The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [132]
“I know, Ivy.”
“They’re seeing us all over the world.”
“I know.”
“You look really pretty, too,” she says.
Ursula’s heart sinks and rises in her chest. “Thanks, Ivy.”
“We’re going to deliver the message now, OK?”
“OK.”
“You looking into the camera?”
“Yes.”
“So am I. OK. . . .”
Ivy takes a breath, and begins to talk to the camera, her voice clear and calm.
“I suppose you’re wondering why my sister Urse and I gathered you all here today,” she says. “We did it because we have something really, really important to say to you.”
She plucks a fresh cigarette from her hair, the old one still burning between her fingers, and lights it with the massive jet of flame from the gold lighter Chas gave her. Without getting up, she reaches over and stubs out the old cigarette in an ashtray on the nightstand. She takes a quick puff and goes on.
“We’re here to tell you we know about you. We know how you look at your life sometimes and feel funny. Like it’s not your life at all. Like it’s someone else’s life. No matter what you do, you feel like you weren’t meant to be here at all, like you were meant to be somewhere else but you don’t know where, and you don’t know who you were meant to be or what you were meant to be doing. All you know is that everything just feels all wrong. And it makes you sad. We’re sorry you’re so sad. But you’ll be less sad when you know the reason you feel like you do. And that’s why we brought you here: to tell you the reason.”
Ivy sucks her cigarette, brings her knees up, and hugs them to her chest.
“The reason is, you don’t belong here. None of us do. We’re all from somewhere else, somewhere very different.”
Ivy pauses. Ursula turns her head and looks at her sister’s profile. Her expression is relaxed and serene, all the unnatural strains and stresses gone.
“We come from another time,” Ivy says, “long ago in the past. We were a great tribe, a powerful tribe. We hunted and gathered. We prayed to the spirits. We lived in harmony with the land. If you think hard enough, you can remember. Do you remember? I remember. I remember it all. I can tell you all about it, and then you’ll remember, too. We rode around on woolly mammoths, and we flew over canyons with hang gliders we made from the skins of giant manta rays. Some of us lived in houses that we built way up high in redwood trees, and some of us lived all together in giant tepees the size of a whole town, and some of us lived in warm, roomy homes we burrowed into the sides of hills. And when we were happy we danced, and when we were sad we rolled around on the ground, and that was all we needed to be happy again. And then we danced again.”
She thinks for a moment, puffing her cigarette, and goes on.
“We had big musical instruments. Do you remember the big musical instruments we had? We had horns the size of school buses, and we had harps made from dinosaur skeletons, and we had drums the size of ponds. And we danced on the pond drums and swang from the dinosaur harps, and a hundred of us blew into the school-bus horns, and that was how we made our music. Are you starting to remember now? Doesn’t that just feel right to you? Doesn’t that just feel so much righter than what you have now? Just keep thinking about it. The more you think about it, the more you’ll remember. I promise.”
She lets her legs back down and reaches a hand up to Ursula’s head.
“You’ve got such nice hair,” she says.
“Thanks,” Ursula says, lulled by the gentle twining and untwining of her sister’s fingers in her hair. It reminds her of the way Javier caressed her in bed, running his long fingers through her hair and down the side of her cheek, whispering in her ear words every bit as hopeful as the ones Ivy is saying now. For the first time she admits to herself that Javier is gone. He’s really gone. A couple of tears make paths down her temples as Ivy goes on with her speech.
“It’s hard to remember because the people from the future don’t want us to remember,” she explains. “They took us out of the past and put us here in this time and gave us new memories. They