“No,” I said. “It’s just kind of creepy.”
“Anna,” she said, “Do you know how much it costs to live in this neighborhood? There’s nothing creepy about it.”
“Did you know that Charles Manson didn’t even kill anyone? And those people that got murdered lived in neighborhoods even nicer than this one.”
She switched the toothbrush off and started running water.
“I did. Are you reading that book at night? Of course you can’t sleep. Manson is day reading, okay? Read it when you’re watching Chips Ahoy! shoot this afternoon, not when you’re alone waiting for the pizza man. Sometimes I think you like to be miserable.”
I wanted to ask her about our mom, about how sick she thought she really was and if I should call her back, but I didn’t want to be shut down, and Delia looked like she was closed for the season, emotionally speaking. My sister could do that, be broken down one day and then look at you the next like you were delusional and had hallucinated the scene where she had acted like a human being.
“I don’t like to be miserable.” I took a piece of cold pizza from the refrigerator and gnawed on one petrified corner.
“There are bananas in the bag,” she said, gesturing at her tote. “Dex is going to pick you up at eleven. Are you okay with that? Don’t attack him with a hammer because you think he’s going to kill you. And please don’t mention anything about last night.”
“You mean the pot?”
“I mean Cora.”
“Okay,” I said. The bananas Delia had bought were too green to eat, but she’d also picked up vanilla almond milk and a box of organic chocolate chip cookies. “Why don’t you want him to know about Mom?”
“Because I don’t like having to explain our family all the time.” She had washed her face and was patting the skin dry. The words came out like an accusation, like she’d already had to pass off one crazy and wasn’t in the mood to explain another. Evidently, according to my family, I was pretty much responsible for all the evil in the world. But wasn’t the whole point of having a boyfriend that he would help you out when terrible things happen?
No wonder she and Cora hated each other. They were exactly the same. Neither one of them had ever found a situation good enough that they couldn’t find a way to wreck it.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to have to lie.”
“Then I’m glad you understand.”
We had a sister stare-off for a good thirty seconds, and then we both let it go.
* * *
My sister was auditioning for a reality show, the herpes commercial, and a bit part in a feature-length. Dex had agreed to take me to work with him all week, and Delia would meet up with us whenever her day ended. At first I wondered whether Dex was a secret perv, not that I was so hot or anything, but it seemed crazy to me that anyone would do as much for Delia as he seemed to be doing. But since I hadn’t woken up drugged and in a second location, I figured that he must really like my sister. Way, way more than she deserved.
I liked Dex, because he never asked me what I was writing about, or told me to get off the phone. At eleven he picked me up, then doughnuts, then Chips. I met Josh and Jeremy on the first day, and they were typical actors in that they were both shorter and more handsome than they looked on TV. Everyone on staff seemed to realize that Chips Ahoy! was like the chest acne of children’s television, best covered up in the hope of growing out of it soon. I guess if you have sixteen-year-olds making a show where they are supposed to be twelve-year-olds and marketing it to six-year-olds, there’s bound to be some major rolling of the eyes.
However stupid the show was, the set was impressive. All the action took place in one of three locations—the deck of the boat, the living quarters down below, or an ever-changing island location that was really just the same place, only they moved the palm trees around. The three spaces were always brightly lit when they were shooting, but the minute the lights went out everyone deserted the set for a winding maze of half-furnished rooms where they did table readings and played video games. When they weren’t filming, I liked to walk around the set, trying out the chairs and sofas for size like I was Goldilocks. Sometimes I took pictures to send to Doon so that she could show them to Birch: me outside the building where they filmed, making wacky faces, a lizard that wandered inside, or the spread of cupcakes on the snack table.
One afternoon, when everyone was on a break, I was snooping around the Chips living room set. I sat on the rocking chair where the butler/steward napped while hijinks ensued, and there was a lump under the pillow so big and uncomfortable that I was sure I’d broken something. I put my hand under the cushion and pulled out a rubber penis the size of a banana. I’d never even seen a penis except when Doon and I would sneak-watch the porno channels, and I couldn’t help it, I threw it off the chair like it was someone else’s used tissue. It bounced three times before landing next to Josh.
“What’s wrong, you don’t like Pinky?” he said, picking it up and waving it between his legs. “Did you know that makes you today’s lucky winner?”
He’d never addressed me directly before, and it sounded strange, to hear him talking about a fake penis like we’d known each other forever. Like we knew each other at all.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, really. We hide it somewhere every episode to keep from dying of boredom. You find it, you get to hide it next.” He held it out and handed it to me like it was no different from a deck of cards. I took it, to prove I could, and tried not to look too hard at the details, the veins etched across the outside and the dirty pink lines that marked the ridges. I walked over to one of the bookshelves and placed it there sideways and dick-end-out so it would look like a toy or a weird bookend from the audience.
“Nice,” Josh said. “You get extra points if the audience can actually see it.” Then he walked away like we’d been talking about the weather.
From what I’d seen, Josh was the more chatty of the twins and spent most of his day playing host to various hipsters who lounged around and smoked cigarettes when they weren’t filming. I hated cigarette smoke, and hid out in one of the hallways when I wasn’t with Dex or watching them shoot. Every once in a while, Jeremy would come into the hallway as well and play video games on his computer. He was quieter than Josh, and when I looked up he would smile at me and ask what I was reading, or how things were going.
The other day we’d had an actual conversation about LSD. I told him about something crazy I’d read that afternoon, about how in the fifties the United States government had allowed tests to take place on unsuspecting people where they gave them so much LSD that the drug completely erased all memories of their past. And not only that, the doctors then convinced one of the men that they’d brainwashed that they’d killed his mother, even though she was perfectly fine. X-Files crazy and totally true, and Jeremy said it figured that the government would do something like that. The LSD talk was the longest conversation I’d had with Jeremy, and I think I held up pretty well. I pretended not to notice that television did not even kind of do him justice, that no matter how much I made fun of Chips Ahoy! with Delia, part of me was stupidly, ridiculously happy that he was talking to me.
Technically, Josh was the better-looking of the twins—he was about a half inch taller, and his features were perfect. Jeremy had a sliver of a scar over his right eyebrow, and his skin broke out along his hairline from the makeup they wore—tiny flaws that were visible in person, but not on-screen. But Jeremy had the better voice, low and calm, and when he smiled he raised the eyebrow with the scar. By day three on the set, I had developed an embarrassing crush.
The twins were part of a Hollywood dynasty. They had just turned sixteen to little fanfare in March, I guess because with their fan base it paid to seem younger. I had thought they were twelve or thirteen, but I really didn’t watch Chips Ahoy! Their mom was a famous groupie who had written a tell-all about all the men she’d slept with in the early
nineties. Doon and I had passed her mom’s old copy of the book around at the pool last summer because the sex scenes were pretty detailed. It was strange looking at the twins and thinking, I have read about your mom’s genital warts. I know which eight-thousand-year-old Rolling Stone your mom went down on. I am trying hard to forget that you were conceived in the back of a tour bus during an AIDS relief show.
And they had an older sister, Olivia, who was the result of a fling with a Japanese rock star that ended in a house burning down. Olivia Taylor was so popular when I was in elementary school that Doon had two Olivia Taylor lunch boxes, and convinced her mom to buy tickets for every night of her show when she played Atlanta. Only last week, she’d been in the tabloids smoking pot and pulling her eyes into an over-the-top Asian slant, which she said was not racist, since she actually was half Japanese, but it still wasn’t doing anything to bring her half-dead career back to life. The twins were the ones on the rise, and you could almost see in the pictures on the gossip sites how much she cared, that it was killing her to see these two little shits riding the wave of her success, cashing in while she was going broke.
“That’s the funny thing about fame,” my sister had said. “It’s not like she’s ugly. She’s not even that terrible an actress, but you can feel that shift. Once that shift happens, you’re fighting an epic uphill struggle. Epic. You need some director to make you his darling and save you from the feeding to the lions that’s going to happen in the press. You can see it in her pictures, that she gets what’s happening and doesn’t know how to stop it. It’s despair, but she’s trying her damnedest not to let it show.”
“She’s just a fucked-up kid,” Dex had said. “Plus, she has money, which makes her a monster. And I mean that in the nicest way possible.”
I wasn’t really prepared for the full Olivia Taylor–ness of Olivia Taylor. I don’t know what might have prepared me. Definitely not the tooth-rotting sweetness of the film she did where she found out her dad was king of some anonymous European country and she had to rescue a dog and make nice with the local prince. For sure not “Nice Is Nice Too,” the hit single that Doon and I made out to the one time we kissed. Positively not Kandy Kisses, the biopic that Doon and I had camped out to see when we were ten years old, Kandy necklaces around our necks. And not the recent gossip-site pics either, which had her looking like she could as easily be sliding into a body bag as passed out in the backseat of her ex-boyfriend’s SUV, waxed lady parts on display like a naked Barbie doll.
In person, she seemed both bigger and smaller than she did in her pictures and videos. Her hair was wound through with silver ribbons and braided in four sections that went down the back of her head into one large ponytail. She wore tight black jeans with silver seams, a fuzzy white sweater, and high-heel wedge boots that came just above her knee. If I hadn’t known she was Olivia Taylor when she walked in, I would have at least known that she wasn’t regular—her clothes, her hair, her skinny-girl slouch—without her having to say a word, her whole being set her apart. And if Olivia Taylor’s star was starting to fade, the last person to know about it seemed to be Olivia Taylor. Even the nerdy “I hate Hollywood” writers took notice when she stormed onto the set, interrupting the tail end of an all-staff Nintendo marathon.
“If you two rat-turds know who leaked those pics, you better let on, or someone’s going to let the rest of the world know which of you ejaculates spends all his Disney money on porn so he doesn’t look like the scared little virgin he actually is. And don’t pretend not to look at me. Don’t forget, I know where you live, you cuntresses.”
The twins didn’t even look up from the on-screen zombie massacre, but gave her an almost balletic, synchronized bird-flip. I don’t think I’d ever heard a girl use the word “cunt,” let alone find a way to make it seem like poetry.
“I have no friends,” she said. “And not in the sad way. Until I find out how those pictures got out, every one of those whores is on house arrest.”
“Boohoo.” Joshua macheted three zombies. “If you screw up my high score I’m putting you on house arrest.”
“You wait,” she said, pushing a pair of oversize sunglasses atop her head. “You wait until no one gives a shit what rotted-out beach your tired asses wash up on, when you get stopped in the mall and someone says, ‘Weren’t you on that show Nutter Butter?’ Because it’s going to happen, and the only person left on planet Earth who’ll suck you off will be some prison guard with basic cable who thinks fucking you will make the president love her.”
It was like she was training for the Olympics of swearing.
“So you’re the klepto?” she said, and it took me a minute to realize she was looking at me. I stood up a little straighter and tried to pretend like she was just another girl in my English class.
“I’m not a klepto,” I said. “I was taking out a loan.”
“Right. Here’s a tip. Own it.”
“She’s fine,” Josh said. “Not everyone is a psycho like you.”
“Is that the best you can do? ‘Psycho’? Maybe you should lay off the video games. So Anna—it is Anna, right? Since you’re a professional, or a loan shark, or whatever you want to call it, would you like to come shopping with me?”
It sounded like a trick question. And she knew my name, which meant that the twins must have talked about me when I wasn’t around. Crazy.
“I’m supposed to be on a spending fast,” she said. “They’re doing a feature for some no-name sad-teen magazine, and I’m going to write some sermon about how not spending has saved my soul and is better for the planet and all of that, only I hate, hate, hate not spending and there is no way any sane editor could expect me to weather this shit-storm without at least a new bag. You need money too, right? I’ll pay you a hundred bucks. Finder’s fee and hush money. If you so much as tweet it to your best friend, I will destroy you, okay?”
Like anyone would believe me. Even Doon would think that I was making this up.
Seeing Olivia Taylor made me realize that everyone my sister knows is only kind of famous. Partially famous, faded around the edges, and potentially forgettably famous. Even Delia, if she works every day for the rest of her life, will never be Olivia Taylor. Olivia Taylor has sold out stadiums. She was on my television five nights a week and again in the mornings as reruns. I am pretty sure I know her birthday as well as her favorite color.
“I can work a credit card,” I said, giving her a smile like I could own the crazy when the time was right.
“Perfect. See you laze-balls later.”
I should have checked with Dex first. Jeremy gave me a look like, “You’re really going to just walk out the door with my insane sister?” And I tried to let him know, telepathically, Yes, because it’s going to be about a million times more interesting than walking out the door with my own insane sister. “The devil you know” may be the saying, but crazy is always a million times more interesting when you’re just getting introduced, shaking hands, and deciding whether or not you’re going to give your real e-mail address.
Even exiting the building, a man who looked like he was casing the parking lot pulled out a camera and started snapping pictures. Pictures of me and Olivia Taylor. I could be the blacked-out square in a trashy magazine in a grocery store checkout line. The question mark over the head on a gossipy Web site. I had arrived.
“Good luck getting five dollars for that,” she said. “Shit-sniffer.”
The man made a motion like he was tipping his hat, then kissed the air at her.
“Disgusting,” she said. “They won’t be happy until I’m dead and they’re first on the scene to take a picture.”
She ushered me to an SUV the size of small house. I climbed into the passenger seat like I knew exactly what we were doing next, like driving around with movie stars was something I’d been doing my entire life. That I did not pee my pants was probably a miracle. Olivia’s laptop was open on her seat, and she fired it up after she sat down. She handed it to me so
that I could see the pictures that were so offensive—three shots of her passed out at a party next to a half-eaten birthday cake, with her basically nonexistent belly hanging ever so slightly over her too-tight snakeskin pants, and her head angled so that it looked like she had the tiniest of double chins.
“Who would do this?” she said, and pointed at the screen. “An asshole of biblical proportions, right? The party was totally closed. Now I have to go all Agatha Christie on my five best friends and my brothers to see who murdered my career. And look at that cake. Grocery store cake. Assholes.”
So these were the pictures she was so angry about. Not ones that made her look like a druggie, or a racist, or a naked druggie-racist, but the ones that made her look just a little closer to regular. The only shock was that it really wasn’t all that shocking.
“Maybe you can pretend they’re not of you,” I offered. “They don’t really even look like you.”
“Tell that to the next casting director running a Web search.” She closed the computer and tossed it behind her, then started the car and drove us off the lot. I was thinking about how much it would have cost to replace the computer if it had missed the backseat, when I felt the craziest sensation, like heavy rainfall thumping up my arm—but without the rain. The feeling traveled from my right shoulder and onto my head, and I panicked. Something from the backseat was attacking me. I must have let out a totally for-real scream, because Olivia almost drove us into a streetlamp by the side of the road.
“Are you completely psycho?” she asked. What I could now see was a large green lizard had jumped from my head and onto her lap. “You’re going to give Iggy a nervous breakdown.”
“Iggy?” I said.
“It’s okay, Iggyyyyyy.” She kissed the lizard on the head. “This is Anna. She didn’t mean to scare you.” The lizard perched on her leg, and she stroked its head delicately. I checked the backseat for more reptiles and tried to quiet my heartbeat. Olivia pulled the car into a parking space marked “Employees Only” behind a strip mall, and tucked the lizard under her arm.
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