The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [6]
Chas shrugs, claps the sketchbook shut, and hands it back to her. “Stay on this savage thing.”
“Chas,” Ursula says. She was planning to be an absolutely ruthless bullshitter, a salesman among salesmen, but this is happening too fast. “I don’t really know about this. I mean, I picked it almost at random.”
Chas watches the storm clouds crawl downslope toward his cetacean throne, his face impassive. “This is not random,” he says. “You picked this for a reason. And it’s the same reason I picked you.”
A teacher with frown lines around her mouth and a real butcher job ofa haircut walks out the cafeteria door and spots their position on the dolphin. Her head cocks as she goes into Indignant Citizen mode and comes at them through the gate, the knife pleats of her heavy wool skirt flaring like a nun’s wimple. Chas and Javier turn and retreat in a single, fluid motion, hopping through a hole in the fence and rounding the cor-ner, their trenchcoats snapping behind them like the booming wakes of jet planes. With a final, embarrassed glance at the approaching teacher, Ursula casts her lot with absurdity, slipping off the dolphin and darting after her coworkers.
Candyland
Ivy is sitting by the unopenable window, in a wooden chair with arms that scythe around her like the pincers of a giant beetle. But she is too slight a prey to come to any harm: the chair seems made for someone twice her size, so the pincer arms can’t grasp her, and she rests her bony elbows on them, hunching her shoulders into nonexistence. She’s gained a little weight in the three weeks since she was admitted to Lady of Nazareth Hospital, due to the medication, Ursula’s been told—her face has rounded out a bit, giving her naturally sulky, petulant expression an even more childlike cast—but she’s still too skinny, or maybe just enviably skinny: when it comes to Ivy, Ursula distrusts her own judgments. Her slightness is accentuated by the oversized clothing she wears, castoffs from their father: a plain white button-down shirt, a pair of khakis she keeps from falling down by rolling the waist over a few times. She’ll wear only men’s clothes now, and of those only the most shapeless and nondescript. Her hair is still long, though since the last time Ursula saw her she has sawed into her bangs to make a jagged window for her improbably wide-set eyes. The job is so crudely botched that she must have done it herself. They can’t have given her a pair of scissors. Maybe she used a plastic knife.
She eyes the shopping bag in Ursula’s hand in undisguised hope, and Ursula holds it up in response. Ivy slips out of the chair, and the two of them leave the room and walk through the maze of corridors, Ivy keeping her eyes on the rainbow of painted lines, stepping only on the gold, taking care to avoid the green and the purple to either side. The terrace deck just outside the cafeteria is empty, the late-afternoon sky faintly drizzling and dark enough for the metal caging enclosing the deck to take on the bluish glow of the three-story-high Lady of Nazareth icon affixed to the hospital’s outer wall above them. Ivy selects a table by the edge of the deck, hitches up her pants, and folds herself monkeywise into a metal chair. Her body is all bones, but still she has no definite structure. Chin propped on her knees, she reaches for the bag Ursula has laid on the table, removes the contents, and arranges them in front of her: two cartons of Sobranies, a lighter, two plastic spoons, a couple of napkins, and a half-gallon carton of ice cream, Ivy’s favorite kind, with separate sections of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
“So, how’s it going?” Ursula asks, trying to sound casual.
Ivy seems confused by the question, and to avoid answering she concentrates on working the cigarette packaging open with her clawlike fingers. She takes out a green cigarette and then puts it back, preferring to start with a pink one. She smokes rhythmically, bringing the gold filter to the center of her full lips at the beginning of each inhalation, then exhaling