American Girls (18 page)

What's that saying? “We always hate the things in others that we see in the mirror”?

“I'm starting to despise auditions,” she said. “They won't call me back. I think I was the oldest woman there anyhow.”

“Seriously? How young was the youngest?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Nineteen?”

“Did they ask her about orgies?”

“I have no idea, I wasn't in her audition.”

“Can we drop it with the orgies?” Dex said. “Maybe you can both forget that we have a child in the room, but I'm having some trouble.”

“I'm not a child,” I said. “Besides, I read about orgies most of this afternoon. Did you know the youngest Manson girl was, like, thirteen? That's younger than me. I'll bet she did more than hear about orgies.”

“Great,” Dex said. “I feel better already.”

“Can I ask a weird question?” I didn't even know I had a question about orgies, but what the heck. “Do you think that people actually like having orgies, or do you think they just like being able to say that they were in an orgy?”

“And,
scene,
” Dex said. “You sure you don't want some ice cream? A lollipop? To go roller-skating?”

“Ice cream,” I said. “Definitely ice cream.”

My sister shook her head and narrowed her eyes.

“Sex talk for ice cream. Kids today can work the system.”

I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, but I was actually being serious with the question. One of the funny things, reading the Manson family members talk about all the crazy sex, is that they were all like,
Yeah, that sex thing, kind of overblown, kind of didn't really happen like that
. It was almost like people wanted the crazy sex thing to be true even if it wasn't. Mostly, when you read what the Manson family really said about those weeks before the murders, they were short on food and hungry, not horny. But talking about the sex was evidently more interesting than the actual sex. Not that I knew anything about sex myself, but sex with a bunch of dirty hippies not being awesome seemed
totally
possible. The story was better than the stinky, hungry truth.

It's not like that would have been a first.

 

13

Dex said one of the fastest ways to make money in LA was to be an extra on a sitcom—totally legal for minors, and the unions made sure the pay was sweet. He wrote me into a
Chips Ahoy!
episode, where I played the quiet half of a nerdy sister pair whose boat comes across the Chips' yacht just before a hurricane hits. I got to wear glasses even bigger than my regular ones, and some crazy plaid miniskirt and kneesocks, and my one line was “Does not compute, buttercup,” which I tried to say like a computer, but I think I just sounded like the nervous lunatic I was. Dex said I was great, and even Josh gave me a high five when the scene was over. “I love those socks,” Jeremy said. “And the glasses. Classic.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “A few more cameos and you'll be the next Olivia Taylor.” He was cracking himself up.

“
Shiiit,
” Jeremy said. “I forgot about Olivia.”

“Lucky you,” Josh said without a touch of humor.

“I've gotta get out of here.” Jeremy looked at the time on his phone and then at me. “Want to come with?”

Jeremy and I hadn't talked much since the day we went to the cemetery, so I assumed that he had written me off as a terrible, possibly pitiful human being best kept at arm's length.

“Sure,” I said, trying hard to sound cool, but I think I accidentally used my computer voice instead.

“I have an idea,” Jeremy whispered. “Top secret.”

I pretended to lock my lips and gave him the
Chips Ahoy!
salute. If there was one thing I knew how to do, it was keep a secret.

*   *   *

Once we were in the car, Jeremy told me his sister was leaving town for Vegas, where she was sponsoring a series of parties on the strip. He was supposed to feed the snake and iguana while she was gone. The way he saw it, I could get back the purse I'd bought her and return it for cash, right a wrong, and the best part was that she was so loaded up with crap and unopened swag that she wouldn't even miss it.

“Have you seen her place?” He signaled and practically stopped driving as he rounded the corner to her street, but then he picked up speed. “I'm just warning you, it's not what you think.”

“Okay,” I said. But what ever was?

Olivia Taylor lived in a super-posh subdivision with a friendly but armed guard who greeted us at the gate before we drove to her bungalow. It wasn't a mansion, which I guess I had been expecting, but was definitely too big for one human being. The outside had a rock garden with benches, a small, squarish fountain, and an atrium with a clogged pond and a few sluggish fish bobbing on the surface.

“You ready to see how the other half lives?” he said, smiling like he knew something that I didn't.

A faint beeping noise droned from inside Olivia's house, and when Jeremy opened the door, a catatonic-eyed Pomeranian clawed halfway up my leg like it had lost its actual mind. The beeping was much louder and shriller inside. After flipping the switch on a light that wouldn't turn on, Jeremy punched the keypad on her security system until the alarm stopped. The dog hobbled down two steps before peeing in a puddle between its legs. Who knew how long he'd been holding it.

“Jesus,” Jeremy said, picking the dog up and rubbing its head. “She forgot Mr. Peabody. Poor bastard.”

The inside of Olivia's house was dark, and after three more useless attempts to find a working light, Jeremy opened the wall of curtains in the living room, letting in enough sun to show that Olivia had probably left in a hurry. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see that the downhill went far and fast. White furniture, black floors, black fireplace, white chandelier. It was like someone got all their decorating ideas from staring at a checkerboard. And then, along the sides of the house, boxes and bags, bags and boxes. Olivia Taylor was a high-end hoarder. I recognized the shopping bag from our excursion, tossed atop a pile of the same that led into the kitchen. Box upon box of Chinese takeout containers littered the counters. This was the picture the paparazzi needed. Piles of unpacked clothes cluttered the sofas, a dog-gnawed piece of pepperoni pizza sat abandoned on the floor, and the air smelled like animal piss and vinegar. For a hot star, she'd left an even hotter mess.

I didn't know what to say, or what I was supposed to do, so I asked Jeremy if we should clean up.

“No,” he said. He pushed a stack of cotton-candy pink and baby-blue leotards onto the floor, sat on the sofa, and stared at the pizza box on the coffee table. Then he let out the kind of sigh that parents make when they're so disappointed, they've actually given up, the kind of soul-gutted exhale that was a million times worse than any kind of mad. “It's her mess. But someone needs to clue her in that she left the dog and her electricity is off. I should have known this place would have gone to shit. She always said that Vegas was for washed-up reality stars and ex-groupies. Guess she'll fit right in.”

I thought about sitting down next to him and putting my hand on his leg, attempting the kind of “It's okay!” gesture that beautiful girlfriends make in the movies before their boyfriends kiss them tenderly and wordlessly express their thanks and understanding. But I wasn't his girlfriend. Still, we were in an empty house together, and even though it was trashed, there was something that made me feel like that had to mean something. I pretended he was the much older version of Birch and sat next to him and said, “I'm sorry. It's really nice of you to look after her.”

He shook his head.

“Maybe that's how it seems,” he said. “I used to think so. It would be nice it if helped, but it doesn't. But then there's the dog.” The dog was standing over the pizza and licking the pepperoni. Every few minutes he let out a rancid fart. People food wasn't doing him any favors, but the poor bastard was practically dry-humping a piece of stale crust now that he'd had a chance to pee. Jeremy shook his head and took the pizza away from him.

“I wonder if she even owns dog food,” he said. I was sitting close enough to smell that he had probably washed his hair that morning, close enough that I could have reached over and traced the three freckles lined along his jaw like a wide triangle. He stopped staring at the mess and put his hand on my shoulder, and I thought for a minute that he might kiss me. I really did, and then it seemed like he'd awakened from a trance, and instead he stood up and kicked the pizza box off the table, kicked it so hard and far that it landed next to the shopping bags lined against the windows.

“Fuck,” he said. “She's still my fucking sister.”

“Careful,” I said before I could help myself. “You don't want her thinking we came and trashed the place.” For a minute Jeremy didn't say anything, and then he started to laugh. Even more than the thought of kissing him, his laughter felt like a gift. Like I registered, and I mattered.

“We couldn't have that, now could we?”

He wouldn't have believed me, but I knew exactly what he meant about Olivia. And then, like someone had written it into the script, the iguana bolted from Olivia's bedroom across the floor, its feet and long green tail slapping the floor like a toddler playing the drums. I couldn't help it, I was cracking up.

“Iggy!” Jeremy chased him to the corner. “Iggy, if this were not so completely depressing, it would be hilarious. You realize that, don't you?” Iggy wriggled out of Jeremy's hands and ran back into the bedroom. Jeremy closed the door behind him. “Who am I kidding? It's a comedy of sad.”

The dog had burrowed into Olivia's clothes and rested his head on a pair of her bikini underwear. Jeremy talked to him like he was the dog's therapist. “And you,” he said, “you actually miss her. You might want to think about your choices, little dude.”

Then it seemed like as fast as the whole thing had become funny, it wasn't anymore. The dog rolled over and let Jeremy rub his belly.

“You mind doing me a favor, Anna? Could you hold your breath and dig through the kitchen closet and see if there's anything in the way of kibble that we could feed this animal? I'm going to give Olivia a call and see if she even knows that she left Mr. Peabody.”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

“And if you can find Iggy and get him in his cage, he'd probably thank you, you know, if he could.”

“I'm sure even iguanas have their ways,” I said, and he pointed a “gotcha”-style finger at me.

Part of me wanted to hear what he was saying to his sister, but I didn't want him to think I was being nosy, so I decided to hunt for Iggy first. I'd never seen Olivia's bedroom. For a minute, I thought about something I'd read about the Manson family, that before the murders they broke into people's homes, sometimes while they slept unaware, and rearranged their furniture without taking anything. “Creepy-crawling,” they called it. I'd thought that the whole point was to scare the unsuspecting residents when they woke up, but walking around Olivia's house, I wondered if there wasn't a thrill to poking around the house itself. Going through someone's drawers could be as intimate as reading their diary, and I was about to see not just Olivia's room, but also in some weird way, a part of Olivia herself.

Before I opened the door, I thought about episodes I'd seen of
Hoarders
where even the bedrooms were overrun, where some crack team of investigators found the outline of where a human being could sleep on a bed otherwise piled to the ceiling with newspapers in triplicate and mold samples that had to be identified by outside laboratories. Another part of me imagined it might be an even more sexed-up version of my sister's bedroom, with padded walls and a secret sex-dungeon entrance. But it was neither. It was messy, for sure, but most of it just looked like a regular-girl bedroom, maybe even the bedroom of someone younger than either of us. Her comforter was ballet-slipper pink, and her bed had the kind of lavender canopy over it that I had begged for when I was eight. She hadn't made the bed, but she'd last slept next to an oversize stuffed iguana, and three or four other stuffed horses were tucked beneath the blankets. Iggy had perched himself on the back of a well-worn plush unicorn. I snatched the lizard before he knew what had happened, and once I got ahold of him, he relaxed and felt softer than I'd imagined. I could almost see why Olivia liked him.

When I went back into the living room, Jeremy was cleaning dog shit off his shoes and talking to his sister on speaker. I don't know what they'd been talking about before, but whatever it had been, she was furious.

“Would you please quit being a douche and get my electricity back on? I'll pay you for it when I get back.”

“You can pay for it now,” Jeremy answered. “You can look up the number.”

“Don't,” she said, like the word had teeth, “use that AA bullshit on me. You're not above this. You spent three nights in jail, if I remember correctly. How would you like it if that little truth was magically revealed to the press? Save your self-righteousness for meetings. I don't buy it.”

Three nights in jail? That was the first I'd heard of that one. I couldn't tell if Olivia was telling the truth, or if the truth bothered Jeremy. If it did, it didn't bother him enough to take the phone off speaker. He shook his head and threw the cloth he'd been using in the garbage, and then he pointed to the iguana and gave me a thumbs-up.

“We've got Iggy,” he said. “Now if you could tell me where you keep the dog food.”

“Who's ‘we'?” she asked. “Did you bring someone with you? I don't want your whores in my house.
Hellooooooo,
” she yelled cheerfully.