Read The Fortunes of Indigo Skye for Free Online Page B

pisses me off to see people smoke, knowing what they are
doing to their poor, formerly positive lungs.
    So anyway, I look down, and there's this
cigarette held between Jane's fingers, and it's right down by her side where
Jack is just breathing all this shit. And Jane doesn't even smoke.
    "What are you doing!" I shriek.
    Jane looks a little shocked. She swivels her
head around as if there must be some robber with a bag of loot running around
somewhere nearby. There's the crime, right in her own hand, and she doesn't even
realize it.
    "No! You! There!" I point.
    "Indigo, jeez," she says. "You scared me to
death."
    She thinks I'm kidding, but I'm not. "You
should be scared to death, 'cause you're certainly gonna put Jack in a coffin,
not to mention yourself."
    She looks down at herself. I can't believe it.
She still doesn't get it.
    "Your cigarette," Nick offers
helpfully.
    She holds it up as if she has no idea how it
got there. "This?"
    "Ugh, God, put it out, I can smell it," I say.
I wave my hand in front of my face. I hold my breath so none of the three
thousand toxins and tars and chemicals can get in.
    "It is a nasty habit," Nick says, giving
me another reason why I like that guy. "I didn't even know you smoked," he
says.
    "I don't," Jane says.
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    "This is just a mirage," I say.
    "No, I mean, I haven't. For years.
Wait," she says. "Why am I explaining myself to you people? I'm a grown woman. I
can smoke if I want." But she tosses the burning stick of tar and chemicals to
the sidewalk and smashes it with her heel.
    I say the one thing I know will affect her,
whether it's true or not. "Smoking is for Republicans."
    "That's just mean," she says to me. "I've been
under a little stress lately," she says to Nick. "In regard to what we were just
discussing."
    "I can imagine," he says.
    "What?" I ask.
    "Nothing," Jane says.
    "What!" I ask again.
    "If I wanted everyone to know, I'd get a
billboard."
    I let it go, because just then we hear knocking
on the glass of Carrera's. We look that direction, and there's Bill in his
yeah-right-I-almost-mistook-
you-for-a-tree hat, gesturing heartily at Nick.
He's waving, then pantomimes slashing his finger across his throat, drops his
head down and gaggles his tongue out.
    "God, I wish I could get out of this place,"
Nick says.
    I hear the growling rumble of Trevor's Mustang
before I see the car itself. Then it turns the corner, pulls up along the curb.
Trevor parks, gets out, opens the door for me. For a reformed pot-head, he knows
how to be a gentleman.
    Trevor doesn't kiss me, because he also knows
how I feel about public displays of affection in front of my boss. I say goodbye
to Jane and Nick, edge onto the cream-colored seats that Trevor says are "pony
interior," though I don't have a clue what
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    that means, other than there are horses on the
seat backs.
    "God, I'm starving," Trevor says.
"Cheeseburger. Beef attack, baby! Fries, shake. You don't mind if I stop,
right?"
    I guess everyone is hungry for
something.
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    3
    "Baby, look at this," Trevor says. He taps the
odometer in front of the steering wheel, and I lean over him, my elbow on his
thigh. We're in the parking lot of XXX Root Beer, which sounds like a porn
theater, but is one of the last drive-ins in the history of mankind or at least
in the Seattle area, and has the best hamburgers you've ever had in your life,
with buns as big as salad plates. Trevor's got the top down because it has
gotten warm, and there are napkins and balls of crumpled foil on the floor
around us. Carnivorous massacre. The Battle of the Burger.
    "Two hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred
sixty," I read.
    "You know what that means."
    I'd been with Trevor long enough to guess. We
met two years ago when I was walking home from school past the Mountain Academy,
which is where the druggies and pregnant girls go when they get shunned from
regular society. Trevor was one of the former. Now he's formerly of