American Girls (25 page)

I felt like I was going to scream or cry; there weren't enough words to let her know how selfish she was, how much she took for granted about who we both were. Even in an argument Delia had to remind me that hers was the bigger story, that no matter what I did, my life would never be interesting enough to measure up to hers.

“Why doesn't anyone seem to understand that this is my life too? You act like everyone is some kind of bit player in your drama, but I'm living my life as well. This is my summer too. Cora is my mom too. Birch is my brother too. That song you just played? That's my song. I love that song, and you just ruined it forever. And Dex is my friend too, not just your boyfriend. And maybe it's not interesting enough for the rest of the world to care, but I care. I like Dex. He's taken me to work all summer. I have friends on that set.”

“Don't confuse actors with friends.”

“Don't confuse my life with yours.”

Roger was leaning against the bar, watching us. I wanted to mail the producer's wife a key to my sister's place and Roger's apartment and an informational copy of
Helter Skelter.

“Why do you have to be so mean?” I finally said. “Just drop me at the set, okay? You can do what you want. I don't care.”

“I can just drop you at the set. Like I've just let you live with me this whole summer. Like I've just shared my home, and my relationship, and jobs, and my life with you. And do I get so much as a thank-you? You want to get to the set? You call a cab like anyone else. Okay? And don't go looking in my purse for the fare.”

I stormed out of the stupid tiki lounge into the dry heat of the early evening. An angry red sun parked just above the horizon, and I clenched my fists into balls and tried not to scream, tried to keep myself calm, tried to remind myself that I had left places worse than this one with less money in my pocket. If I never saw my sister again, it would be too soon.

 

17

The party was mostly over by the time I made it across town. My cab fare cost the better part of what I'd won the last week at poker, and Dex had already left to meet someone, probably my sister. Nice that she hadn't called to make sure that I showed up. Nice that she wasn't worried about me at all. Jeremy was laughing with two of the crew members, but when he saw me he waved and broke away.

“I thought you'd skipped town,” he said. “Don't miss your last chance for a genuine Hollywood party.” I could tell that he was kidding, that on his party scale, this one was probably lame squared. I still wished the cab had moved faster.

Josh was talking to a girl that I hadn't seen before, her legs wishbone slender and as toned as a dancer's. The two of them were laughing and looking at the giant
Chips Ahoy!
cookie cake with the twins' pictures etched across the surface. Then he pointed across the room at the steering wheel of the boat, where Pinky was wedged atop its wooden hub. The girl laughed and pushed him playfully on the shoulder, and he pretended like she'd really hurt him.

“I guess the fun is mostly over,” I said. “I wanted to make it. My sister was filming. It's a long story.”

“You didn't miss all the fun. This is LA. The real fun hasn't even started.”

Going out at night wasn't on the list of things that I did on a regular basis. Maybe one of our parents would drop Doon and me at a movie, but not with boys.

“My sister will kill me.” I thought about it another minute. “If I don't kill her first.”

“Sisters are a challenge.” Joshua and the girl he was with disappeared, but not before he dragged Pinky through the icing atop the cake and licked the creamy sludge from its tip like he meant business. “Brothers too.”

“Have you ever gotten in a fight where the other person did everything wrong, and you still felt like you were the bad guy?”

We walked over to what was left of the giant cookie cake. Pinky had taken half of Jeremy's face, but Josh's sugary image remained untouched. Jeremy broke off his brother's nose and half his cheek and handed it to me.

“You're not weird about germs, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“What did you fight with your sister about?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” I said. And I sounded exactly like Delia. “She kissed another guy. Her ex-boyfriend. Please don't tell Dex. I saw her do it, and it was so stupid. He's the worst guy on earth. But then the whole thing became about what a dishonest, lousy person
I
am. Don't ask me how.”

“Is he the guy who broke her nose?”

“Basically.”

Even for me, the cookie was too sweet, or maybe Delia was right—I was poisoning my system and it was finally catching up to me.

“Whatever she said, I'd try to forget about it. Was any of it true?”

“I don't even know,” I said. “Maybe I am a thief. I read something I shouldn't have read. Is that stealing? I only read it because she never tells me anything.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I don't want to be an awful person. I feel like everyone thinks I'm this terrible human being, but when I do things, I'm not trying to be horrible. I'm really not.”

I didn't tell him the worst part, that in the cab, on the way to the set, I got an e-mail from Doon. Usually we texted or one of us called, so I was kind of surprised to see a regular message from her, titled: “TALK.” I almost didn't open it because sometimes e-mails like that are from Russian ladies who want husbands or African “kings” trying to give you part of their nonexistent inheritance. But I opened it. She told me that she was disappointed in me as a friend, that I only talked about myself, that since I had been in LA I didn't even ask how she was doing. Since I hadn't asked: her dog was sick and her brother was thinking of joining the army. She said that she wasn't going to be checking on Birch again because she wasn't my servant and that I should call my mom myself if I wanted to talk to him. She said that my mom was sick and missed me and that I was being selfish all around, and that she hoped when I came home I had plans to make some new friends.

It hurt a million times worse than the fight with my sister, a billion times, and I couldn't tell Jeremy about it because it was all true, even though that's not how I'd meant any of it. I'd thought that she'd have wanted to hear about TV sets and cool vintage shopping and Olivia Taylor, because to me it was a million times more interesting than anything happening in our sad neighborhood. Looking at the weird losers milling around the set, at the half-eaten cookie cake, the stupid fake penis now propped upright in the potato chip bowl, I wanted to scream.

“I don't think you're horrible. If it makes you feel better, you didn't miss much with the wrap party.”

“I still wish I'd been here,” I said. “Anything would have been better.”

“Anything?” He offered me another piece of cookie cake, but I waved him off. “How late does your sister let you stay out?”

“Well, since we're not speaking, I'm going to say as long as I want.”

“You up for something kind of crazy?”

“Is that a trick question?”

We left with the last of the crew members, who were heading to an after-party at one of the writer's homes. Delia had mentioned it, and she may well have been there with Dex already, spinning some version of what she thought I might tell him, waiting for me to show. I thought about letting her hang, seeing if she'd break down and tell Dex what she'd been up to, why we were fighting, but being around Jeremy made me feel like I should be the bigger person. Do the right thing.

So I texted her: “I'M ALIVE. LIKE YOU CARE.”

“Are we picking something up for the party?”

“Better,” Jeremy said. “Trust me.”

We crept along the freeway until we turned off into a relatively deserted area of what looked like warehouses. They could as easily have been movie studios or places where serial killers stored their bodies—nothing on the outside gave away their contents. Jeremy slowed down and I worried for a second that we were lost, that he was, in fact, too nice to be a television star and it was all a cover for slicing ladies into pieces, and this was going to be both my last night in Los Angeles and on the planet.

“There it is,” he said, pointing at a warehouse on the corner. The building was as nondescript as the others, except for the two gorilla-size men outside the entrance, guarding the doors. Jeremy parked the car and for the first time I could hear the music coming from inside, loud and heavy on the bass.

The gorillas looked like they didn't even see us, though one of them outstretched his hand and Jeremy high-fived him on the way in. The music was so loud I could feel it pulsing through the floor, and the hipster crowd was already thigh-to-thigh.

“What do you think?” Jeremy shouted.

What did I think?

The warehouse was cavernous, and along the sides were piles of garbage, spray-painted with glitter and sculpted into a makeshift moonscape. Boxes of Tide, Cap'n Crunch, old CD cases, crumpled paper bags, junk mail, you name it. I went closer and touched it, to see if was real junk or just junk made to look like junk. It didn't smell, but otherwise there was no way of knowing. Atop the garbage, around the room were what looked like taxidermied monkeys, holding American and British flags and wearing astronaut suits. The lights went out and the walls glowed with eerily graffitied letters:
FREEKMONKEE. LOST IN SPACE.

“Get out,” I said, and grabbed Jeremy's shirt like he was Doon, like he was my very best girlfriend in the entire world and just the person to not even kind of believe this was actually happening. “Get out, get out, get out, get out, get
out
!”

“I thought you'd like it,” he said, smiling.

“Is this a release party?”

“Pre-release. It's Max's birthday.”

Max Storer. The drummer. Which meant that it was August 10 and I had officially died and gone to heaven, and heaven was a shit pile covered in glitter. I guess it made as much sense as anything.

Next to the stage was a DJ booth, and manning it was a statuesque alien in an aluminum-blue wig, with silver moon boots and a skintight peacock-colored bodysuit that changed from green to blue and back again depending on the light. There was none of the dollar-store, club-kid glow-sticking—everything glittered and glowed, but differently as the light changed. Even the garbage was beautiful.

“Where are the bathrooms?”

Jeremy pointed across the room.

“Find me and we'll go backstage,” he said.

A tall blonde in a gold minidress walked past us, looked an extra second at Jeremy, and kept going. I headed for the bathroom. And even though I was in LA, at this super-exclusive event, when I crossed the floor it seemed like I could just as easily have been crossing our high school cafeteria, only with better decorations and prettier people. People were still giving you the once-over to see if they knew who you were, if you'd be worth getting to know. I saw the way that blonde sized Jeremy up with a “Maybe later” kind of side-glance. It wasn't that she didn't recognize him, it was more that he was the wrong kind of famous. He was cheeseball-TV famous in a room of rock-star cool.

In the bathroom, I gave myself a hard look in the mirror. I was wearing the shirtdress with pants that my sister had convinced me wasn't actually just wearing two outfits at once, so the first thing I did was take off my jeans, roll them into a ball, and cram them into my bag. I unbelted the black tunic, which now hung midthigh, and loosed my hair from its braid. I had forgotten my comb, so it was wild and just a little tangled. Someone had already glittered herself in the bathroom, so I made sure no one was looking and I swept all the leftover glitter into my hand, dusted it into my hair, and then shook it around to make sure that it was at least somewhat evenly distributed. I did the best job I could penciling in the area around my eyes, and then I took off my glasses. I would be able to see far away but not close up, so I'd just have to trust that I looked funky enough to blend and take my chances.

The inside was packed, and I had to squeeze my way through about ten feet of people before I found Jeremy. He was talking to some friends, other actors or musicians, and he introduced me as “a friend who was working on his show.” It wasn't as good as “girlfriend,” but it was definitely a step up from runaway thief. And before I could even worry about what to say next, the crowd began to roar and whistle, pumping their arms as the Freekmonkee scream sounded from the monkeys on top of the garbage heaps.

Karl Marx walked out onto the stage, half whispering the song I had heard in Jeremy's car. It felt like he had darkened the room and started a séance with three hundred of his closest friends, the sounds were that eerie and mesmerizing. The crowd settled down and then erupted when the opening chords of “Heart Not Beating” began. If I hadn't been worried about embarrassing myself in front of Jeremy, I would have held my phone up and recorded the whole thing, because even though I was definitely there and it was really happening, I was still having trouble believing it. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the music, to a place that felt so pure that it seemed impossible that anyone could exist outside that crazy space, let alone be mad, or worried, or sick, or sad. There was just this perfect sound, and hundreds of people becoming a part of it, and I was part of those hundreds. When I opened my eyes, there were lights flashing across the warehouse, and people were ripping parts of the trash piles off, throwing them at each other and onto the stage. Most of it was paper and all of it glittered and it was like nothing I'd ever seen.

Jeremy shouted something, but I could barely hear him. I leaned closer.

“C'mon,” Jeremy said. “This is the last number. I've got to check on Olivia.”

The moon-booted space DJ. Olivia Taylor. Of course. I'd heard the twins talk about their sister's new career, making appearances at clubs on the Vegas strip. My stomach dropped for a second, but I decided to play it cool. Fear of Olivia Taylor was not going to make me miss the chance to meet Freekmonkee. I was Jeremy's friend. I worked on a show. I had as much of a right to be there as she did. Kind of.