American Girls (15 page)

Roger's e-mails to Delia were about as short as the ones I got from him, and just as badly written.
It is like blood, this hurt I have for you. You and my art are the same, ripped from this place I do not know. How would I be without either? I wonder. I have no answer.
Crappy English, but I knew creepy even in translation. And Roger spoke the universal language of sketchball. Fluently. The last one he had written Delia early last week:
You are like a haunted place I cannot exercise. I hate and am drawn to at once.
It took me a minute to get to
exorcise,
which made the whole thing funny but not. And my sister never wrote him back. Not once. The last one had some weird quote about “the devil making the light more real” attached to the bottom. I closed her computer and hid it under a pillow. For all I knew Roger was hexing us both.

When I was a lot younger, my mom took us to church all the time. We went to this super-evangelical church until I came home one day singing, “I'm no kin to the monkey,” and my dad said that was the end of that. The churches we went to after that were a lot less scary, but I still remembered the things we'd been warned about at the church: Satanists, Ouija boards, reading the wrong book or listening to the wrong song and accidentally letting the devil in. My mom, who was otherwise pretty new-age friendly, didn't think anyone should mess with Satan, and the more I read about the Manson case, the more I didn't think anyone should either.

At night, my sleep was all messed up. I had nightmares about the white nightgown soaked red, these happy, smiling vegetarians who thought nothing of putting a knife in the belly of a pregnant lady. And they probably weren't any different from the long-haired actress wannabes at Whole Foods making sure that their meat was cruelty-free. I worried that I shouldn't have been reading about the murders at all, that I was catching some sinister wave and something might happen to Birch, or my mother. Maybe my mom was right in keeping me a whole continent away from her while she recovered. I felt like telling my sister and stupid Roger to forget the whole thing. It's not like Olivia Taylor was going to show up and pay me for the bag, plus interest. The thousand dollars I owed felt more like a million.

My sister almost caught me reading her e-mails the morning I told her I'd had enough with playing
Home Alone
. I slammed her computer shut and practically winded myself running to the sink to get a glass of water when I heard her keys at the door. Even though the clock blinked seven forty-five, she had the messy hair and flushed cheeks of someone who had been up since before dawn, working out. She flopped onto the couch and stretched one leg into the air, close to her nose, then the other.

“I can't stay here anymore.” I sat beside her and talked to the floor so I wouldn't lose my train of thought. “You shouldn't leave me here at night. And you shouldn't be here either. It could be dangerous.”

She opened her computer and ignored me for at least two minutes. I almost checked her ears for earplugs.

“Why?” she finally said. “There's nothing up here. You're too big for a coyote to eat. Don't be so dramatic, Anna. Did you think you were going to become rich and fall in love with a girl named Daisy when you read
The Great Gatsby
? You're as suggestible as Cora.”

“I am not.”

“Yes. You are.” She typed as she talked, pausing to delete, type, delete. “But you can come over to Dex's if you want to. He has a couch and I don't think he'll mind.”

“Thank you.”

Before shutting the computer down, she logged out of her e-mail account. That was a first.

“I get jumpy when Mercury is in retrograde. Yesterday Roger shot me on the steps of an apartment building where a stalker had killed an actress, a young one. She opened the door, and that was it. It's the case that gave us the stalking laws we have now, so I guess that's something good to come out of it, but it's really eerie, being in all these places that look so, I don't know, regular.” Delia's eyes narrowed as she talked, like the body was right in front of her.

“I think the whole thing is creepy. Roger is creepy, and he doesn't know what he's doing.”

“Roger has money and Roger is paying me.”

“So? I think he's driving by your house at night. I do. He even told me I should try to be like a Manson girl, you know, for research. I know he's paying me, but he'd probably pay me to eat dog shit, too, and that wouldn't make it okay.”

“What are you talking about?” Delia said, laughing for real. “Why would he do any of that? He sees me every day. He doesn't need to stalk me; driving by my house would be redundant.”

I wasn't buying what she had to sell, not with that pitch.

“Anna, are you having an easy time paying back that money you owe Mom? Or your dad? Assuming that we forget that you're living rent-free and eating my food? Does money just rain from the sky?”

“No.”

“Well, it doesn't for me, either, okay? I can work five jobs one year and have nothing the next. In this town, unless you are insane, you say yes to everything within reason.”

The last time I mentioned the stalker, Delia repainted her just-manicured nails. This time, she took a pair of tweezers out of her makeup bag and plucked at the stray hairs growing beneath her brows.

“It's not worth it if you wind up dead.”

“Dead?” she said. “You really do have an imagination.”

“I know about the note,” I said, playing a card I probably should have kept hidden.

She was quiet for a good five seconds before she answered.

“What note?”

“The one Roger left on your door. He thinks you're a whore. I mean, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes, does it? He's trying to ruin your relationship with his stupid movie, and he secretly hates you at the same time. I'll bet he hired that lady to bang on your doors at night. Don't you remember that awful thing that he said to you when you broke up?”

Delia slammed her fist on the table.

“I told you never to bring that up. People say stupid things when relationships end. I'm over it. And it's none of your business. None. Get it? It's not Roger driving by, okay?”

She was lying. I could tell because her lips were moving.

“How do you know?”

“I just know. It could be a million different things. It could be press, right? Ever heard of them? They might have gotten wind about Roger's film. I have a feeling it's going to be huge.”

I gave her a good, hard “Not on this earth” stare.

“Okay, I have a feeling it might be the actress that I beat for the zombie role. She probably decided to see what life was like without her meds and is taking it out on me. Once she's back on them I'll be fine. Happy?”

She wasn't going to tell me the truth.

“How is that better?”

“It isn't better, but she's done this kind of thing before and she drifts on to the next person who beats her out. You're making a mountain out of a molehill. Just ignore it. I can't afford the emotional energy to make this an issue. My relationship is suffering. I need to start making money soon, or I'm going to be back in Atlanta working retail, okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “I'm not trying to make you mad. And I'm sorry I looked in your purse, okay?”

“An apology doesn't change anything, Anna. One more strike and you're on the next plane to Atlanta. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

I had no idea what was really going on in her head. And while I definitely didn't want to blow my invitation to stay with her in Dex's condo, I knew for a fact that she needed to start taking the crazy around her a little more seriously. She could get as mad at me as she wanted to, but I was doing her a favor. Someone needed to wake her up.

“Why is everything always about money?” I said. “Can't Dex just hire you?”

“No, he can't. They don't want to see old people on kids' shows.”

“It's not a kids' show, and you're twenty-six. That's not old.”

Then she lifted her face and pulled a lone black hair out of her chin. I almost threw up in my mouth.

“It is a kids' show, and for a kids' show, I am old. Those are the facts. I don't really have any more time to make it. I have to keep swinging. I
have
to.”

And suddenly she looked determined. Creepy-determined. I always thought of things coming easy to my sister, of life handing her whatever she wanted. Two years ago she was almost cast as a Bond girl and filmed a sitcom pilot that never aired. She worked with Roger, but she was definitely doing him the favor. Now she was strictly B movies and reality TV, with Roger's stupid film suddenly at the top of her priority list. Maybe I just didn't like to think that Delia could fail, but for the first time I could see that she'd thought about it. Thought
hard
. Even with something as stupid as the herpes commercial, there were probably a hundred other girls who'd be just as geared up to pretend to have herpes.

“I hope you get herpes,” I said.

My sister finally cracked a smile in spite of herself.

“Me too,” she said. “And if not, there's always gonorrhea, right?”

“Or the clap. Or is that the clap?”

I couldn't wait to pack my bag and sleep in that big, insulated condo building where you could hear your neighbors walking heavily across the floors above you, their weird sex noises muffled through the walls. I was triple-locking the doors and never leaving again.

 

11

By July, I'd spent most of my summer reading about people doing things so horrible that they seemed almost unbelievable. On the other hand, in this very same world there were things so amazing, so completely unlikely, that they sounded just as made up when you tried to tell them to another person. How could I text Doon, “Jeremy Taylor whisked me away from the set today to spend the afternoon with him. Just him,” without sounding like a pathological liar? A delusional lunatic? Still, that's exactly what happened. When Dex and I arrived on the lot, we didn't even make it out of the parking lot before Jeremy came up and asked if he could “borrow me” for the morning.
Borrow me?
He could have flat-out stolen me for the next two months and I wouldn't have complained.

“I thought about you this morning,” Jeremy said. He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his plaid shorts. The shorts plus the pink polo shirt he was wearing meant that the “Chips” had been “playing golf” on deck. I had on a flowered sundress patterned with oversize red flowers and emerald-green vines, one of my sister's choices from the consignment shop on Melrose. I felt absurdly overdressed, but Delia was right, Jeremy didn't seem to notice. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about my grandfather.”

“Oh,” I said, not exactly sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Where does he live?”

He opened the door for me, and I climbed into a fortress of a vehicle, similar to Olivia's but even larger. I buckled my seat belt and willed myself not to act as nervous as I felt.

“He died a few years ago,” Jeremy said after he started the car and slowly drove us out of the studio compound. “He was a great character actor in the seventies. If you've seen any of those old gangster films, he's the skinny one with the droopy eyes.”

I was drawing a complete blank. I hated gangster movies.

“I'd probably know him if I saw him.”

“Definitely. He was hilarious. I still think about him almost every day.”

I'm pretty sure that he was thinking about him right then, because he got quiet and for a while we sat there in silence, moving through a part of LA that I hadn't visited before. As much fun as it was to be on the set, I liked the neighborhoods outside the make-believe world of Hollywood, the thirty different LAs hidden inside of LA. And the neighborhoods could change so fast that if you weren't paying attention, you could close your eyes and miss one. I was worried for a minute that Jeremy was like my sister, that he was disappearing into a bad mood that was somehow going to wind up being my fault, but then he started humming along to the opening chords of a song that had just begun to play. He turned the volume up.

“Who is that?” I asked, pointing at his stereo. “If I didn't already know every song they ever recorded, I'd say that sounded like Freekmonkee.”

“You like Freekmonkee?”

“Um, yeah. That would be an understatement. My best friend, Doon, knows more about them than their own parents.”

“Cool. Josh hates them.”

“He hates Freekmonkee? And you let him live?”

“He's working on his rap CD. I guess they're the wrong kind of Freek-ee.”

If my dad had made a comment like that, I would have groaned, but Jeremy's jokes were cute even when they bombed. And the thought of his brother making a rap album was actually hilarious, though I was pretty sure that being the first to laugh at that idea was not a strong move.

“So what is this?”

“It's the new Freekmonkee.
Lost in Space.
They have the same label as Olivia, so she got me a copy.”

“Get. Out. Get, get, get, get
out
.”

I turned the music up louder before realizing that I should have asked first.

“But the first single isn't out until next month—I just heard Karl Marx say so. On a podcast, I mean. Is this a CD or just the music? How many songs did you get?”

I was babbling like a deranged toddler.

“It's ten songs. There's a promo case back there somewhere. Here.” He pushed a button and skipped to the next song. “This is going to be the first single.”

I had officially died and gone to heaven. Karl Marx's low voice half chanted,
We're all just part of the void. Travelers on a lonely path. Lost in space. Lost on Earth. No looking back, no looking back.