American Girls (4 page)

My sister rolled her eyes and pulled out her phone. At least she had an escape.

After a minute Delia gestured at the middle water tower.

“Anna,” she whispered, “see that tower? A Canadian tourist was staying here and they found her body in it, but not until it was badly decomposed. The residents of the hotel had been using the water for weeks.”

The wind picked up as she was talking, and I felt a chill.

“Are you serious? You mean that actual water tower?”

“Completely.”

The water towers looked like oversize cans that should have been recycled long ago. They creaked to life every time someone flushed a toilet or ran a shower. I wanted to be home as much as I'd ever wanted anything in my life.

“
Gwiazdeczko,
” Roger said, and kissed my sister on the mouth. “
Misiu
.”

He was reaching for my cheek, but I put out my hand instead. My sister might have been confused about her relationships, but I was not even remotely confused about mine.

“Oh,” he said. “You are so much bigger and formal now.”

He was looking me up and down like I was trying out for some part in his idiot film. Hollywood people could be gross even when they weren't trying. Pimps and butchers.

“She looks more like you every day, you know.”

“Rest assured she has a mind of her own,” Delia said. “I figured it would be okay if she came today. She knows the drill.”

“You are not in school?” Roger asked, like he cared.

“No,” I said. “Keen eye for detail.”

“Always the mouth,” he said, and gave me a shut-the-eff-up smile.

“So I had a breakthrough,” he said, and he took my sister's face between his hands, like he was going to make out with her or snap her neck in one swift move. “I
know
. I know who you are.”

“That's reassuring,” I said. “You did live together for five years.”

My sister glared and Roger ignored me. Just like old times.

“Your character. Do you know how many children Charles Manson had?” he asked, like it was the riddle of the Sphinx. “How many grandchildren? He probably wasn't allowed conjugal visits, but no one knows what is really possible in prison. Could he have found a way around that? There were many children from his family who were placed in foster homes, who never knew who they were, let alone who their father was. And the sex was so promiscuous then, no? I thought she was going to be like Catherine Deneuve in
Repulsion,
right? So maybe it's in my unconscious, this woman who is victim and sadist. Manson. Polanski. I feel it out there.”

I had to hand it to Roger, he was good at acting like he had an audience even when the two of us were pretty clearly underwhelmed.

“I'm a Manson girl?” Delia gave Roger her “Would you care to rephrase that while I melt your face with my mind?” look. I almost felt sorry for him. “Isn't that a little obvious?”

“No,” he said, prickling. “Not a Manson girl, and not obvious. You are a child of California. All of those girls were children of America, reckless children. Heartless children. Cruel children who hated their parents. They confused love and hate, death and life. It may not be Manson, it may be one of the others at the compound, but it is part of that hot desert, that last summer of the 1960s. I need to think.”

That was an understatement. I was starting to get cold, and I didn't like the sound of his movie. He was just the kind to pitch someone off a roof as part of his method, to scare up publicity for his latest failure.

My sister sucked in a long breath and exhaled. “Well, you need to shoot, because the light's changing and I don't think they're going to want us up here all week. Dex gets home Friday, and the rest of this week is zombies. Once he's back I can't just shoot anytime you like. You need to pick a schedule and stick with it.”

“Dex,” Roger said, and left it at that.

My sister turned her phone on and handed it to me.

“Just keep the sound off,” she said, and gestured at a place for me to sit near where the elevator had opened.

I pretended to be texting, because I didn't want to give either of them the pleasure of finding what they were doing interesting, but it was hard not to watch my sister. I always learned more about my sister by watching her than by listening to her. If you ask Delia about her father, Mom's first husband who left and never looked back, she'll give her standard “That sonofabitch, I'm glad he's gone” answer. But my mom told me that after he left, Delia cried whenever the doorbell rang. It didn't make sense, according to my mother, because it's not like he didn't have a key.
She would open her mouth and her eyes would get so open, and then they
'
d just shut. It was like a light went off, and she wouldn
'
t talk about it.
That's what my mom had told me. I didn't get to see that much with Delia, any kind of openness, but she could bring it out when the cameras were rolling. I imagined that might have been what she looked like as she started wandering around the roof of that building, like she was waiting for a doorbell to ring, for someone missing to come home.

I'd been using Delia's bag as a pillow, waiting for her to let down her guard so that I could search the contents. If she saw me open it, she'd ship me back to Atlanta for sure. Roger had her posed at the edge of the building, sitting so close to the edge that it made my stomach drop just to look at her. They seemed to be disagreeing about which direction she should turn her face, so without moving any other part of my body, I slipped my hand into the side pocket of her bag and pulled out the paper that had been posted to her door. Inside there was one word, handwritten.

Whore.

The handwriting was ugly and aggressive, like it had been scratched with a knife, and I wished that I hadn't opened Delia's bag because that word was impossible to unsee, impossible now not to wonder who despised my sister enough to drive to her house in the middle of the night and leave personalized hate mail. Doon and I had joked about Delia being a slut, but the letter was hardly funny. And I had been sleeping in the living room while someone was just outside, doing what? Peeking in the windows? Waiting behind the bushes to see when Delia read it?

For a second, I thought that I was hallucinating hot-stalker-breath just behind me, but it was just Roger.

“I have something for you,” he said. “I did not mean to scare you.”

“It's okay.” I folded the paper quickly and put it in my own pocket, nervous now that Delia would claim her bag before I could replace the letter. “So, genius,” he said, “I hear you have time on your hands and need money.”

Wow. Euro-subtlety there.

“Thanks, Delia,” I said. “Maybe I should get a business card.”

My sister took her phone back and wandered away from us. I pretended to be helpful, grabbing her bag for her, and slipped the paper back in when Roger turned to look in the direction she'd gone.

“I was joking,” he said, half looking at me, half ignoring me. “You know, but really … you are not so different from these Manson girls. You steal money, take a plane, head out for California.”

He handed me a worn copy of
Helter Skelter
, and then looked at me like he was waiting for a thank-you. Delia had wandered over to the water towers and was covering her phone with her hand while she texted—like anyone was looking.

“So what's your point?”

“I think you know my point.”

My mouth felt dry, and as I looked at the ice-blue rings of his irises, it was like Roger was trying to work some mind-voodoo on me, to make me as blindly obedient to his so-called vision as my sister was. I might have borrowed a credit card number, but that did not make me a Manson girl. Not even kind of.

“You forgot the murdering-pregnant-women part,” I said.

Roger waved me off, slipping further into his genius-at-work mode. Or just being his usual rude self. A rat bolted past us from beneath one of the water towers, and before I could react, Roger kicked it out of the way like he'd been kicking rats his whole life.

“I will pay you. You read about these girls for me. I am interested in how you see them, how they feel to you. Maybe you will let me know what was in their hearts. Or you make another one up, create a history.”

“I don't want to read about murders,” I said, trying to keep track of where the rat had disappeared into the shadows. A total lie. What I meant was:
I don
'
t want to read about murders and then have to talk to you about them
. “And I don't see how I'm supposed to figure out what's in their hearts. That's just weird.”

“Suit yourself. But I will pay you ten dollars an hour for research. You keep the billing.”

“You can buy your own breakfast,” Delia said, suddenly ten feet closer and stupidly cheerful. “Besides, last I checked, you love things that are graphic and disgusting. You seemed excited enough to hang out on the zombie set.”

“That's because zombies are absurd. I'll bet no one on the zombie set accuses me of being a zombie.”

For the second time since I'd left for California, I thought about Leslie Van Houten and how she'd started out a nice person, how something in the desert air outside Los Angeles had changed her.

“Oh for God's sake, Anna. Roger isn't saying you're some kind of cultish drone; you can stop being so melodramatic. And if you can't stand to hear what you did simply put, maybe you should think about behaving differently.”

I hate, hate, hated when my sister tried to tell me what to do, like she was so perfect. I should have told Delia what she looked like from the cheap seats, but then she was already getting letters on her door with the same information, so what was the point?

Roger just smirked.

“
Bisous,
” my sister said, kissing Roger on both cheeks.

“Bisous.”
He all but tongued her cheek.

They were gross. Whoever this Dex guy was, I already felt sorry for him. We took the stairs and then the elevator back to the lobby in silence.

 

3

The next morning, my sister let me use her phone to call Doon. Delia pretended to water her one sad plant for about fifteen minutes so that she could listen in, but being monitored was better than not getting to talk at all. I needed my cell phone situation remedied in the very,
very
near future.

“I have a hit out on you,” Doon said. “You picked the worst week of my life to run away. I think my parents are shopping for bars for my windows. My mom just threatened to ground me until you get back from California. You
are
coming back, right?”

Doon was eating cereal. I could tell because she kept slurping between sentences, and whenever she and her parents were fighting she'd eat ten bowls of Corn Flakes at a time.

“I guess,” I said. “It's that or move in with my lunatic sister forever.”

I was a little nervous that Doon wasn't telling me something, that she'd been dead serious when she joked that I was a “traitor” the other night. A few weeks ago, I'd taken the fall for a bunch of texts that the two of us had sent together, texts that had been Doon's idea to begin with. Sending anonymous messages was the kind of thing that didn't seem so terrible at the time, but made my mom grow another head when she read what we'd written. On the scale of terrible things, if a one was sticking your tongue out at someone and a ten was flying a plane into a building, I think that what we wrote rated a 1.5. Maybe a two. But to my mom it was like an eleven. She waved a stack of printed-out messages in her hand and practically wailed at me, “How could you have such cruelty in you?” Like it was even my fault! If I'd really broken it down for her, all I'd done was let Doon use my phone to send maybe fifty words and a couple of pictures to one of the most popular girls in my school, Paige Parker, because Doon swore she knew a code where they couldn't trace your phone. Which, as it turned out, she didn't. If Doon hadn't spent half her life with her phone privileges revoked, it wouldn't have even been an issue.

“What is this?” my mom asked, pointing to the picture on top of the second page.

“A dog eating its poop?” I said. Underneath was written “TASTES LIKE PAIGE, YUMMMMM,” and even though it was stupid and I was supposed to act like I felt terrible about it, the gleeful look on the dog's face cracked me up every time.

“You think this is
funny
? I don't even know you, Anna.”

Maybe it would have been mean if Paige Parker were some kind of social leper, but she wasn't. Paige Parker could have had any guy she looked cross-eyed at, and she certainly got more than her share of invitations to slumber parties and dances. Yet somehow from my mom's point of view, Paige had become this tragic victim of her daughter the bully. I tried to tell her that my bullying Paige Parker would be kind of like a minnow eating a whale, but she wasn't having any of it. I guess that Paige's mom had some relative in law enforcement trace the texts back to my phone, and she called my mom in tears. Actual tears. I made the mistake of rolling my eyes when my mom told me that part.

“You don't seem to understand that she could get the police involved. I had to beg on your behalf. Do you know how that made me feel?”

I didn't answer. Who knew how anything made her feel? The whole thing was so much less of an issue than she was making it.

I had heard my mom talking to Lynette later about whether or not I was “you know, a sociopath,” which I definitely wasn't. The one thing I couldn't tell them was that the whole stupid thing had been Doon's idea, not mine. Besides, Paige Parker was beautiful and popular and I was positive she didn't care what I thought about her, if she even knew who I was. Maybe her mom had been crying about the texts, but my guess was that Paige hadn't even read them. I tried to explain that much to my mom and asked her why she always rooted against me, but she went in her bedroom and closed the door while I was still talking. Like rude didn't count when it came from her.