The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [8]
“They want me to sit up straight and push out my chest,” Ivy whispers, hunching over further. “They want me to advertise for the Bodies. But it’s really for the Antibodies. My belly button lies along the i-axis. I’m the drain magnet in the glamour continuum.”
She looks up at Ursula, hoping for comprehension. Not finding it, those strange eyes of hers wander off again. Ursula’s own eyes are a little more wide-set than average, but Ivy’s are wider still. When she was a child, her wide eyes, small mouth, and pale, bulbous brow gave her face the underdeveloped look of popular conceptions of aliens. When he had them for a weekend once, their father joked around with Ivy, telling her that when she was born, her eyes had been on stalks; that they’d swiveled around independently of each other and seen everything coming and going; and that their mom had performed the surgery to put those eyes back inside her head, where they belonged—or almost, anyway. Later Ivy asked Ursula if it was true; their mom was, after all, a plastic surgeon, and the two sisters had sneaked looks at informational videotapes of procedures that seemed far more unlikely than that. Out of a combination of malice toward Ivy and loyalty to their dad, Ursula swore it was true, and for weeks afterward Ivy wore a baseball hat low over her face to hide her alien deformity.
She stamps out her cigarette and lights another, a pastel-blue one this time, her wide eyes crossing slightly as she brings the flame to the tip.
“The Imagineers are gunning for Total Control,” she whispers, staring with suspicion at the plastic spoons on the tabletop. “They’ve interfiltrated the compound. They monitor all the desire lines. Except the gold.”
“That sounds serious.”
“I’m keeping the gold open for the trendspotters,” she says. “They’re my onlyhope.” She pauses, processing. “My lonelymope. Ace-in-the-sleeve. Let-me-leave.”
Ivy’s predominant facial expression since she was admitted has been the shell-shocked look she wore when she was four, in the months after their parents got divorced, when she’d sit in the backyard day after day gazing at the insects amid their giant blades of grass, her neck twisted, her lower lip pushed out, her eyes adamantly bulged. But now, as she speaks, that other, far rarer look appears. It happens like it always does, all at once and for only a few moments. Her pale, delicate face clears. Her forehead smoothes. Her pout recedes. Her lips curl into a slight, secret smile. This is the look she gets when she talks about the trendspotters. The first time it happened was two weeks ago. She said the trendspotters were with her, hidden but always present. She said they would never abandon her. And they would help her complete her mission and save the human race.
By that time Ursula knew about Chas—not from Ivy, but from her friend and slightly more successful fellow model Sonja Niellsen, who other than telling her his occupation only described him as an “old guy.” Ursula had already called him to set up a meeting, with no other plan at the time than to try to get some perspective from him on what Ivy had been going through during the period leading up to her breakdown. But after Ivy started talking about trendspotters, looking as hopeful and comforted as a child being paid a visit by imaginary