The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (3 page)

15

I might be lacking a little faith in Trevor as
a businessman.

"Nunderwear!" Bex shouts, raising a fist to the
air. This is Trevor's latest brilliant plan. He'd had other ideas before, but
this time he's
serious.
The last time, he was serious too, but he's
forgotten that. Nunderwear is based on those days-of-the-week underwear, only
with Nunderwear, they'd all read Sunday. Trevor's got this whole product line of
gag gifts he wants to sell under the business name Lapsed Catholic Enterprises.
He's sure other lapsed Catholics would find them just as hilarious as he does,
and he doesn't even smoke anything (anymore). He wants to make those little
packets of cheese and crackers using communion wafers, called My Body Snack Pak.
Then he has the Pope's Hat Coffee Filters, which he actually sketched out on a
piece of notebook paper. Shaped like the pope's hat, they'd come in a pack of
fifty and fit any standard electric coffeepot, for using or wearing.

"You guys laugh, but you won't be laughing when
I'm rolling in the dough."

"If I had that kind of money?" Bex says. "I'd
give it away to the needy. To people whose houses have washed away, just like
that."
She snaps her fingers.

"CNN isn't good for kids," I say.

"I mean it," she says. Her blue eyes look
directly at me. She's eleven years old, so I suspect her submersion into
disaster coverage will fade as soon as she's in her sixth-grade class painting
papier-mâché tribal masks they've made out of strips of the
Seattle Times
and Gold Medal flour and water. "I would."

"Severin?" Trevor asks.

"Easy. College."

"Like you're not going to get scholarships," I
say.
The,

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"You have no idea. I get Bs! God. I'm up
against these kids who've taken every SAT prep class, who've hired college
counselors that have been working with them since they were zygotes, searching
out scholarships and filling out applications.... It's nuts. And they don't even
need
the scholarships."

"What's a zygote?" Bex asks.

"I told you, we'll work out something," Mom
says. But she doesn't look too sure, honestly. She stares down into her plate
when she says it, picks at her salad with her fork as if the solutions are
hidden somewhere under the lettuce.

"What's a zygote?" Bex asks again.

"When the egg and the sperm--"

"Oh gross, never mind," Bex says.

"Can we ditch the sperm talk at dinner,
please?" I say.

"What about you, Missus?" Trevor asks. His mind
is still on rich people. "What would you do if you had lots of money? Lots and
lots of money."

"College. For Severin and Indigo and
Bex."

"I don't want to go to college," I
say.

"So you claim," Mom says. It's an ongoing
argument between us, and now when the subject comes up, Mom stops it cold with
some statement that indicates her irrefutable superior knowledge about my real
desires. She doesn't get that I don't know what I want to study, and that it
therefore seems a waste of money. I'm not going to be one of those people who
spend thousands of dollars getting an art history degree and then end up working
in a dentist's office.

"Okay, besides college," Trevor says. "Don't
you people dream big? Swimming pools?"

"I'll take a pool," I say.

17

"Famous people, parties ..." He's trying to
bait me.

"Hun-ter E-den," Mom sings. Okay, so I had a
little crush on Hunter Eden then. Who in their right mind didn't? My friend
Melanie actually went to one of his concerts and met him, because her dad's PR
firm handled Slow Change. Yeah, I'd have liked to handle Slow Change. I may not
have wanted to dance to my own drummer, but I wouldn't have minded dancing to my
own guitar player. Not only did I find his playing to be amazing and
inspirational, but he was sexy enough to melt ice, like he did on the body of
that girl in the video for "Hot."

"Okay, okay. Front row tickets, backstage pass,
after-concert party. Then I'd die happy," I say.

"I could sing you 'Hot'," Trevor offers.
Everyone laughs. Even Chico does his
eh, eh, eh
laugh imitation. "It
wasn't
that
funny."

"You still need something for yourself, Mom," I
say.

"College
is
for myself," she says. "You
can take care of me in my old age."

"Diamonds!" I joke. Mom is a nonjewelry person.
If she ever gets remarried (which was looking unlikely since she didn't even
date) she'd probably rather strap a hefty Barnes & Noble gift card to the
third finger of her left hand than a ring.

"Dahling," she says. "No, I like the blue ones.
What are they? I always think topaz, but that's not right."

"Sapphires," Severin says. "How about a trip
somewhere?"

"Zygote City," Bex says.

"A Jenn-Air built-in Euro-style stainless with
precision temperature management system," Trevor says.

"No, I know," I say. Bex looks at me and
smiles. "I know too," she says. "Toilet seat!" we say together.

18

"Eh, eh, eh," Chico says.

"Come on, guys, it is
not
that bad," Mom
says. She was wrong, though--it was. It had a thin, shifty crack in it, and you
had to be careful how you sat down, or it'd snip you in the ass. If you stumbled
to the bathroom in the middle of the night and didn't stay alert, you'd get a
zesty wake-up pinch.

"We've got the only toilet seat in all of
Zygote City that bites," Bex says.

"I promise, I'll get it fixed," Mom says. "Add
it to the list." Microwave oven: out of commission since Bex put a foil-wrapped
Ho Ho in there. Why she wanted to warm it up is still a mystery. Vacuum: worked
if you only used the hose attachment and didn't mind spending about twelve hours
hunched over the carpet like you'd lost a contact lens. Iron: black on the
bottom and leaking water.

"Gold toilet seat," Trevor says, as if it's
decided.

"Or one of those padded ones," Severin says,
and grins.

"Those give me the creeps," I say.

"Me too, but I don't exactly know why," Mom
says.

Freud, our cat, saunters in from the living
room, stretches his hind legs behind him. Bex dangles her fingers toward the
floor and Freud nudges them with his triangle nose.

"Here, kitty, kitty," Chico says evilly. He
makes smooching sounds.

That was what my life was like, before I got
rich.

19

2

I might have been the only one in the world who
didn't have a cell phone, but I didn't care. Or maybe I cared a little. One time
Trevor and I were driving around downtown Seattle, and we saw this guy sitting
on the curb with his bottle of Thunderbird in a brown bag, and a cardboard sign
that read will work for food, and he was talking on a cell phone. I'm not
kidding. Unless he was on some Friends and Family plan, that's just whacked. But
it did make me wonder if maybe I should spend my hard-earned money on one. I
decided no, though, because I really needed a car right then, and that's what I
was saving for.

Mom always said that in the real world, not
everyone has cell phones and TVs in their rooms and drives their dad's BMW. She
was referring to the Skyview kids that went to my school. Nine Mile Falls (the
suburb just east of Seattle) has its sections, like those parfaits at Carrera's
with the layers of pudding and whipped cream. There's the downtown, where we
live, which sits in the valley between three mountains, Mount Solitude being the
largest. The town is all small Christmas-card charm and lies along a winding
river that runs with salmon in October. There's another hill, though, at the
edge of town, called the Midlands, where new housing developments are
continually springing up; not-there, and then there, like those toy sponges that
are paper flat until you put them in water. And finally there's another part of
the Midlands, the highest part of the hill, a neighborhood called Skyview.
Skyview is where all the kids live whose parents

20

make a ton of money at Microsoft. The land of
SUVs, of big headlights bearing into your back windshield with crazy-eyed
caffeinated aggression. The super rich, the only-on-television rich, MuchMoore
rich, don't live in Nine Mile Falls at all, but a few miles north, on Meer
Island.

And I guess there are parfaits within parfaits,
layers within layers. Downtown, you've got the apartments, you've got people who
rent small houses like we did from Mrs. Jesus-Freak-Homophobe Olson, and people
who own their homes, like a lot of our neighbors. And then in the other places,
you've got the people who have the huge house but no furniture inside, the
prestigious job versus just a fat check, Meer Island waterfront or just a Meer
Island address. At my school, you had the downtowners under the same roof as the
Midlanders and the Skyviewers, the kid whose mom waits in the food-bank line by
the library in the same PE class with the kid whose mom waits in line at
Nordstrom.

Apparently, there are a lot of "real
worlds."

Anyway, I didn't have a cell phone, so when
Jane called my house at six a.m. to ask me to come in to work on my rare Sunday
off because
Nikki has to stay home with her kid who has strep throat, and
God, let's hope she didn't give it to Nikki and all of us while she was at
it,
the ringing phone wakes up Mom. By the time I get dressed, she's making
coffee, standing at the sink in her frizzled, high-voltage morning hair and the
chenille robe she'd had forever. Its fuzz was worn down in spots, just like an
old mule.

"Morning," I say.

"Here, kitty, kitty," Chico says. The cover of
his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad
for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day. I lift the
fabric

21

so he can join us. Freud walks toward Chico in
his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets,
and I'm not sure why. I mean, we're nice people, but our pets seem to have made
a pact with the devil. Freud has some psychological issues--he's slightly
sadistic and a merciless hunter. He once sat in a tree swiping at the air in the
direction of a squirrel, his focus that of a hired killer, totally oblivious to
the snow that was blowing around like mad and accumulating steadily on his fur
like a layer of meringue. He brings you the heads of rodents and birds, lays
them down in the kitchen or on your bedroom carpet. He should have been in the
Mafia.

"I got water down my sleeve," Mom grouses. "I
hate
getting water down my sleeve." She dries her forearm with a kitchen
towel.

"Go back to bed," I say.

"I can never get back to sleep after I've woken
up. You get called to work?"

"Sorry. Yeah. Jane needs me to come
in."

"I thought so." But even her
I thought
so
is ragged and awake-against-your-will weary. "I'll drive you over if you
bring me home a piece of Harold's pie. It'll give me something flaky and
fat-laden to look forward to." Harold is Harold Zaminski, this funny old guy
Jane gets our baked goods from. He likes to play practical jokes. One time he
stuffed the small patch of lawn in front of the store with election signs for
this baby-faced Republican running for Senate, just to give Jane a coronary.
When Harold's granddaughter visits, he'll bring her in, walk behind her, hands
up near her neck like he wants to strangle her. She's a bit of a monster, but
you can tell he's crazy about her.

"Deal," I say. "You have plans today?" Hopeful
question. I

22

wished Mom got out more. The last date she went
on was when I still had school recess.

"Oh, I might meet Allison for coffee, or I
might just have a robe day and get all the accounting done. Weed the yard with
Bex, if I can bribe her."

"Mom, I love you but you need to get a
life."

"I have a life," she says. "And I'm getting
pie-ie, I'm getting pie-ie." She sings this and gives a little chenille-dance,
neatly proving my point. One thing you can say about daughters and mothers--like
it or not, they know the truth about each other.

Trina is already at Carrera's when Jane and I
arrive. She's sitting in her car, head back against the seat, listening to
music. It's somewhere near the end of April, I don't remember exactly, but the
top of her convertible is down. She isn't wearing her fur, even though April in
Seattle can still have a bite, same as our toilet seat. Trina's wearing these
jeans that lace up the side and this white tank top that's zingy against her
tan. It's an over-the-counter tan for the most part, kept alive with aerosol and
electricity after she and her boyfriend, Roger, got back from Palm Springs a few
weeks ago. She's told us this. Trina's a confessional person. She rarely has an
unexpressed thought.

"My God, it's about time," she says. She
follows us in before Jane even has the lights up. Luigi, our cook, is already in
back, and so is Alex, this quiet boy from my school who helps with the dishes. I
hear Luigi singing. He always says,
Me, I coulda been Tony Bennett. They told
me I coulda made a recording, but I went into the restaurant business instead.
More stable.
He sings all kinds of things--TV commercials, snippets of
opera, Elton John songs, stuff he makes up.
Don't leave me outta eggs,
Jane,
he'll croon. But