The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (28 page)

"What kind of emergency, Indigo? It better be
good, okay? He'd better be in the hospital or something."

It's one of those times when you can tell the
truth won't do. "He's ..." I think quickly. "He
is
in the hospital. With
a ... With a ..." Shit. "His pancreas burst."

"Pancreases don't burst!" Jane says.

"Burst pancreas." Joe chuckles. "Heh, heh,
heh."

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"I gotta go," I say.

"We both know you're lying, Indigo. The least
you could do is respect me enough to tell the truth," Jane says. She looks calm.
She sounds calm, even. Severin's desperate voice, though, has filled me with
urgent, hurry-up. I speak fast.

"Severin, okay? He needs me to come get him.
His girlfriend invited him to this swimming party that wasn't a swimming party,
and now he's ..."

I realize how lame it sounds. I should have
stuck with the burst pancreas. Jane folds her arms. She shakes her head, and I
see that her face is getting the red flush again. "Honestly," she says. "He
can't wait? You're willing to pick up and ditch me like this because your
brother's girlfriend did a shitty thing?"

"He's really upset.
Really
upset." The
words hang. They sound silly and frivolous, tinsel words.

Jane unfolds her arms, twists her watchband
around in circles. "Listen, Indigo ... Honestly," she says again.

"Jane, I'll make up my shift, I
promise."

"You know, this all just doesn't seem ... I'm
not sure this is working."

"Wait a minute," I say.

"If you leave me in the lurch like this ... I'm
just thinking. Maybe you should take some time off. Until you get your head
straight about this money and all...."

I'm standing behind the counter and she's in
front of it, and something seems backward in this, so I go out front too.
"You're firing me," I say.

"Oh, no," Nick says.

"Indigo--"

"You are." I'll tell you one little thing about
me, and that is

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that I'm not too keen on being bossed around.
If, say, my Mom tells me to empty the dishwasher, I like to wait a little bit,
you know, not hop up and do it right away, because then it feels more like my
own idea. That's a little problematic when you have an actual boss. But Jane,
she's more like a friend than a boss, and we understand each other. Friends
don't fire you, though. Bosses do. And the fact that my boss is suddenly all
bosslike is making this awful feeling rise up, like when you shake a can of Coke
before opening it. This firing? If there's going to be a firing it's going to be
my own idea.

"Indigo. I can't keep making concessions for
you. Your priorities seem--"

"I quit."

"Wait. Let's sort this through, okay? I'm just
saying you might need a little time ..."

"Quit.
Finit.
Finished. The end.
Sayonara."

Trina waves her fork in my direction. "Just a
second here. You can't quit."

"Everyone needs to go to their corners," Joe
says. "Time out."

Funny just sits there with her pen raised above
her notebook, and Nick looks struck. The bookstore guy's Farm Scramble is
getting cold. "I think those are my eggs," he says.

But there is no way to back out now. I've said
the words. And there are some words you can't take back. It's like trying to get
popcorn back into the kernel.
It's over. I'm leaving. We're through.
You
can try, but there's no forgetting that someone wanted out.

I toss my apron right there onto the floor
where I stand. I swing my backpack over my shoulder. I let the bells bang on the
door behind me. And I try to ignore this feeling in my chest. This heaviness, a
searing rip. The sense that my heart is

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breaking. I ignore it, get into my car, and
step on the gas.

A Hostess delivery truck driver lays down on
his horn. "Watch it, you lunatic!" he shouts out his rolled-down
window.

"Shut it, Twinkie," I shout back.

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13

I bring Severin home. He doesn't say anything
on the drive, and once we're back, he goes to his room and shuts the door. I sit
down in the rocker, which has found a new place by the shoved-aside coffee
table. I quit my job. I can't believe it. I quit my job.

"Do you think God's a baseball fan?" Bex asks.
Since school let out and since we bought the new TV and Xbox, Bex has given up
on tsunami victims, given up on her friends Max and An Ling, who she used to
play with after school sometimes. Bex just wants to lie on the floor in front of
the TV, be swallowed up and devoured by the huge screen and whatever is on--
Wheel of Fortune,
Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, the Daytona 500
racing game. Now a field of green fills our living room, as do men in white
uniforms, cool and pure as vanilla ice cream.

"I don't know, Bex, why?"

"They always pray before a game," she
says.

"Do you want to go swimming or something? I'll
take you to Pine Lake."

"No." Her chin rests in her open palms. Her
legs are crossed at the ankle. She has a Band-Aid on one shin, but I have no
idea how she could have gotten scratched, since she hasn't moved from the TV in
days. Freud is curled up in a spot of sun by the front window.

"I don't really want to either," I say. "How
about CNN?"

"Nah. There are so many more choices now that
you got Premium Cable."

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We watch baseball. We watch a men's diving
championship, which is more interesting, due to the embarrassing bathing suits.
Bex does a lot of snickering and pointing. We share a bag of Cheetos and then we
watch some woman trying out Paris restaurants. Bex puts in a video game and her
cartoon car makes cartoon loops around a cartoon track.

Mom comes home just after six. "God, what a
shitty day," she says. "Bex, I
told
you no TV today." She heads straight
for the kitchen, and I get up and follow. I'm actually stiff and creaky from
sitting in that chair so long.

Mom drops her purse onto the kitchen chair, and
her mail onto the table. "Indigo, please. Don't let her sit and be a zombie like
that."

"You don't mind if I'm a zombie," I
say.

"Zombie," Chico says. "Zombie. Zombie.
Zombie."

"Would you feed Chico, please? I don't worry
about you being a zombie because you never were exposed to endless entertainment
on a life-size television when you were her age.
You
didn't go from
compassionate Samaritan to hypnotized TV child. The other day, she was watching
bass fishing."
Mom rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers. "Of
course, you were never as prone to extremes as Bex either. I'm worried she'll
join a cult someday, or get involved with some guy she'll never leave even if
he's jobless and wears a Budweiser cap...."

"Maybe we should sign her up for some summer
camp thing. Horseback riding or crafts, or--"

"They're just so expen-- No! Jeez. I didn't
mean to say that. Forget I said that. We're not having this conversation. Ack!"
She pounds her head twice with her fist.

"Mom, this is stupid! What good is this money
if I can't share

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it with you? You, who needs it? This is
ridiculous."

"So, it's ridiculous. I don't like the idea of
crazy spending. It worries me. If there was a thoughtful plan, it'd be another
matter. Some sense of applying the brakes. But it feels like all, buy this, buy
that, buy whatever." She does what we do when we don't know what to do. She
opens the refrigerator and stares inside. She lets the door slap shut again.
"Indigo--you know, I just haven't processed how to handle all this money stuff
yet."

"I know," I say. I lift the door to Chico's
cage. Chico eats these bird pellets, but he also needs regular, healthy human
food too. I give him some broccoli from the fridge, a bit of wheat bread, a
little pinch of leftover chicken. "Chico good boy," he says. Sure.

"And I can't process it right at this moment.
This has been one shitty day." She drops into a kitchen chair. She shoves aside
the stack of mail. She rubs her temples with her fingertips. "There's a full
moon, or something, because Dr. Kaninski's schedule was just
packed.
So
we're seeing twice the amount of people, and no one's got their insurance cards,
and then there's an emergency call from this father who says his son's locked
himself in his room and he's got a
gun,
and Dr. Kaninski's at
lunch
and then it turns out the son doesn't have a gun, after I interrupt
the doctor's pad thai, and then this woman calls for the second time in a month
to get more meds when she has a three-month supply, and then the day is finally
over and I go to my car and I've got
a. flat."

"Oh, man," I say. "You should have called
me."

"For you to do what? Change my tire? Offer me
moral support while I panic?"

"I can change a tire!" I say. "Okay, maybe I
can't change a tire."

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"Dr. Kaninski changed it for me." She chuckles.
"A psychiatrist changing a tire. His golf ball tie was flipped over one
shoulder. I feel stupid not knowing how to change it myself. I doubt I could
have jacked the thing up, though ..."

"I think that means you have penis envy," I
say.

"Male arm muscle envy, and no other body parts,
thank you." Mom takes off her shoes. There's the clunk of her heels under the
table. "Hot, tired, and sick of humanity. This calls for fast food," she
says.

"Agreed," I say. "It's been a shitty day for
everyone."

"What happened?"

"Trust me."

"Do me a favor? Take a poll and figure out what
everyone wants to eat. I'll meet you at the car."

"I'll drive" I say.

"Forget it," she says. "I value my
life."

Taco Time, we decide. I'm counting on insta-fat
and salt served in cardboard food boxes to lift my mood, which has gone gray and
senseless as ash. I'm not the sort to get depressed. Usually, the times I can
count on it hitting are when we've had two weeks of straight, gloomy rain, and
when I hear those ads for some depression medicine or clinical study on the
radio.
Are
you
feeling helpless or hopeless? Does your life seem
meaningless and empty? Are you full of the awareness that we just put up with a
bunch of endless crap, punctuated by brief moments of brightness, and then we
die?
Depression ads are so depressing. If you don't have it before one of
those things, you have it after. Those usually are the only real times a fuzz of
gloom descends on me. But now I feel this tug and pull at my inner joy, a
gradual darkening, the way they used to get

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the room ready for a movie in elementary
school. The screen is yanked down. The heavy curtains dragged shut, first one,
then the other. Finally,
Justin, get the lights.
I've just graduated from
the inane prison that's high school and I'm the relatively new owner of two and
a half million dollars and I'm feeling
depressed?
Melanie (and most of my
peers and a few teachers and Severin and sometimes Mom) may have been right
after all--I
am
crazy.

We get into Mom's car, which now has three
regular wheels and one tiny, undersize spare that looks both forlorn and wrongly
hopeful. Then Mom forgets her keys and has to go back in again. It's practically
a law in our house that you can't leave the house without forgetting something.
You say good-bye to a member of my family, and it's just a rehearsal, because a
second later they'll come dashing back in. Finally, we're buckled up, and the
minute Mom starts up the car, my phone rings.

"In, listen. I've just had a brilliant
idea."

Uh-oh. The last brilliant idea Trevor had was
when he thought he'd surprise his mom and give her the afternoon off from
day-care work. He carted off six little kids and put them into her minivan while
they were playing outside. When Mrs. Williams came out to the backyard and found
it empty, she screamed with the full-power open-throttle fear and outrage of a
bear whose cubs have been snatched. It was so loud, the guy on parole across the
street took off running even though he didn't do anything wrong, and old Mrs.
Jaynes, the neighbor lady next door, who'd been on a ladder picking apples from
her tree, flew from it in airborne surprise, breaking a hip and flinging apples
in all directions. An apple was even later found in one of Trevor's mom's
flowerpots, and another, weirdly, in a baseball mitt one of the toddlers had
brought over. Poor Mrs. Jaynes has used a walker

219

ever since; she shouldn't have been on a ladder
at her age, but still. The police stopped Trevor and the minivan as they were
pulling out of Burger King; they were all wearing golden crowns and singing a
sloppy rendition of "Wheels on the Bus."

"I've had a lousy day, Trevor," I warn. Mom
backs out of the driveway, looking both ways. Ever since I got my own car,
everyone else's driving has been driving me crazy. I never realized how slow she
goes. We're moving at maybe five miles an hour. I wouldn't even have known we'd
left, except the trees and houses are stepping backward oh so slightly out my
window. At this rate, we'll be at the mailboxes by Tuesday.