The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (2 page)

"It looks gorgeous," Trevor says. You can see
why I keep him around. I could turn it blue and he'd say the same thing. I
have
turned it blue and he's said the same thing. He grabs a hold of the
beads of my necklace, pulls me to him. He rubs the beard he's trying to grow
against my cheek and we kiss again. No offense to Trevor, but we all know he has
reluctant facial hair. He just can't grow a beard. My legs do better. We kiss a
little more, which is

8

something he
can
do, and then we walk
over to his car and he starts it up. His car has the low, hungry rumble of a
muffler barely hanging in. It's an old Mustang convertible, and it's kind of a
piece of shit, but Trevor always says it's a
Mustang,
which apparently
means it can be a piece of shit and still be something great.

Trevor pulls up in front of my mom's house. We
walk up the porch steps and past the hanging flower baskets, the flowers already
turning crunchy from spring sun. Mom's gardening skills are less skills than
good intentions. She'll come home all happy from Johnson's Nursery, carrying
those low-sided cardboard boxes full of wet, bright flowers, and a week or so
later, the plants will be as thirsty as Trevor after moving refrigerators on a
hot August day. I squeak on the garden hose before we go in, tip it up into the
baskets. The flowers are so dry, the water basically gushes out the hole in the
bottom, but at least I like to think there's maybe a few good karma points for
effort here, and I don't know about you, but I need all the good karma points I
can get.

Inside, my little sister, Bex, is sitting
cross-legged on the floor and watching TV. She had a little crush on Trevor
then, and usually she'd have gotten carbonated at the sight of him, jumping up
and jabbering away. But right then she's focused on that screen.

"What're you watching?" I ask.

"The news." She plays with the ends of her long
braids, crosses them under her chin.

Sure enough, CNN. More images of small huts and
tiny villages washed away by flooding waters, concerned-voiced news anchors with
the kind of perfect hair that has never actually been close to tragedy. The
fourth day of nonstop disaster coverage. "Bex," I say. "Look. It's beautiful
out. Go outside and play. Ride your bike, or something."

9

"I can't," Bex says.

"She's grounded!" Mom shouts from the kitchen.
"Still?" I say.

"Too long, you think?" Mom shouts again. Trevor
and I go to the kitchen, where Mom has started dinner. She's wearing jeans and a
white T-shirt with hanger bumps on the shoulders. I smell onions, the
bitter-sweet tang of them frying in butter. Her long hair is tied back, strands
around her face frizzly from steam. "I don't know about grounding. What do I
know about grounding? Bomba and Bompa never grounded Mike or me. Hi, Trevor,"
she says.

"Hey, Missus," he says, which is what he calls
her even though she's not married. My Dad was living in Hawaii with Jennifer.
Mom called Jennifer her "step wife."

"That's 'cause Uncle Mike was perfect and the
only rebellious thing you did was marry Dad," I say.

"Bomba loved your Dad," Mom says.
"Loves.
So even that wasn't so rebellious." Bomba, my grandmother (who
earned her name when I was a baby and couldn't pronounce "Grandma"), lives in
Arizona, where she and Bompa moved a while back to make their retirement money
"stretch." I like the idea of that, money stretching, the way you take a pinch
of gum from your mouth and pull. Bompa died about seven years ago, when my
parents were getting divorced. He said he got colon cancer from all the smoke my
Dad blew up his ass, but really, he liked the joke so much, he'd use it with
various people--insurance salesmen, his brother-in-law. I look at the picture of
Bomba that's on our fridge, stuck there with a magnet from a pizza delivery
place. She's sitting in a blow-up kiddie pool with her sunglasses on, her boobs
all water-balloon saggy in her swimsuit, and she's reading

10

a magazine. She taped on one of those cartoon
bubbles, and has herself saying, "Bomba, luxuriating in the pool." I miss not
seeing her. Without Bomba, we have all cookie and no chocolate chip.

"Why's Bex grounded?" Trevor asks.

"She had to go to the principal's office," I
say. "This girl at school--"

"Lindsey," Mom interrupts.

"She
hates
Lindsey," Trevor says.
"Suck-up. Teacher's pet." Another reason Trevor is great. He keeps up with all
that stuff. He pays attention.

"Yeah, that's the one," I say. "Lindsey told
Bex that Bex couldn't karate chop, so Bex proved her wrong. Knocked her on her
butt."

"Oh, man," Trevor says.

"Oh, man," Chico, our parrot, says from his
cage in the corner. If you have any brains, you stay away from Chico. He'll lure
you to him with nice words, like
Come here, Sweetie,
or
Give me a
kiss
and he'll make smooching sounds. But then when you get close,
snap!
It gets the vet every time. Trevor snitches a baby carrot from the
counter, and Mom gives him a look, shoves the knife over for him to chop some
instead.

"She's lucky she didn't get expelled," Mom
says.

"Still, she's been grounded for a week," I
say.

"I like being grounded!" Bex shouts from the
other room. As you can tell, our house was pretty small. Privacy, forget
it.

"That's not the idea!" Mom shouts back. "See?
What do I know about grounding," she says.

Mom finishes browning beef and adds garlic, and
the whole house gets rich with the blissful, hypnotic meld of butter
and

11

garlic and onions. She's making a Joe's
Special, one of her top-three favorite meals at her favorite restaurant,
Thirteen Coins, somewhere we go only for a special treat, since it's pricey.
Okay, actually we went there only once that I can remember, back when she and
Dad were still married and she didn't have to worry in the grocery store aisle
over whether she should buy shower cleaner or not. In the old days,
fabric-softener sheets you tossed into the dryer and already-made juice in
bottles (versus the frozen kind you mix with three cans of water) were not
considered luxury items. We could get the ice cream in a round container and not
in a square one.

I hear Severin, my brother, come home. Severin,
Indigo, Bex--my father had this thing for individuality in names, according to
Mom, which basically means,
If you don't like it, blame him.
Severin says
hi to Bex, and then his bedroom door shuts. Mom adds the eggs and spinach, which
may sound gross, but it's not. It's amazing. My mother is great in the kitchen,
but if you really want to understand Naomi Skye, the person, you need to look at
the complicated relationship she had with her old Datsun then. First of all,
every smell on the road--a street being tarred, a fire, some tanker spilling
exhaust--would elicit this panicky reaction along the lines of,
What's that?
Do you smell that? Is that my car?
She'd roll down her window, sniff, sniff,
sniff, until you said,
Mom,
relax.'
See the flames coming out of that
building? The fire trucks? The plumes of black smoke over there?
And then
she'd hold a hand to her chest and breathe a sigh of relief.
Thank God,
she'd say.
I thought I was going to need a new engine or
something.

Then, second, there was that pesky little red
"engine" light that flickered on the dashboard. This was a sign of certain doom,
which she completely ignored. If you pointed it out, she'd say,
It's

12

fine. It always does that. It'll go off.
And then, finally, there were the windshield wipers. We'd be driving along, and
her windshield wipers would be going even though it'd stopped raining twenty
minutes ago, or maybe even the day before. Still, they'd be
ke-shunk,
ke-shunking
and she wouldn't notice until you said
Mom! Your wipers are
on!
and she'd give this little surprised
Oh, right!
and shut them
off. See, a triple threat existed in Mom; it's still there, really (and will
probably be there always, no matter what), some anxiety-denial-distraction combo
that expressed itself most clearly as soon as she was behind the wheel of that
old yellow car.
That's what happens when you're a single mother and work
full-time in a psychiatrist's office and are raising three kids and trying to
find the time to get the laundry done,
she'd say as she sprayed Febreze on
some shirt in lieu of actually using the washing machine. I don't know about
that, but I do know that even if she's a bit scattered, she's great with food.
She knows how to feed us.

There in the kitchen, Trevor agrees. "Mmm." He
groans with smell-pleasure. His own mom runs a day care in their house, so he
was lucky if he got hot dogs cut up into little pieces and Cheerios in a
baggie.

"Tell your brother and sister that dinner's
ready," Mom says.

"Bex! Sever-in!" I shout. "Dinner's
ready!"

"Indigo, God." She sighs. "I could have done
that." Which is what she always says.
"Go
and
tell
them."

"God!" Chico says.

In a few moments, we're all around the table,
pouring milk, passing rolls. Mom liked us to sit and have that meal together.
We will not he one of those families that eat in the car on the way to
somewhere else. Where sports practice and meetings and trips to the mall are
more important than being together,
she would say. I
want us
to

13

share our day.
Trevor was the one who
really got off on this, since his mother didn't hear a word he said unless he
was dripping blood and had to go to the emergency room.

"Top of the line built-in model," he says, "and
they aren't even gonna
use
it. It's for the
catering kitchen.
The
place the caterers go to make a mess in so guests don't see." Trevor had
delivered a refrigerator earlier that day to some people on Meer
Island.

"The Moores have a catering kitchen," Severin
says. "And this whole room where Mrs. Moore can practice her tennis swing in
virtual reality. I saw it at the Christmas party." Then, Severin worked after
school for MuchMoore Industries, which I'm sure you've heard of, but if you
haven't, it's this company that sells digital cameras and image transferring.
They'll print your name and photo on any object from greeting cards to
wallpaper. Severin's my twin, but you'd never know it. I got blessed with the
part of Mom that'll reach into her purse for a pen and will pull out a tampon,
and I got blessed with the part of Dad that's dissatisfied with social
constraints, and that's maybe just a little dissatisfied in general. The way
most people feel on Sunday nights is how I think he feels a lot of the time.
This led him to get fired from his job at an advertising firm, after he
submitted a proposal for a major account, Peugeot, with the slogan, "Got Peu?"
After that, Dad left advertising for good, moved to Hawaii, and opened a shop
that rents surfboards.

Bomba, who loves me, claims I
dance to my
own drummer,
and I'm sure she's got this wrong, because it makes me sound
like I'm flailing around in the focused psycho-ecstasy you see in groupies in
the front row of any concert. But Severin, he doesn't dance to his own drummer.
He walks in a straight line. He got the parts of our parents that remember to
buy stamps and that love books and

14

that plan for the future. Severin's one of
those guys who have looks and height and brains and a sense of purpose. He
worked for MuchMoore, hung out with the Skyview kids from our school, and he
could fake his way through the truth that he didn't fit in with them. The fact
that girls like Kristin Densley and Heather Green called our house all the time
and that he got good grades didn't piss me off, though, because Severin's this
really nice person. He treated Trevor like an equal even if Trevor graduated
from the alternative school. Severin, my
brother,
talked to me at school,
even if no one seemed to grasp the idea that we were related. He's the kind of
guy that also does nice things for no reason, like once he replaced a broken
string on my guitar as a surprise.

"Two kitchens to clean, is all I can think,"
Mom says.

"They
don't clean them," I
remind.

"No, they just hire immigrants at less than
minimum wage," Mom says. She sounds like Jane, my boss.

Bex takes a swig of milk. "There are people
without
homes
and
food
now, let alone refrigerators," she
says.

"Detention's over, Bex," Mom says.

"No, wait. Seriously," Trevor says. His face
does get serious. But serious in a way that makes you want to laugh. "What would
you do if you had that kind of money?"

I know that Trevor is someone who asks a
question because he's dying to give you his own answer, and I am a good
girlfriend, so I say, "What would you do?"

"I know what
I'd
do," he
says.

"Start your business," I say.

"What's that saying? 'Give a man a lemon, he
eats lemons for a day; teach him to make lemonade and he'll always have
something to drink'? I'd invest in myself," Trevor says. You can see
why