The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (23 page)

"You know what the problem is?" Trevor says.
"The problem is, you're treating this like a problem." We're talking on the
phone. I'm sitting on my bed, legs folded. I stare at my guitar case across the
room. For some reason, since I got the money, I can't open it. I haven't felt
like playing. I don't know why, except that I don't know if I'm the girl who
plays that guitar or not. I've got old-me and new-me pieces, and I'm not sure
where they belong.

"You don't understand," I say. "Maybe it's just
new. But everyone's different and it's bugging me. I don't know. Maybe I'm just
adjusting to it."

"It"--the
word has its own definition.
"It"
means the money.

"In, you're not having any fun with this. This
should be fun. This is, like, every person's
dream."

"It's hard to have fun when everyone is acting
so weird. They're not relating to me. Just me with money. Already. My family,
the Irregulars ..." I don't mention Trevor himself. That'd put us on opposite
sides, and I need him now on mine. "You should hear Jane. Her voice is all
distant-cool. I don't get it."

"It's all new, In. And maybe, are you maybe
reading too much into things?"

"I don't know." I trace the squares of my quilt
with my finger.

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"In, God! This is great! You're forgetting it's
great. Okay, I know what we're going to do. We're going to go
shopping."

"Shopping." Maybe he's right. I
have
forgotten the fun parts, haven't I? I've been sucked up suddenly into the
weighty and spinning frenzy of Important Decisions.

"What's the point of having money if you don't
spend it? What's the fucking
point,
In? Come on."

And right then, I'm sure he
is
right.
I'm sure, because this small spoon starts stirring a little pot of glee inside.
The glee of the traitor, the swapping over from you
shouldn't
to
why
not?
Fun--permission internally granted.

"I don't understand why you don't just go for
the big stuff right away," Trevor says. We're in Bob Weaver, who is gleaming so
hard it's nearly a gloat, heading out for our planned outing of disposable
income amusement. We just got fueled up with a double espresso and a brownie,
and I am officially and legally high. "If it were me, I'd be getting a stainless
steel beauty, freezer on the bottom, an ice maker, cubed or crushed."

A refrigerator. Hmm. With caffeine jazzing
through me, everything seems like an exceptional idea. I have to force myself to
stop and think. "Maybe tomorrow," I say. I see a folded sheet of notebook paper
sticking out from underneath Trevor. He's sitting on it. I give a little tug and
he moves a leg to free it. I unfold it and read.

"What?" I say. Happiness jets over to
irritation. "What's this?"

"It's nothing," he says. "Just a few ideas."
Refrigerator,
it actually reads.
Car stereo. Floor mats.
The words
run down the paper and extend to the other side.

"A list," I say. "But
your
list." And
there it is again, suddenly,

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some heavy feeling in my chest. Something that
feels like anger but that might be disappointment. I'm hoping for anger. Anger
is brief and vacates the premises quickly; disappointment is the uninvited guest
that never leaves. I try for anger. "What, am I Santa and you've been a good
boy?"

"Ideas,
In. Come on, lighten
up."

Nothing makes you feel less like lightening up
than someone telling you to lighten up. But this is supposed to be a fun day. We
have planned for fun, and when you plan for fun, you don't want a fight. Fights
on days you've planned for fun are especially upsetting. I don't want to argue,
not today. So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier
than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their
big Broadway number on your internal stage.

We go to the mall. For the record, I hate the
mall. I hate the mall music and the mall lights and the mall chicks with their
mall chick outfits, and the mall foam boat that the screaming kids play on. I
hate the mall women spraying you with mall perfume and the mall escalators (I
always find the down when I need the up) and the mall parking lot. The only
thing worse than the mall is the mall at Christmas.

But let me tell you something about the mall.
The mall is a very different experience when you have money as opposed to when
you don't. It's the difference between standing outside of somewhere and going
in.

You can tell that Trevor and I are mall
virgins, because we make strategic error number one right off the bat. Trevor
doesn't want the Mustang scratched, so he parks on the top level of the garage,
in the farthest-away spot, a spot that has its own zip code and isn't close to
anything except the JCPenney photographer and

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the catalogue purchase return counter. I should
have brought my hiking boots and compass and trail mix.

The main part of the mall... well, it's like
being on the inside of a pinball machine. We bounce from flashing lights to
flippers to bells. My mood improves by the second. This is way better even than
the caffeine rush. By the time I get out of Radio Shack, Trevor has to make a
trip to the car. I buy tiny televisions and travel alarm clocks and five cell
phones (family plan), and a DVD player and a big-screen TV that will be
delivered the next day. Headphones. Xbox for Bex. Games for aforementioned Xbox.
Digital camera. Ipods, docking stations (whatever those are--Trevor says we need
them), a laptop, a remote control robot.

Trevor wants to go into Victoria's Secret, but
I say fuck off. It's my money, and I go into Sharper Image instead and I buy a
travel pillow and massagers and something that measures your golf swing (Trevor
likes this) and a weather forecaster and a machine to make our air pure and this
thing to clean our jewelry, even though we don't have jewelry yet.

Trevor makes two more trips to the car, and I
go clothes shopping. I start to get the hang of this, see, because I'm feeling
this mall-with-money difference, this
I'd-own-the-world-if-I-wanted-
to
buzz. Something is happening to me
in here. I feel swingy and powerful, like Freud after he brings you a mouse
head. The more I get into it, the more I get into it, if that makes sense. The
noise, the lights, the credit card slide across the table; it's some Las Vegas
high minus the Elvis impersonators. I buy shirts and jackets and a robe for Mom
and shoes for Severin and a coat for him too, and outfits for Bex, skirts and
sweaters, and this Harley shirt that comes with a matching key ring that Trevor
likes.

I'm pretending I'm a millionaire and can buy
anything I want

175

and I'm starting to believe me. We're walking
through Nordstrom when Trevor starts to get whiny.

"Can we eat yet," he says. "C'mon, In. I'm
tiii-red."

But there in the center of the store on the
first floor is a place I've never gone. A non-Indigo place. A small perfumey
universe of swivelly white chairs and women with high cheekbones and powdery
faces and lab coats, which are supposed to make us think that eyeliner is a
science that requires an expert. A place that says that real beauty can be
bought only there; that the plastic packages of the drugstore mascaras and
lipsticks are merely clownish frauds. Even looking over there gives me some
scritch of insecurity, something I suddenly feel I need to overcome now that I
could belong there. When you have money, you have Ziploc bags and not fold-over
baggies. You drink Diet Coke and 7UP, not the "Diet Cola" and "Lemon Lime Drink"
of the store brand. You fill up the whole gas tank, instead of buying the few
dollars' worth you have in your wallet. You go to a salon, rather than cut your
own hair or get a ten-dollar chop job at a place where everyone rushes out
looking the same. And you come to this place, where a skilled professional with
a cool demeanor guides you toward the power of beauty. It's a test. The big
test. A fitting-in right of passage. A metaphorical journey from the two-dollar
Wet n Wild lipstick of the masses to the seventeen-dollar lipstick that comes in
its own glossy bag with a braided rope handle.

I step forward and try out a wealthy
confidence. I sit down in one of the swivelly chairs. I am a millionaire. Once
the lab coat is off, once they remove the jacket of superiority, these makeup
counter women just go home and make a salad and get up the next day and put the
lab coat on again.

"I'd like a whole new look," I say. The woman
standing over

176

me has blond hair swooped up crescent-roll
style, a poofy, decisive makeup brush already poised in her hand.

"The colors you're wearing are too harsh," she
says. La-ti-dah, big deal.

"Your colors are fiii-iine, In. I want to
go-oooo," Trevor whines.

The woman is wiping my face with a cotton ball
dunked in something cool and stingy. "You have good lines," she says. "Let's
make the most of them." It's a compliment and an insult both. She starts dabbing
and dobbing, her face close to mine, warm breath smelling like what she had for
lunch, making me shut my eyes and hold my own breath. I pop my eyes open, and
yikes, hers are right there, large and staring at my mouth, and I slam my eyes
shut again. Lip liner, eyes, brows--my skin pulls different directions, and then
finally, "There. I'd recommend the number seventeen moisturizer, and the skin
care line. You have large pores."

I look in the round mirror on the counter in
front of me. I look airbrushed. Finished in a way I've never looked finished
before. I'm afraid to blink, lest I crack myself.

"You look great," the woman says.

"Right," Trevor says. "Except for the hair, she
looks like you. Fuck, they all look like you," Trevor grouses, swooping his hand
in a wide motion to include all the women in all the swivelly chairs.

"Don't mind him," I say, moving my lips like a
ventriloquist. "He just needs lunch. I'll take it all," I say.

I have to ride home sitting on the Motorized
Bumper Boat, with the Turbo Hair Groomer and the shower radio wedged under
my

177

elbows and the espresso machine and alcohol
breath-screening device under my feet. Trevor perked up after I bought him a hot
dog and fries and an Orange Julius, extra large. We pull into the driveway and
he honks the horn like mad, scaring Freud, who leaps from the open window of
Mom's car, where he was sleeping but knows he shouldn't have been sleeping. He
jets across the lawn and hides under the front hedge. Bex runs out the front
door.

"Christmas and every birthday anyone's ever
had," she shrieks. "Now we're talking!"

"Xbox," I say. "No," she breathes.
"Yes."

"OH MY GOD!" she jumps up and down the way she
used to when she was younger and had to go to the bathroom badly. I carry in an
armload of boxes, passing Ron the Buddha on the way in, who eyes us serenely
from over by the rhododendron bush. I flop onto the sofa when I get in, take my
shoes off. Mom's wearing a pot holder on one hand, with a lethal amount of happy
toasters on it. "Well, look at you," she says.

I put my hand to my face, forgetting the layers
pasted there. I look at my fingertips, splotched with dots of brown. I haven't
figured out yet that you're not supposed to do this. "I had a
makeover."

"So I see," she says.

Severin pushes open the front door with his
hip. "Clear the living room, we're coming in!" His arms are full of boxes. "Make
room!" He shoves Mom's rocker with his foot, and it sits against the wall
pointed the wrong direction. It looks somehow offended.

Trevor sets some boxes down with a
thump.

178

"Hey, easy with the merchandise," Bex says. The
room is filling. "Check it out!" Bex holds up a musical soap dispenser for Mom
to see. Mom nods. She looks overwhelmed. Picks at a piece of packing tape with
her finger.

"Let me get a knife," Severin says. He trots to
the kitchen and comes back, starts slitting the lids of boxes.

"Maybe we should do this in some sort of...
order," Mom says.

"Nah," Bex says.

Trevor returns. He passes out the boxes of cell
phones. "For you, Missus," he says to Mom. "And you, and you, and you," to me,
kissing me. "And me."

"A CELL PHONE!" Bex shrieks.

I remove mine. I decide I want to take a
picture of all this.

"Wait, we've got to charge them first," Severin
says.

Trevor takes control of this, lines them up on
the floor by the TV. In a few minutes, the room is filled with blocks of
Styrofoam and plastic wrappings and instruction manuals. I hear Bex's voice,
locate the top of her head as she sits cross-legged on the floor in a bare spot
surrounded by cardboard towers.

"Cool," she says. She's wearing a pair of the
headphones, and she's got the alcohol-level breath analyzer, Alcohawk, held in
her palm.

"Indigo," Mom says. "You don't even
drink."