Indy stands in the too-narrow, fingerprint-stained mirror of her and Sylvie's dorm room and reminds herself why she agreed to this.
The excited cries and senseless, booming bass of the music bleeding all over Proudley's campus easily filters in through the walls, but here, Indy is alone, tugging at the hem of her glittery form-fitting cocktail dress, worrying the neckline plunges just a bit too low, fiddling with the earrings Sylvia said she could borrow. She's seen Sylvia wear them, and she's seen her own mother wear something similar. On them, it looks elegant, effortless, regal. On her, it's gaudy: a little girl playing dress-up with little knowledge of what she's actually put on.
The homecoming tradition is a major celebration, a tradition that encompasses a lot more than Proudley, she knows. Sylvia and her band Good Cheese were able to secure a gig as a major part of tonight's festivities, to boot. She's excited, surely. But she also feels faintly sick to her stomach for a reason she can't explain.
Indy half turns away from the mirror, eyes falling upon the desk drawer where she knows Dobbs's journal lies. The visit with Lamar Pine was just yesterday. She still hears his voice in her head.
A loud click sounds in her ears like the turn of a key in the door, and a moment later, Sylvia comes bustling over the threshold, a collection of plastic and paper shopping bags slung over her arms.
"Syl!" Indy whirls in surprise. "I thought you were supposed to be backstage by now?"
"Oh, I definitely am. Frank's gonna kill me," Sylvia says, tossing the shopping bags onto her bed without an ounce of ceremony. "But I went last minute shopping downtown and bought a way better outfit for the stage tonight, so, here I am. Is that the one you decided on? Girl. You look good. Can I do your eyeliner?"
"Oh. Oh, I don't know, Sylâ"
To her dismay, when Indy turns around, Sylvia already has her eyeliner pen out and at the ready. Indy gives in.
"Here. Not that you need it, but this is just an extra finishing touch, since I'm here." Sylvia turns Indy's shoulders towards her, snapping the cap from the eyeliner pen and resting it between her teeth. "Okay okay. Close your eyes."
Indy closes her eyes, and tries not to flinch at the cool brush of the eyeliner against her eyelid. "I'm really not a party person, Syl," Indy confesses. "I'm going, obviously. I'd never miss a performance of yours, not in a million years. But it's the rest of it I don't know about."
She's not looking at Sylvia's face, of course, but she can hear the way her voice changes, a subtle downward shift in the pitch, the cadence of it. Indy senses the pen hover slightly over her eyes before it brushes her skin again. "You've gotta be specific, Indy," Sylvia murmurs. "You know I can't read your mind."
Indy chews her lip. "I think the dress is too much."
"And I'm fucking Superman."
"What?"
"It's not about the dress. You love the dress. I saw your face when you bought it," Sylvia says, and only when Indy hears her footsteps shuffle backwards against the rug does she let her eyes open. "You just don't want people looking at you. You're afraid of being the center of attention."
For just this moment, Indy wishes Sylvia was the type of friend who lent you earrings and did your makeup for you and engaged in surface-level, daily coffee gossip, but nothing deeper than that. Then again, Indy supposes, that wouldn't make her much of a friend at all.
Indy sits on the edge of her bed. Mindlessly, she brushes a hand over the slicked edges of her hair, fussing with one curl that's already started to come up. "It takes a certain type of person to enjoy that. I think a lot of people would feel like I do, like some weird organism wiggling under a microscope."
Sylvia rolls her eyes. "You're not some weird organism. You're the type of girl who keeps a creepy ghost book instead of burning that shit up the second you find it, if you think it might save someone else's life."
Indy lifts her gaze from the floor, trying to keep herself from gaping like a fish, and likely failing.
"All I'm saying is, doing heroic shit like that, you'd better get used to being the center of attention," Sylvia explains, tossing the eyeliner pen to her desk with a defining thwack. She steps over to her wardrobe, pulling the door wide and disappearing behind it. "You're a star, Indy. Of course everyone wants a fucking glimpse of you."
Sylvia slams the wardrobe door shut again, and Indy would be shocked at how she's changed outfits at record speed if she weren't so distracted by Sylvia's words.
"So?" Sylvia says, performing a brief twirl, so that she passes before Indy's eyes in a blur of hot pink fuzz. The lights catch upon baby pink patent leather knee-high boots, the platforms so tall Indy is dizzy just looking at them. "How do I look?"
Indy considers it. "Like a bubblegum lollipop personified."
"Just what I was going for," Sylvia says. "Well. See you later tonight. Don't be late and don't be shy!"
She grabs her bag from where she left it by the door, and vanishes out into the hall again.
Indy finds Gatz where she expected to, beside one of several food trucks surrounding the Commons, devouring a carnitas taco while chatting casually with another student. The pair are proof enough that leaving her dorm was a mistake, Gatz in a deep purple suit, statement necklace glittering upon their collarbone, the girl they're speaking to in a long, silky dress the color of expensive champagne.
The snatches of conversation she hears as she presses closer are confusing, nonsensical to her, until she realizes the two of them are speaking French. Indy has lost count of the amount of languages Gatz is fluent in, which means she's also lost count of the amount of international friends they've made because of it.
"Oh, Indy!" Gatz's eyes light up when they see her. Gatz turns, speaking more rapid-fire, ebullient French to the girl next to them. Indy doesn't understand a single word, but the girl turns and gives her a big smile before leaving them be, so she figures whatever Gatz said must have been kind, at least. "I was waiting for you, and you know waiting makes me hungry. Where have you been?"
"Just...getting ready," Indy murmurs, mindlessly brushing the sequined hair pins she placed behind her ears earlier. "You're much better at all that than me, Gatz. Finding the right accessories took way longer than it should have."
Gatz narrows their eyes, clearly unconvinced, but to Indy's relief, they don't comment. "Making a masterpiece takes time. You look great, Indy. I was looking for Percy earlier, but that assholeâwell. You know how he is."
"Probably already in the middle of the crowd, if I know him at all," Indy groans. The live band hasn't started yet, but already there's a dense crowd of students dancing and jumping and doing other, less innocent things besides dancing and jumping in the center of the lawn: a sea of nondescript shadows and silhouettes.
"You're probably right," Gatz agrees, employing a sympathetic grimace. "Taco?"
Gatz tips their taco tray in Indy's direction, in which one taco remains. She starts to decline, until she considers how much a taco would improve her situation, and takes it.
"Let's make our way to the front," Indy says. "I want to be ready when Sylvia comes on."
Getting to the front thankfully isn't as difficult as Indy worried it would be, and she and Gatz make it up to the stage's security railing without much incident. Up here, the booming speakers threaten to burst her eardrums, so loud she can barely hear her own thoughts over the bass. Lights swing around, arcing up and down across the stage and the crowd, painting the night in unforgettable shades of neon. Everything is sweat and glitter and alcohol and a senseless wave of ceaseless noise, and Indy finds herself gripping the back of Gatz's jacket just to stay sane.
"Oh oh oh!" Suddenly, Gatz is shaking Indy's shoulder. "Here they come, here they come!"
Indy follows their voice, which is soon swallowed by the echoing roars of the others around them. She figures the noise from Proudley's campus tonight will be audible from even five miles away.
Good Cheese takes the stage in an almost eerie silence, walking out, setting up their instruments, twisting their mics into the right place without even acknowledging the clamoring mass in front of them. Indy spots Sylviaânot that it's hard to do, as she stands out like a pink highlighter among the darker, softer hues of her bandmatesâin the far corner, fingers hovering over the keys.
A first-timer to one of Good Cheese's shows would probably be unsettled, perhaps offended, by their silence.
But then the lights go low, and the rest of the voices hush with them.
The drums kick to life at a speed much like that of Indy's own pulse, the lights flare, and the lead singer's voice blares through the speakers. It was an illusion, one the band is proud to create: a moment of quiet before the storm everyone's begging to see.
The music is peppy, upbeat, a sound straddling so many genres it's hard to confine it to one. Sylvia has described it herself as "EDM neo-funk with much respect to the ancestors," but Indy doesn't know what that means, and she doesn't really think Sylvia does either.
Indy catches Sylvia's eye just for a moment as the band swings into another chorus. Sylvia winks at her. She could be imagining it from this distance, but she appears to mouth at her once more, Don't be shy.
By the time the last song fades from the speakers, Indy is unsure whether it's over too soon or it couldn't have possibly taken longer. The crowd shifts into a dull, happy murmur as the band shuffles offstage, and Gatz turns to her. "I'm gonna go find us something to drink. Wait here and then we'll go find Sylvie, yeah?"
"Wait," Indy says, her faint, night-induced drowsiness coalescing into panic. "Gatz, I can justâ"
"I'll be back in a second!" they say, and Indy reaches for them, but finds herself gripping nothing but air.
She curses under her breath, retreating to the far corner of the stage, where the crowds stretch slightly thinner and she at least has the space to move her arms. By now, the skin there is prickled with goosebumps. The night isn't cold, but it's too far from warm: the crisp, brisk promise of fall soon to be winter.
"You go here?"
Indy half-turns, meeting the gaze of a guy she's never spoken to before. He has a kind face, dimpled cheeks, curly hair cut close to his head. An earringâwhich she thinks may be authentic diamondâglints from one of his ears.
"Iâ" Indy hesitates, sure he must be talking to someone else. When his gaze follows her and her alone, she starts again. "Yeah. Media."
"Yeah?" His lip turns up in a smirk, which she guesses is supposed to be inviting, though somehow to her it doesn't feel that way. "What's that like?"
Indy's about to answer him, when her eyes slide past his shoulder, to a close huddle of guys watching the exchange from some distance away. In the dark it's too hard to see their faces, to read the thoughts blazoned across them. All she can see from here are their smiles, leering, bright as a monster's fang. She fills in the blanks on her own.
"I'm sorry," Indy says, though she isn't. She turns and walks in the exact opposite direction, away from the stage, the crowd, the spot where Gatz told her to wait. She wants nothing more than to be back in the solitude of her dorm, which she never should've left in the first place.
"Indy?"
She recognizes Percy's voice, calling out to her, and slows for a moment, her body wishing to see him before logic kicks in. She walks faster.
"Indy. Hey! Are you okay?"
He's closer than before, close enough to reach out and take her arm.
Indy whirls. How is it that he's hardly there when she wants him to be, but when she wants to be alone, he always appears? "I'm fine, Percy."
He gives her a look she doesn't quite understand. A frown, maybe, but it's more conclusive, as if she's just answered some question of his without even meaning to. "Sylvia did great tonight, didn't she? You're not gonna go find her?"
"We live together," Indy reminds him. "I'll see her soon enough."
Indy pulls away without another word, continuing on until the soft grass of the Commons becomes cobblestones beneath her feet. Her cheeks are wet. She can't remember when she started to cry.