That being the hum-drum little lives that all her friends lived in the various places they’d settled down. Nine-to-five desk jobs, paycheck to paycheck, dreary cubicles, and boring conversations about the property ladder.
None of that was any fun at all.
You need to make some real decisions about your life, her father had told her after her college graduation, which everybody liked to say had been a skin-of-the-teeth kind of deal for the not-so-good March sister. Serious decisions.
Indy had felt that she was full up on serious. She had taken a fifth year to get her degree and might have taken a sixth if she hadn’t been so deeply bored by the whole thing. Still, she’d paid her way—meaning there had been no letting anybody down if she made academic decisions that didn’t suit them, like failing a class because she’d forgotten to attend it, or accidentally going off to a music festival instead of taking her exams.
Disappointing them, sure. But not actually letting them down or spending their money. Indy had some standards, thank you. And she had never felt the need to let her father know how she’d paid her way through college. Or why it was she had such a robust savings account come graduation.
There were things a father didn’t need to know.
I know what I want to do with my life, she had told him, wrinkling up her nose in his direction as they’d sat down by the river near her childhood home, fishing.
Or in Indy’s case, pretending to fish while doing what she did best. Lounging.
Okay, what she did second-best.
Nothing is not a good answer, Bill March had replied. He’d shot her a look she knew well, filled as it was with laughter, love, and that particular gleam that made her think, sometimes, that her father knew exactly how free-spirited she really was.
I’m going to live, Dad, she had said. Deep and hard and wild. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a life?
Everybody’s hard and wild until it’s time to pay taxes, her father had said with his typical calm midwestern practicality.
I’m going to be just fine, she had told him, smiling wide. I promise.
And she had been.
She had taken a certain delight in sending her raciest photos to her sister, because Bristol was so easily scandalized. Indy had sent postcards to her parents from every new place she went. London to Bali to Perth to Rio and back again. She’d worked when she needed money, went on marvelous adventures as the spirit took her, and followed her pussy wherever it wanted to go.
The club in Budapest had been one of the underground ones she’d developed a taste for over time, on all continents. She loved the inherent mystery of these pop-up events. A warehouse or a field somewhere, often in a sketchy part of town to make the whole thing feel more edgy and exciting. There was never any possibility of planning for these things, there was only waiting for the text to come and then racing off—no matter her state of inebriation—to dance and howl and party until the sun came up.
That was why a wise woman didn’t have a plan. All the good stuff happened outside those lines.
The night in question had been like all the other nights in all the other cities and fields and beaches she’d discovered on her travels. The DJ had been particularly good and Indy had lost her friends somewhere in the crowd, but that was never something she worried about. She liked to let the universe take a hand in such things. She would either find them again or she wouldn’t, but her experience, everywhere, was that there were always new friends to be made.
You have a low bar for what you call friendship, Bristol had told her. More than once.
Or you have a ridiculously high one, Indy would retort. You can make a friend, Bristol. It’s not a lifetime commitment unless you want it to be. It also won’t kill you.
Bristol, as ever, had remained unconvinced. And also lonely, by Indy’s reckoning, though she would die before she admitted it.
But Bristol hadn’t been on Indy’s mind that night in Budapest. She’d danced and danced. At some point she’d decided she needed a little bit of fresh air after all that dancing and she’d wound her way through the crowd, buzzing along nicely on the music and the beat she could feel deep inside her.
Indy had slipped out the side of the warehouse, and never knew, later, what made her wander away from the groups of people doing the same thing she was. Either taking a breath from the party inside or carrying on their own festivities out in the summer dark. She’d wandered away from the clusters of them, half wondering if she could see the stars in this part of Budapest. If she got away from those party lights and all the lit-up cell phone screens. If she’d had another motivation, she couldn’t remember it.
She hadn’t known what she was walking into until it was too late.
Scary men arguing in a dark alley. A gun in her face.
Then Indy on her knees on the pavement, hard, her heart pounding so wildly it had made her feel ill.
In that moment, she’d been certain that every warning she’d ever been given was about to come true. With a vengeance. Every dire prediction anyone had made about the way she lived, the way she was, was about to happen to her after all.
You don’t think before you act, her sister
