Indie Girl Read Free

dress. With the right cut of top and jeans, I had grown pretty good at camouflaging the parts of myself I most disliked.
    Today, the day my life was going to change, I had carefully picked out a pair of cords, my favorite cap-sleeved cotton tee, and a nifty blazer with burnished chrome buttons. Gazing into the steamed-up mirror, I slicked back the golden highlights in my short hair, the color of which had made my parents cringe when I first came home with them a few weeks ago. It had been inconceivable that a black-haired Indian girl could carry off such pale streaks, but I somehow had managed to accomplish it, and even my parents eventually had to agree that I “looked nice.” The tiny diamond I wore in my right nostril sparkled beneath a spotlight overhead. When I had first started high school, all the girls had
oohed
and
ahhed
about my innate fashion sense. I decided not to tell them that every woman in my family had had a nose piercing as soon as she “approached womanhood” as my mother had nauseatingly called it, and that fashion had nothing to do with it. On my lips I rubbed some bronze-colored gloss, and feathered some mascara onto my lashes. I spritzed on the Shalimar perfume I had taken from my mother’s dressing table, wantingdesperately to smell like a grown-up. Then I took a slim chartreuse-colored
dupatta
and wove it through my belt loops, adding just a touch of ethnicity without looking like I was going to a Bengali religious festival. On my left wrist, surrounding the Timex I had found on eBay, were four mirrored bangles, their slim wooden bases knocking against each other. My mother had bought them for me during a recent grocery-shopping visit to “Little India” in Artesia, more than an hour’s drive from our house, but as close to going back to Calcutta as possible without actually having to get on a plane. When my mother had first brought them home, I had grimaced at their ultra-Indianness. But now, combined with bootleg corduroys. Nepalese beads around my neck, and pointy-toed Payless shoes on my feet, they looked perfect.
    I stepped back, wishing that the school would at least invest in a full-length mirror in the girls’ changing room. I looked at myself up and down, reminding myself again why I coveted clothes so much. In the right things, like I was wearing today, I could shine. I could stand out and be distinctive. Fashion, in that sense, was really the only thing that helped me make any kind of a mark.
    Now, I just had to hope that Aaralyn Taylor, discriminating fashionista that she was, would agree.

    The auditorium was still being set up when I arrived. Brown plastic chairs were being wheeled out and stackedin rows, about twenty in a line, stretching all the way back in the hall. Aaralyn Taylor wasn’t due to arrive for another fifteen minutes. The idea was for the assembly hall to be packed with eager listeners before she got there. Given her celebrity status and the fact that today’s visit was the highlight of Career Week, there was no reason it wouldn’t be. Guests from the previous day had included someone from NASA and a transport official from Los Angeles County, neither of whom had interested me very much. The following day, there would be talks given by a Silicon Valley executive and a political blogger, both of which had potential. But this encounter with someone who sat front row at all the biggest fashion shows, who regularly chatted on the phone with Nicole Kidman’s stylist or had personal shopping expeditions at Barneys: Well, how could anyone
not
want to come hear her? Aaralyn had become almost as famous as the stars who appeared in the pages of her magazine. I had seen her on TV, on the red carpet at all the award shows, being interviewed about her dress and jewels as if she were a nominee herself. She was the Anna Wintour of the West Coast, someone whose glamorous looks and coveted closet and access to huge movie stars put her in the same league as them.
    But there