Indie Girl (2 page)

“What
is
that you’ve been reading all day?” asked my father, who had been working on his speech in his office at home.

“A book on fashion,” I said. “The first one I’ve ever seen. I love it.”

“Well, at least it’s something to keep you occupied,” my mother announced wearily as she transported a tin of hot
chapatis
from the kitchen. “Finally, one whole day in which you’ve not told me that you are bored.”

That’s how it began. This was before I was really familiar with Google, so I had no choice but to actually leave my house to find out more. I went back to the library to see if there were any more fashion books, and checked out anything I could get my hands on. When I had exhausted all those possibilities, I asked my mother to take me to Borders and Barnes & Noble, where I sat in
a chair leafing through encyclopedias on fashion and books on fashion history that I knew I could never afford to buy, my mother hovering nearby checking out the arrivals on the New Fiction table. I went all the way back to Egypt in 3000
BC,
which, according to the weightier books on the subject said, was where fashion began. And I slowly charted its evolution through the ages, through ancient cultures, to arrive at where we were today.

All of a sudden, history was interesting to me; if I didn’t know the difference between Mayans and Etruscans before, I knew it now. As I left Borders one humid afternoon, I stopped by the magazine section, where I picked up a copy
InStyle.
I leafed through the pages, gazing at the silk bustiers and taffeta gowns, the hip-hugging denim capris and leather halterneck dresses worn by rich, famous, and beautiful people. I loved staring at the clothes in the pictures, wanting to soak in the details of each and every one.

It was that summer that I decided that fashion was going to be my life.

Now, at fifteen, my ambitions were utterly serious. Girls my age loved to troll through the mall, checking out the cool clothes in store windows. That was all fine and fun. But as far as I saw it, the study of fashion was a serious academic exercise. While the other girls in my class looked at “The Red Carpet” section of
Us Magazine,
I perused the contents of
The St. James Fashion Encyclopedia: A Survey of
Style from 1945 to the Present.
When they were off listening to the new Gwen Stefani album, I would be examining every item of clothing she was wearing in her videos, guessing which designer she had chosen and why, writing lengthy dissertations for myself about how her fashion choices reflected her mind and music.

I put as much thought into fashion as my friends did when they were cramming for geometry or biology or English. That’s why I loved
Celebrity Style
so much. It took fashion as seriously as I did. It didn’t do what other magazines did—stalking famous people, writing about their drug addictions and alcoholic binges. It didn’t talk down to young readers, like so many of those teen magazines did. It was about fashion, yes. But as I told my mother countless times, it was frivolous in a
good
way. Few magazines could claim such a virtue. Yes, there were beautiful pictures and glamorous clothes, but I loved how it was put together. It was really about
style.
And because I was so in love with the subject, I could talk for an hour about Donna Karan’s signature look or the resurgence of Pucci or what defined London street style. I
cared
about it.

Fashion was my life. And today, after staving off sleep during algebra and being breathed on in class by Mrs. Mok, who had the worst case of halitosis ever, I was finally going to start living it.

I skipped the last five minutes of phys ed so I could hit the showers early, beating out the lines that would invariably start forming outside the curtained-off cubicles. It was my least favorite subject anyway: The problem with exercise, I had decided, was that it involved movement. Whenever my mother was in an especially generous mood, I would take advantage of it by asking her to write a note for Mrs. Mok, specifying that my allergies were acting up, that I was wheezing and puffing and couldn’t
possibly
jog around the campus again. My mother might have known that this wasn’t true, and that perhaps it didn’t reflect well on my doctor father, to have a daughter who always claimed some ailment or another. But my mother was a very practical sort: As long as I didn’t miss “real classes” as she called them, skipping phys ed on occasion was fine. After all, being able to sprint a couple of miles or score goals wasn’t going to help me get into an Ivy League college, was it? But today, I had decided to go for it, figuring that maybe a bout of exercise would lend a nice blush to my cheeks and a shine to my eyes before my life-changing moment with Aaralyn Taylor.

Still, my lack of interest in the exercise discipline, combined with the love of my mother’s homemade
idli sambar,
accounted for the roll of flab I had around my waist and that hovered on my upper thighs, parts of me that my irritating younger brother would describe as “jiggly bits.”

And I had to confess that there were moments when I would almost succumb to the desperation to be thin that lived in the air around me and that was everywhere I looked. There were at least three other girls I knew of in my school who chewed gum all day because it was the only thing that made them feel less hungry. I couldn’t imagine forgoing my mother’s
dosa
for a packet of Dentyne. There were rumors that Ashli, a brunette who was a math whiz although she looked like she could be a model, would routinely throw up after lunch, just so she would never have to worry about zipping up her True Religion jeans. Anybody considered even remotely fat or pudgy was immediately discounted as a “loser,” even if they were sweet and smart. I had tried, ever since I started high school, not to buy into it, to try and be comfortable with who I was. But I would be the first to admit that it was not always easy, that I had pushed away
my mac-and-cheese in the cafeteria more than once, that I had vowed to start that watermelon diet on Monday, but had given up as soon as I smelled my mother’s spices.

So thank heaven I knew how to dress. With the right cut of top and jeans, I had grown pretty good at camouflaging the parts of myself I most disliked.

Today, the day my life was going to change, I had carefully picked out a pair of cords, my favorite cap-sleeved cotton tee, and a nifty blazer with burnished chrome buttons. Gazing into the steamed-up mirror, I slicked back the golden highlights in my short hair, the color of which had made my parents cringe when I first came home with them a few weeks ago. It had been inconceivable that a black-haired Indian girl could carry off such pale streaks, but I somehow had managed to accomplish it, and even my parents eventually had to agree that I “looked nice.” The tiny diamond I wore in my right nostril sparkled beneath a spotlight overhead. When I had first started high school, all the girls had
oohed
and
ahhed
about my innate fashion sense. I decided not to tell them that every woman in my family had had a nose piercing as soon as she “approached womanhood” as my mother had nauseatingly called it, and that fashion had nothing to do with it. On my lips I rubbed some bronze-colored gloss, and feathered some mascara onto my lashes. I spritzed on the Shalimar perfume I had taken from my mother’s dressing table, wanting
desperately to smell like a grown-up. Then I took a slim chartreuse-colored
dupatta
and wove it through my belt loops, adding just a touch of ethnicity without looking like I was going to a Bengali religious festival. On my left wrist, surrounding the Timex I had found on eBay, were four mirrored bangles, their slim wooden bases knocking against each other. My mother had bought them for me during a recent grocery-shopping visit to “Little India” in Artesia, more than an hour’s drive from our house, but as close to going back to Calcutta as possible without actually having to get on a plane. When my mother had first brought them home, I had grimaced at their ultra-Indianness. But now, combined with bootleg corduroys. Nepalese beads around my neck, and pointy-toed Payless shoes on my feet, they looked perfect.

I stepped back, wishing that the school would at least invest in a full-length mirror in the girls’ changing room. I looked at myself up and down, reminding myself again why I coveted clothes so much. In the right things, like I was wearing today, I could shine. I could stand out and be distinctive. Fashion, in that sense, was really the only thing that helped me make any kind of a mark.

Now, I just had to hope that Aaralyn Taylor, discriminating fashionista that she was, would agree.

The auditorium was still being set up when I arrived. Brown plastic chairs were being wheeled out and stacked
in rows, about twenty in a line, stretching all the way back in the hall. Aaralyn Taylor wasn’t due to arrive for another fifteen minutes. The idea was for the assembly hall to be packed with eager listeners before she got there. Given her celebrity status and the fact that today’s visit was the highlight of Career Week, there was no reason it wouldn’t be. Guests from the previous day had included someone from NASA and a transport official from Los Angeles County, neither of whom had interested me very much. The following day, there would be talks given by a Silicon Valley executive and a political blogger, both of which had potential. But this encounter with someone who sat front row at all the biggest fashion shows, who regularly chatted on the phone with Nicole Kidman’s stylist or had personal shopping expeditions at Barneys: Well, how could anyone
not
want to come hear her? Aaralyn had become almost as famous as the stars who appeared in the pages of her magazine. I had seen her on TV, on the red carpet at all the award shows, being interviewed about her dress and jewels as if she were a nominee herself. She was the Anna Wintour of the West Coast, someone whose glamorous looks and coveted closet and access to huge movie stars put her in the same league as them.

But there was another far more compelling reason for me to be here.

The other week, tacked onto the bulletin board in the
College Counseling Center, was a flyer that made my head spin.

There, a few months before the end of semester and the start of summer break, counselors would post potential internships at local businesses that students might be interested in taking on over the summer. There were also babysitting jobs and lots of assistant positions to entertainment-industry types who lived out here in suburbia. But there were often a number of service jobs as well—sales positions in neighborhood boutiques or cashier postings in restaurants and cafés. I had gone along in the hopes of checking out potential listings for anything to do with fashion: Maybe the Gap or Victoria’s Secret in the mall closest to my home needed some help over the summer. Maybe I could spray perfume on people who walked through the beauty floor at Nordstrom; it was beauty and not fashion, but at least I’d be close to gorgeous clothes. There would have to be
something
for me.

And that’s when I saw it.

A pale green sheet of paper and, on it, in medium-size gray font some words that had made me almost faint with excitement.

This was it. This was everything I had ever wanted. I couldn’t tear myself away from the flyer. I would qualify well before July 1.
Celebrity Style
wanted me!

When I had gone home that afternoon, I barely spoke to my mother before racing upstairs to my computer. All I had been able to think about all day was how I would wow the people at the magazine, Aaralyn Taylor especially, not just with my enormous knowledge of and passion for the subject of fashion, but also for my reliability, efficiency, and punctuality. There was no way
I couldn’t get this job. I would know each and every item of clothing on sight. And as for accompanying a senior fashion editor on an interview or photo shoot—I would be knowledgeable and smart and would do the magazine proud. I was
perfect
for it. I just knew in my heart that nobody would be able to do this better than me. I didn’t care that it was in West Los Angeles, and that I would have to take three buses and spend two hours getting there. It was a matter of fate that I had come into the College Counseling Center that day and seen the flyer. My parents had always taught me to believe in destiny, and here it was, staring me in the face.

I peered intently at the screen. There was an application that had to be downloaded, printed out, filled in, and mailed back to a street address in Beverly Hills.

There wasn’t anyone who would read this and who would doubt my sincerity. Aaralyn Taylor, I had decided, must have been like me once. My words would resonate with her. She would see a kindred soul in me.

I thought of all that now, as I hung around the assembly hall waiting for the talk to begin. I had already sent in my application,
before
the deadline. I guess they had to give everyone a fair shot, but I was sure that my bid for the job was on the top of a big pile of them on Aaralyn Taylor’s desk, and that she had drawn a gold star on it and stuck on a Post-it note to call me.

I looked around for my best friend, Kim, whose
parents were Korean and, like my own, traditional but trying to keep up with the times. I finally caught sight of her down the long corridor, her blunt hair swinging from side to side as she waved and made her way toward me. She was the spitting image of her mother. Mrs. Cho was small and slender, her cheekbones high, her skin porcelain. She had always reminded me of a little doll. Kim had inherited her mother’s pretty if rather bland looks, but had elected to give herself a bit of an edge with some rather unusual fashion choices. One weekend she had dyed her bangs pink. Another, she had paid for an airbrush tattoo across her upper arm. Last week, she came to school wearing a vintage Hermès tie and baggy gray pants, looking for all the world like an Asian Annie Hall.