American Girls (5 page)

“I texted you about a thousand pictures,” Doon was saying. I'd missed whatever she said before that. “My hair is white now. I hope it doesn't fall out.”

“I didn't get them.”

“Are the guys a million times better-looking out there?” she asked. “I can't believe you left without telling me. And what gives with your phone?”

For a minute Doon was quiet and I could hear her typing. She liked to check e-mail while she was on the phone.

“Did they ask?” She hesitated. “About the texts?”

“They didn't ask about you,” I said, because I knew that was what she meant, and for a minute it made me angry. “I wouldn't tell them if they did.”

“Thanks,” she said, but I couldn't tell from her phone voice how much she meant it. “I almost forgot, your moms were at the Kroger with Birch yesterday. They pretended like they didn't see me but I think they did. They were in the baby aisle, and they actually seemed kind of happy.” I didn't say anything, and after a few seconds she said, “I mean, not really happy. I think they were probably trying to fake me out.”

I couldn't tell whether Doon was trying to hurt my feelings or not, but when she said that my mom looked happy, I almost started to cry.

“My sister needs her phone,” I said.

I felt a little queasy after the call, not better, not the way I'd thought I would feel. Delia had mercy and took her phone back without asking me any questions.

*   *   *

The rest of the week we were on the set of the zombie movie that was, according to my sister, paying her rent. The movie set for that film was real, not like Roger's sketchball, faux-indie home movie. Filming was like I had imagined it would be, from watching TV and reading magazines, only there was a lot more sitting around and waiting, and all the food on the fancy tables was bulk-food sad and stale. And the actors were short. There was one guy who I guess was kind of famous on a cable TV show, and his face was handsome, but it was like they made him in miniature, so I just couldn't see how people would get excited about him if they knew the truth—that he stood on a box for his love scenes with my sister. Sometimes, when it seemed like everyone was so busy-busy that I had literally become invisible, I would look at the whole mess of them and pretend they were telemarketers or dental assistants, and then it would crack me up—everyone walking around spewing fake blood and staring at their phones like they weren't just going to work with the rest of the world.

When we went home at night my sister would learn her lines for the next day, and the calls with my mother would start.
I can't even talk to you. You have no idea how much you scared me. How are we going to get you home? I can't just leave Birch, and I don't want you traveling alone again. How can I trust you to get on the right plane? Where would you end up next?
Like I was baggage just begging to be lost.
Do you know my milk almost dried up when I thought you were gone?

Oooohmigod,
I had to hand it to my mother, she could even make running away totally disgusting.
I expect you're spending your time away figuring out how you're going to pay Lynette back. You have to learn to think about someone other than yourself.
That was a little too “pot-kettle,” as my grandmother used to say, but mostly she just yelled at me until she got tired and asked if I had anything to say, which I really didn't, except that I wasn't sure how I was going to pay the money back, which she said didn't count as an apology and just got mad again. Yesterday, I had asked her how Birch was doing and she calmed down a little bit and put him on the phone, but then he disconnected.

Aside from the call to Doon, Delia was being a real monster about letting me use her phone—even though she couldn't use it herself when she was filming. After the first day on set, the zombie film had lost its charm. My sister was right about the dialogue being idiotic. It was almost like the director had decided that if he filmed every scene at least twenty times, the words coming out of the actors' mouths might magically become interesting. Wrong. So I started to read the book that Roger had given me.

I found a relatively quiet place near the food table and cracked
Helter Skelter
open to the pictures in the middle: mug shot after mug shot of Charles Manson, lined up beside each other to show how he'd changed with each passing term in jail. The pictures reminded me of when parents lined up school pictures to show how their toothless second grader gradually became their peroxide-at-the-beach ninth grader. Over the years, the short-haired, clean-cut con man of the 1950s became the dead-eyed, swastika-tattooed, homicidal maniac of the sixties. There were also pictures of bad furniture, the rooms where the victims were murdered, and the various household objects that had been used against them: electric cords, beams in the ceilings, roasting forks from family dinners. The bodies were whited out, almost like after they were murdered they'd been erased from the scene.

And then there were the girls: long-haired and without makeup, looking like they all knew some juicy secret that they weren't going to tell you. A group shot of five of them talking intently, heads shaved, worried brows, like they were getting ready to go on a cancer walk, not waiting to be sentenced to death. It was hard to believe that crimes that horrible had actually happened, in regular living rooms on regular evenings. Manson's battalion of zombie-bimbos were the kind of slow-moving death that scared me more than any dumb Hollywood movie. If you wanted a go-to for “At least he's not…” and Hitler was taken, Manson was a pretty safe second choice.

I'd been reading for three hours, which meant thirty dollars. I would have to read for fifty hours to make back the plane ticket, and fifty more to get home to Atlanta again. Or maybe I'd be like some sleazy lawyer and start charging Roger for whenever I thought about the Manson family. I mentally gave myself five extra dollars for having to read about the murders twice, just to get the details straight.

On the night of August 8, 1969, Charles Manson sent Charles “Tex” Watson and three of the Manson girls, including head psycho Susan Atkins, to 10050 Cielo Drive with instructions to murder everyone inside in the most gruesome way possible. They killed five people, including the eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate. But the murders didn't stop with Tate.

The next night, six more of his “family” members killed a married couple, the LaBiancas, in basically the same way but in a different part of Los Angeles. The killers even showered and changed into new clothes from the victims' closets at the crime scene. Then they hitchhiked back to the Manson compound and treated the person who drove them home to breakfast. The whole city of Los Angeles locked its doors, bought guns and guard dogs, and started concocting theories about orgies in the Hollywood Hills and roaming bands of Satanists. Everyone panicked. And those weren't even the only murders Manson was responsible for. Evidently there were plenty more, bodies in the desert never found, close friends who couldn't cough up money on demand. He sat around this abandoned film set, baking in the sun, like some psychopathic film director yelling “Do this!” and “Go there!” to dozens of hippies who seemed to think that they were making the world a better place by slicing off ears, gutting women, or just sleeping with the latest hitchhiker who stumbled by. Susan Atkins, the woman who helped kill Tate, said that it took “a whole lot of love to kill someone.” Bat. Shit. Crazy. They left forks in the stomachs of the LaBiancas and on the walls of both crime scenes they wrote in their victims' blood.

Pig.

Healter Skelter.

Rise.

Death to Pigs.

And carved in the stomach of the last of the victims:
War.

Healter Skelter,
misspelled, made me think of the chicken scratch in my sister's purse:
Whore.

When Delia put a hand on my shoulder, I jumped. The book was making me more nervous than I'd expected. Then when I looked at her face, I almost had a full-on freak-out. When I'd last seen her she'd had on her pre-zombie-apocalypse makeup, but now blood was trickling down her cheek and her left eye was completely black. A bruise that looked like a handprint wrapped purple-blue around her neck.

“I know,” she said. “The makeup artist is a genius, right?”

That was one word for it. Fingernail marks dotted her collarbone, and when she smiled two of her teeth had been painted gray. Another three had been blacked out entirely.

“Dare me to drive home with this on?”

I thought about the Manson family, driving around with blood on their hands, and how in Hollywood, you couldn't tell the killers from the actors. If there was a stranger place on earth, I didn't know where.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

*   *   *

When we came home from the set a miracle had taken place—my phone, which I had almost given up for dead, was plugged in and ringing.

“You going to answer that?” Delia asked.

I picked the phone up and looked at the number. Atlanta. My mom.

“I don't want to,” I said.

“Well, if you want to keep the phone, I suggest you answer.”

“Do you know something I don't know?”

“Of course I do. Now pick it up before it goes to voice mail.”

It's terrible having an actress for a sister: traitor. Mental note made and filed.

When I answered the phone, it wasn't my mother's voice that I heard, but Lynette's. I hadn't talked to Lynette since I landed in LA, but it was her credit card that I used. I was guessing she took that personally. I would have.

“Hi, Anna,” she said. Awkward.

“Hey, Lynette.”

“I've gotta get the zombie off,” my sister said, popping a black cap off her front tooth, and before I could figure out a way to make her stay, she was in the other room.

“Well,” she said, “I can tell by talking to your mother that you have no idea what you've put us through on this end.” Then she stopped, inhaled (long and loud), exhaled (longer and louder), and started again. “Sorry, that's not how I wanted to start this conversation. I'm glad that nothing happened to you. We both are. I want to say first, before we get into anything else, that I don't think the way your mother handled things, changing your school and all, was the best idea.” She paused again, and I put the phone on speaker.

“When all of this happened,” she said, “I tried to put myself in your shoes. Your mother said that it didn't go well when she and your father talked to you, and I realized that I never got to say anything myself, and most of the time, we're so busy with Birch or work that we don't hear what you have to say. I think you know what questions I might have, so I won't patronize you.”

Then she stopped. It was my turn, but I didn't want to talk. It didn't have anything to do with her, and I knew that she was being nice. If I'd had any sense I would have Googled “How to sound sincere when apologizing,” but I hadn't, and it was too late.

“Okay then,” she said. “I considered just letting the money go, but since you're almost sixteen I think that it's important that we take this seriously. I'm not going to lecture you about what you should and shouldn't have done, but the money needs to be repaid. With slight interest.”

I wondered what she was doing on the other end of the line. Smiling? Waiting for me to tell her what an awesome person she was for wanting to turn me into a financially responsible adult? She could wait forever.

“Here is what we decided. You're ahead on your studies, and it's almost summer, so we're going to let you stay with your sister until you've earned the money to pay me back and for a return ticket. You need to be back by the end of the summer. This isn't a joke and it's not a vacation. We checked and saw that there are jobs you can do if you have a permit, and your sister has been kind enough to say that she'll help as much as she can with finding a job and transportation.”

I was going to get to stay in LA! I bit my cheek so that I wouldn't sound as happy as I felt.

“Was this Mom's idea?” I asked.

“It was mine,” Lynette said. “But that's not all. You can test out of your science and math classes, but your history teacher wants you to do a final project. He's going to be sending you an e-mail with details. Your teachers were all quite understanding. I hope you realize that you'll be missing all the end-of-year activities, the chance to say good-bye to your friends.”

I was already thinking of the places that I would apply for jobs, maybe the candy store near the lot where my sister was filming. Or one of the ice cream stores with the trendy names and all the girls in line who looked like they kept that ice cream down for about 2.5 seconds. If Mom and Lynette thought missing some picnic at the aquarium was a punishment, they had read the wrong piece of Internet wisdom.

“And you can decide how you want to communicate with Birch.”

You wouldn't think it was possible, but I'd really forgotten about not seeing Birch for three months. He was just learning to pull himself up on furniture when I left, and he could make baby sign language for “finished” and “more.” He even called me “Na Na” when he really wanted my keys or to go through my wallet. He would probably start walking this summer.

“Do you think he'll remember me?”

Lynette let out a long sigh, like I was beyond hopeless, and I felt for a minute like I really was going to cry.

“Why didn't Mom call today?”

“Your mom has her own struggles,” she said, but I didn't see my mom struggling. Instead, I saw her walking down the frozen food aisle with Birch and Lynette, having a grand old time and trying to forget that she even had a daughter. All the while, Lynette was blathering on about how much my mother loved me, and how she wasn't very good at expressing it, and how worried she had been. But I knew what Doon had seen—three people who did just fine on their own.