The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [75]
The photo shoot had been a trial. At first it had promised to be a disaster. Ivy had emerged from the trailer confident enough, but then her eyes had locked on Chas, standing off to the side with Cabaj and the other Litewater people. They hadn’t seen each other since the day after she was admitted to the hospital, and Chas froze at the sight of her. Odd things began to happen to his face. His normally cool eyes took on a look of fright, and his effort to smile came off as a grimace, a pulsing bulge of tension warping his jawline from one side to the other.
Ursula had been anticipating and even dreading this moment of truth for the previous couple of weeks, so she was now gratified to discover that this demonstration of Chas’s love for Ivy caused her nothing more than a slight and relatively toothless bite of jealously. In fact, more than anything, the sight of his reaction soothed her, as she took it as proof of several things at once: he wasn’t heartless; she hadn’t been completely crazy to team up with him; he really was doing what he thought was best for Ivy; and she herself, in going along with it, was genuinely attempting to help her sister as well.
But as she realized when she finally turned her attention to where everyone else’s was, at the moment Ivy didn’t look all that helped. At the sight of Chas’s face in all its contortions, her posture had degenerated and her features had grown primal, shoulders hunching, head jutting, bottom teeth showing, eyes panicked and wild. The onlookers started to panic as well: they had gotten more of a savage than they had bargained for. The photographer shot a worried look at Camille Stypnick, the Mitchell and Chennault art director, who looked at Ed Cabaj, who in turn tugged nervously at his jowels and looked to Chas for reassurance. Then everyone else began looking to Chas, the orchestrator of the fiasco. Sonja, who now accompanied Ivy almost everywhere, stared at him with a cold, steady enmity. Chas, for his part, continued to watch Ivy.
Ivy began to murmur, a rapid, inhuman monotone, her eyes wide with astonishment, as if she, too, were only a listener:
the the the Bodies, the Bodies, have the girl now the Antibodies they’re losing marketshare the Bodies, cannot repeat cannot denominate the girlmarket alert the Monopopolice repeat the system turmoiled the the plot to be foiled the little bitch the little bitch to be loyaled to the equilibriumaintenance
Of course, it had occurred to Ursula that something of this nature might happen, and even that—as Chas had suggested on the rooftop—she might not be unhappy if it did, might not be all that terribly upset to see Chas’s scheme blow up in his face and Ivy’s career go down in flames in the same fateful moment of truth. But as she watched her sister ramble on, her body frozen in a kind of formalized cringe, her mind once again uncoupled, all Ursula felt was a horrible, bottomless guilt. She had lied to herself about her own motives from the very beginning, she thought. She had come to Mid City not to take care of Ivy but to claim a piece of her, had gotten a job with Chas not to get acquainted with Ivy’s life but to ascertain whether a man who found her sister attractive might find her attractive as well.
She wanted to run up and grab Ivy and apologize and plead with her to come back, to give the world another chance, to give her another chance. But she no longer trusted herself, suddenly afraid that her own presence could do nothing but harm. Probably all the other onlookers felt the same way; no one dared approach Ivy.
Then Chas turned to James T. Couch.
“Christ. Do something already,” he muttered.
Couch smiled. “Not to worry, Boss. I got your back.”
Casually, he walked toward Ivy, hands in pockets, whistling some moronic little jingle, drawing out the moment to show them all precisely