American Girls (19 page)

“It's Anna,” he said. “You met her. And she's not a whore. She just found your iguana and put him back in his cage, so you might want to thank her.” He slumped forward onto the counter where he'd laid his phone down, and shook his head like she could see him. “You're so angry. I don't get how you do it.”

“I'm angry? How are you
not
angry, is the better question. How are you not outraged every second of your life?

“Anna,” she said, her voice lower and suddenly sweet, “you know he's in AA, right? You know that in that stupid cult they have a rule that you have to do one nice thing every day and not get caught. My guess is that you're that thing for Jer-Bear here. Otherwise, from what I've seen of you”—and she might as well have been looking me up and down when she said it—“you're not his type.”

“Enough,” he said, in a voice so adult that it sounded like it belonged to someone else. “No more. The crazy thing is, Olivia, most days I try to do something nice for you, and I don't get caught because you don't even notice.”

Then there was a silence like someone had slapped her across the face. Then the
beep-beep-beep
that she had left the conversation.

I wanted to disappear as much as I'd wanted anything in my whole life. I didn't care about the stupid purse anymore, or about helping Jeremy clean Olivia's apartment, or that her electricity was off. I didn't even care that I'd been stupid enough a few minutes before to think that Jeremy had brought me there because he really liked me. If Olivia had called me a hag, it wouldn't have felt any worse.
Not his type
. I didn't have to speak “bitch” fluently to know exactly what she meant. She meant ugly, and the word felt a thousand times more embarrassing than if she'd paraded me around in my nonmatching underwear. I wanted out of there, but I didn't know how to ask.

Jeremy had found the dog food and placed it by the door. Beside it was the bag from the store where I'd bought Olivia the purse.

“I found this.” He lifted the bag toward me. “The receipt's still in there. It has your dad's name on it. I'll bet you can return it.”

I took the shopping bag, but I couldn't look him in the face. Olivia's dog licked my ankle, and when I reached down to pet him I could feel how small and fragile his head was beneath all that fur, that he had a slight shake even when he was trying to be still.

“You can't pay attention to her,” Jeremy said.

“Sure,” I said. “No. I'm not.”

More than anything I wanted him to stop talking, and almost like he could read my mind, he offered to take me back to the set. Mr. Peabody sat on my lap and we listened to music as we rode. I didn't recognize any of the songs, but they were low and sad, like they'd been dipped in the darkest of blues. Maybe it was the music, but when we got to the studio, Jeremy touched his hand against my face before I got out of the car.

“I'll see you later,” I said, and before I could stop myself, like a total idiot, I said, “Thanks.”

He looked at me like I was sadder than Mr. Peabody. At least he had the sense not to say you're welcome. And at least I had the sense to leave.

*   *   *

The rest of the week I played sick. I had to stay at my sister's place, because otherwise Dex would know that I was faking, but I couldn't go back to
Chips Ahoy!,
not until Jeremy had at least a week to forget that his sister had all but called me a hag. Delia said he probably wouldn't even remember, but that was only because she hadn't been on the receiving end of the beat-down I'd taken. I'd rather have risked Delia's psycho neighborhood than endure further humiliation. Not even a contest, really.

Delia brought me a stack of movies from Dex's place, including one that he'd snagged from the set:
Kandy Kisses: From Olivia Taylor to You
,
the Real Olivia Taylor Story.
“In case you get tired of working on your history final,” she said. I couldn't tell whether Delia was being nice or just messing with me. I'd seen the movie twice with Doon when it first came out. We even talked her mom into taking us to a midnight screening “slumber party” the night that it opened. At the time, Olivia Taylor had seemed like the prettiest, nicest, funnest person you could ever trade stickers with, but now I knew that she was a spiritual wolf in Malibu Slut Barbie's hand-me-downs. Then I remembered that the twins were in the movie, and that more than anything made me load it up.

The movie came out right when my parents were first having problems, and part of the reason that I loved Olivia Taylor so much was that her own dad had never been a part of her life, and some of her mom's lunacy couldn't help but leak onto the screen. Her family wasn't crazy in the same way that mine was, but it was definitely crazy. The movie opened with a group of fans, teenage girls, talking about how much they loved Olivia Taylor, how she made them feel like someone understood them, how no matter how sad they were, they knew that happiness was just a “kandy kiss” away. Then, surprise, Olivia Taylor came out of her bus, showering them with air-kisses and high-end candy, telling them that
they
were
her
inspiration. The movie followed three months of her tour, three months of her and her mom fighting about her costumes, her boyfriend, the size of her ass. Her brothers had just gotten cast in
Mouse Around the House,
a show that ran for about ten seconds and might have been even worse than
Chips Ahoy!
Still, it was pretty obvious that Mom had her eyes on the newbies, that Olivia was going to be on her own soon enough, fighting or no fighting. Right after the movie came out, the court case when Olivia sued for emancipation started.

But the funny thing was, in the movie, Olivia had so many friends. There was her best friend from her neighborhood, the girl she met in dance class and would
never leave behind,
who tap-danced (badly) through her “Rock Pop Rocks” number, not to mention a posse of managers, stylists, and choreographers who claimed that they were just a bunch of big love-balls orbiting Olivia. Selfless fans with nothing but her best interests in mind. The movie closed with Olivia looking at the camera and saying, “If I can make one person happy, I've done my job. I just want to make the whole world a little sweeter.” Air-kiss and fade to black.

Jeremy texted me as the credits rolled: “Does the iguana get to live?”

I wrote back: “I don't know. Do you call that living?”

Jeremy responded: “LOL. Hope ur feeling better.”

And that was it.

I decided that I had camped out long enough. The next day I would put on my big-girl pants and go back to the set. It didn't matter that I still felt embarrassed, that I had no idea what I was going to say to Jeremy when I saw him. I didn't even know what I was supposed to do with the stupid handbag; the fine print of its receipt read:
Can only be returned for store credit.
Not even kind of helpful. But if watching
Kandy Kisses
taught me anything, it was that you couldn't trust what you saw, no matter how beautiful it looked. And if everyone was going to pretend to be a little better off than they actually were, a little more sure of their place in the world, I might as well join the party.

 

14

I was trying to make myself inconspicuous on the set, tucked in a hallway and reading a book that was supposed to be from the perspective of Sharon Tate's family. The book imagined how all of Tate's relatives were just going through the motions on a regular day when they got the news about their daughter, their sister. She was murdered the night before what was supposed to be her baby shower; presents had been wrapped: baby boots, blankets, a bassinet. And then the phone rang and their lives changed forever. The Manson murders took America by surprise, and in particular, this one family. I knew what it was to hate the telephone, to have this low level of dread every time the phone rang or a message showed up at the wrong time of the night. Since my mom told me she was sick, all news was potentially bad news.

Only most of the time, the news wasn't bad. I kept getting calls from my mom about how great her life was going. She'd found a circle of moms who would donate their breast milk to Birch (I cannot even get into how hard I almost threw up). She was meditating and imagining me with a circle of light all around me.
Like a bull
'
s-eye,
I said, and she didn't even pretend to laugh. But she never apologized, never even admitted that she'd said the horrible things that she'd said.
Oh, Anna, you hear things that aren
'
t there. I don
'
t remember saying anything like that. In fact, I would never say anything like that.
The whole thing was making me crazy. When I wasn't worried sick that she was dying, I was ready to quit talking to her forever.

It would be wrong to say that I had a genuine premonition when Delia's number flashed while I was tucked in my usual corner on the
Chips Ahoy!
set, but at the same time I had this crazy sense that something wasn't right. Everyone had just finished the table-reading when my sister called, her voice cloudy, telling me to get to the hospital. It took me a minute to realize that she wasn't talking about Mom, she was talking about herself. She sounded foggy.

“Anna,” she said. “Just get someone to drive you. Do not, I repeat, do
not
let Dex know. Just make something up.”

“Are you okay?”

She started to cry. “No, I'm not okay. My nose is broken.”

“Your nose is broken?”

“Don't say that, okay? Don't say anything. Just get here and take me home. I don't have money for a cab. I was mugged. Someone stole my wallet.”

“Oh no!”

“Please,” she said. “Just hurry.”

I must have looked as worried as I felt, because Jeremy stopped milling around the food table and asked what was wrong.

“My sister,” I said. “She got mugged. She's in the hospital, and she needs a ride back to her place.”

“I'll get Dex. I just saw him.”

“No,” I said, and hated that this was going to make me sound like an even bigger sketchball, a sketchball-ette from a family of the same. “She doesn't want him to know. I think she's really medicated. She said her nose is broken.”

“I can drive you,” Jeremy said.

“Really? That would be amazing.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I just realized, I don't even know what hospital she's at.”

“What part of town was she in?”

“Downtown. She's shooting an indie film.” And I even had the sense not to say “with her ex-boyfriend.”

“I think I know.”

Jeremy was a slow driver, which I guess I had noticed before, but it hadn't bothered me. I foolishly chalked it up to his wanting to show me the wonders of Los Angeles at a speed that I could appreciate. Now, when I needed to be at the hospital ten minutes ago, the fact that he was a terrible driver was becoming clearer with each stop on yellow and long pause as he rounded a corner. He was cautious. And by cautious, I do not merely mean “safe driver,” but scared old man going ten miles an hour down the road. For the first few minutes I looked at the faces of the angry motorists as they passed, throwing us shade for slowing them down. How had I missed this?

“Do you need to call your mom?” Jeremy asked.

“I can't,” I said. And then before he could ask why not: “I can't because she's sick herself. She won't know what to do. No one ever knows what to do in my family.”

He pumped his brakes as we came to a four-way stop. Then he waited well past when my sister or Olivia would have turned, meandering through the intersection. He was going to get me killed. Then my whole family would be in the hospital.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” he said. “What does she have?”

“Cancer,” I said, and I realized I hadn't said the word out loud since that first night. It sounded ugly and heavy.

“Anna,” he said. “Why didn't you tell me? I'm really sorry.”

“Remember how you told me that once you say something, it kind of goes away? It's not like that with my mom. It's more like if I don't talk about it, it won't be real. Like saying she's sick really makes her sick. That probably sounds crazy. Plus, my sister hates talking about it. My whole family is insane, you realize that, right?”

My mom's surgery was scheduled for tomorrow. Lynette had called yesterday to tell us that while they were optimistic, they wouldn't really know anything until they were inside her. She'd decided not to have both her breasts removed, just the one, and to have chemo and reconstructive surgery. Lynette said that she was depressed. Birch was fussy, and every time she nursed him she became inconsolable.
I think she
'
d really appreciate a call, some flowers, as much goodwill as you can send. Her mental state has me worried.
I gave her a call later and she told me how much she loved me and missed me and couldn't wait until I got home. How I was her baby, that she wanted her babies around her. But I didn't want to be there the way I had when I first heard the news.

“It's the kind where she'll get better. Only she doesn't sound so good. I think she's getting really depressed. The more she tells me that she's trying to visualize her body becoming this healing space, the more I think she's worse off than she's letting me know. She was breastfeeding my brother, and she had to stop, and she thinks that my running out to LA just made it worse, so that sucks too. It all sucks. It's a big fat pit of suck.”

“And this all happened since you came out here?”

“Yes.”

The sad-puppy look again. Not what I had wanted. I did not want to be his good deed for the day. I wanted to be something more.