Indie Girl (12 page)

I had to confess there was something else too. Cayman. In the past few weeks, I had thought many times about that night he and I shared Chinese food, about the
easy way we talked and laughed. In that one evening, I had developed a huge crush on him, and I hadn’t really crushed on anybody since Ace Young on
American Idol.
At least Cayman was a person I could see again—if only the Taylors would call.

My mild depression was compounded by the fact that Kim had somehow gone and found herself a boyfriend. Brett was in school with us, and I had known that Kim had really liked him, but I always saw Kim to be like me: crushing on boys that she could never have. I had figured that she, like me, would probably never kiss anyone until she was in college.

Brett was decent enough, so I didn’t discourage Kim’s infatuation with him. He didn’t take drugs or seem to be the kind of guy who would ever show up at school with an Uzi. In the past, he had just never seemed to notice her, uttering no more than a throwaway “hey” every now and again. I figured she’d get over him before long.

But everything had changed last week, and I was there at the precise moment it happened.

It was lunch period, and we were hanging out in one of the hallways comparing shoes, and Kim’s brand-new magenta RAZR cell phone rang, loudly broadcasting the song she had just downloaded from Lil Scrappy. Brett happened to be walking past and his cell rang at the exact same moment with the exact same song.

“Dude, you got ‘Money in the Bank’ too,” he said,
saying more to her then than ever before. “The song is kick-ass.”

Kim beamed at him, stuttered for a second, and then gathered herself quickly enough to initiate a conversation about Scrappy’s new album. I stood there, smiling at both, unable to contribute to the conversation.

They hit the mall the next evening and had hung out together ever since, united by something as meaningless as a temporary ring tone. I didn’t want to be jealous, but I was; not because Brett was anything special, but because Kim had finally joined the ranks of the girls who dated, and I was still left behind, sitting around at home on a Saturday with nothing more than a plan to accompany my parents to lunch at the home of one of their friends.

My cell rung at that moment, and my caller ID told me it was Kim.

“Hey,” I said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“’Sup?” she replied. It always made me laugh when Kim tried be more cool than she was. She was also recently experimenting with ultra-hip clothing pieces that even I didn’t have the courage to try out. With her straight hair and generally bland features, ripped denim jackets covered in chains and skinny camouflage-print leggings looked a little silly.

“Not much,” I replied. “You?”

“Just chillin’,” she said. I thought she had been watching too much BET.

“I thought you might be Aaralyn. Haven’t babysat in two weeks. Weird,” I said.

“Oh hey, I heard something about her,” she replied.

I sat up. Being the gossip fiend that I was, those were my favorite words in the whole world. That, and “warehouse sale.”

“About Aaralyn? How? What?” I asked anxiously.

“I was with Brett at Stone Cold Creamery last night,” Kim said, a tinge of pride in her voice. “His friend Tyler was there too. You remember Tyler, right?”

“Vaguely,” I replied, recalling another moderately good-looking, moderately boneheaded boy in the Brett vein.

“Well, guess who else was there? Brooke Carlyle. The line was humongous—you know what it’s like on a Friday night. So I stayed outside to grab a table. Later, Tyler said that Brooke told him she was about getting ready to intern at
Celebrity Style
over the summer.”

My heart stopped.

“But, like, she was saying that things looked iffy at the magazine, that her aunt has been really stressed out,” Kim continued. “That Aaralyn chick is crazier than usual. Brooke can’t even pin her down for a few minutes. Aaralyn and that husband of hers, the one with the hippy-dippy name, they’ve been away a lot. They’ve been dropping off the kid with a relative, and going off to Palm Springs, Santa Barbara. Their marriage is dying, baby.”

“Oh my God,” I replied. “That would explain a lot.
Listen, I
have
to hear more about this. Wanna grab a bite somewhere? I’ll see if someone can drive me.”

My dad agreed to drop me off at the strip mall Starbucks that was midway between Kim’s house and mine. He was on his way to Home Depot with Dinesh, to look for tiles for a kitchen remodel he was about to attempt on his own, after being inspired by something he’d seen on HGTV. He had made these efforts before, and they usually resulted in a pile of materials sitting in our garage, expensive tools still in their boxes, and not a lick of work done with any of it.

But my arrangement to meet Kim worked out perfectly, actually. Kim was going to go hang with Brett later, and said she would use me as her alibi, like she always did. Her parents thought she was too young to date, and they said they didn’t want her to go out alone with any guy until she was at least in college, so I had been covering for her. So far, she hadn’t gotten caught, but I did tell her it was only a matter of time. But the secrecy surrounding their relationship had seriously helped in this instance. Nobody knew that Brett was dating Kim, which is why Brooke stood in line as she waited for her cheesecake ice cream with graham cracker pie crust and talked about Aaralyn’s problems.

She probably wouldn’t have if she had known that Tyler’s friend’s girlfriend’s best friend happened to be after the same job.

·   ·   ·

Brett showed up at Starbucks just as Kim and I were getting tucked into our Caramel Macchiatos, still steaming hot, the foaming milk on top sprinkled with cinnamon. We had elected to split a slice of lemon Bundt cake, which I knew was a very wicked thing to do, but I was bored and distracted and couldn’t help myself. Still, I soothed my guilt around it by reminding myself that at least I was sharing it.

Kim stood on her toes to kiss her boyfriend. It was weird, seeing her lips touch his. My first instinct was to turn away as if I were crashing some intimate moment.

“I’m early,” Brett announced. “So I’m gonna hang with you.”

“Sure,” I said, smiling politely.

“So Brett, Indie wanted to know what you heard last night,” Kim said, launching straight into it.

“About what?” he asked.

“You know, that thing you told me, about what Brooke Carlyle said last night. About her aunt and that magazine.”

“You tell her, babe,” he said to Kim. He then reached into the sleek gray bag he had had slung across his body and pulled out a portable media player. I couldn’t believe it; Kim’s new boyfriend was going to sit there and watch TV. What a catch he turned out to be.

Kim turned back to me, visibly embarrassed.

“Okay, I’ll just tell you what this guy—” she motioned to her boyfriend with her thumb—“told me yesterday.” Brett, his eyes affixed to the screen, headphones on, was oblivious.

“Brooke was just going on about really expecting to work at that magazine this summer,” she continued. “But her aunt is totally MIA, not calling her back. The magazine’s going through a rough patch. Not good all around. Brett told me that Tyler was doing most of the listening or at least pretending to listen. He was faking it because he’s really into that girl. She’s pretty hot, I guess.”

Brett, obviously at the end of whatever show he was watching, removed his headphones and turned his attention back to us.

“You done discussing that bogus stuff?” he asked.

We both nodded obediently.

“Good,” he said, putting his gadget away. “Come on, Kim,” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”

As soon as my shiny new issue of
Celebrity Style
arrived, the first one for the month of May, I took it upstairs to read in the privacy of my bedroom. The cover story was a compilation of celebrity weddings, and included a small item on Gina Troy. I leaped ahead to the fashion section, which was my favorite part of the magazine. I usually loved it for the “Headliners” section, where it would give stars to fashion items—five for the piece that was the trendiest, the prettiest, the best value for money—and one star for some awful number that a fashion victim actress/model had thrown on for some event. It was a great page—informative, witty, and easy to read.

But the entire section was missing.

I went back to the index at the front, and looked for it, checking all the pages again carefully, but it wasn’t there. I flicked through a few more pages, looking for the column called “Frisk,” where a staff writer would corner a celebrity at an event or even out on the street, and ask them what they had on—from the make of their watch to their underwear. It was always revealing and insightful to learn that some A-list hottie had found a skirt for five dollars at a Salvation Army store, but had thrown it together with some stylist-provided designer dud. I loved it, because in my mind, that was what fashion was all about—letting the clothes speak for themselves.

But that wasn’t there either.

Instead, there was a note at the back of the magazine saying:
HEADLINERS AND FRISK ARE TAKING A BREAK, AND WILL BE BACK SHORTLY.

What was going on?

I then remembered my conversation with Kim from the other day.

I had been so enamored of the magazine—of the beautiful pictures and the gorgeous gowns—that I had forgotten to take into account that it was a business like any other, a business that needed new ideas and good people.

That whole week in school, I had been finding it very hard to concentrate on anything. Mr. Fogerty had already lost his patience with me twice during class, once when I had forgotten to bring my homework in, and another time when I was telling Kim about the latest disappointing issue of
Celebrity Style
in the middle of Mr. Fogerty’s talk on identifying acidic oxides in the atmosphere. Any other time, I might have been vaguely
interested. But I couldn’t get Aaralyn out of my head. I had actually started to become strangely sympathetic toward her, wondering how she was coping with everything that was happening. And then of course, I thought rather selfishly, if I never saw Aaralyn again, I’d probably never see Cayman again either. I felt a little pinprick of disappointment.

“Indira!”
he said, as I was in mid-sentence with Kim. “Is this something you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”

I shook my head meekly, all the while wanting to blurt out to Mr. Fogerty that everyone in this class would rather hear about the soap opera goings-on at the Taylor household rather than what happens when chromium trioxide reacts with water.

At nine that night, while I was helping my mom with the dishes, my cell rang.

“Hi, Indie, it’s Aaralyn,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound as sharp as it had in the past, it was more subdued, more tempered.

“Hello, how are you?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, as if I had no idea that she was apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“Fine,” she said curtly. “We’ve been away a lot. But I could use your help tomorrow afternoon. From two to seven. Can you make it?”

“I think so,” I said, realizing after I hung up that I
should probably have asked my parents first to see who could drive me.

“Tomorrow is not possible,” my father said sternly, when I checked with him. “How could you forget?”

I had a blank expression on my face. What had I forgotten?

“Tomorrow is Aditya’s wedding,” my father said, raising his voice. “We are all expected there.”

Aditya was the son of very good friends of my parents. He was twenty-one and had met his fiancée at UC Berkeley. I think my father had been secretly hoping that Aditya would have remained single into his mid-twenties, so that he and I could eventually have gotten together. But because he was now old enough to drink while I was still a teenager, Aditya had never paid any attention to me. I could see what my father liked in him though; he was tall, good-looking, and well-spoken, and was on his way toward a degree in bioengineering. He had apparently expressed an interest in restaurants and culinary arts, but his father, who was like mine in so many ways, had said something along the lines of: “No son of mine will become a kitchen boy!” And so Aditya had changed his mind and had conceded to poaching eggs in his spare time instead of as a career. His fiancée, Sumitra, who was from an equally pedigreed family, had been majoring in earth and planetary science. They would no doubt have extremely well-qualified children. I
thought they were far too young to be married but seeing as my parents were that age when they got hitched, I didn’t really have much heft to my argument.

“Dad, I’m sorry, I completely forgot,” I said, by way of explanation.

“Uh-oh, you’re in
trrr-ooo—bbel,
” Dinesh said, his voice tuning into an annoying singsong one that he reserved for moments such as these.

“How could you forget? We have been talking about nothing else all week,” my mother said, dropping a chopstick onto the table. “Why, just the other night, I showed you two saris and asked you to help me choose one. Remember?”

I did, vaguely. But with the dramas at the Taylor residence playing out in my mind, and my mild but completely pointless infatuation with Cayman, I had been preoccupied lately.

“What time is the ceremony? And where is it again?” I asked my mother.

“Eleven. And lunch right after,” she said. “At the temple in Malibu.”

“I can do that,” I replied, feeling slightly relieved. “Aaralyn said she wouldn’t need me till two. So I can come to the ceremony, have a quick bite afterward, and then maybe one of you can drive me to Brentwood?” I asked, a begging tone creeping unbidden into my voice.

My parents looked at each other.

“Indira, we cannot just disappear,” said my father. “It is rude. This is a big community celebration. Everyone will be there, including Rinky, Tinky, and Pinky.
Those
girls will be there start to finish, socializing nicely with everyone.”

“Dad, they just have nothing better to do,” I said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of my mouth.