The Fortunes of Indigo Skye by Deb Caletti Page A

doing her civic duty as she sees
fit," Joe says in his old, gruff voice. "Those are cancer sticks."
    "Unhappy with his work. Why is he unhappy?"
Trina presses, but I am saved from revealing more, because just then Leroy comes
in.
    He is holding up one arm, the right one, with
the dragon, breathing flames that lick up the back of his hand. In that hand is
the red and black sign from the window of the Thunderbird. "Trina, God. Someone
put a 'For Sale' sign in your car," he says.
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    ***
    It's May, and on my way to school after work
that day, Nine Mile Falls is all warm-weather promise. It's that perfection that
comes just before something; summer, in this case. You see all that it can be
before it becomes what it is. No lawns are brown yet, no one is cranky from
too-high heat, there are no splinters or sunburns or bee stings. The air is just
all jazzed up from school almost out, and the usual signs that the prisoners are
about to be released for summer break are appearing--the telephone lines in
front of the school are strung with old tennis shoes that had been flung there
and are now hanging by their tied-together laces; the kids walking back home
wear short sleeves and sandals and floppier, less-homework backpacks, and the
ones in cars are almost required by law to shout things out windows. Prom
invitations and graduation class years are written on windshields with soap. The
slams of locker doors sound triumphant rather than doomed.
    I was part of it all and not part of it, as
always. Part of it because there were kids I liked, such as Melanie and Liz and
Ali and Evan (who we call King Tut because he once wore this metallic-gold
shirt), and teachers I liked--fane Aston (art class, who never marked me late
for class, even if I got there ten minutes past bell because of work), Mr.
Fetterling (American Government). Not part of it because I couldn't care less
about prom and rah-rah shit like that, and because there were these rituals and
rules I just didn't get, things I was supposed to be interested in that I
wasn't, like who was going out with who and like those magazines with makeup
tips and who-gives-a-shit articles. "What does your favorite nut say about you?
Take our quiz! If you like almonds, you're the romantic type ..." Yeah. When you
want what's real
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    and you try to find that in high school, you
might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner
of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.
    I didn't get things and people didn't get me,
ever since the ninth grade. I went to this concert, and the chick at the door
stamped my hand with what was supposed to be a sun. She'd probably just OD'd on
coffee--her shaky hand gave me a crappy ink mark with only five solar rays in
the exact shape of a marijuana leaf. I was Lady Macbeth trying to scrub that
thing off. But the dyes they'd used sunk so deep they'll probably give us all
cancer in thirty years. Anyway, ever since then, people decided that my unique
clothing choices plus the design on my hand equaled STONER, and the closest I'd
ever gotten to dried herbs was my mother's oregano. I'm sure no one would even
remember that mark specifically, but it never went away in people's minds, which
just goes to show how badly we have the need to sort people into groups and keep
them there. It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people
have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to
understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that
we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything
that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning
Supplies.
    Anyway, that day I'm having what I consider to
be a regular school day. My schedule is pretty light; the only truly sucky part
of the semester is that I have to take PE as a senior, because I couldn't stand
the idea of taking it as a