American Girls (23 page)

“And?”

“It did.” He talked with his hands, pointing ahead like we were in the car together. “I tried to follow it, but whoever was driving went really fast.” His face reddened. I knew exactly how “fast” he drove, but it was cute that he was embarrassed.

“The car is always gone before I can even get the plate,” I said, helping him out as best I could.

“But I got the number.”

“Seriously?”

“And,” he said, with the face of a conqueror, “I have a name and address.”

I felt a little dizzy.

“And, we're taking a break so they can rewrite the rest of this episode. Even for this show, it's ridiculous today.”

“You think?” I said, and we both started laughing.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let's go check it out. If they see us go they'll make me stay.”

No one noticed that we were leaving. Josh's entourage had melted out of the darkness and onto the set the minute he wasn't shooting. The writers were huddled together with Dex in the center, the quarterback of a losing team. Once we were clear of the set, we jogged to the car, probably moving faster than we would be once the car started to roll.

“So how's your sister?”

“Worried about her face,” I said. “I had an epiphany. I realized that my sister on painkillers is kind of like your sister on Vitaminwater.”

Jeremy laughed. “Did you go shopping?”

“No,” I said. “We went to this crazy film shoot. It was just. Crazy.”

“Same movie she was on when she got mugged? Already?”

“Don't tell,” I said, lowering my voice. “It's her ex-boyfriend who's directing it. So she doesn't want Dex to know because she thinks he'd get jealous.”

“That guy was her ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

He mulled it over for a minute. “I guess that explains it.”

Who knew what he was thinking? If Roger explained anything about my sister, I didn't want to know.

It was late afternoon, and the traffic was heavy as we inched across town. Jeremy had one of “his people” trace the license plate, which was evidently less of a big deal than I thought it would be. A perk, he said, of having to deal with stalkers. The address wasn't terribly hard to find, block numbers on the side of a curb, but the house itself was far removed from the road, guarded by hedges and a wide gate. Jeremy parked his car a block away, and we pretended to be walking, slowly casing the joint like a pair of unarmed teenage idiot detectives. The neighborhood seemed deserted, like so many LA houses during the day, the swimming pools abandoned, the lawns perfectly manicured for no parties, no sitting.

“I think we could climb the side,” Jeremy said, pointing to the sloping hill next to the gate. “And peek down from there. See if the car is in the driveway. If it's really the place.”

“And then what?” I picked at the side of my nail, the way I did before tests.

“I don't know. We could knock on the door and tell them we've called the police.”

“And that we've trespassed and then wait for them to do something even weirder?”

“Let's at least take a look. That won't hurt anything. There's no one around.”

I looked at the embankment, at the totally inappropriate open-toe sandals I was wearing, at the dirt and debris and potential for sliding on my face. Then I thought about the chances that the people on the other side of the gate would have guns, dogs, surveillance cameras. I was like the opposite of a Manson girl, unarmed, unprepared, and these were the opposite of Manson times. Now most homeowners were armed and jittery, just waiting for the chance to pick off a kid who walked on the wrong lawn at the wrong time with a bagful of something sinister, like Mountain Dew. Or maybe I wasn't so different from a Manson girl, ready to execute some incredibly stupid plan just because a boy I liked was telling me so.

“Just to be safe,” I said, “how about this. You keep watch and I'll climb up, and I'll let you know if the coast is clear.”

“How about if you keep watch and I climb?”

I pointed to his clothes. “You wore your set clothes. And we're due back in an hour. They'll have your head if they're dirty. How are you gonna get dirty in the middle of the ocean?”

“I can take this off,” he said, stripping off his shirt before I could stop him. He was even more beautiful half naked. I was going to climb a cliff for this boy, possibly get eaten by Dobermans and thrown in jail, and for what? To help my sister, who didn't even want to help herself.

“Ouch,” he said, starting to climb. “I guess we wear clothes for a reason, right?”

“That's probably the idea.”

It wasn't too far up the hill, a short climb, and frankly it made the gate by the entrance seem a little bit silly, unless the idea was to slow someone down on their way back out who'd decided to steal a car. From the top of the hill, it was easy to see the house, a flat-topped super-modern pad that hugged the side of a cliff. Three cars were parked beside the house. A blue BMW, its convertible twin, and a red Honda hybrid. The Honda was the one I had seen outside my sister's house, but that wasn't what made my breath catch in my lungs. The BMW and the convertible had the same magnets on the back, passes to some country club, which looked familiar to me, though I couldn't quite make the connection.

“Duck,” Jeremy whispered, pushing me down against the embankment as a woman wandered out of the house, talking loudly on her cell phone. She didn't appear to notice us, though we were barely hidden, and it was obvious she was upset about something. Jeremy inched closer to me, pushed my head down a bit more, and made a sign against his lips to be quiet. Like I was really going to talk.

“I'm going to check the license plates,” Jeremy said.

“Are you crazy?” I whispered as loudly as I could, but he just put his index finger against his mouth again to shush me, and every time the woman turned away from us, he moved farther down the hill. He was going to go inside the house. He was officially insane.

I'd read about how people think they can hear their own heartbeats when something really scary is going on, and I was pretty sure I could hear that plus every other weird thing my body was doing—blood rushing to my head, my mouth as it dried up, my palms beginning to sweat. I clutched my cell phone in my shaking hand, wondering if someone inside was going to catch Jeremy. He had disappeared into the open door when the woman wasn't watching.

The next five minutes must have been forever, because no sooner had Jeremy gone inside than the woman yelled into her phone, shut it off, and headed back into the house. For all I knew, she was getting ready to Taser Jeremy and drag him to some rich-person dungeon where she'd slice him up and serve him for dinner to her Paleo coven. Best-case scenario, she'd only call the cops. How would I ever explain this to anyone without the two of us looking like juvenile delinquents, the kind of sketchball teenagers that parents warn their children about becoming?

And then finally, moving a lot faster than he had on the way down, Jeremy opened the door and closed it silently behind him, and made his way up the hill. He was halfway to where I was waiting when the door flew open, and the woman emerged. Jeremy flattened himself against the hill, and she scanned the landscape.

“I have a gun, you know,” she yelled.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep my body from trembling.

“I'm calling the police,” she shouted and held her phone in the air.

Then she went back inside, maybe to get her gun, but we weren't waiting that long. Jeremy had made his way farther back up the hill than I had thought, and he squeezed next to me and whispered, “I left a note.”

“You left a note? Are you insane?”

“And I moved around some of the things on the counter. Like you were telling me those people did in that experiment.”

He was remembering everything wrong. There was no experiment, just the Manson family practicing their creepy-crawling, breaking into homes and watching people while they slept, moving their furniture around and leaving without a sound.

“What did the note say?” I asked.

“‘Stop,'” he said. “They'll know what it means. They're not the only ones who can leave notes, right?”

Next to me, Jeremy felt warm, and I would have sworn that I could hear his heartbeat as well. And while I was lying there, waiting for the cops to show up and drag us away, I remembered why I recognized the stickers on the back of the convertible, “HH” and “SSI.” It was the same car my sister had been driving around LA the week of the zombie shoot, before Dex came back into town. We were at the nameless producer's house, or he was inside. And if there was some jealous vixen stalking my sister, she may well have been the producer's wife. Whoever she was, I'd have bet my life that she had her reasons and that my sister knew exactly what they were. I had to remind myself to breathe.

Finally, what felt like a million years later, the woman drove the red Honda down the long driveway and away from us. Jeremy gestured at the car.

“Look,” he said. “The plates match.”

But I wasn't looking at the house anymore. I was looking farther down the hill, across the lanes of traffic that bisected this area from the area where my sister lived. I wasn't great with directions, but even from this far away, I recognized the gaudy lilac paint job on my sister's back porch, almost DayGlo in the sunlight. And then I looked harder at the house, and something clicked, some sixth sense that let me know something that I didn't need to see from the front for proof. That the windows in the front of that house were wide and open. That the clear view up and down the canyon cut both ways. The porno house. This had to be the porno house that my sister was always pointing up the hill and laughing about, an inside joke between her and herself, and I was just one more person on the long list of people to whom Delia liked to lie.

“It's not the car,” I said.

“It is the car.”

“It's not. We have to go back.”

“They're the stalkers. We should go back in and move a sofa or something.”

I looked at Jeremy, shirtless, earnest, and so tragically gorgeous, and I realized that he was treating this like a sitcom, like something that was going to have a neat ending where the doors opened and the good guys won. But there weren't any good guys, not from where I was sitting. No good girls, either.

“Please,” I said. “I want to go back.” My face was about to rain down a total loser cocktail of snot and tears. I started climbing back over the hill, no longer caring if anyone inside saw us. I just wanted out of there. Jeremy followed, saying something about how he knew lawyers who would know what to do next. He was still excited. Even TV people got excited when you did something that seemed like it would be on TV. Only it wasn't TV, because then I could have turned it off.

“Are you okay?” he said when we got back to the car.

“I'm not. I just want to go home.”

“Your sister's place?”

“No. That's not my home.”

“Dex's?”

“No. That's not my home.”

Knowing there was nowhere to go just made everything worse. My dad had called last night, excited that he and Cindy were engaged, that the trip to Mexico had been, as he put it, a “success.” He was mad that I used his credit card, but not as mad as he should have been. He was too excited about his future. But I wasn't.

When my dad first split up with my mom, during his weepy and needy phase, I was his best friend. We'd watch Turner Classic Movies all of Sunday, and my dad would explain who all the old actors were, why the movies were important. After Cindy showed up, everything changed. If I got a meal alone with my dad, it was like some kind of international peace treaty had been signed. I was supposed to be so grateful; she was supposed to be so generous. And now I was going to be stuck with her, forever. She was probably knocked up already and they were just slow-playing it for fear that I'd run away for good. That's probably why my dad suddenly didn't have any money. The only thing left for me in Atlanta would be my mom and Lynette and their house of sick and weird.

It felt like my mom, my dad, my sister, they could all just take one relationship, trash it, and go on to the next thing, start building again, and expect everyone else to be excited. To throw a freaking party. But what about me? I was the leftover from my mom's second marriage, about to get promoted to being the leftover from my dad's first.

“Anna,” Jeremy said. “You're not okay. Should I just take you back to the set?”

I nodded my head because it was the only place left to go.

 

16

My last full week in LA, Roger shot the final scenes of his film in front of what used to be 10050 Cielo Drive, but was now 10066 Cielo. The drive to the site was long and winding, with spider-vein-like cracks in the asphalt of the road ahead. As we wound our way higher above the city, the sound of the traffic below became increasingly muffled. A “No Trespassing” sign hung close to the entrance, with a redbrick wall in front of the sign announcing the new address in large brass numbers. From the outside, it could have been some tacky Atlanta minimansion. The estate seemed proud of its new identity, like it was daring you to try to figure out what it used to be. Nothing remained from the original home except for the telephone pole, to the right of the gate, which Tex Watson had scaled in order to cut the phone lines. It loomed like a forgotten remnant of the murders, of the 1960s even, a stake in the ground marking a gruesome past, an arbitrary last witness.

Barely any of the research that I did made it into Roger's film. Since Charles Manson treated “knocking up ladies” the way other people did “taking out the recycling,” Roger decided that referencing it directly would be too much. Dex had warned me about this when he had told me about the movie business. He said that anytime you worked on a movie, whether you were writing it or researching it or shooting it, you could never forget that the end product was out of your hands. If you wrote a screenplay about Charles Manson, you shouldn't be shocked if it wound up being about Willy Wonka. It still felt like a lot of wasted energy. But Roger paid me $600 more, which, with the money from my
Chips
appearance, was enough to pay my debts and even go home slightly ahead at the end of the summer.