American Girls (3 page)

While I was surfing the Web, I started getting more and more nervous, like I was going to have a panic attack. So I Googled “panic attack” and decided that I didn't want to start having those at fifteen, but it didn't make my chest feel any less tight. I don't think I missed my mom and I know I didn't miss Lynette, but I wondered if Birch had noticed I was gone. At night, he liked to bring me this book about a duck and a cat and an owl who make soup out of pumpkins. I'd make these big slurping noises and he would die laughing, and when Birch laughs it's pretty disgusting in terms of cute. I wondered if he brought the book to Lynette, or what they told him had happened to me. He wouldn't have understood either way, but I kind of wished now that I had said good-bye, or left him a picture of me by a plane.

In the other room, I could hear my sister practicing her lines.
It pumps. It bleeds. But does it feel?
Her bed felt like the bed in a hotel, with white-white sheets and pillows everywhere, and the room smelled faintly of roses.
Do you love me? Or do you just think you love me? What is it beating inside of you?
From through the wall, those same lines over and over. Louder, then soft. Scared. Happy. Excited.

Alone.

 

2

When I woke up, my sister was already awake in the other room, doing sun salutations and drinking Chinese tea. There was nothing to eat in the refrigerator. Nothing in the cupboards, either. My sister had a blender that could pulverize the nastiest of vegetables, but only month-old apples and powders to put in it. If someone had wired her jaw shut, she probably wouldn't have had to change her diet. When I'd been away from my sister for months, I only remembered the good things about her—that she was funny and stylish and always had great stories about famous people. When reality sunk in, I remembered that she ate salads without dressing when she was
starving
and seemed to assume that I would just want to do the same. I found two peanuts in the crumpled bag from the airplane at the bottom of my purse. Delia had sworn she would take us grocery shopping, but I knew that meant “in this lifetime,” not “this morning.”

“Can we go get some breakfast?”

My stomach whimpered like a sad dog.

“Why? Are you treating?” My sister's ass was in the air, and it was pretty clear from looking at it that breakfast was not on her daily list of concerns. I should have Googled “flat-out evil” and crossed it with her butt to predict how she'd respond.

“This isn't a vacation,” she said. “And I'm not made of money.”

“I never said you were.”

Delia had sunk back into child's pose. She let out a long, measured breath and shifted back into downward-facing dog.

“There should be an apple in the bottom drawer. You can have that.”

“An apple isn't breakfast. Not even for horses.”

“Well, today it's going to have to be. It's zombie day off, so we're meeting Roger at eleven thirty, and Dex comes back Friday, so we'll hit the market at some point, but there's not much I can do about breakfast this morning. Dex may have found a job for you, so make sure to thank him.”

My sister moved from side plank position to side plank position, then effortlessly to upward-facing dog, arching her neck and talking at the ceiling. For someone who did a lot of yoga and had a peace sign tramp stamp on her lower back, she sure could be a bitch.

“There are three hours between now and eleven thirty. And please tell me Roger isn't Roger-Roger.”

“Roger is Roger-Roger, and don't mention anything about meeting him to Dex. It's all professional between us now, but Dex won't understand that, and between you and him, I get tired of explaining everything.”

Yeah, because it's so complicated to explain Roger.

“Who is Dex, anyhow?”

My sister broke her pose, wiped her brow, and looked at me like I'd just ruined her workout. “Seriously, Anna, do you listen to anything? I've been talking about Dex for months. He's my boyfriend, you know, the one who's been filming in Hungary the last two weeks? The one who calls every night at ten forty-five?”

She was lying through her teeth, but if I wanted to eat again, I'd let it slide.

“How am I supposed to know who you're talking to? I thought your boyfriend was that bald European producer with the car. Do we really have to see Roger?”

“I'm just borrowing the car while mine gets fixed, and Roger is doing very well these days, I'll have you know. Did you watch those Burger Barn commercials? ‘The Revolution Starts Now'? That's Roger. And now he's making a film about murders in Los Angeles, and so far, it's beautiful.”

By “beautiful” she meant really, really, really boring.

“Because murder is so uplifting.”

“It's a part of life,” she said, like I was a total idiot from some other universe. “I'm playing a woman who is drawn to these places and doesn't know why. Like
Vertigo,
but there's a kind of spiritual kinship to the women who come to Los Angeles and never make it out. And it's all visual, no speaking.”

I gave up and started eating the apple. “Dead women who don't speak. Sounds right up Roger's alley.”

Roger was like the Edgar Allan Poe of stupid people. He'd been making movies about women who were dead or dying, who didn't have much to say, for as long as his stringy hair had been ponytailed into a cliché. My sister dated him for five years, and tortured us with as many Thanksgivings and Christmases where he reminded me how sad consumerism was and how unethical it was to eat meat, as if I asked, while I was just trying to have a second serving of dressing in peace. And he wasn't even American, he was Polish, which should have made him more interesting but actually just made him more annoying. When Delia finally dumped him, my dad and I did an actual dance of joy around the living room.

I must have been daydreaming, because next thing I knew Delia was in front of me asking, “Ready?”

She had twisted her hair into a French braid that wound around her head, glossed her lips, and wrapped a chic white scarf around her neck. It was disgusting how little it took for her to look beautiful.

“Sure,” I said. “Just let me get my bag.”

“We'll get some muffins,” she said. “There's a holistic bakery on the way. Sugar and gluten free, but you'd never know it. I crave their blueberry flax cookies. They're like crack.”

“Ass-crack,” I said, but softly, because I was hungry.

Outside, the air was cold and the fog or smog or whatever it was hadn't lifted. In Atlanta, I always imagined LA as warm all the time, but this morning was cool and I'd only brought the thin jacket that I'd worn to travel. I wrapped my hands under the ends of the sleeves and hugged my fists close to my body. Delia was staring at her door. Someone had come in the night and taped a white envelope with her name handwritten across the front. No one had knocked, I was sure of that, and the handwriting was spidery, Delia's name in all capital letters.

She turned her back away from me while she opened it, and when she turned back toward me her face had lost some of its color. If she hadn't just gotten Botoxed, I would have said she looked worried. Maybe even scared. She folded the piece of paper and put it into her purse.

“Who's it from?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Not for you, okay?”

When my sister was finished with a subject, she had a way of letting you know. The letter had just been declared off-limits, but I was going to pretend not to care and see if I could fish it out later. That's what we did with information in our family—we squirreled it away and then dared someone else to lay claim. When my mom became a lesbian, I called Delia and she said, “That's the news?” like my mom had been batting for both teams her whole life. It made me mad, because I could tell she wanted me to be the last to know, or at least later than her. The note was probably just a bill for pizza, but as long as I couldn't see it, it was interesting.

We hit the bakery drive-through and though Delia didn't ask what I wanted, she did pay. I tried to eat around the flax-seeds, which only gave me less food and a lapful of crumbs.

“So,” she said. “You haven't seen Roger lately. Be prepared for his hair.”

I was listening with one ear, and searching for my phone to see if Doon had texted me back. Since it was three hours later in Georgia, I figured she'd have something interesting to report. She had promised to low-level-stalk my mom and Lynette and remind Birch that he had a sister. For all I knew my mother was cutting my face out of pictures and reconstructing her perfect family, without me, from the ground up. I told Doon I would text her pictures every day to show him.

“Are you kidding me?” I said.

“What?” Delia said. “Are you okay?”

I was not okay, not even kind of.

“My phone. My phone is dead.”

“You probably forgot to charge it.” She was doing some kind of weird facial exercise while she drove, pursing her lips and then opening her mouth as far as it would go, like she was blowing imaginary bubbles.

“It was fully charged this morning. I checked.”

“Just plug it in here.”

She passed me the car charger and I hooked my phone in. Just the black-screen flatline of a phone with no pulse. Lynette. My mom.

“
Oooohmigod,
” I said. “Now what am I supposed to do?”

“Well,” my sister said, and I swear she was half smiling, “phones don't pay for themselves.”

“What if some maniac shoves me in his trunk? How am I supposed to call and let people know where I am? What if I'm drunk and at a party and need a ride? What if someone tries to date-rape me?”

“What if you can't text your little friend twenty-four-seven?” Now she was doing her breathing exercises, blowing air out of her mouth and making a noise that sounded like a dying cicada. I pretended to cover my ears.

“I can't
live
without my phone.”

“Pretend you're a pioneer.”

“It's not funny.”

She popped a breath mint. “I didn't say it was funny. You can use my computer when we get home. It's not like you've been dropped on some deserted island to fend for yourself. Just chill.”

We drove past billboards advertising new television shows and energy drinks that would have sounded made-up if they hadn't been real: Kwench,
Emergency
,
Volt
, Lifeline. An actress I didn't recognize loomed thirty feet tall in a tight-fitting tank top. A surgical mask dangled off the index finger of her right hand, and a pair of hot-pink lace underwear was half tucked behind her back with the other hand. Her eyes were wide and green, and she had that actressy look like someone had just whispered in her ear, “Pretend you have a secret,” but you knew there wasn't any secret, not really, except maybe that the show was going to be even stupider than the billboard. The actress was naked from the waist down, and letters the same hot pink of her panties covered her lady parts with the words “GET SHOCKED!!!!!
VOLT
. SUNDAYS AT 9.”

“I read for that role,” Delia said, gesturing behind her. “But they wanted a blonde.”

I didn't feel like hearing about the millionth role my sister had almost gotten. Not until we'd figured out the phone situation.

“I need my phone,” I said.

I
really
couldn't live without my phone if I was going to have to be front row for the Delia-and-Roger show all morning. That was a punishment too cruel, even for Lynette. If she had ever met Roger, she would see why electronics were a necessity. Maybe I could just stare at the blank screen and ignore him while I slowly died of boredom.

We pulled in front of a hotel that looked like it should have been condemned a decade ago, and my sister parked her car next to a homeless man who appeared to have an open sore on his left arm. He sat next to a sleeping woman whose bare feet were tar-black on the bottom, and he covered her gently with what looked like a mermaid beach towel as we passed.

“Keep moving,” my sister said, not even looking in their direction.

“That guy,” I said. “He needs to go to the hospital.”

My sister shook her head and checked her phone. “This is downtown, Anna. Watch the news around here sometime. This is where the hospitals dump the people who can't pay their bills. The hospitals won't have him.”

Inside the building the lobby was more posh than the exterior would have suggested, but I still felt like we should be careful not to put our purses down, because any surface could have hosted a pop-up party for bedbugs. Doon got bedbugs at camp last summer, and her mother made her strip naked before she could come into the house; then her mom took all of her clothes and boiled them at the Laundromat before she would let her take them back into the house. Bedbugs can live for a year without eating. They're the zombies of the bug world—legion, tireless, and impossible to destroy.

“Okay,” Delia said. “We're supposed to take the elevator to the top floor, then the stairs. Roger will meet us up there. Did you know that Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker,' used to live here? It's like that hotel in
The Shining
, I think there was another serial killer here for a while as well, but I can't remember who. Can you imagine booking a room here on purpose?”

“Great,” I said. I hated that I was more bothered by the homeless couple than by any long-gone psycho, that the thought of walking by them again made me decide against asking to go to the coffee shop on the corner. And it's not like there weren't homeless people in Atlanta; they just didn't seem to be openly wounded. Or maybe I wasn't looking as closely.

When the elevator stopped, we climbed a final flight of concrete stairs and stepped into the open air. The top of the building was dirty with bird crap and discarded cans. Three water towers sat toward the edge of the space, near a thin wall that looked like you could trip over it into the street, and about twenty feet away from us, dancing over his computer as he typed and held a hand up in our direction with a “No, no, don't bother the genius” wave, was Roger. He had on tight black jeans, a black leather jacket, and had shaved his head into a cancer-victim crew cut.