American Girls (6 page)

“It's a complicated thing,” Lynette finally said, “the way mothers love their daughters. You don't understand it now, and I know it's not helpful when an adult says something like that, but one day you'll see. The way you feel about Birch is the way your mother feels about you, only she's had thirteen more years to know you and hope for you and love you.”

Sometimes when Birch was doing something accidentally hilarious like trying to eat a shoestring, I'd ask my mom what I was like when I was his age. She told me that she wrote everything down in my baby book, but I wanted to hear what she remembered.
Well,
she said,
You were terribly smart. We could tell that from day one. And we could always see what you were thinking. Your eyes would get wider and brighter and you
'
d lunge for something, or start dancing like a lunatic, and your father and I would laugh and laugh and laugh.

I could sort of see myself being like that, but the thing I couldn't picture was my mom and dad laughing like she said they did. It was like someone telling you about a trip they had taken, somewhere far away and fabulous, only when you went to visit it yourself the weather was lousy and all the good places were closed. I thought about the movie my sister was working on, and how it sometimes felt like my life was the transplanted part of everyone else's life. Something that could be cut out, or grafted on, but didn't really serve a purpose on its own.

“It's not the five hundred dollars, is it?” I finally said.

Lynette was silent for a long time. I listened to her take a deep breath.

“If you need to come home,” she said, “just let us know.”

Five minutes ago I'd wanted nothing more than to stay in LA all summer, but the longer I talked to Lynette, the less it felt like paradise. What I wanted, maybe, was for home to be real, for it to be as easy as taking a plane ride home to make anything better. But it wasn't, and I think we both knew it.

“Okay,” I said. “Can I send Birch pictures?”

“Of course. Send him anything you want.”

After I got off the phone, it was still working but I didn't feel like calling anyone. I didn't feel like doing much of anything except for staring out my sister's big open window and wishing there were someplace out there for me to land.

 

4

A garbage truck outside the bedroom window woke me up at six forty-five. My sister was already in the shower, and it was good to know there were signs of life on the roads other than stalkers leaving late-night messages. All the houses on my sister's street had high fences and thick trees, protecting private pools and tennis courts. Cars cruised the streets but half the homes seemed like the lights were on timers, the garages closed for the season. It was beautiful, but it wasn't neighborly.

I checked my e-mail and found the note from my history teacher that Lynette had told me was coming. Mr. Haygood was about a million years old, and he taught the one elective that I was allowed to choose—History and Culture, an excuse to read books, watch movies, and talk about America. He was bald and always wore polo shirts where you could see his outie of a belly button poking through, but he made history a thousand times less boring than in a regular class. When we studied the 1920s, he pretended that cell phones were illegal and made half the class narcs, and then he had us read
The Great Gatsby.
We spent most of the year talking about things like the Red Scare and the American dream, and whether or not America's really that great after all. Doon's dad said all the teachers at my school are communists. Delia, who had Mr. Haygood when she was in school, said he was an “acid casualty.”

At first I thought that there was nothing attached to the e-mail he had sent, a mistake or an academic get-out-of-jail-free card. But then I saw there were two sentences:
Talk to me about something in the last fifty years that really changed America.
Duh, that was too easy. Hello, 9/11. Then after that he'd written,
And while you
'
re at it, what
'
s so great about Los Angeles?
This is why I didn't want to leave my old school, because Mr. Haygood wasn't afraid to ask a question that a person might actually enjoy answering.

Mr. Haygood said that we shouldn't be afraid of ideas or words or things that challenged us—not in movies or in the news or in school. When we finished
The Great Gatsby,
the last day of class, he asked, all sly and crafty, “While we're on the topic of all things prohibited: Is there any chance that Nick Carraway was in love with Gatsby?” You could practically hear half the class snickering, not that it was funny. I technically had two moms, and I could have told all of them that it wasn't exactly stand-up comedy. But Mr. Haygood waited the laughter out, and by the end we wondered if maybe he wasn't right. Gatsby sure was more interesting than Daisy, or that weird golf pro who was always lounging around and passing herself off as a love interest.

There were no classes like Mr. Haygood's at Doon's school, the school where I was headed in the fall since my parents had decided that sending me to private school was a waste of their ever-evaporating money. I knew what Doon read in her classes—boring books approved by the state of Georgia. She was always telling me about some book that got banned because a parent thought it was a scandal to read the word “damn” or “booger” or something stupid like that. All that was left in the library, Doon claimed, was young-adult lit as written by Barney the Dinosaur. No thank you. And there was no way they talked about which team Gatsby was batting for. Not on this earth.

“Worry about that later,” my sister said, pointing at the door. “Move. Now.”

Her boyfriend was back in town, and she was all hot and bothered.

Overnight, the BMW had vanished and the Jetta that my mom had sold my sister after Birch was born had materialized in the driveway. Delia didn't say anything about the switch, so I didn't ask. The inside of the Jetta reeked of cigarettes. Delia spritzed on some perfume that smelled like window cleaner, shook her hair out of the ponytail, and reapplied the plum lipstick that she had wiped off for the shoot with Roger that had evidently taken place before I even woke up. My sister may not have been a zombie, but she definitely didn't sleep.

“I think you should take Roger up on his offer,” she said.

“Really, because I think you should stop taking Roger up on his ‘offers,' or whatever you two are calling that movie of his. He doesn't even know what he's shooting. Why would you do this? He's an idiot. Haven't you figured that out yet? He probably just
wishes
he were Charles Manson. Did you know that if a girl wore glasses, Manson would break them because he thought they should all be ‘natural'? He wasn't just a psychopath, he was an asshole. Who cares why anyone wanted to listen to him?”

My sister broke it down for me like she was some mafia boss. “I'm not saying you should care about Charles Manson, I'm saying it's a good business opportunity. Do you know they've hired television writers as young as seventeen? It'll be a great credit for you when the film gets released. Roger is going places. We stopped sleeping together at least a year before we broke up, not that it's any of your business. He thinks he might like men. Okay? You happy now?”

I wanted to say “
Ewwwww,
” not because of the men part, but because it was my sister and Roger and
ewwwwwwwwwww
. The thought of the two of them having sex was scarring, then I wondered if maybe she was just dating our mother, but in reverse, which was doubly scarring. Third-degree-psychic-trauma scarring.

“So if it's so innocent, why can't you tell your new boyfriend?”

“Dex? You don't know men at all, do you, Anna?”

“Am I supposed to?”

Delia's phone was ringing and she answered in a completely different voice from the one she'd been using. Good morning, sunshine.

“Hey, honey, yup, we're on our way. Okay, I'll pick some up but they're poison and you know it. Love you too.” She clicked off. “Keep your eye out for Doughnut Dynasty; it's coming up on the right.”

“Actual doughnuts? Fried with real sugar?”

“You'll like Dex. You both have the palate of five-year-olds.”

We pulled into Doughnut Dynasty, and Delia ordered a half dozen of the daily selection at the drive-through: one pink coconut, two chocolate sprinkles, what looked like a jelly or custard, a caramel pecan, and a Nutella banana.

“I'm just gonna have a chocolate sprinkle,” I said. “There are two of them.”

“Want to rephrase that as a question?”

“No.”

The minute I ate the doughnut, I wanted all five more. I wanted a dozen, all to myself, in some closet where I didn't have to hear about what they cost or how many empty calories they had in them.

“Ohmigod, please tell me you've at least tried these.” I was shaking down the napkin for any sprinkles I might have missed. They were that delicious.

“Sugar makes my face swell.”

“Sugar makes my face smile.” I was practically salivating at the thought of chocolate. Since Birch was born, my mom didn't even notice if I ate brownies for breakfast. Maybe my sister was right, maybe I was a sugar junkie.

“And then you'll crash and complain about how tired you are all afternoon.”

“Do you talk this way to Dex?”

“Dex lives on sugar.” Delia honked at the too-slow driver in front of us. “He never crashes because he's completely addicted. Sugar is as toxic as any poison.”

“It's not that toxic. I remember when you used to drink Mountain Dews on the way to drop me off at school. You weren't, like, dying or anything.”

“But my skin was terrible. It's your body, Anna,” she said. “And I'm only concerned because I want you to be your very best self while I'm at work.”

“You're not taking me with you?”

“This week you're going to Dex's work.”

“Okay, so pretend that I've forgotten everything you've told me about Dex. Who is he and what does he do again?”

“See, I knew you weren't listening. Was that so hard to admit?”

Yes, I thought, because it is a lie. I couldn't hear something she never said.

“Well, where to start—he's biracial, but probably whiter than I am.”

While Delia was equal opportunity about the BMWs she would borrow, when it came to actual dating, frat-boy white was last year's color. In high school, she was strictly interested in black guys. She found the one Nigerian exchange student to take to prom. She once broke up with a perfectly nice biracial kid from the suburbs because he was “too white.” I think Roger slipped in because he had an accent and wore eye makeup on a semi-regular basis. By sheer virtue of his awesome command of Euro-weird, she must have overlooked the pasty glow of his flesh. Never mind that she herself had a lack of pigment rivaled by the walking dead. If I could have rolled my eyes,
Exorcist
-style, into the back of my skull, I would have.

“But he can't be whiter than you because you're actually white.”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “You'll like him. He's a writer.”

“Roger is a writer,” I said.

“I know, I know,” she said. “You hate Roger. But he's not a writer like Roger is a writer. He writes for
Chips Ahoy!
”

It is a miracle that I didn't spit my doughnut onto her dashboard.

“You mean
Chips Ahoy!
with the Taylor twins? Seriously?”

She nodded her head, and we both started laughing at the same time.

“That is the worst show in the history of the world,” I said.

Chips Ahoy!
with Josh and Jeremy Taylor was a show about two very rich teenagers named Dan and Mickey Chip. For unknown reasons, they're traveling the world on a yacht with their butler, trying to find their parents, who have been lost at sea. And somehow they've brought friends along. It might have been the single stupidest show in the history of television. I'll bet even six-year-olds across America have turned their televisions off in disgust.

“How is that show even on television?” I said. “And how did you meet this guy?”

“At a movie,” she said. “And he knows the show is terrible. He's working on his own pilot. The show pays really well. He's actually quite funny.”

This is where I can never really trust Delia. Because she would talk about Roger's student film, saying, “It's actually quite deep,” when the only thing deep about Roger was his voice.

“Well his show isn't.”

“Be polite,” she said.

My sister made a sharp right into the garage of a cardboard box of a four-story condo building that took up the entire city block. After she parked, Delia grabbed the box of doughnuts, checked her makeup one more time in the car mirror, and directed me to walk at a clip toward the elevator. “And remember, if he asks about last week, there was no Roger. Got it?”

“And I'm the family asshole?”

“No one's an asshole, Anna.”

We rode the elevator to the fourth floor and walked to the last apartment on the left, 427. The door was cracked and a television was on extra loud in the living room, running classic movies. Marilyn Monroe in her fat phase was leaning over some crazy-looking sailor and fogging up his glasses. And not watching TV, but leaning over the breakfast bar eating an extra-large bowl of Cap'n Crunch, was Dex, who looked less like an LA writer than any boyfriend my sister had ever had.

“Boo,” my sister said, handing him the box of doughnuts.

“I missed you,” he said, and slapped my sister's ass like they were in a relationship where she was capable of being fun. She moved his hand around her waist.

“This is my sister, Anna.”