Ovenshine

22.

Gatz's "important" matter was truly just cornering Indy and forcing her to help them decide which silk vest to wear to the auction: which were largely the same, except for minute details like trim and embroidery that Indy hurt her eyes squinting at. They asked nothing about the conversation they had just pulled her from, and Indy was glad for it. It allowed her to forget for a moment that it happened at all.

Now, she has not seen Percy since this morning. Dusk is settling beyond the window, the sky mauve and reticent, and downstairs is a symphony of clinking silverware and rapid footsteps and somewhere, a string quartet tuning up. The evening stirs—not yet awake, but on its way there. Indy stands in the guest room's mirror and passes a hand over the ruched blue silk of her dress, borrowed from her mother. She's had to pin the front to keep it from slipping, and the sharp metal pokes her if she breathes too hard.

She shifts her weight, as if trying to manually shake the awkwardness from her shoulders. She knows Percy, she knows this house, but she doesn't know this crowd. She's a fraud, an undercover agent yet to realize she's in too deep.

Two soft knocks on the door. Sylvia doesn't wait for a response, just pokes her head in. "You ready yet? People are getting here. You should see this shit. It's like the fucking Grammy's."

Indy sighs, hoping the breath comes out steady, though the last thing she feels at the moment is steady. "How so?"

"So many limos and everyone's trying too hard."

Indy gives the bedazzled purple suit Sylvia's wearing a brief glance. It's all she can give it; like the sun, the glimmer of it threatens to blind if she looks any longer than that. "You'll fit right in then, disco ball."

Sylvia swats Indy's shoulder. "I hate you," she says casually, then links their elbows. "So, what do you say? Are you ready?"

As I'll ever be. But Indy just nods her head.

The first thing to shock Indy when the two of them step out into the hall is the noise, the cloud of senseless babble bouncing off the walls, rising up and mingling with the crystal chandeliers. She catches mere threads of conversations, about vacations and new neighbors and zen yoga, interspersed by laughter far too loud to be authentic. The second to shock her is the artificial brightness of it all: a manufactured daydream, but with none of the whimsy, everything sterilized. Every light in the house is on at full brightness. The entire house blazes in dazzling gold chrome.

The last are the smells. Designer perfumes hang in saccharine clouds among the attendees. Alcohol sweetly stings her nostrils. As Indy and Sylvia reach the base of the stairs, two men in tuxedos carry a painting past them, and for a moment it is all oil and sugar.

"Indy," Sylvia says, gripping her arm tighter. "You with me?"

"Barely," she answers. She has the thought to look for Percy, but takes one look at the thick crowd mingling in his foyer and realizes she'll never find him, and perhaps that's for the best.

"It's so Real Housewives in here," Sylvia says, and Indy traces her gaze, finding Percy's mother in a circle of women near the door, all of them with their statement necklaces and pin curls. Neither Sylvia nor Indy seem to have gotten this memo. "So? What do we do?"

Indy has no idea, but she would never admit this.

"We find the Dobbs family," she says to Sylvia. "What else?"

Gatz has learned the hard way that rich people eat terrible food, for some reason. They loiter by the hors d'oeuvre table in the middle of the foyer—which is big enough, truly, to resemble a rotunda in a natural history museum. The appetizers, slowly spinning on a rotating display, are all small and cubical, sitting on even smaller, polished white plates with just a drop of some unidentifiable, suspiciously colored sauce. Gatz bites into something that has the taste and consistency of freshly cut grass. This is going to be a long night.