If I had a quarter for every time I heard the word “money” in the next few weeks at home, I’d be a millionaire if I weren’t already a millionaire. Melanie was averaging four calls a day to either ask how I was going to spend it or recommending ways to, and Severin and Bex kept looking at me with the wide eyes of those starving African kids in the ads. Jane was acting weird, as if me and the me who had money were two separate people—she seemed irritated, as if I’d gone off and done something she disapproved of, and even pulled me aside to ask if she needed to find a replacement since I was probably leaving. Trina invited me to go shopping, and Funny suggested she write up a story about me for the paper. Not only did I tell her no, I vowed everyone else to silence, didn’t breathe a word of it at school (not even to Liz or Ali or Evan). Still, KMTT, a local radio station, phoned and asked to speak to the waitress who got a really big tip, and KING 5 News knocked on the door. Severin told both that someone was playing a joke, but Severin’s a crappy liar.
And Trevor—a few days after I get back home, he tells me he has a surprise for me. Surprise—you think flowers. Balloons. A life-size cutout of Hunter Eden he might have gotten at Tower Records. No way am I expecting what I do see when he pulls into our driveway. I hear him honking, and I run outside barefoot ready to be happily grateful. I stop on the walkway.
“Wow,” I say.
There is an odd weight in my chest suddenly at the sight—Bob Weaver, gleaming in brand-new orange-red metallic glory, and Trevor, leaning out the window, his smile as bright as the glints of sun on the Mustang’s freshly painted hood.
“Doesn’t he look like a fucking king? Some king of cars?”
“Wow,” I say again. “You had him painted.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind. It would have taken me, what, five, six more months to save up the rest of the money? But now, why not just get it done? I couldn’t wait to see your face.”
Trevor springs from the car. The car door is still flung open, and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me hard.
He pulls back. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
I wipe my wet mouth with the back of my hand. It is hard to say the words, because he looks so happy. They feel heavy, like I am pulling something hard but necessary. “Don’t you think you should have asked?”
“You’re kidding, right?” he says. He shakes his head, as if he didn’t hear right.
“I think you should have asked,” I say. My voice sounds thin, even to me. It stretches far and long, across some great expanse of distance that seems suddenly possible between us, some vast space I’ve never seen before.
“God, In,” he says. “This is what, crumbs? A drop in the bucket? I thought you’d be happy. This doesn’t even sound like you. We share everything.”
Twisty tree roots of guilt wind up my insides. I shake my own head, to exile those thoughts. He is right. Crumbs. And yet, the small voice inside says, “everything” isn’t the same everything it was before. “I’m sorry,” I say. And I am sorry. “It’s beautiful. I’d want you to have it done. Of course I do.”
He pulls me close again. Kisses my hair. I close my eyes, against the sight of new differences. “It’s for us, In. Let’s put the top down. I want you to see it with the top down too.”
And let’s not forget Mom. Mom, who is on her third talk with me. Now she calls me to the kitchen. She’s got her yellow legal pad and pen and sits at the table with me across from her, same as the other two times. A yellow legal pad and a pen means a PLAN. She even has PLAN written across the top of the paper, same as she did during the last two talks that went nowhere.
“Indigo, we’ve got to make some decisions here,” she says.
“I want to buy a house,” I say. “For you.”
“No, Indigo. I told you. No.”
“No,” Chico says. “No, no, no.”
We might as well play a tape recorder. It’s the same conversation we’ve had twice before. “Why are you being like this, Mom? I want to help. I want to make things easier for you.”
“Pride, okay? Just let me have it.” College, she writes. “We need to talk about college.”
“As I said before. Of course we’ll use the money for Severin’s college. And Bex.”
“And you.”
“Mom.”
She slaps the pen down on the paper.
“Cars,” I say. “For everyone. You, me, Severin—”
“Too much. Too much at once,” she says. “I don’t want this to change us all suddenly.”
“Then I’ll buy my own.”
“Fine,” she says. But her voice has edges. She doesn’t write down the word “car.” Instead she doodles a dark spiral on the page, circle within a circle within a circle.
We are at some sort of standstill, and the argument is so new and strange, we might as well be attempting to argue in a foreign language. “Look,” I say. “I’ve had the money all of, what, a few weeks now? It’s sitting nice and cozy in the bank. We don’t have to make any decisions about it right this minute, do we? Can’t I have a little time to get used to this?”
Mom sighs. She tilts her head back, looks up at the ceiling and shakes her head. “Money, money, money,” she says. And right there, three more quarters earned.
“You know what the problem is?” Trevor says. “The problem is, you’re treating this like a problem.” We’re talking on the phone. I’m sitting on my bed, legs folded. I stare at my guitar case across the room. For some reason, since I got the money, I can’t open it. I haven’t felt like playing. I don’t know why, except that I don’t know if I’m the girl who plays that guitar or not. I’ve got old-me and new-me pieces, and I’m not sure where they belong.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “Maybe it’s just new. But everyone’s different and it’s bugging me. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just adjusting to it.” “It”—the word has its own definition. “It” means the money.
“In, you’re not having any fun with this. This should be fun. This is, like, every person’s dream.”
“It’s hard to have fun when everyone is acting so weird. They’re not relating to me. Just me with money. Already. My family, the Irregulars…” I don’t mention Trevor himself. That’d put us on opposite sides, and I need him now on mine. “You should hear Jane. Her voice is all distant-cool. I don’t get it.”
“It’s all new, In. And maybe, are you maybe reading too much into things?”
“I don’t know.” I trace the squares of my quilt with my finger.
“In, God! This is great! You’re forgetting it’s great. Okay, I know what we’re going to do. We’re going to go shopping.”
“Shopping.” Maybe he’s right. I have forgotten the fun parts, haven’t I? I’ve been sucked up suddenly into the weighty and spinning frenzy of Important Decisions.
“What’s the point of having money if you don’t spend it? What’s the fucking point, In? Come on.”
And right then, I’m sure he is right. I’m sure, because this small spoon starts stirring a little pot of glee inside. The glee of the traitor, the swapping over from you shouldn’t to why not? Fun—permission internally granted.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just go for the big stuff right away,” Trevor says. We’re in Bob Weaver, who is gleaming so hard it’s nearly a gloat, heading out for our planned outing of disposable income amusement. We just got fueled up with a double espresso and a brownie, and I am officially and legally high. “If it were me, I’d be getting a stainless steel beauty, freezer on the bottom, an ice maker, cubed or crushed.”
A refrigerator. Hmm. With caffeine jazzing through me, everything seems like an exceptional idea. I have to force myself to stop and think. “Maybe tomorrow,” I say. I see a folded sheet of notebook paper sticking out from underneath Trevor. He’s sitting on it. I give a little tug and he moves a leg to free it. I unfold it and read.
“What?” I say. Happiness jets over to irritation. “What’s this?”
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Just a few ideas.” Refrigerator, it actually reads. Car stereo. Floor mats. The words run down the paper and extend to the other side.
“A list,” I say. “But your list.” And there it is again, suddenly, some heavy feeling in my chest. Something that feels like anger but that might be disappointment. I’m hoping for anger. Anger is brief and vacates the premises quickly; disappointment is the uninvited guest that never leaves. I try for anger. “What, am I Santa and you’ve been a good boy?”
“Ideas, In. Come on, lighten up.”
Nothing makes you feel less like lightening up than someone telling you to lighten up. But this is supposed to be a fun day. We have planned for fun, and when you plan for fun, you don’t want a fight. Fights on days you’ve planned for fun are especially upsetting. I don’t want to argue, not today. So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage.
We go to the mall. For the record, I hate the mall. I hate the mall music and the mall lights and the mall chicks with their mall chick outfits, and the mall foam boat that the screaming kids play on. I hate the mall women spraying you with mall perfume and the mall escalators (I always find the down when I need the up) and the mall parking lot. The only thing worse than the mall is the mall at Christmas.
But let me tell you something about the mall. The mall is a very different experience when you have money as opposed to when you don’t. It’s the difference between standing outside of somewhere and going in.
You can tell that Trevor and I are mall virgins, because we make strategic error number one right off the bat. Trevor doesn’t want the Mustang scratched, so he parks on the top level of the garage, in the farthest-away spot, a spot that has its own zip code and isn’t close to anything except the JCPenney photographer and the catalogue purchase return counter. I should have brought my hiking boots and compass and trail mix.
The main part of the mall…well, it’s like being on the inside of a pinball machine. We bounce from flashing lights to flippers to bells. My mood improves by the second. This is way better even than the caffeine rush. By the time I get out of Radio Shack, Trevor has to make a trip to the car. I buy tiny televisions and travel alarm clocks and five cell phones (family plan), and a DVD player and a big-screen TV that will be delivered the next day. Headphones. Xbox for Bex. Games for aforementioned Xbox. Digital camera. Ipods, docking stations (whatever those are—Trevor says we need them), a laptop, a remote control robot.
Trevor wants to go into Victoria’s Secret, but I say fuck off. It’s my money, and I go into Sharper Image instead and I buy a travel pillow and massagers and something that measures your golf swing (Trevor likes this) and a weather forecaster and a machine to make our air pure and this thing to clean our jewelry, even though we don’t have jewelry yet.
Trevor makes two more trips to the car, and I go clothes shopping. I start to get the hang of this, see, because I’m feeling this mall-with-money difference, this I’d-own-the-world-if-I-wanted-to buzz. Something is happening to me in here. I feel swingy and powerful, like Freud after he brings you a mouse head. The more I get into it, the more I get into it, if that makes sense. The noise, the lights, the credit card slide across the table; it’s some Las Vegas high minus the Elvis impersonators. I buy shirts and jackets and a robe for Mom and shoes for Severin and a coat for him too, and outfits for Bex, skirts and sweaters, and this Harley shirt that comes with a matching key ring that Trevor likes.
I’m pretending I’m a millionaire and can buy anything I want and I’m starting to believe me. We’re walking through Nordstrom when Trevor starts to get whiny.
“Can we eat yet,” he says. “C’mon, In. I’m tiii-red.”
But there in the center of the store on the first floor is a place I’ve never gone. A non-Indigo place. A small perfumey universe of swivelly white chairs and women with high cheekbones and powdery faces and lab coats, which are supposed to make us think that eyeliner is a science that requires an expert. A place that says that real beauty can be bought only there; that the plastic packages of the drugstore mascaras and lipsticks are merely clownish frauds. Even looking over there gives me some scritch of insecurity, something I suddenly feel I need to overcome now that I could belong there. When you have money, you have Ziploc bags and not fold-over baggies. You drink Diet Coke and 7UP, not the “Diet Cola” and “Lemon Lime Drink” of the store brand. You fill up the whole gas tank, instead of buying the few dollars’ worth you have in your wallet. You go to a salon, rather than cut your own hair or get a ten-dollar chop job at a place where everyone rushes out looking the same. And you come to this place, where a skilled professional with a cool demeanor guides you toward the power of beauty. It’s a test. The big test. A fitting-in right of passage. A metaphorical journey from the two-dollar Wet n Wild lipstick of the masses to the seventeen-dollar lipstick that comes in its own glossy bag with a braided rope handle.
I step forward and try out a wealthy confidence. I sit down in one of the swivelly chairs. I am a millionaire. Once the lab coat is off, once they remove the jacket of superiority, these makeup counter women just go home and make a salad and get up the next day and put the lab coat on again.
“I’d like a whole new look,” I say. The woman standing over me has blond hair swooped up crescent-roll style, a poofy, decisive makeup brush already poised in her hand.
“The colors you’re wearing are too harsh,” she says. La-ti-dah, big deal.
“Your colors are fiii-iine, In. I want to go-oooo,” Trevor whines.
The woman is wiping my face with a cotton ball dunked in something cool and stingy. “You have good lines,” she says. “Let’s make the most of them.” It’s a compliment and an insult both. She starts dabbing and dobbing, her face close to mine, warm breath smelling like what she had for lunch, making me shut my eyes and hold my own breath. I pop my eyes open, and yikes, hers are right there, large and staring at my mouth, and I slam my eyes shut again. Lip liner, eyes, brows—my skin pulls different directions, and then finally, “There. I’d recommend the number seventeen moisturizer, and the skin care line. You have large pores.”
I look in the round mirror on the counter in front of me. I look airbrushed. Finished in a way I’ve never looked finished before. I’m afraid to blink, lest I crack myself.
“You look great,” the woman says.
“Right,” Trevor says. “Except for the hair, she looks like you. Fuck, they all look like you,” Trevor grouses, swooping his hand in a wide motion to include all the women in all the swivelly chairs.
“Don’t mind him,” I say, moving my lips like a ventriloquist. “He just needs lunch. I’ll take it all,” I say.
I have to ride home sitting on the Motorized Bumper Boat, with the Turbo Hair Groomer and the shower radio wedged under my elbows and the espresso machine and alcohol breath-screening device under my feet. Trevor perked up after I bought him a hot dog and fries and an Orange Julius, extra large. We pull into the driveway and he honks the horn like mad, scaring Freud, who leaps from the open window of Mom’s car, where he was sleeping but knows he shouldn’t have been sleeping. He jets across the lawn and hides under the front hedge. Bex runs out the front door.
“Christmas and every birthday anyone’s ever had,” she shrieks. “Now we’re talking!”
“Xbox,” I say.
“No,” she breathes.
“Yes.”
“OH MY GOD!” she jumps up and down the way she used to when she was younger and had to go to the bathroom badly. I carry in an armload of boxes, passing Ron the Buddha on the way in, who eyes us serenely from over by the rhododendron bush. I flop onto the sofa when I get in, take my shoes off. Mom’s wearing a pot holder on one hand, with a lethal amount of happy toasters on it. “Well, look at you,” she says.
I put my hand to my face, forgetting the layers pasted there. I look at my fingertips, splotched with dots of brown. I haven’t figured out yet that you’re not supposed to do this. “I had a makeover.”
“So I see,” she says.
Severin pushes open the front door with his hip. “Clear the living room, we’re coming in!” His arms are full of boxes. “Make room!” He shoves Mom’s rocker with his foot, and it sits against the wall pointed the wrong direction. It looks somehow offended.
Trevor sets some boxes down with a thump.
“Hey, easy with the merchandise,” Bex says. The room is filling. “Check it out!” Bex holds up a musical soap dispenser for Mom to see. Mom nods. She looks overwhelmed. Picks at a piece of packing tape with her finger.
“Let me get a knife,” Severin says. He trots to the kitchen and comes back, starts slitting the lids of boxes.
“Maybe we should do this in some sort of…order,” Mom says.
“Nah,” Bex says.
Trevor returns. He passes out the boxes of cell phones. “For you, Missus,” he says to Mom. “And you, and you, and you,” to me, kissing me. “And me.”
“A CELL PHONE!” Bex shrieks.
I remove mine. I decide I want to take a picture of all this.
“Wait, we’ve got to charge them first,” Severin says.
Trevor takes control of this, lines them up on the floor by the TV. In a few minutes, the room is filled with blocks of Styrofoam and plastic wrappings and instruction manuals. I hear Bex’s voice, locate the top of her head as she sits cross-legged on the floor in a bare spot surrounded by cardboard towers.
“Cool,” she says. She’s wearing a pair of the headphones, and she’s got the alcohol-level breath analyzer, Alcohawk, held in her palm.
“Indigo,” Mom says. “You don’t even drink.”
I shrug. I hand her the barbecue fork that’s also a thermometer.
“We don’t have a barbecue, either,” she says.
“I think that’s coming with the TV,” Trevor says.
“I’m sober!” Bex says.
At dinner Mom opens a bottle of wine, but not before Trevor hunts around in the paper and packing bubbles and locates the new one-touch bottle opener. Mom doesn’t drink—I think someone from work gave her the wine last Christmas. But now she sips it gratefully, sighs as if she’s just descended into a hot bath after a long day.
“Oh. My. God,” she says.
“This is the best day of my life,” Bex says. She’s wearing all three shirts I got her, and this cool hat with a feather in it that looks a little like Robin Hood’s.
“I thought your best day was when you collected a hundred and sixty-three dollars at QFC for tsunami victims,” Mom says.
“Oh, that,” Bex says.
Severin is wearing this abdomen exerciser we bought him that increases muscle size without any actual physical activity. He forks in a few bites of meatloaf, then undoes the Velcro strap with a shh-shwick. “I don’t think I can eat with this on,” he says.
“You look buffer already. More buff,” I say.
“Yeah, In, a buffer is something you shine a car with,” Trevor says, and I stick my tongue out at him. “Wait. Can we get a buffer? For Bob Weaver?”
“Honey, I don’t know if I can take another day like this,” Mom says. “Undoing all that packing tape and twisty ties alone has given me a migraine.” She’s not even eating. She’s just drinking wine and nibbling at bread crusts. “And the makeup…Honey, you’re a natural beauty. All that foundation—I think of bodies in caskets.”
I decide to ignore her. I decide she just needs time to get used to the new me. “Wait. Something’s missing,” I say.
“How could you even tell,” she says.
“Something I got for you. It’s probably with my clothes.”
I go into the living room, kick my way through paper and plastic. Freud is sleeping on an open instruction booklet Severin was reading. I find the shopping bags with my new clothes still inside. I reach my hand around the crispy new fabric, feel for a small bag.
“Aha!” I shout.
“Oh, God,” Mom groans.
“Oh, God,” Chico says.
Back in the kitchen, I hold the bag out to her. Trevor chuckles. “I know what it i-is,” he sings.
Mom takes out a small box, decorated with color tiles. She opens the lid. “It’s a pillbox,” she says. She knits her eyebrows together, baffled.
“For your hormone replacement therapy,” I say.
“I am not in menopause!” she says.
“Yet,” Bex says.
“Wow. What can I say,” she says. “That was very thoughtful.”
“It’s got the little squares so you can remember to take them every day,” I say.
“Just what I needed,” she says. Sips her wine again.
Just then, one of the cell phones rings in the other room.
“Hello?” Chico says.
“Cell phone!” Bex shrieks, and runs there. “It’s mine!” she announces. Hers is pink. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, pushes the talk button, then holds it up to her ear. “This is Bex,” she says. “Huh?” She covers the mouthpiece with one hand. “They want to order a pizza.”
“Ask them what kind,” Severin says.
“What kind?” Bex says into the phone. She listens a moment, covers the mouthpiece again. “Large Canadian bacon and sausage.”
“Where are they calling from?” Severin says.
“Take their credit card number!” Trevor says. We’re all laughing now.
“Where are you calling from?” Bex says. “Astoria?”
“Tell them we’ll be there in about five hours,” Severin says.
“Bex, tell them they have the wrong number,” Mom says, but she’s laughing too.
“We’ll be there in five hours,” Bex says. She listens. “They hung up,” she tells us. “My first call. Cool.” She punches in a few numbers and in a moment our home phone rings.
“Hello?” Chico says.
“I wonder who it is,” Mom says.
In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It’s music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The fucking ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds, to the tune of “Zippity Do Dah”?
I listen. It’s coming from the bathroom. My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser/alarm clock, singing at midnight.