American Girls (27 page)

When he was talking I could tell that he wasn't lying, and it made me wish that I were a better person, that I knew how to take a compliment.

He pulled up beneath a white skyscraper of a structure, and it took me a minute to register that it was the Hollywood sign. He parked the car and rolled his window down, so I rolled mine down as well. The air was surprisingly warm and smelled faintly floral.

“That's the observatory where
Rebel Without a Cause
was shot,” he said. “I love James Dean.”

“Is that why you drive the way you do? Method?”

Jeremy had driven us to a clearing at the top of a hill. I got the sense that there might have been other people not too far away, also parked to see the view. He turned the key in the ignition to let the music play, loudly at first, and then he turned it lower.

“I almost killed someone,” he said. “That's what my sister was talking about. That's why I didn't go to Japan. I was out one night with Josh and we'd been partying way too hard. Righteous, ugly partying, the kind the photographers love, and I think they figured we were both in the same car, because the paparazzi followed Josh. I woke up in the back of the club and it was practically morning and my head was black, just black. So I got in my friend's car, his keys were in my lap and we sometimes did that, to throw off whoever might be stalking my ride. And I didn't have my license yet but that didn't matter to me at the moment, I was so sure I could handle the car. I was going down Vine, and this girl was crossing the street, and I came so close to hitting her, all I could see was this look on her face, how surprised she was. I could have been the last thing she ever saw. I did hit her, I guess, but it wasn't enough to go to the hospital or anything. So I called my publicist and they gave her some money, and by some great miracle, no one found out. My sister knows because she was there when I called my mom. She'll probably let it out someday, but I'm okay with that.”

His hands clenched the steering wheel as he talked, and he stared out the front window at the great expanse of Los Angeles, lit from below by the hustle and bustle of the night.

“That's terrible. I'm so sorry.”

“So I went into recovery,” he said. “It's not an excuse for not being there for her, but it's the truth. I know my sister thinks it's a joke, but it isn't. There's a guy in one of my meetings. A really big actor from the nineties, and he was my sponsor for a while. He told me that everyone spends their lives wanting to be like us, and thinking this is it. The big dream. But the real trick is just learning to be regular.”

I watched a woman leave her house about a hundred yards straight down the hill. She went into her backyard and lit a series of tiki torches, and they were beautiful, like fireflies.

“There's probably something to that,” I said. If I hadn't known Jeremy better, maybe if I hadn't been with him tonight, I might have thought it was a jerk-off thing to say, like when really beautiful people say that beauty is only skin-deep. But I could see that it was almost as hard for him to blend in as it was for him to stand out. And even for those with the dream in their grasp, it was always in danger of slipping away.

“What are you thinking about?” He lifted the leather armrest that separated us.

“Nothing,” I said.

I said nothing, because I knew that saying “I was thinking about Charles Manson” would be the absolute wrong thing to say when Jeremy Taylor was focusing his impossibly perfect face on yours. Even I had that much sense. But I
was
thinking about Charles Manson, about how, on top of everything, he couldn't stand the thought of being regular. The address where Sharon Tate was staying, 10050 Cielo, had just been vacated by a record producer who'd turned down Manson's songs. He'd said they'd never work, never break into the mainstream. Manson may have been driving that black, hippie LSD trip of a school bus around like it was a movable Technicolor orgy, but the stops he made were all about him. He wanted to be bigger than the Beatles. He believed he would be. It was all so much less interesting and more petty than the pseudo-psychic, Satanic, Beatles-referencing mania. There was no mystique to being told “You are not good enough,” losing your mind, and taking your anger out on the messenger and the blessed. If he had been born thirty years later, TLC would have given him a reality show, and the world might have been a safer place.

“You
are
thinking about something,” Jeremy said.

“I am,” I said. “About a paper that I need to write.”

Jeremy laughed, and when he touched me his palms were damp on my arm. It seemed outside the realm of the real and possible, but he was nervous. Before I could say something to get him off the hook, Jeremy took my face in both of his hands and gave me a kiss so gentle, and then so firm, that it made me forget that he kissed women for a living. He pulled back and smiled, pushed my hair off my face, and kissed me again.

“Stop thinking about your paper. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I wanted him to kiss me again, and he did.

“Is this because I'm regular?”

“It's because you're beautiful.”

“I thought you said I was interesting.”

“Interesting
is
beautiful, put that in your paper.”

I didn't care that it sounded like a line out of a movie. I didn't care that no one would believe me, or that it would ruin it even to tell. I sat there under the Hollywood sign and made out with Jeremy Taylor like we were the happy ending of a really foul-mouthed romantic comedy. If a roving band of hippies had come out of the mountains and tried to cut us down, I am pretty sure I wouldn't have cared. And the only thing I can say is that it was nothing like I'd imagined. It was so much better.

“You go home tomorrow,” he finally said. “Just when we're getting to know each other.”

“I know.”

He took his phone out and messaged me a number that he said never changed, in case I needed to get ahold of him and his cell didn't work anymore.

“Look me up next time you visit your sister. This is going to be my last season on
Chips Ahoy!
I haven't told Josh, but I can't do it anymore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I think I'm going to apply to colleges next year, see if I'm good at anything.” Then he smiled again and looked me dead in the eyes. “Or maybe I'll just do more of this?” Then he leaned his body into mine and kissed me again.

If those were his future plans, they were fine by me.

 

19

Jeremy dropped me back at my sister's house the next morning. I'd only stayed up all night once, when I was in summer camp, to watch the sun rise, but never with a boy and definitely not with Jeremy Taylor. He offered to drive me to the airport, but I needed to pack, to have a minute to sit and let the evening sink in, to make it real for myself before time or having to tell it to another person screwed up the moment, pushed it a little further away.

“If you change your mind about the ride,” he said, “just call.”

“I will,” I said, waving as I stood outside my sister's apartment.

As he drove off, I tried to take a mental snapshot of the moment, the orange of the flowers blooming by my sister's doorway, the electric hum underneath my skin. Dawn shaded the sky a dusty pink, the same color the sky had been when the cab dropped me off by the set the night before.

Day and night had no real meaning in Los Angeles. Where last night ended and today began was anyone's guess. Morning was pinker and smelled fresher, but it didn't really signal the start of anything. I imagined that could be as disorienting as it was wonderful, that in LA life always just seemed there for the taking, even as it was passing you by. Every week you looked up and there was another blonde with a gun on the billboard—another pair of green eyes staring into space, begging to be noticed, then disappearing as mysteriously as they had appeared. Another night meant another club opening. Another grisly murder. Another love story.

And then I went to unlock my sister's door and realized that it was already ajar. My stomach dropped. Delia was careless, but not careless enough to leave a door open.

“Delia,” I said, trying not to sound scared. Then louder, “Delia?”

No answer.

I pushed the door open and stepped back. The inside of my sister's apartment was trashed. Black-and-white photographs of what looked like naked bodies were on the floor. I still hadn't seen my sister.

“Delia!”

Something moved.

“I'm calling the police,” I yelled, and tried to steady my hands to find my phone.

“Don't,” a voice whispered. My sister's voice.

“Delia! Are you okay? What happened?”

My sister was in the middle of her couch, cocooned in blankets and staring at the wall. She shifted, rubbed her eyes, and continued to look intently at absolutely nothing.

“You scared me to death,” I said. “You're kind of scaring me now.”

She held an oversize cup of coffee between her knees, and she looked tired.

“What happened?” I asked. “That lady. Did she come back?”

“You could say that,” Delia said.

“Where's Roger? Or Dex. Should I call Dex?”

“We broke up,” Delia said.

“Oh, crap. Did you tell him about Roger?”

My sister laughed, that laugh that crazy people do in the movies before they sink their teeth into the flesh of the living.

“Nope, not Roger.”

“Then why?” I asked.

“Look around,” my sister said. “Take a wild and crazy guess.”

By my feet was half of an eight-by-ten photograph that had been ripped in half. The part that I picked up showed the torso and bare thigh of a woman, wrapped around a man's very unsexy, pale, and hairy torso. The thigh had a small cursive
D
tattooed in the center. My sister's thigh. And the torso? Not Dex's.

“What happened?” I asked.

My sister closed her eyes like the question itself gave her a headache. “Dex and I went to the wrap party. Then we went out. Then we came home and that crazy bitch had plastered my whole door with pictures.”

I felt scared and embarrassed for my sister.

She kept her eyes closed while she talked. “I would say that it took about two minutes for Dex to go from really worried to really,
really
pissed. We had an extra-super-shitty fight. Things were said, pictures were ripped, glasses were thrown.” She gestured around her apartment as she talked, like she was directing the scene. “And now he's gone.”

“You need to call the cops,” I said. “She's dangerous.”

“I'm going to move,” Delia said. “I'll change my number. I called her asshole husband, again, and he's changed his number, so it's in the air. She's already wrecked my life, the ten percent that Roger didn't get. That's what she wanted.”

I shook my head back and forth the whole time she talked. “That's not enough, Delia. What if she's violent?”

Delia handed me two intact pictures that had been facedown beside her.

“I can't call the police.”

The first picture was of Jeremy walking around a kitchen without his shirt. I didn't recognize the kitchen, but I knew what he'd been wearing that day. The entire place must have been rigged with security cameras. And the second photo was of a girl with her eyes closed hunched down in grass on a hill. It might have been tough to prove in court, but Delia and I both knew that it was me.

“Oh
no,
” I said.

“I'm not even going to ask,” Delia said. “Because it doesn't matter at this point.”

“Is she going to have us arrested?” I was feeling sicker by the minute. “Does this mean I'll never get into college?”

Delia laughed. “She's not interested in you. Truly. And don't beat yourself up too much, because calling the police probably wouldn't matter anyhow. I thought about it, and then I heard myself saying that someone was taping pictures of me and her husband on my front door. You think the police care about things like this? I had a guy follow me to my door once, like, the kind of thing where I ran inside and closed the door and called the police, and the cop who came over accused me of being delusional. You think anyone in this town gives an actual, honest-to-God shit about me? Guess again.”

Dex did,
I wanted to say.
That 10 percent of your life, you ruined yourself.

But what was the point? It was nothing she didn't already know. And I cared. I actually did.

“We were trying to help,” I said. “Not that it matters.”

There were other pieces of Delia across the rug. I didn't know if she'd torn them into shreds, or if Dex had. Her perfectly manicured hand looked like something peeking out of the corner of a crime scene photo. It made me think of Olivia's hand, wrapped almost possessively around Karl Marx's forearm, before he unwrapped her and handed her off to his bandmate.

It seemed like everything in LA that was whole could be broken down and sold off in pieces. And maybe one day Olivia would wake up and regret her time with the band, the way my sister regretted her time with the producer. The way the Manson girls eventually regretted their time with Manson. Maybe the situations weren't the same, not even close, but from where I was sitting they didn't seem so terribly different.

“I did almost call the police, to see if they could find you,” Delia said.

“And said what, that you abandoned me outside a bar in LA?”

The minute I said it, I wished that I could take it back.

My sister shook her head. “I'm sorry. I don't want to fight. I don't want the summer to end badly because of last night. I shouldn't have kissed Roger. I wasn't thinking, and it was stupid. And God knows you shouldn't have to see pictures of your sister's sordid and ancient love life. Not that I'll ever convince Dex of that now.”