The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [53]
And he went home to his squat and saw his street-punk roommates anew. Their look, he saw, was not just a look: no, it was a vessel, perhaps the only one at their disposal to carry their difference, to keep it alive through the soul-numbing climate of adolescence. And if they could just manage to smuggle it safely through to adulthood, he realized, this difference would develop, flourish, grow into political, cultural, and moral convictions. And the imagination required for these kids to re-create themselves through fashion would heighten their sense of what was possible in adulthood. And the close friendships they learned to make through sharing their fashions would in adulthood give them the skills to forge alliances, movements, communities. And the courage it took for them to bear the scorn of their parents, teachers, and peers would in adulthood serve them as courage to fight for all their visions of what was admirable and beautiful and right.
And this, he told her, was what trendspotting meant to him. Trendspotting meant everything to him. It meant there was so much meaning out there that once he fully knew how to find it he’d never go hungry for it again.
And he sleeps, his jaw loosened, his mouth pulled down once again into that overbitten, sad, and childlike frown. And wide awake now beside him, Ursula watches his face, thinks about his story, and makes out the pattern clearly now. Spirals of depression. Rebounds into mania. Time after time breaking abruptly with his past, abandoning all his old plans, friends, attachments, and beginning all over again down some new path. She wonders how long he’s here for this time, how long before she becomes as insubstantial to him as he seems at times to her, how long before they slip through each other’s fingers, the haphazard kink of life that brought them together once again smoothing out like none of this ever was.
Plastic
That guy in there,” Ivy says, pointing into a room as they walk by. “You see him?”
An Asian teenage boy, lying on his back, staring without emotion at the ceiling.
Ursula nods. She wishes Ivy would keep her voice down.
“He drank a quart of Drāno,” she says. “It ate his whole throat away, and most of his stomach, too.”
The boy blinks, possibly in annoyance. Ursula takes Ivy’s skinny arm and coaxes her out of the doorway.
“He can’t eat or drink,” Ivy says, fascinated. “He has to get fed through the IV. He can’t talk, either.” She looks down, watching her slippers slide forward across the floor. The latest cocktail of medications seems to be working, though the side effect of muscular stiffness rather resembles the tendency toward catatonia it helped alleviate. Except for the slippers, she’s begun to wear her own clothes again, today a black sundress printed with small white flowers, which Ursula hasn’t seen on her since she was fourteen. Apparently she’s no longer concerned about being used to advertise for the Bodies or the Antibodies.
“The Drāno hollowed him all out inside,” Ivy says. “I know that feeling. To be all hollowed-out inside. Let’s ride the elevators.”
They pass the front desk. Ivy walks ahead to the lobby and pushes the Up and Down buttons simultaneously. Instantly a car arrives, going up, and Ivy slips in, gesturing for Ursula to follow. A doctor is inside, a slight, serious-looking Indian man, and Ivy presses her hands together and gives him a little Hindu head-bow, then leans her thin, stiffened body back against the stubbled aluminum wall.
“You a plastic surgeon?” she asks the man.
“No,” he says. “I’m an internist.”
“Our mom’s a plastic surgeon,” Ivy tells him, “and she had these videotapes she’d make of the procedures to show patients what to expect. Urse and me watched them on the sly. They were gross but kind of funny, too. She drew on the women’s boobs with a red Magic Marker. Two circles like eyes around the aureoles.”
Ivy traces