resented them, or if she resented herself because she believed them. 

“Sure thing,” I agreed because then I would get to meet her, and then I could find more reasons to hate her. Alright, so maybe not that. It would be nice but it seemed to be more because of Ivy that I would have to at least try. She seemed to find this genuinely distressing, and I wasn’t a fan of that. Not to mention that my life could have been so much easier if someone had just trained her properly for humanity. Take a moment and try to imagine the warning label that humanity as whole should come with. Do not touch with a ten foot pole. Violent and contradictory, do not engage. Flammable. Or at least I imagine it would say something like that. If I didn’t know better I would say that there was some i***t somewhere that thought that this was hilarious. “So don’t take this the wrong way,” I started hesitantly, starting a new conversation, “My parents should have mentioned you going home by now?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s magic,” she said happily as if it were no big deal, seeming very on board with putting the last conversation away, and I looked at her horrified. She’d what? Ivy?! She groaned, and blew out a sigh. “I’m not making them like me or anything, they just don’t realise when the week’s up. We stay in the middle of that week for as long as we like,” she explained softly, huffing and pressing a kiss to my head. I accepted it good-naturedly, and tried to figure out what exactly the ethics of what she was doing were. Colours flickered behind her back, and I took comfort in the sparkling light. Nobody else seemed to notice, but since we’d had the tea party I hadn’t seemed to be able to stop. It didn’t hurt anyone though, so I didn’t bring it up. The issue of what she was doing to my parents? It at least had to be addressed.

“That’s morally wrong, and they’re nice to you so personally objectionable also,” I said trying to cover for the part where I was thinking fast, to figure out what exactly I was willing to commit to. I knew that was right, it just didn’t match up to what I wanted to do. Which was about as simple as you make it, so complicated. I was going to go with complicated.

“You didn’t tell me to stop it yet,” she said smugly, making an observation, because no. No I had not. Reinforcing my credibility as a shitty human? It’s like my own new shiny hobby that I was determined to excel at.