American Girls (11 page)

Besides, Doon was writing me less and less. I guess she was irritated with me for leaving her stranded. And it wasn't just her. My mom was probably going to throw a party to celebrate her Anna-free life as soon as she started feeling better, my sister was constantly busy auditioning, and to the rest of planet California, I was all but invisible. Olivia dropped me back at the
Chips Ahoy!
set where—shocker—no one had noticed that I was missing. Dex was in a writers' meeting, and the twins were playing Texas Hold'em with a few of the extras. I perched on a couch end near the edge of the game, trying not to take up too much space.

“So how'd it go?” Josh asked without looking up from his cards.

I didn't answer for a full minute because it hadn't dawned on me I was supposed to field the question.

“Oh,” I said. “I think I just bought your sister a purse.”

“I thought you were broke.” Josh still didn't look up, but Jeremy did, probably long enough to see that I looked dazed, like I'd been hexed by a very beautiful person who'd cast a spell on me so that I handed over my father's credit card without so much as a “Why?”

“I guess I'm even more broke.”

Jeremy laughed a little, and then he said, “Consider yourself lucky. The last person she took shopping bought her a car.”

“Seriously?”

He raised his arm like he was taking a Boy Scouts oath. It was a gesture that the “Chips” made all the time on the show, bleeding into real life or vice versa.

“She's a whore,” Josh said, and Jeremy frowned like he was going to contradict his brother, but didn't. I saw the same word from the letter on my sister's door for a second and squeezed my eyes to make it disappear.

“You know how to play?” Jeremy asked.

“Kind of,” I lied. I knew how to play, and I knew the first rule of knowing how to play is pretending that you only kind of know how to play.

“I'll buy you in,” Jeremy said. He tossed a fifty-dollar bill across the table to his brother, who handed me a stack of chips.

My mom was a pretty serious gambler back in the day. She made it to the final table at the World Series of Poker once, and we played poker growing up the way other kids played Old Maid. I didn't really think of myself as a competitive person, but the minute someone passed me two cards facedown, I became a shark.

“I know the rules,” I said. “But do you have a cheat sheet for what beats what?”

I was the only girl at the table and I knew that they would humor me. They would be on the lookout from then on for beginner's luck, but I could tell that the “Ohmigod, like, is that a spade or a club?” angle was going to go far. The nice thing about poker is that lying isn't really lying in poker, it's just playing a game. If you let on that you're a shark, that doesn't make you a nice person, it makes you an idiot. There are some great female poker players, and they might have played with a few, but I knew they wouldn't expect it from me.

I bet like a total moron and played extra dumb for the first two hands.

“I'll help you if you want,” Jeremy said.

“No help,” Josh replied. “You bought her in. That's it.”

I shrugged my shoulders and Jeremy gave me an “I tried” kind of half smile in return. He had the same almost fluorescent-blue eyes that made Olivia's face so impossibly beautiful. Only his eyes were kinder, the eyes of a seer, not a judge. If I hadn't been in shark mode, I would have felt bad that I was about to take his fifty dollars.

I started to play a little more carefully, won a few hands, and then lost big. Really big. I had three kings, but Josh had a full house. It was a miracle hand; he had an ace and the other king in the hole, and he cleaned me out except for my last three chips. I was barely going to have enough to make the blind.

“Sorry,” Josh said, but I could tell that he loved it, cleaning out the already cleaned-out girl across the table from him. I almost said, “Golly gee, shucks,” just to be an asshole, but I still had three chips and a chance. And in poker you make your own fate. In the next hand, I doubled my pile and then a few hands later tripled it again. Nothing crazy, but by playing tight I was holding my own while still being able to look “lucky.”

Jeremy was dealing and I got a pair of eights facedown. There was an eight on the flop and a pair of tens. It was almost a dream hand, and I knew it but couldn't let it show. The twins were watching me like a pair of falcons. I willed my hands not to shake.

I put in half the money that I had left, which would have cleaned out anyone but Josh. Jeremy folded and the other two extras folded as well. One of them was out, but I didn't even notice when he left.

“I'll call,” Josh said, looking me straight in the eye, gladiatorial. He pushed his chips into the pot. Jeremy turned an ace, and I could see Josh smile, just the tiniest curl at the corner of his mouth, and I could feel it, he had tens. He was going to beat me.

“All in,” I said, pushing my chips into the center.

Josh could barely contain his glee.

“You know there's no insanity plea in poker, right?” he said.

“I know.”

He pushed the rest of his chips into the pot.

And then I caught that last eight on the river. It wasn't just statistically unlikely, it was a damn miracle, up there with the wine and the fishes and feeding of the multitudes. I had been prepared to go down in a blaze of glory, but now I was going to win. I was going to win and it was going to look like dumb luck, so I did what only a true shark would do.

“Double or nothing?”

“It's not even your money,” Josh said.

“This is hilarious.” Jeremy slapped his hand on the table, delighted. Even the extras had stopped texting.

“You realize I'm going to destroy you,” Josh said. “Is it possible you just like owing people money?”

“Double or nothing,” I said. “I have a job. I'm good for it.”

By then I had forgotten that they were television stars. Jeremy fished fifty more dollars out of his wallet and handed it to me. I put it on the table.

“It's your life,” Josh said, and matched me. He rolled out his cards, exactly what I thought, full house, tens and eights.

“Is this better?” I asked in my most bullshit girl voice and laid my eights on the table.

“I love this girl,” Jeremy practically yelled, and it made me remember that he was one of the two biggest teen stars in the country, one of whom had just declared his extremely exaggerated love, and the other of whom I had just cleaned out.

“You bitch,” Josh said, turning the slur into a term of great respect. “That's impossible.”

“Possible,” Jeremy said. “Happened.”

“Shut up, douche bag.”

I tried not to gloat as I moved the pot in my direction.

“I gotta go,” one of the extras said, pointing at his phone as if that explained everything.

“Cool, bro,” Josh said. “Later?”

“Mos def.”

They bumped fists, and then Josh excused himself.

“That was evil,” he said, turning around and pointing a finger at me. “How long are you here, again?”

“Most of the summer,” I said.

“Rematch. Beware and be ready. No cheat sheets next time.”

I smiled and shrugged like I had no idea what he was talking about. Jeremy stayed behind and I gave him the two hundred and fifty dollars that I had won.

“Thanks for spotting me.”

“Dude, I would have paid five hundred dollars to watch that beat-down. How long you been playing poker?”

“I don't know. Since I was born?”

Jeremy made a dramatic “Thank you, God” gesture at the ceiling, and handed the money back.

“You won it.”

“But it's not mine.”

“An honest thief,” he said. “We'll split it.”

He handed me $125. I would have framed the bills if I didn't already owe everyone I knew.

“So what are you doing here?” he asked. “Really. We know now that you're a card shark. Are you some kind of media plant, too? Writing a story about the ‘troubled Taylors'?” He tucked his chin into his chest and used his best old-man newscaster voice when he mentioned his family, like he was trying to make them something imaginary, something he wasn't really a part of. I knew the feeling.

“God, no,” I said. And I must have sounded shocked enough for him to believe that it was the truth. Had he really been thinking I was some kind of mole?

“But you are a writer, right? Are you working on a screenplay?”

In LA everyone was working on a screenplay, and in a way, I guess I was.

“Kind of. I'm helping”—I had to think about this one—“my sister's friend. I'm doing some research. And I have this paper I need to write for school.”

“I figured,” he said. “You're always reading.”

He smiled and tilted his head to the right. As he pushed his shirtsleeves up his arm, one at a time, for a minute I saw my life from a distance and I couldn't believe it was really mine. How could I have been missing Georgia? Nothing like this ever happened there—not in Atlanta. Not to me.

“I'm not
always
reading.”

“You read a lot. What are you reading about now?”

“Cults,” I said. “You know, the kind where there's someone in charge and people listen.”

“Oh, I know about cults,” Jeremy interrupted. “My mom was kind of in one when we were little. We lived on this farm in Pennsylvania when Josh and I were toddlers, and we weren't allowed to talk unless we were singing.”

“You're making that up.”

“Uh-uh. And Olivia was, like, five, and they made her dance with these crazy flowers in her hair, and they'd already picked out some old dude for her to marry. Only they didn't call her Olivia,” he said, and then made a nonsensical sound that made it pretty clear that his career was going to stay in acting, not singing. “That was her name.” He paused and then made another ear-splitting noise. “And that was mine. I still remember.”

“Seriously?”

He started laughing.

“Nah,” he said. “But I had you going, hustler. My mom did almost make us become Scientologists a few years ago. But my dad threatened to sue her for custody.”

I'll be honest, I didn't think Jeremy was capable of making a joke, not a real one, at any rate. My sister was pretty and funny when you got her going, but I always thought that really beautiful people were kind of like stuffed animals, like they sat in corners and didn't say much of anything, because people loved them anyhow. But Jeremy was actually funny.

“I gotta go,” he said. “I want to read the screenplay sometime.”

“Yes,” I said, “definitely,” and I tried to repeat the crazy noise that he'd made.

He gave me a high five, and headed for the parking lot.

I was $125 richer, but it felt like a million. Next time we went to the hippie grocery, I could spring for some serious organic chocolate. Jeremy Taylor had made conversation with me like I was his favorite person in the universe, at least for a minute. And while it felt great, all I could think about was whether or not I would look better if I took off my glasses, if there was some way to slide them over my head and show that, look,
just like the movies,
I was secretly a knockout underneath. Only I wasn't one of those movie characters who wears glasses and pretends to be ugly, I was just a regular person who probably didn't look all that different either way. Not that I would really know, because I couldn't even see my own face clearly without my specs. I never could get used to putting contact lenses on my eyeballs, so the whole instant makeover hadn't been an option.

Normally I didn't care because I'd never known any different. I started wearing glasses when I was three years old. One afternoon my mom was playing with me, and my right eye just kind of rolled in toward my nose. Freaked her out. My parents took me to the doctor, scared that I had a tumor, but I had just started showing the signs of being as farsighted as I had probably been since birth. They got me glasses that were hip and cute, the kind adults like, but glasses are glasses. No kid has ever said: “Look at the hot new girl with the glasses. Maybe she'll have braces and a clubfoot, too!” I think it made me cautious about other kids, because I was always one screwup from becoming “Four Eyes” on the playground. Those were the facts, like a card hand that you couldn't fold. But beauty wasn't everything. I could still be the kind of girl who beat a table full of movie stars at poker. If I couldn't be dateable, I could at least be respected. I was like the lady Godfather of plain-girl self-awareness.

But in that exact moment, I wished I were just a tiny bit more lovely. I wanted Jeremy to cancel whatever plans he had for the rest of the evening so that we could go waste our winnings together. I wanted him to look at me the way men looked at Delia.

“You been sitting here this whole time?”

The writers' meeting must have ended. Dex slapped me on the shoulder.

“Kind of?”

“You disappeared for a while. Not gonna ask. So long as I bring you home in one piece. And don't let those players take you for all you're worth.”

I gave him my most angelic, innocent look and said, “I'll be careful.”

*   *   *

On our way home from the set, Dex and I usually ordered takeout or went through the cafeteria bar at one of the health food stores to make sure Delia was fed and watered when she got home. Whether she ate or not during the day was anyone's guess, but I'd have put my meager winnings on no. Dex would let me sit in the car and read, or text Doon, or write notes to Birch while he shopped. I was pretty deep into my research for Roger. Every night I sent Roger an e-mail about what I'd been reading, and he'd send back some one-word response like “Received.” All warm and fuzzy. I wasn't sure he was even reading my reports, but I was keeping a log of every hour that I spent working on the project. Last time I checked he owed me two hundred bucks.