Indy cringed as Lucy kept gushing. “Puja is incredible, too,” Lucy continued. “She has me stretching my range and pushing my boundaries in ways I didn’t think I could ever do. I’m so excited to do it. I can’t wait for you to see it. I think you’ll love it, I really do. I know how you feel about cheesy theater, and this isn’t that, I swear. It’s really dark. Are you coming tomorrow night?”
“Oh, is it tomorrow?” Indigo asked, still piecing together her schedule with her newly acquainted perception of the outside world.
“Yes.” Lucy laughed. “It’s kicking off Industry Showcase Day, technically. I hope you’re feeling well enough to come. I’d love your notes on my performance, and I know Puja would die to know what you think.”
“I’ll be there,” Indy said.
Lucy clearly had no idea that Indigo and Eleanor had been conspiring to get her fired, or that Indy had seen her and Nick together in the woods. And did she really think mono lite was a real thing? Maybe she was confusing it with a protein shake.
They walked down the hill together, away from the penny fountain, and veered south toward the Pilates studio and the Esther Williams Pool. “You know,” Lucy said thoughtfully, “before this summer, I was worried that I wouldn’t be generous enough to teach others how to act. Like, how it was when I interned with that casting director last winter? I hated reading sides with other actors and knowing I’d be ineligible to book the role. It drove me crazy. It was like serving food to homeless people at a soup kitchen when you were really starving yourself.”
Indy began to walk toward her bunk, and Lucy followed.
“But assisting Rashid has taught me that helping others doesn’t take anything away from myself.”
“Uh-huh.”
They walked until they got to a fork in the path—the path on the left led to the dining hall; the one on the right led to the Beat cabin. Indy stopped as Lucy began walking to the left.
“Well, feel better,” Lucy said, as sincere as a Hallmark valentine. “Oh! What are you putting up for the art show? I can’t believe I forgot to ask. I’m so sorry.”
Indy was beginning to sweat under the heat of the sun and her long sleeved shirt. “I’m…I’m going to do something really big and really great. I want to keep it a surprise. You’ll see.”
“I can’t wait.” Lucy waved good-bye and practically skipped off toward the main house like she didn’t have a care in the world.
19
In the time since running into Lucy, Indigo had cleaned her bunk like she was in some kind of housekeeping contest. She used a fresh pair of her own cotton underwear on her face as a makeshift surgical mask while she frantically tidied up all the crap she’d accumulated during her breakdown. There were piles of dust of all different varieties, and the more she Swiffered, bagged, and shook out her linens, the more her eyes watered with residue from the clay, charcoal, pencil shavings, eraser remains, and anything else you can imagine getting in your hair and eyes.
By the time Eleanor came back from dinner with a pilfered napkin full of a single portion of the night’s meal—barbequed wild tiger shrimp with farmer’s-market arugula and roasted quinoa—Indy was gone. She had already packed up the stuff she wanted to take to the studio and threw everything she wanted to get rid of into two huge garbage bags she left in the corner of their room.
The next morning, Indigo showered and changed into her long black dress and paired it with a jean jacket to cover her arms. She blew her hair straight and even put on foundation with sunscreen in it, and some mascara. If she was going to come back to the studio, she was going to at least look decent doing it.
The first thing Indy noticed when she walked into the painting studio was that Nick wasn’t there. The second thing she noticed was that it was really crowded. There were all the girls from her drawing and painting electives, taking time out from chipping away on their ambitious Industry Showcase Day projects to stare at Indigo in slack-jawed amazement the moment she walked in.
“Whoa, Hamlisch! We’d pegged you as a goner,” said Erin, wiping sweat from her forehead.
“Hey, Indy!” Suzie yelled from across the room. “Join the party.”
“Hey,” Indigo said, as casually as she could. She tried not to gape at the part of the floor that was still black from the fire—the only telltale remainder of that night, it seemed—and set herself up at an empty easel. She walked with intention to her workspace, and felt the eyes of her peers on her as she did. Indy grabbed a large pad of Bristol paper and a rubber-banded bunch of colored pencils on the way, and pretended like she was wearing blinders.
But the other artists kept staring at her, as though their eyes were shouting at Indy, “Where the HELL have you been and how the eff are you going to pull off a major project in twenty-four hours or less?”
Truthfully, Indigo had no idea. In fact, showing up at the studio the day before the exhibit could have been the latest and the most public of her mistakes to date, which, so far, included: coming back to camp, choosing an unavailable guy to have an obsessive crush on, setting a fire, destroying the same unavailable guy’s work in that very fire, ruining a friendship, becoming an unwitting partner in Eleanor’s scheme against that now ex-friend, and, finally, embarking upon a self-destructive course of non-action that landed her with no artwork to show.
She would just have to endure the pain of it. The frustration, the dry spell, the untimely lack of inspiration, the paralyzing anxiety around having to create something Big and Good on an impossibly tight deadline. When the urge to look around and gawk at the beautiful and impressively accomplished works of art in the studio around her got too strong to avoid, Indigo turned and ogled, and saw the heads of her peers whip back around to the fruits of their labor as she did. The stuff they were working on dazzled Indigo—she was intimidated and jealous and felt so guilty for not putting in the hours of inspired work that everyone else had.
There was Megan Stein’s twenty-foot mural—a multicolored, enormous, sprawling, heavily detailed representation of the history of her family, portrayed in narrative form from left to right. Megan had meticulously painted all of the important events of the Steins’ lives in gouache paint with gold-leaf accents: from their arrival at Ellis Island from the Old Country, to Megan’s first period, to her stepbrother’s promotion at Goldman Sachs.
Next to Megan’s floor-to-ceiling mural stood a life-size sculpture. Erin O’Donaghue was putting the finishing touches of bronze patina on the surface of what looked like a takeoff of Michelangelo’s Pieta. But in Erin’s sculpture, where the Virgin Mary would be was a seated female who looked a lot like Erin herself—and instead of holding a freshly crucified Christ, she was cradling the naked body of Robert Pattinson.
Indigo felt dumb sitting and staring at a blank sheet of paper, waiting for an idea, two days before the show. Finally, she just started drawing, like she did back at her bunk, letting her hand lead her, and tried hard not to judge what it made.
After amassing page after page of scribbles, she finally plugged herself into her earbuds and hit play on a Ting Tings playlist on her iPod. She was determined to shut out the outside voices and her inside demons, the ones telling her she couldn’t do it—screaming that she had no time, no ideas, no talent, no vision, and no ability. Remembering an exercise that Nick had given her to do when she was just eleven and he was lecturing his class on the subject of artist’s block, Indy gave herself the task of drawing one of the empty chairs in the studio, just to prove that she could still draw from life. “Because once you tap into the fact that you still have a skill,” she remembered him saying, “you can free up the muscle memory that goes into actual creativity.” Indigo began to draw the chair.
Back then, he’d taught her that art was mostly about the cardio of just showing up and doing the work anyway. If the determination to create something great was there, it took a little patience. Very rarely did magic just flow out of the pencil or brush instantly—you had to clock the hours to see real resul
ts, like anything else that was worth doing.
Indigo began to clock the hours.
And after what seemed like ages of darting her eyes to the chair and back to the lines she made on the page, making sure the two looked like each other, and that the piece looked not just true to life but also good in its own right, Indigo realized that she was alone. It seemed the studio had cleared out for lunch as soon as she stopped consciously thinking about whether or not the other girls were staring at her. And it was a relief. Because even though the drawing of the chair turned out to be just okay—not great—it was enough to keep Indigo working.
She worked through the next period and the next. She worked through dinner, churning out drawing after drawing of that same stupid chair—each one slightly better than the last. And she realized in the process that she was able, at some point, to somehow focus on something besides the clamor of others in the space—in their space—in Nick’s space. On Nick.
Indigo took tiny comfort acknowledging what she had accomplished, and paused her iPod, which was now blasting a Ted Leo and the Pharmacists song, having gone through all her other artists alphabetically, and landing straight back to T. She went to wash her hands, trying not to panic from the realization that she only had a stupid—however well drafted—series of colored-pencil drawings of a folding chair ready for the big show. And as she looked out the studio window above the sink, she saw hordes of girls on the hill in the dusk, wearing sweaters and sweatshirts and jackets over their summer clothes, walking toward the direction of Theater Row.
Crap.
The clock on the wall said that is was 7:45, which meant Puja’s play, starring Lucy, was starting in fifteen minutes. Part of her wanted to stay in the quiet, safe, Nick-less studio for a while longer, but she also knew that she had hit a wall. She had no interest in going through the same process as before, crumpling up page after page of mediocre ideas. And if she drew another chair, she might go insane.
Instead, Indigo cleaned up her station, pressing her final chair drawing gently in between the last page and the cardboard backing of her Bristol pad before putting it away in her locker.
She buttoned up her jean jacket and raced out the studio toward the theater, running through the coolness of the approaching night down the path lined with evergreens. Soon, she saw that the front of the intimate Playwrights’ Theater was busy with campers filtering in and taking seats according to their housing assignments.
The girls from the Neo-Expressionist cabin (who were going into seventh grade) sat up in the bleachers next to the campers in the Weimar Classicism bunks (who were going into eighth). On either side sat the thirteen- and fourteen year-olds from the Deconstructionist cabin—but, Indigo noticed, no girls in the Rococo, Marxist, or Pre-Raphaelite bunks. In fact, the entire audience was full of “upper-hill,” or older, campers.
“Indy! Over here!”
Indy landed her eyes on Yvonne, who sat in an aisle seat all the way up on one of the back rows to the left. The Playwrights Theater was a “theater in the round” space with seats on all four sides of the stage, but not for too many butts. It was Indigo’s favorite of the performance spaces at camp.
Yvonne Bremis waved her fleshy arm in the air at Indy, tapping the empty seat beside her as she did. She was wearing a tangerine sundress with small pit stains under the sleeves.
As soon as Indigo made her way next to Yvonne and plopped down in the seat next to her, it was like a load was taken off her chest. Indigo didn’t have to worry about anyone asking her questions about where she’d been or what she was up to or what she was working on or why she wasn’t at dinner. Yvonne was holding Indy hostage now, and she talked at her like she was on some kind of game show to determine who could say the most stuff without taking a breath.
“Oh my God, Indigo! Are you excited for Puja? Are you nervous for Lucy? This is crazy!” She produced a taco from nowhere and took a voracious bite. “Let me tell you,” she continued, with her mouth full. “First of all, I want to apologize for hogging the armrest. I can’t help myself, A,” Yvonne said, finishing what was left of her snack. “And B, I also want to apologize if I smell a little bit—it was a hot day. I know it’s cooler now, it’s evening, obviously, what are you going to do, but I’m still sweating like some kind of beast, and I want you to know I’m aware of it, and I’m sorry if it offends you in any way.”
“It’s fine,” Indigo said. “I can’t…it’s not a problem.”
The lights began to lower, and Indigo was saved from any more talk about Yvonne’s B.O.
“Silver Springs women!” Lillian practically shouted from the stage. “I am honored to welcome you all to the first event of Industry Showcase Weekend!” She paused for applause, but there was none. “When I say ‘Industry,’ you say ‘Showcase!’ ‘INDUSTRY!’”
Nothing.
Lillian switched gears like a seasoned pro, or at least a camp director used to being ignored.
“So! We are truly blessed to be treated to tonight’s very special evening activity—a production of Puja Nair’s brand new play, Torment, starring our own C.I.T. with the M.O.S.T., Lucy SERRANO!”
Applause nearly drowned out the second half of Lucy’s name without Lillian having to demand it. Lucy was clearly a fan favorite: the crowd was absolutely on board for whatever they were about to see, as long as it involved her.
“Now, remember—while I usually don’t like to restrict access to any art because of the age group, Puja’s play contains some adult themes and language that could be confusing or disturbing to lower hill campers. So, tonight’s performance is strictly for us old-timers, right, ladies?”
There was a long silence, and the sound of someone clearing her throat. Then somebody in the audience shouted “Show us your tits!” and the crowd exploded. Yvonne laughed so hard, Indigo was worried she was hyperventilating. Once the audience finally settled down, Lillian’s face was red—possibly from shame, but also because she, too, was laughing along with the crowd, for fear of otherwise seeming like a poor sport.
“Fair enough!” Lillian said. “Fair enough. So now, without further ado, Silver Springs is proud to present Torment by Puja Nair.”
More applause scored the dimming of the house and theater lights, and a single spotlight landed on the center of the stage. A hush fell over the crowd. Lucy, wearing an insane amount of makeup and dressed in leggings and a skimpy tank top over a visible black bra, took her place in the light and began to address the audience. It was clear from the moment she landed onstage, before she’d delivered a single line, that she was playing a prostitute.
“Let me tell ya a few things about what it’s like to work Thursday nights in Ko-reatown,” Lucy said to the audience, in an exaggerated Chicago accent that hit the back wall with its volume alone. “First of all, you’ve gotta be packin’. I don’t care if your john is a five-foot-four, chino-wearing motherfucker with tortoiseshell glasses and a fanny pack.”
Lucy’s accent began to shift into some bizarre amalgamation of Boston, New Jersey, and “ghetto.”
“He can cut you, and he can hurt you,” Lucy continued, in character. “It’s part of the game. And bitches got to protect they’selves if they’re gonna reckon any sort of street survival. You wanna know how I know? Shit. I learned it the hard way.”
Blackout.
The song “I Know You Want Me” by Pitbull blasted through the state-of-the-art speakers that were mounted on all sides of the theater, as tech majors, dressed head to toe in black, moved in an impressive-looking set—including a bed, a dresser, and a nightstand—onto the stage.
As the lights transitioned from pitch black to a dim red, Tiffany Melissa Portman, the actress from Indy’s bunk who helped her with her makeup for the social—took the stage and sat on the bed that was already positioned on the right-hand side of the stage. Tiffany was wearing a fake mustache, and her long hair was pulled up under a dark, scruffy wig that ended right below her ears. She had a pillow stuffed beneath a blue button-down
shirt, which was tucked into a pair of skinny jeans. After the eight summers that Indigo spent at Silver Springs, watching girls play grown men onstage would never cease to be awkward.
Lucy came back out, this time in a slip and pink stiletto heels. She took her place at the lip of the stage as the lights came back up, flickering in a pretty great facsimile of low-rent, motel lighting. Those theater-tech girls were pretty talented.
Once the scene was set, Lucy began applying red lipstick out toward the audience, pretending she was looking into a mirror over the chest of drawers that was set to the left of the bed. Tiffany delivered her first line in a very deep voice.
“So, how much is it gonna be?”
“Five hundred for everything—a grand if you want me to spend the night,” Lucy said, coldly, into the invisible mirror. She twisted her lipstick back down into its case, then tucked it between her breasts, into her bra.
“And your ad said that you…” Tiffany said. “…partied.” Tiffany cleared her throat and opened her legs wide, straddling the air in front of her. Is that how Tiffany thought men naturally sat?
Lucy spun her thick, shiny blond hair around as she reacted upstage to Tiffany’s offer. Her hair was way too classy-looking for a hooker’s.
“Yeah,” Lucy said, sidling up to man-Tiffany. “I party. Are you holding?”
Holding, packing. What did Puja know from this world, and where did she learn this slang? She was from Great Neck, Long Island.
“You bet I am,” Tiffany said, reaching into the back pocket of her skinny jeans to take out a prescription bottle of pills. “Catch.” She threw the bottle to Lucy, who caught it in one hand, then looked at the label.
“Sweet,” Lucy said as she placed the pills on the dresser.
“Do you mind if I turn on some music?” Tiffany mimed hitting a button on a bedside radio to cue an Al Green track on the stereo, at a low volume. While Al Green’s musty, lascivious vocals filled the theater, Tiffany scooted down on the bed, closer toward the center of the stage, and to Lucy.
Art Girls Are Easy Page 16