“Honey, I’m home!”
Right on cue, Eleanor burst past Puja and Yvonne, who were still standing in the doorway, and waltzed into the room, accidentally kicking over a cup full of paintbrushes as she did.
“Sorry, ladies. No visitors to the crazy ward tonight.” Eleanor dropped her bag on the floor. “Indigo has work to do.”
Puja rolled her eyes and grabbed Yvonne’s arm. “See you later, Indy. If your captor ever releases you.” Indy heard Yvonne mumble something about Eleanor being the insane one as they walked down the hall and out of the bunk.
“Sit down on my bed,” Eleanor said, “I have something so mind-blowing to show you.”
“Wait,” Indy said. “What’s today?” She was suddenly panicking.
“Tuesday,” Eleanor said, kicking some stuff out of the way so she could open her bottom drawer. “But anyway, this thing I have to show you—”
“Shit!” Indigo said, clapping her hand to her mouth. “I’m supposed to meet with Jen every Wednesday and Friday, which means I totally spaced on at least one meeting. If I don’t meet with her tomorrow, I’m fucked. Even if I make the meeting, what am I going to show her? Everything I’ve been working on is total crap. Jesus Christ, Eleanor. Why am I even here? I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“See, well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Eleanor said, smiling in that authentic, sparkling, sharklike way that indicated true delight, or a plan starting to take root.
“In here”—Eleanor reached over to the floor and grabbed her purse, being careful not to upset too much of the paper matter around it as she did—“is some pretty outrageous proof that the nanny cam project we embarked upon was not for nothing.”
“What?” Indy asked. What did this have to do with her work being lousy and having a meeting with her adviser tomorrow?
“Video footage. Of Lucy. Oh, and it is incriminating. It’s like we let a fishing line off a boat or something, and we got a white whale to bite it! Does that metaphor work? My family doesn’t fish.”
“And mine does?” Indy said.
“Well, your stepmom is Asian—right? Don’t those people basically rake the bottom of the ocean and serve whatever they find over noodles?”
“Oh my God, Eleanor! What’s your problem?”
“I’m sorry, my bad. Please forgive me. That was out of line.”
Indy shut her eyes in exasperation. “So, your point is that you caught Lucy doing something on one of those cameras you set up?”
“The ones I put by the lake and in her cubicle near her rehearsal space were a total bust. But the one in her bedroom? Jackpot.”
Eleanor removed a DVD from a case in her purse and inserted it into her MacBook Pro. “Indigo, this is beyond anything we could have ever imagined. There’s no way in hell Lillian will allow Lucy to stick around once she sees this footage.”
Eleanor hit play.
The footage was dark, for sure, but it was definitely Lucy. You couldn’t mistake those curls for anyone else’s, and she practically smiled into the camera, all dazzling big teeth practically blinking a row of lights that illuminated the frame.
Then someone stepped into the shot with his back to the camera. It was hard to see whether it was Nick or not, but the idea that it was suddenly crossed Indigo’s mind and made her change course about whether or not she could bear watching the footage.
Indy watched the screen as Lucy made her way over to the guy, whose dark, medium-length haircut almost got in the way of the action. And it was action. They shared a quick kiss, and then Lucy stepped back and gyrated, lifting her shirt off and showing her perfect, slender figure—her perky breasts barely concealed by a cotton bra. She licked her finger—where did she learn to do that? Stripper class at Crunch gym?—and traced the midline of her body all the way down to her panties, then snapped the elastic on them.
“Gross!” Indigo said.
“I know, right?” Eleanor said, smiling.
Then, Lucy—who really was as photogenic as she was beautiful in real life, thought Indigo, against her will—put her finger in the mouth of the guy, who was, at this point, completely out of frame, safely behind the greedy gaze of the hidden camera.
“I feel weird watching this,” Indigo said out loud, if only to break the tension. She noticed that Eleanor didn’t seem uncomfortable at all—her eyes danced with a twisted pleasure, either from the delight of having caught Lucy in a nefarious act, or from being genuinely turned on.
“It gets better,” Eleanor said with a straight face, not looking away from the screen.
In the shadows of the video footage, Lucy began gyrating atop what was assumed to be the lap of the guy off-camera, moaning as she did, and rolling her head in circles like she was convulsing with pleasure.
“Oh. My. God,” said Indigo. If that was Nick she was straddling, she’d never be able to talk to Lucy again.
“Yup,” said Eleanor.
Lucy kept at it. Moaning, breathing heavily, feeling her own boobs outside her bra, squeezing them together as she bounced up and down. This couldn’t be how people really had sex. Was it sex? Was it a lap dance? Who was the guy? Indy fought every urge to shout “Move the camera so he’s in the shot!” Was that or wasn’t it Nick?
“Uh-uh-uh-uh-oh-my-God. Oh MY GOOOOOD!!!!” bellowed Lucy, before Indigo could be too distracted by her train of thought.
WHAT? Lucy apparently now had a perfect body, and porno moves to go along with it? Indy would have been jealous of her if she weren’t so embarrassed and confused about what exactly she’d seen.
“And now,” Eleanor said dramatically, “the climax.”
“Isn’t that what we just saw?” Indy asked.
Lucy, still in a wobbly darkness, dismounted her partner and skipped off into the next room. She came back with a bottle of prescription drugs and a rolled-up dollar bill, waving them both in the air like goodies she was showing off.
“Ta-da!” She spilled the bottle of pills onto the dresser next to her bed, and broke them up with the palm of her hand, then divided the dust into tidy white lines with a credit card.
And then her head of blond curls went down, nearly out of the lower frame, and all you could hear was a sniff, whoosh, and gulp sound—in that order.
It was shocking beyond anything Indy could have imagined.
Indigo had smoked pot with Lucy, of course, but seeing her friend snort prescription drugs seemed too surreal to process. It was like an episode of 60 Minutes or something—like something parents warned their kids about. “Don’t huff cleaning supplies! Say no to crystal meth! Don’t snort prescription drugs!”
But here she was, Indy’s towheaded former best friend, her face down in a mess of mystery powder. Ativan, Xanax, Vicodin—who knew? It was hard-core shit, and Indigo felt awful for knowing that Lucy was dabbling in that kind of darkness. She felt even worse for having had to see it firsthand—and under secret circumstances that she couldn’t confess.
“I wasn’t expecting this at all,” Indigo announced.
“I know!” Eleanor squealed. “We couldn’t have hoped for a better smoking gun. With this evidence, not only will she get fired, but she’ll be thrown into Passages, the Malibu rehab where Demi Lovato tended the smoothie bar for six months last year. Say buh-bye to that Pantween shampoo campaign, Lucy!”
Eleanor rubbed her hands together wickedly.
But Indigo couldn’t be happy about it. She felt awful—sick to her stomach with guilt. But it was too late. Sometimes things just couldn’t be unseen. And after everything Lucy’d put Indy through this summer, Indy tried to believe with all of her soul that she deserved what was coming to her.
18
“I was worried about you, Indigo.” Jen Rant was sitting cross-legged on her office chair across from Indy, who slumped in the corner beneath her gray hoodie.
“It’s not like you to miss meetings,” Jen continued, knitting her thick, Frida Kahlo–esque eyebrows in matronly concern. “I haven’t seen you around t
he dining hall or anything.” Jen leaned forward on her chair, for the full “teacher with a purpose” effect.
“I’ve just been pretty absorbed in the process of making stuff, and I don’t really want people checking in with me along the way.”
“I can understand that,” Jen said, nodding. There was a pregnant pause before she continued. “Nick told me he hasn’t seen you in the studio for a while.”
The mention of Nick’s name sent her into a particular flurried nausea. The guilt she felt for destroying his piece only intensified every day.
“I’ve been working out of the Beat cabin,” Indigo tried to respond without any noticeable emotion.
“Any reason why you’re avoiding the studio?”
Was Jen hinting at the fire? Was she trying to get a confession? Indy had been pretty isolated, so she didn’t know whether people were buzzing about the missing artwork, the charred floor, and other remnants of her impulsive mistake from last week. But she assumed that if they were, she was suspect number one.
“It’s just easier for me to concentrate in my own space.” She cleared her throat.
“And what are you concentrating on?” Jen asked, lowering her gross bare feet down to the carpet and using them to move herself, rolling chair and all, closer to Indigo, who winced at the gesture.
“I’m concentrating mostly on the process. The process of creation. The process of the work.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.…What does that mean, exactly?” Jen asked.
“Well, I…I don’t really know.” Indy felt herself let down her guard. She had officially run out of bullshit, and the game of convincing Jen that she believed something she didn’t was no longer working.
“I just keep starting stuff and then it turns out looking shitty and awful and then I throw it away. I do that all day. It’s like chipping away at a mountain that keeps growing back. I hate it.”
Tears formed in the corners of Indigo’s eyes. It was not her intention to show her hand to her adviser, but there she was, blubbering like a toddler all of a sudden. All it took was an admission to Jen Rant that she’d been spending her time in bed, scribbling on scrap paper fit for the bottom of a parakeet cage, instead of working slowly but surely on some kind of masterpiece in the studio, the way she was supposed to be doing. Like she had done every other summer of her life.
“Shh, it’s okay.” Jen Rant opened one of her desk drawers and handed Indigo a travel pack of designer tissues with the words “Steampunk Kitty” emblazoned on the plastic casing. “We’ve all been there before.” Indigo grabbed a mahogany-and-bubblegum-colored tissue from the pack, unfurled it to see an illustration of a Persian cat wearing a top hat and monocle, and blew her nose into her hands so hard, Jen jumped a little bit. Indigo kept sobbing.
“You know,” Jen said, pushing her toes into the carpet as she rolled back into her first position in the room. “The thing about artists is that when we’re working on something, we’re never alone.”
Indigo considered this.
“But when we’re in between projects, or we’re feeling uninspired, or if for whatever reason we’re not able to concentrate, it can be the most alienating thing in the world not to have our work to comfort us—to keep us company. When your relationship with your work is awry, your mind can be a hostile place—nothing can grow there.” Jen narrowed her eyes. “Your thoughts keep horrible company in that state.”
That must be why Indigo felt like utter garbage. She couldn’t create art, so she had no reason to like herself. Not only was her best friend a distant alien she didn’t feel like she knew anymore, but her crush, who had once taken up prominent fantasy real estate in her mind, had been since recast as an enemy. Her dad was far away with her stepmom, her real mom was dead, and the only person she was speaking to was Eleanor, who was, now that she thought about it, a miserable tiger that couldn’t change stripes.
Being out of her bunk for the half-hour it took to walk over and sit down with another human being was all that Indigo needed to remember that. Eleanor, however helpful she’d been to Indy in her distressed mental state recently, was still, by nature, meaner than Indy could be to herself when she was depressed. And that was pretty bad.
“I guess I’ve also had other stuff on my mind,” Indigo admitted. “I saw…well, I don’t want to say, because I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. But I heard about something that happened between my best friend and…somebody else…that makes me want to avoid the studio. I don’t want to say anything more. I hope that’s okay.”
Jen’s face seemed to get even paler than it usually was. “What do you mean?”
“Well, nothing happened that necessarily needs to be reported,” Indy said. “But Nick…”
Shit. Did she really just say his name out loud? What was the matter with her? Where was her filter? Getting Nick—or was it Lucy?—fired was Eleanor’s project. But there was something about being around Jen, whose hungry curiosity about what it was she had to say about this stuff, that made Indy suddenly want to tell her everything.
“Nick what?” Jen asked urgently. She was obviously trying to downplay how intrigued she was by Indy’s little slip.
“Nothing,” Indy said quickly. “I misspoke. I didn’t see anything, and none of this has to do with my doing my work. Which I will do. I swear I will.”
Jen stared at her. She seemed colder.
“Well, then,” she continued. “You realize the Industry Showcase Art Exhibition is this weekend.” She seemed stern all of a sudden. “I need to have a completed project ready to hang in the gallery by then, or you’ll be left out of the show. And it’s been my experience that when scouts come to Industry Day, they are looking to discover someone. I don’t think you want to miss that, do you?”
“Of course not,” Indy replied, a little taken aback.
“Good to hear,” Jen said, writing some notes down on a pad. “You know, there was a small fire in the painting studio a little less than a week ago.”
Shit. Oh God. Oh God.
Indy’s heart began to race and her forehead instantly sprouted a line of sweat beads along her hairline. Surely Jen had to notice that she was freaking out.
“Nobody knows who set it or what happened exactly,” Jen said. “It was in the middle of the night, so there were no witnesses. Apparently, somebody destroyed another person’s work. It wasn’t a fellow camper’s painting, but it’s still pretty serious. I just wondered if you knew anything about it.”
“Nope, not a thing,” Indy lied, but she knew the blood had drained from her now-sweaty face.
“Or if you were avoiding the studio for any particular reason having to do with that incident?”
“Nope,” Indy said again, shifting around in her chair. When did she become so entrenched in scandal? She was a good person deep down—but a bad liar. Surely Indigo was blowing her own cover with all of her fidgeting and darting glances.
“All right,” Jen said reluctantly. “I’ll come by the studio to check in on your progress. I really can’t have you presenting a blank canvas and saying it’s a statement on minimalism. That’s an amateur-hour prank—and it’s been done before. I expect more from you.”
Indy had to clean up her act. She needed to throw away all the trash in her bunk and take whatever artwork she could salvage to the studio. She’d go during lunch, when Nick was in the dining hall, but she’d still go. Indigo felt herself get nervous, but it felt like the right thing to do—a good step to make.
The silence around the Performance Art Center, along with all the peacefulness that came along with it, soon dissolved like sand through open fingers when the sound of girls around Theater Row exiting their classes after what was the first period of the day crept toward Indigo.
And then, in the distance, like a scent of leaves that evoked fall without forcing you to make the conscious connection, or the first insinuation of a breeze right before it hit your skin, she saw Lucy.
She looked great—happy, rested,
tan, toothy, comfortable in her environment. Lucy saw Indigo and smiled at her in the most natural, kind, authentic way. She looked as comfortable as Indigo felt anxious. And then they were next to each other and Lucy was hugging her.
“Where have you been hiding?”
“In my art cave,” Indigo tried to joke, feeling like she was about to break down and cry. She wanted to apologize for what she’d done to hurt her, but she was still angry, too. She hadn’t seen Lucy since the woods, and the sight of her brought back feelings of rage as well as guilt. Indy was so tired of her stupid feelings. Why did being an artist necessitate riding a nonstop roller coaster?
“Ha-ha.” Lucy smiled.
“No, I’ve been under the weather for real,” Indy said. “I think I may have had like a short bout of mono or something? Mono lite. I’ve just been staying in bed. But I’m fine now. Not contagious or anything. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.” Lucy gave her friend a squeeze on the shoulder. “I just missed you. I’m glad you’re okay. You still look sort of pale.”
“Yeah, well, what can I say, I’m the original goth.” Indy smiled weakly. “So, what are you up to?” she asked, behind a fake grin.
“Well, everything. It’s been a crazy week. I told you I was cast in Puja’s play, right? I’m starring along with that girl from your cabin, Tiffany Melissa Portman?” Clearly Lucy was just pretending everything was fine, when she must have known it wasn’t. She had to be the best actress of all time.
“Anyway, it was supposed to be a reading, but it turns out Puja is actually a really great stage director as well as an amazing playwright, and ambitious, obvs. So the whole thing has taken leaps and bounds in terms of scale, and now it’s a wholly staged theatrical production. It’s really edgy, completely brave. It’s about this girl who’s really weak, and she has this mentor she needs to impress, but she crumples under the pressure. Stuff you can relate to, but on, like, a much deeper and more far-out scale?”
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