I hadn’t seen my sister in almost a year. She’d always been pretty, but now she had the smoothed-down look of a Barbie doll. Her hair was straight and the glossy black of an expensive magazine cover. She had on a wifebeater, blue jeans, and five-inch-high dominatrix heels: black leather with silver studs. But she could still walk faster than me, in my Converse low-tops, Old Navy denim, and red Georgia sweatshirt.
“They wanted to send you right back home,” she said. “You can thank me for the fact that you get to stay here to cool off for a couple of days. But you’re under house arrest, okay? No running off to the Coffee Bean for celebrity sightings. I want to understand what’s going on. You know this makes me feel guilty too, don’t you?”
Just walking through the LA airport made me glad that I wasn’t in Atlanta. When you go up the escalators at the Atlanta airport there’s a mural on the walls that features a mystery-race toddler with creepy blurred-out genitals playing in a fountain. I think it’s supposed to be friendly and We love everyone, yay! but it’s just weird. The LA airport is the exact opposite; no one is trying to look friendly, and everyone we passed looked half starved and almost famous.
“You’re not listening,” she said. “Does it even bother you that I could lose my job for missing work today? Finding an actress to fill my shoes is like finding a clover in a clover field, okay? A thank-you would be in order.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Delia stopped walking and stared me down, like the old days.
“And thank you. Thaaaaannnnnnk youuuuuuuu.”
“A little sincerity never killed anyone,” she said, and then she gestured for me to hand over the bigger of my bags.
“So what are you working on?” I asked.
“Were you even listening when I called last weekend? It’s an indie horror flick about zombies and the organ trade in China.”
“Seriously?”
I hadn’t checked any other luggage, so we headed straight for the parking lot. It felt like I was going on vacation.
“Did you know that part of the reason they won’t get rid of the death penalty in China is the organ trade? And they don’t just execute people in prisons, they have these vans that drive around and pick people up and do away with them on the spot. So I’m supposed to be this American woman who sees a body thrown from one of the vans”—she paused in creepy horror-movie style—“only it’s not really dead yet. I think they’re trying to make a point, the director keeps talking about human rights and Amnesty International, but I think that’s to hide the fact that he can’t write dialogue. Not my problem as long as he can pay my salary,” she said. “You want to know what it’s called?”
“What?”
“Thief of Hearts. I mean, unless your lead zombie is Internet dating, it’s too tragically idiotic, right?” She was cracking herself up.
“I guess.”
We got into a BMW convertible that was definitely not my sister’s. It had magnets on the bumper that advertised private schools, or where someone vacationed, code letters that only other super-rich people would recognize.
“What’s the HH for?” I asked. “Heil Hitler?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The sticker, on the bumper. And SSI? Is that Nazi too?”
“Hilton Head and St. Simon’s Island. Vacation spots. Lord, Anna, there are more of those on bumpers in Atlanta than here. Where do you get these things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The Discovery Channel?”
For the longest time she was dating Roger, a film student who would have been hard-pressed to drive a ’92 Corolla off a used-car parking lot. But now she’s “just good friends” with the producer of the Bond flick that she lost the part for, and he lets her use his car when he’s abroad. Because friends do things like that in LA, especially when one of the friends is extremely good-looking.
“Let me finish about the film,” she said. “Not that you were listening. I’m practically the lead, only I’m down a kidney or something by the end.”
It was three hours earlier in California and the sky hadn’t started to get dark, but I felt tired. I leaned my head against the window and watched the traffic, the palm trees, the fruit stands on the sides of the streets. It was easy to be in California with my sister. She was the kind of person who people didn’t just buy drinks for—they offered her their cars, their homes, their credit cards. I knew what the week would be like if I stayed here—Pilates and yoga, a trip to the old perv who balanced her energy, a few days on the set, a manicure or a haircut, and maybe a sip of a beer when we went out with the producer when he came back, just to prove how “cool” he was. People were nice to me when I was with Delia because I was her sister. My sister would never have to steal five hundred bucks—if she so much as looked a little sad, someone was there to open his wallet.
If only my sister were my mom. “Overrated,” she said when I told her that once. “Cora was my sister-mom, and we’re a real portrait of functionality, right?”
I’d heard stories about my mom in the old days, how she would take Delia on dates with her when she couldn’t find a sitter, or the time they took off for the World Series of Poker in Vegas because my mom had a dream that she was going to win big. The mom I got, Cora 2.0, always made me call her Mom, and until their divorce she and Dad were sort of like the living room furniture—around, but nothing to notice. I guess they were fine, but they definitely weren’t fun. When my sister talked about Cora, it was like she knew a totally different person.
I thought that maybe my mom was going to call back and I was going to be forced to get on the phone to apologize, but after my sister clicked off the second time, the phone never rang. While Delia was learning her lines, I sent Doon a message: “In LA. Hiding from Mom and Lynette. May have taken a credit card.” Doon said I was evil for leaving without her, but she was on top of the credit card situation. She told me that I should Google “punishments for stealing” so that I would be ready for anything when I talked to my mom. Then she said that she’d read that Freekmonkee was recording a new album, and that the band had moved into a neighborhood not far from my sister’s. She signed off with, “PLS buy me ticket! TRAITOR!!!!! JK. Not!”
We figured out a while ago that my mom likes to get advice from the Internet. After reading about how a child who steals probably already feels ashamed enough (please God, let her decide that I’ve suffered enough!), I found a site that showed a truck running over the arm of a boy who’d been caught stealing in Iran, only it turned out that the picture was a fake and it was just a scam for money. Then I searched those death trucks in China that my sister was talking about, and they looked like the kind of RVs that I used to think would be fun to take on vacation, where you could shower and poop and sleep and wake up in New Mexico, only in China they were sleek and black like giant police cars, and you woke up dead. I wondered if Doon had heard about those. I was pretty sure she hadn’t, so I sent her a link to a page. China definitely sounded worse than Atlanta, even if my sister swore by Chinese doctors.
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 mou
th 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.”
American Girls Page 2