American Girls (10 page)

“I'm not a klepto,” I said. “I was taking out a loan.”

“Right. Here's a tip. Own it.”

“She's fine,” Josh said. “Not everyone is a psycho like you.”

“Is that the best you can do? ‘Psycho'? Maybe you should lay off the video games. So Anna—it is Anna, right? Since you're a professional, or a loan shark, or whatever you want to call it, would you like to come shopping with me?”

It sounded like a trick question. And she knew my name, which meant that the twins must have talked about me when I wasn't around. Crazy.

“I'm supposed to be on a spending fast,” she said. “They're doing a feature for some no-name sad-teen magazine, and I'm going to write some sermon about how not spending has saved my soul and is better for the planet and all of that, only I hate, hate, hate not spending and there is no way any sane editor could expect me to weather this shit-storm without at least a new bag. You need money too, right? I'll pay you a hundred bucks. Finder's fee and hush money. If you so much as tweet it to your best friend, I will destroy you, okay?”

Like anyone would believe me. Even Doon would think that I was making this up.

Seeing Olivia Taylor made me realize that everyone my sister knows is only kind of famous. Partially famous, faded around the edges, and potentially forgettably famous. Even Delia, if she works every day for the rest of her life, will never be Olivia Taylor. Olivia Taylor has sold out stadiums. She was on my television five nights a week and again in the mornings as reruns. I am pretty sure I know her birthday as well as her favorite color.

“I can work a credit card,” I said, giving her a smile like I could own the crazy when the time was right.

“Perfect. See you laze-balls later.”

I should have checked with Dex first. Jeremy gave me a look like, “You're really going to just walk out the door with my insane sister?” And I tried to let him know, telepathically,
Yes, because it's going to be about a million times more interesting than walking out the door with my own insane sister.
“The devil you know” may be the saying, but crazy is always a million times more interesting when you're just getting introduced, shaking hands, and deciding whether or not you're going to give your real e-mail address.

Even exiting the building, a man who looked like he was casing the parking lot pulled out a camera and started snapping pictures. Pictures of me and Olivia Taylor. I could be the blacked-out square in a trashy magazine in a grocery store checkout line. The question mark over the head on a gossipy Web site. I had arrived.

“Good luck getting five dollars for that,” she said. “Shit-sniffer.”

The man made a motion like he was tipping his hat, then kissed the air at her.

“Disgusting,” she said. “They won't be happy until I'm dead and they're first on the scene to take a picture.”

She ushered me to an SUV the size of small house. I climbed into the passenger seat like I knew exactly what we were doing next, like driving around with movie stars was something I'd been doing my entire life. That I did not pee my pants was probably a miracle. Olivia's laptop was open on her seat, and she fired it up after she sat down. She handed it to me so that I could see the pictures that were so offensive—three shots of her passed out at a party next to a half-eaten birthday cake, with her basically nonexistent belly hanging ever so slightly over her too-tight snakeskin pants, and her head angled so that it looked like she had the tiniest of double chins.

“Who would do this?” she said, and pointed at the screen. “An asshole of biblical proportions, right? The party was totally closed. Now I have to go all Agatha Christie on my five best friends and my brothers to see who murdered my career. And look at that cake. Grocery store cake. Assholes.”

So these were the pictures she was so angry about. Not ones that made her look like a druggie, or a racist, or a
naked
druggie-racist, but the ones that made her look just a little closer to regular. The only shock was that it really wasn't all that shocking.

“Maybe you can pretend they're not of you,” I offered. “They don't really even look like you.”

“Tell that to the next casting director running a Web search.” She closed the computer and tossed it behind her, then started the car and drove us off the lot. I was thinking about how much it would have cost to replace the computer if it had missed the backseat, when I felt the craziest sensation, like heavy rainfall thumping up my arm—but without the rain. The feeling traveled from my right shoulder and onto my head, and I panicked. Something from the backseat was attacking me. I must have let out a totally for-real scream, because Olivia almost drove us into a streetlamp by the side of the road.

“Are you completely psycho?” she asked. What I could now see was a large green lizard had jumped from my head and onto her lap. “You're going to give Iggy a nervous breakdown.”

“Iggy?” I said.

“It's okay,
Iggyyyyyy
.” She kissed the lizard on the head. “This is Anna. She didn't mean to scare you.” The lizard perched on her leg, and she stroked its head delicately. I checked the backseat for more reptiles and tried to quiet my heartbeat. Olivia pulled the car into a parking space marked “Employees Only” behind a strip mall, and tucked the lizard under her arm.

“You have a lizard,” I said.

“An iguana,” she corrected me. “Did you know they can live as long as people? And unlike people, they never, ever fuck you over.” She gestured for me to get out of the car. “You do have a credit card, right?”

The way she was looking at me, I seriously thought that she might leave me in the car if I answered wrong.

I had a card from my dad, just for emergencies, and there was a good bet it was still working since I hadn't heard from him since he went to Mexico last month. I could hear his voice while Olivia was still talking:
I can
'
t take the time I need to get away with Cindy? Not even a weekend? This is what happens? Why doesn
'
t anyone tell me anything?
And then my mother, who'd probably look on this as an opportunity to remind him just how much he sucks at being a dad:
It
'
s a month you
'
ve been gone, not a weekend. And you are still technically her father, so you could tear yourself away from your piña coladas,
blah, blah, blah.

“It's just for emergencies,” I said.

“Well, this is an emergency.” She'd led me to a hole-in-the-wall boutique with a thick glass door and spare, headless mannequins in the windows. “You'll buy with your credit card and I'll pay you back. It has to look like we're shopping for you.” After we entered the store, one of the women who worked there locked the door behind us. Olivia put her lizard on the ground, and he ran underneath the sale rack. The normal rules no longer applied. We had entered a parallel universe where her arrival meant that some whole other secret set of rules went into effect: Iguanas, good. Other customers, bad.

The store walked the line between chic and totally destroyed, and the clothes looked like they could have been from Goodwill, if Goodwill charged a hundred and fifty bucks for a T-shirt.

“This would look amazing on you,” she said, holding up what I thought was a shirt but soon realized was a dress. “You would look like someone deserving of a solid bang on the third date, am I right? I heard that southern girls were all sluts at heart. Back-door gals because the front's for Jesus or your husband or something.”

She stopped short and looked at me. “You're not a virgin, are you?”

The salesgirl nearest me was trying not to laugh. It was so embarrassing to hear it, and in that exact moment, as I felt the heat spread like brush fire over my face, I hated Olivia Taylor. She was a horrible, horrible person. I hoped my credit card was declined. I hoped someone scanned her toxic-waste-heap of a brain and leaked that to the press.

She, on the other hand, had already moved on.

“This,” she said, and handed me a duffel bag with a geometric pattern across the front, two large metallic straps that went over the shoulders. “This is the one you
have
to have. I told you it would be perfect. Flawless. Love, love, love it.”

She wasn't even looking at me, or anyone else in the store when she talked, she was like a tornado, swirling and touching down, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that her movements were arbitrary, that I was nothing more than some trailer park she might destroy before disappearing back into the clouds.

“You have to buy it,” she said. “I know it's just what your daddy would want you to have for your birthday. She's turning sixteen.” She mangled “daddy” like it was the filthiest word in the English language, like she'd finally found something that caused her physical pain to say. The clerk pretended to care. She probably saw this kind of mania three times a day, seven days a week. I always thought that people in LA must be in awe of the fame, of the random interactions with the people you only saw on-screen. Now I could see that it was probably just exhausting.

I pulled out the credit card that I was supposed to use only for emergencies and bought a $498 green python bag. It was more than I'd ever spent on anything in my life, including the plane ticket before taxes. My hands shook as I forked over the card. I'd almost wished the card had been declined, but now that it had gone through, I had visions of my dad getting a call in Mexico that there was a strange charge from Los Angeles. They were probably alerting the credit card police even as the store clerk slipped the bag into a felt pouch, and then a larger bag, and handed me the package.

“Do you want the receipt or should I put it in the bag?”

I looked at Olivia, who was pulling her hair across her face and practically making out with her phone. She waved me off.

“I guess I'll take it,” I said.

The clerk handed me the paper, and I half tried to pass the receipt to Olivia, who brushed me off again and kept talking. I put it in my purse, and got the weird feeling that I had done something very, very wrong.

I tried to ignore her, to figure out something to do with myself that didn't look sad and idiotic and alone. The iguana was running laps around the front counter, and the salesgirls had stopped smiling.

I stood by the still-locked door to the store as two girls in cutoff shorts tried to open it, failed, peered inside, and moved on.

Across the street, above a salon that advertised fifteen-dollar manicures, another billboard for
Volt
blocked the sun. The same blond actress in the same white tank top stood with her hands in front of her, balancing a stethoscope against a handgun. She was trying to look serious and sexy and smart all at once, but mostly she just looked as fake as her fluorescent-green eyes—like every other actress on every other billboard trying to look serious and sexy and smart. My sister said that the show was about a neurosurgeon who had been hit by lightning as a child and could see the future when patients were dying. She could decide whether it would be better if they lived or died. At least, that was what the show had been about when she read for it. By now, Delia said, the show might just as easily have been about a nurse with an electric vagina. Looking at the actress's face, it could have gone either way.

“Texting your friends?” Olivia said. “I'll bet you couldn't wait to tell them who you were shopping with. Did you send pictures?”

She took the phone from my hand, like she owned it, and read aloud, “‘Out shopping with Olivia Taylor.' See? This is why I have to check everything. You can't make any money for that, you know.”

“I left without telling anyone where I was going,” I said. “It's to my sister.”

“Of course it is.”

She handed me the phone the same way she had taken it, like it was more hers than mine, like she was entitled to anything she could put her hands on, just because. As the salesgirl unlocked the front door, she gave me a “Good luck with that” kind of smile. I gave a “Pray for me” widening of the eyes in return.

On the way back to the set, I watched Olivia Taylor text with both hands and her elbows on the steering wheel, and tried not to think about the fact that she hadn't made any mention of the hundred dollars she'd promised me, let alone how to pay me back for the bag. And as we drove farther from the store, the prickly unease that I had been feeling became something hard and dark. I felt something that I'd only read about in books, the kind of cold that ices your insides when something terrible is just about to happen. I remembered a picture that Doon had said we should figure out how to send but never did, a fake selfie of Paige Parker with rope around her neck and whited-out eyeballs, and I wished that someone could have done the same to the so-called terrible pictures of Olivia Taylor. I knew that part of me wouldn't have cared at all if something really bad had happened to Olivia—worse, part of me wanted it to. And just for a second, maybe because it was California and you could understand how truly vomit-worthy fame could be only when you were right up next to it, I almost, kind of, understood what it might have been like to be a Manson girl.

 

7

I was starting to wonder what I was doing in Los Angeles. As Olivia cruised past yet another billboard for
Volt,
I almost longed for the weird billboards of the South. It seemed like anyone in Georgia could afford to take out roadside advertising, and once you got outside Atlanta there was always some crazy billboard that let you know that people were made by God,
not
from monkeys, or that
demanded
the president's birth certificate, or—my favorite—a six-year-old with a crossbow advertising the “kids' corner” of the local gun store. Doon and I would text pictures of the best ones to each other, daring each other to call the number on the anti-evolution billboard and ask whoever answered to explain the hair on her chest, or to take Birch to the gun store to see if there was anything for toddlers. I wouldn't have even bothered sending her the
Volt
pictures, they were such an obvious and boring kind of stupid.