American Girls (13 page)

From the bathroom, the toilet flushed.

“If,” she whispered, leaning in and pausing for dramatic effect.

“What?”

“You have to let me know which twin.”

I covered my face with both hands and told her.

“Knew it,” she said. “He's the keeper.”

Dex emerged from the bathroom and went into the kitchen.

“So we'll go shopping tomorrow afternoon,” she said loudly. “You can tag along with me and we'll hit some of the boutiques on Melrose. I think they're your style.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon we met Roger at a vegan restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, the same Sunset Boulevard that I had seen watching old detective movies with my dad, though it didn't look anything like it had back in the day. Old-movie Los Angeles always seemed more glamorous than dangerous, full of snappy dialogue and women in tight dresses, not douche bags ordering black bean burgers with their kale juice. Any femme fatale worth her salt would have arched her eyebrows and ashed a cigarette on Roger's plate in disgust. Any femme fatale except for my sister.

“You are in a good mood, no?” Roger asked. He was shooting a commercial nearby, and his hair was growing in. He looked the way I imagined someone might if they'd been slated to go to the electric chair and grown their hair in when they got a pardon.

“I'm taking her shopping,” Delia said.

Roger smirked. He considered all shopping other than his own bourgeois.

I ordered something that was supposed to approximate a hot dog and sweet potato fries, Delia ordered the flower-power salad, and Roger ordered black coffee, extra annoying since he had insisted on meeting here. He could have ordered that on the moon.

“So,” he said, leaning across the table and pretending like he was gazing into my soul. “Tell me. Do you now have a favorite Manson girl?”

That was Roger, always with the most disgusting way of saying anything. Boxers or briefs? Bundy or Dahmer? Fromme or Atkins?

“No,” I said. “They're all pretty weird.”

“Understatement,” Delia said, picking at her salad. “Don't play coy, Anna. You've been reading every night. Roger was thinking that maybe my character is reincarnated, or possessed, so it doesn't have to be literal. Tell him what you know.”

“Well,” I said. “For one thing, he made all the women throw away their birth control, so if you wanted her to be someone's niece or granddaughter or something, it wouldn't be hard or anything. Did you know that Susan Atkins and Charles Manson had a kid?”

“Susan Atkins,” Roger said. “She was a Manson girl?”

It dawned on me that Roger might not have read a single word that I had sent him. Nada. Not a one.

“Yes,” I said. “But she's too crazy. I mean, they're all too crazy, but she was extra too crazy. And then she became a born-again Christian, so I don't really think that would fit.”

“No,” said Roger, like fundamentalists were more repulsive than serial killers. “None of that.”

I took a bite of my hot dog, which was salty but nothing a normal person would confuse for meat. Birch could have done better with a pile of mushy grains. The fries were okay, though, because it's hard to mess up fries, and they didn't have to pretend to be something else like the rest of the menu. At the table next to us, a greasy-haired thirtysomething dude was eating alone, fingering his food like he couldn't remember why he ordered it, all but spraining his neck to listen in on our conversation. He kept staring at Delia like he knew her, but she didn't seem to recognize him.

Delia pointed at my plate. “Just don't complain that you're hungry later.”

I tried not to breathe through my nose and took another bite of the hot dog and a big swig of apple juice. I made eye contact with the creeper at the next table, and he smiled like he knew me as well. I looked away.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Delia said. “You'd think we were trying to poison you.”

Roger ordered more coffee.

“That reminds me,” I said. “So I guess there were a few girls on the ranch who were less crazy and more scared. One of them, Barbara Hoyt, hid out in the brush for days while they hunted her down, but they didn't get her. And then she was supposed to testify for the prosecution in the trial, and she ran away to Hawaii, and one of the women fed her a hamburger laced with so much LSD that it almost killed her.”

“You can't kill a person with LSD,” my sister said matter-of-factly.

“Whatever. They tried to do it anyhow, but the thing was that it was like this inside joke, or punishment or something, because they were all vegetarians and they weren't supposed to eat meat.” I pushed my plate away. Even the Manson girls knew that everyone needed a burger now and then. “Maybe if it were someone like her, who went crazy or something and was just wandering around, not knowing who she was … Anyhow, that seemed more interesting to me, since you asked.”

“Only then the movie would have to star a senior citizen.” My sister was irritated.

“Do not be so literal,” Roger said. “I like this. It is a good start. I want you to find out about every woman in this case. More of these hamburger stories. More that we do not remember. Something…” He fanned his hands dramatically over the Formica tabletop. “Something will click.” He picked up the check and opened his wallet, put his credit card down, and handed me three hundred dollars.

“Seriously?” I said. It was a hundred dollars more than I figured he owed me, and I was even counting the time I spent staring into space when I got bored.

“This is LA,” my sister said. “People do way less for more all the time. Take it and keep walking.”

*   *   *

If shopping with Olivia was kind of like accidentally being taken hostage, shopping with my sister was like watching a top hostage negotiator lay out a plan of attack. We crossed the street while Delia mapped out the order of shops we were going to hit—consignment, then low-end retail, then high-end with excellent sale rack.

“I think you're fighting what's attractive about you,” she said. “Your hair, for instance—you should get better product and let it run wild. Everyone straightens their hair around here, so it makes you different, and you are different, so you might as well play it up.”

My sister saw everyone, even people who weren't actors, as trying to create an image. Last summer she'd convinced me that I wanted to be like a French film actress from the fifties. Now she thought I should go boho chic, let my inner flower child out to play.

“This is the best secondhand place in LA,” she said, and pointed to the entrance of a color bomb of a boutique where even the mannequins had posh green and blue wigs on their too-hip, size-zero frames. “But I'm swearing you to secrecy.” The dresses in the windows were short and colorful, with layers of necklaces and rows of bangle bracelets.

“I'm going to look like I had a psychotic break if I show up tomorrow wearing this stuff,” I said, and lowered my voice because it was embarrassing to even talk about it. “He's going to know that I went shopping to look different.”

“Anna,” Delia said. “I don't want to disappoint you, but your average guy won't notice anything you change about yourself short of missing limbs. If you came in armless, he might ask if you got a haircut, okay?”

“But I wear that purple sweater every day. I think he'll notice. He calls me ‘Purp' sometimes.”

“Oh dear lord.” She raised her hands to the ceiling. “I have my work cut out for me.”

Within minutes she had two armloads of clothes, and ushered me into the dressing room.

“I'll be here,” she said. “And unless it doesn't fit, I want to see everything. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

The first dress was crazy, and I do mean padded cell for the criminally insane. Electric purple with neon-pink flowers and green trim, it looked like someone had repurposed upholstery. There was no way I was walking out of the dressing room in it.

“How's it going?” Delia asked.

“Not this one.”

Delia's hand rattled the knob. “Can I at least see it?”

I opened the door.

“Okay,” she said. “You're right, it's a little loud, but look at the length. Halfway up the thigh is perfect for you. And I love the sleeves. We're in the ballpark.”

I tugged at the back of the dress like maybe there was some secret panel that would drop down and cover my ass. No dice.

“This is a terrible length. I can't go to the set naked. I'm naked. You realize that?”

“It's not naked, seriously, look around this town. You wear this, you're still practically a nun.”

She may have been right, but not right enough for me to bare my butt over.

“Don't they sell jeans?”

“Of course they do, but I want you to stand out. I'll bring jeans, too, but keep looking at the dresses, see if there's anything that you could tolerate, okay?”

There were racks and racks of dresses in my size, some used and some new, and I tried to find five or six that seemed like something I would not ridicule if I saw them on another human being. Sometimes I do better if I can pretend that I'm someone else when I look at myself in the mirror, just unfocus my eyes and act like I'm some random person wandering down the street, bumping into some chick named Anna who just started my school, then I'm usually a little more okay with how I look. I'm not actively offensive—in fact, there are times when I'd even say that I look nice, if it's not me doing the talking. So I shopped like I was shopping for alterna-Anna, this chick who landed in Hollywood and played poker with the stars. What would
she
wear?

I must have been deep in the delusion, because I bumped arms with a fellow shopper.

“Excuse me,” the man said, giving me a super-creeper grin. The dude from the vegan café, with nothing in his arms and no reason to be up close and personal, not in this place.

I turned to look for Delia, who was across the store, flipping through rows of jeans.

“Is she your sister?” he asked. “She's very lovely.”

I didn't say anything. I beelined for Delia and told her that we needed to leave. Now.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “After you've begged me all week to take you shopping? Are you sure you're not on drugs?”

“It's just—” I started, but by then the creeper was right beside us. He held his hand out to my sister, who ignored it until he dropped it by his side. But he didn't stop staring at her, like his inner carnivore had found the steak of his dreams. For all I knew, he was the one leaving notes on her door. I didn't like it, not one bit.

“I couldn't help but notice you,” he said, sidling even closer. “Are you represented? Because I think I could do wonderful things for you,” and I would have bet my last dollar that he wasn't talking about movies.

My sister, for her part, kept looking at the jeans, avoiding eye contact and acting as if this was business as usual.

“She has an agent,” I said. “Okay?”

He ignored me. The cashier was checking something on her phone, oblivious. Then, without so much as a glance in the creeper's direction, Delia said in her most matter-of-fact voice: “I think you can see that I'm shopping for a friend's birthday, and you can respect that this is something I intend to finish this afternoon.”

No muss, no fuss. The creeper didn't leave.

She kept ignoring him, talking to me like he wasn't even there.

“These are great jeans,” she said. “Have you tried them? I think they fit almost well enough to justify the price.”

Finally, the creeper relented. He exited the store, still checking back to see if my sister was looking.

“That was awful,” I finally said. “What was wrong with that guy?”

My sister shrugged like he was some pesky mosquito.

“If you ignore them,” she said, checking the price tag on one of my dresses, “they generally go away. My shrink told me once that for some people, all attention is positive attention. I don't give creatures like that my attention.”

What a strange way to live. No wonder she barely rolled her eyes when I mentioned the car parked outside her house the other night, or the crazy lady who was definitely
not
just confused about the address of some party, or when I wanted to talk about our mom's surgery. Either she was a Zen priestess or she was completely delusional.

“Now try these on,” she said, pointing to the pile of dresses in my arms. “I want to be amazed.”

 

9

For the next two weeks, it seemed like my sister was never around. She claimed to be auditioning for a pilot and reshooting more of the zombie flick, but I had a hunch she was trolling around with Roger. Dex would send me on errands on the
Chips
set to keep me busy, and then we'd hang out and wait for Delia in the evenings. There was no way I could forget about my family, but I did start to forget about school. I forgot about it so epically that when I got an e-mail from Mr. Haygood, subject line:
FINAL?
, it took me a good two minutes to figure out whether or not it was spam. It wasn't. Mr. Haygood wanted me to “stay on track,” as August was “rapidly approaching.”

“Shit!” I said, and then, “Sorry. I mean crap.”

Dex shrugged his shoulders. “What gives, young one? You gonna let me in on why the only books you read are about serial killers?”

The question threw me enough that I told Dex my first lie. I said, “I'm supposed to be writing a final paper for my history class about Los Angeles and some event that changed America, so I picked Charles Manson.” He gave me a funny look, and then I added, “And I'm supposed to find out everything I can about all the people who were involved.” Dex got that peculiar squint around the eyes that adults get when you can tell that they're not sure what's happening in schools anymore, and then he smiled and said he'd help me brainstorm. One thing I know about grown-ups—they'll believe anything is a real assignment if you say it with conviction. I could have said, “I'm supposed to be pretending to be a Manson girl for my drama class and writing it up,” and he probably would have gone along with that as well.