“You have a lizard,” I said.
“An iguana,” she corrected me. “Did you know they can live as long as people? And unlike people, they never, ever fuck you over.” She gestured for me to get out of the car. “You do have a credit card, right?”
The way she was looking at me, I seriously thought that she might leave me in the car if I answered wrong.
I had a card from my dad, just for emergencies, and there was a good bet it was still working since I hadn’t heard from him since he went to Mexico last month. I could hear his voice while Olivia was still talking: I can’t take the time I need to get away with Cindy? Not even a weekend? This is what happens? Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything? And then my mother, who’d probably look on this as an opportunity to remind him just how much he sucks at being a dad: It’s a month you’ve been gone, not a weekend. And you are still technically her father, so you could tear yourself away from your piña coladas, blah, blah, blah.
“It’s just for emergencies,” I said.
“Well, this is an emergency.” She’d led me to a hole-in-the-wall boutique with a thick glass door and spare, headless mannequins in the windows. “You’ll buy with your credit card and I’ll pay you back. It has to look like we’re shopping for you.” After we entered the store, one of the women who worked there locked the door behind us. Olivia put her lizard on the ground, and he ran underneath the sale rack. The normal rules no longer applied. We had entered a parallel universe where her arrival meant that some whole other secret set of rules went into effect: Iguanas, good. Other customers, bad.
The store walked the line between chic and totally destroyed, and the clothes looked like they could have been from Goodwill, if Goodwill charged a hundred and fifty bucks for a T-shirt.
“This would look amazing on you,” she said, holding up what I thought was a shirt but soon realized was a dress. “You would look like someone deserving of a solid bang on the third date, am I right? I heard that southern girls were all sluts at heart. Back-door gals because the front’s for Jesus or your husband or something.”
She stopped short and looked at me. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
The salesgirl nearest me was trying not to laugh. It was so embarrassing to hear it, and in that exact moment, as I felt the heat spread like brush fire over my face, I hated Olivia Taylor. She was a horrible, horrible person. I hoped my credit card was declined. I hoped someone scanned her toxic-waste-heap of a brain and leaked that to the press.
She, on the other hand, had already moved on.
“This,” she said, and handed me a duffel bag with a geometric pattern across the front, two large metallic straps that went over the shoulders. “This is the one you have to have. I told you it would be perfect. Flawless. Love, love, love it.”
She wasn’t even looking at me, or anyone else in the store when she talked, she was like a tornado, swirling and touching down, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that her movements were arbitrary, that I was nothing more than some trailer park she might destroy before disappearing back into the clouds.
“You have to buy it,” she said. “I know it’s just what your daddy would want you to have for your birthday. She’s turning sixteen.” She mangled “daddy” like it was the filthiest word in the English language, like she’d finally found something that caused her physical pain to say. The clerk pretended to care. She probably saw this kind of mania three times a day, seven days a week. I always thought that people in LA must be in awe of the fame, of the random interactions with the people you only saw on-screen. Now I could see that it was probably just exhausting.
I pulled out the credit card that I was supposed to use only for emergencies and bought a $498 green python bag. It was more than I’d ever spent on anything in my life, including the plane ticket before taxes. My hands shook as I forked over the card. I’d almost wished the card had been declined, but now that it had gone through, I had visions of my dad getting a call in Mexico that there was a strange charge from Los Angeles. They were probably alerting the credit card police even as the store clerk slipped the bag into a felt pouch, and then a larger bag, and handed me the package.
“Do you want the receipt or should I put it in the bag?”
I looked at Olivia, who was pulling her hair across her face and practically making out with her phone. She waved me off.
“I guess I’ll take it,” I said.
The clerk handed me the paper, and I half tried to pass the receipt to Olivia, who brushed me off again and kept talking. I put it in my purse, and got the weird feeling that I had done something very, very wrong.
I tried to ignore her, to figure out something to do with myself that didn’t look sad and idiotic and alone. The iguana was running laps around the front counter, and the salesgirls had stopped smiling.
I stood by the still-locked door to the store as two girls in cutoff shorts tried to open it, failed, peered inside, and moved on.
Across the street, above a salon that advertised fifteen-dollar manicures, another billboard for Volt blocked the sun. The same blond actress in the same white tank top stood with her hands in front of her, balancing a stethoscope against a handgun. She was trying to look serious and sexy and smart all at once, but mostly she just looked as fake as her fluorescent-green eyes—like every other actress on every other billboard trying to look serious and sexy and smart. My sister said that the show was about a neurosurgeon who had been hit by lightning as a child and could see the future when patients were dying. She could decide whether it would be better if they lived or died. At least, that was what the show had been about when she read for it. By now, Delia said, the show might just as easily have been about a nurse with an electric vagina. Looking at the actress’s face, it could have gone either way.
“Texting your friends?” Olivia said. “I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to tell them who you were shopping with. Did you send pictures?”
She took the phone from my hand, like she owned it, and read aloud, “‘Out shopping with Olivia Taylor.’ See? This is why I have to check everything. You can’t make any money for that, you know.”
“I left without telling anyone where I was going,” I said. “It’s to my sister.”
“Of course it is.”
She handed me the phone the same way she had taken it, like it was more hers than mine, like she was entitled to anything she could put her hands on, just because. As the salesgirl unlocked the front door, she gave me a “Good luck with that” kind of smile. I gave a “Pray for me” widening of the eyes in return.
On the way back to the set, I watched Olivia Taylor text with both hands and her elbows on the steering wheel, and tried not to think about the fact that she hadn’t made any mention of the hundred dollars she’d promised me, let alone how to pay me back for the bag. And as we drove farther from the store, the prickly unease that I had been feeling became something hard and dark. I felt something that I’d only read about in books, the kind of cold that ices your insides when something terrible is just about to happen. I remembered a picture that Doon had said we should figure out how to send but never did, a fake selfie of Paige Parker with rope around her neck and whited-out eyeballs, and I wished that someone could have done the same to the so-called terrible pictures of Olivia Taylor. I knew that part of me wouldn’t have cared at all if something really bad had happened to Olivia—worse, part of me wanted it to. And just for a second, maybe because it was California and you could understand how truly vomit-worthy fame could be only when you were right up next to it, I almost, kind of, understood what it might have been like to be a Manson girl.
7
I was starting to wonder what I was doing in Los Angeles. As Olivia cruised past yet another billboard for Volt, I almost longed for the weird billboards of the South. It seemed like anyone in Georgia could afford to take out roadside advertising, and once you got outside Atlanta there was always some crazy billboard that let you know that people were made by God, not from
monkeys, or that demanded the president’s birth certificate, or—my favorite—a six-year-old with a crossbow advertising the “kids’ corner” of the local gun store. Doon and I would text pictures of the best ones to each other, daring each other to call the number on the anti-evolution billboard and ask whoever answered to explain the hair on her chest, or to take Birch to the gun store to see if there was anything for toddlers. I wouldn’t have even bothered sending her the Volt pictures, they were such an obvious and boring kind of stupid.
Besides, Doon was writing me less and less. I guess she was irritated with me for leaving her stranded. And it wasn’t just her. My mom was probably going to throw a party to celebrate her Anna-free life as soon as she started feeling better, my sister was constantly busy auditioning, and to the rest of planet California, I was all but invisible. Olivia dropped me back at the Chips Ahoy! set where—shocker—no one had noticed that I was missing. Dex was in a writers’ meeting, and the twins were playing Texas Hold’em with a few of the extras. I perched on a couch end near the edge of the game, trying not to take up too much space.
“So how’d it go?” Josh asked without looking up from his cards.
I didn’t answer for a full minute because it hadn’t dawned on me I was supposed to field the question.
“Oh,” I said. “I think I just bought your sister a purse.”
“I thought you were broke.” Josh still didn’t look up, but Jeremy did, probably long enough to see that I looked dazed, like I’d been hexed by a very beautiful person who’d cast a spell on me so that I handed over my father’s credit card without so much as a “Why?”
“I guess I’m even more broke.”
Jeremy laughed a little, and then he said, “Consider yourself lucky. The last person she took shopping bought her a car.”
“Seriously?”
He raised his arm like he was taking a Boy Scouts oath. It was a gesture that the “Chips” made all the time on the show, bleeding into real life or vice versa.
“She’s a whore,” Josh said, and Jeremy frowned like he was going to contradict his brother, but didn’t. I saw the same word from the letter on my sister’s door for a second and squeezed my eyes to make it disappear.
“You know how to play?” Jeremy asked.
“Kind of,” I lied. I knew how to play, and I knew the first rule of knowing how to play is pretending that you only kind of know how to play.
“I’ll buy you in,” Jeremy said. He tossed a fifty-dollar bill across the table to his brother, who handed me a stack of chips.
My mom was a pretty serious gambler back in the day. She made it to the final table at the World Series of Poker once, and we played poker growing up the way other kids played Old Maid. I didn’t really think of myself as a competitive person, but the minute someone passed me two cards facedown, I became a shark.
“I know the rules,” I said. “But do you have a cheat sheet for what beats what?”
I was the only girl at the table and I knew that they would humor me. They would be on the lookout from then on for beginner’s luck, but I could tell that the “Ohmigod, like, is that a spade or a club?” angle was going to go far. The nice thing about poker is that lying isn’t really lying in poker, it’s just playing a game. If you let on that you’re a shark, that doesn’t make you a nice person, it makes you an idiot. There are some great female poker players, and they might have played with a few, but I knew they wouldn’t expect it from me.
I bet like a total moron and played extra dumb for the first two hands.
“I’ll help you if you want,” Jeremy said.
“No help,” Josh replied. “You bought her in. That’s it.”
I shrugged my shoulders and Jeremy gave me an “I tried” kind of half smile in return. He had the same almost fluorescent-blue eyes that made Olivia’s face so impossibly beautiful. Only his eyes were kinder, the eyes of a seer, not a judge. If I hadn’t been in shark mode, I would have felt bad that I was about to take his fifty dollars.
I started to play a little more carefully, won a few hands, and then lost big. Really big. I had three kings, but Josh had a full house. It was a miracle hand; he had an ace and the other king in the hole, and he cleaned me out except for my last three chips. I was barely going to have enough to make the blind.
“Sorry,” Josh said, but I could tell that he loved it, cleaning out the already cleaned-out girl across the table from him. I almost said, “Golly gee, shucks,” just to be an asshole, but I still had three chips and a chance. And in poker you make your own fate. In the next hand, I doubled my pile and then a few hands later tripled it again. Nothing crazy, but by playing tight I was holding my own while still being able to look “lucky.”
Jeremy was dealing and I got a pair of eights facedown. There was an eight on the flop and a pair of tens. It was almost a dream hand, and I knew it but couldn’t let it show. The twins were watching me like a pair of falcons. I willed my hands not to shake.
I put in half the money that I had left, which would have cleaned out anyone but Josh. Jeremy folded and the other two extras folded as well. One of them was out, but I didn’t even notice when he left.
“I’ll call,” Josh said, looking me straight in the eye, gladiatorial. He pushed his chips into the pot. Jeremy turned an ace, and I could see Josh smile, just the tiniest curl at the corner of his mouth, and I could feel it, he had tens. He was going to beat me.
“All in,” I said, pushing my chips into the center.
Josh could barely contain his glee.
“You know there’s no insanity plea in poker, right?” he said.
“I know.”
He pushed the rest of his chips into the pot.
And then I caught that last eight on the river. It wasn’t just statistically unlikely, it was a damn miracle, up there with the wine and the fishes and feeding of the multitudes. I had been prepared to go down in a blaze of glory, but now I was going to win. I was going to win and it was going to look like dumb luck, so I did what only a true shark would do.
“Double or nothing?”
“It’s not even your money,” Josh said.
“This is hilarious.” Jeremy slapped his hand on the table, delighted. Even the extras had stopped texting.
“You realize I’m going to destroy you,” Josh said. “Is it possible you just like owing people money?”
“Double or nothing,” I said. “I have a job. I’m good for it.”
By then I had forgotten that they were television stars. Jeremy fished fifty more dollars out of his wallet and handed it to me. I put it on the table.
“It’s your life,” Josh said, and matched me. He rolled out his cards, exactly what I thought, full house, tens and eights.
“Is this better?” I asked in my most bullshit girl voice and laid my eights on the table.
“I love this girl,” Jeremy practically yelled, and it made me remember that he was one of the two biggest teen stars in the country, one of whom had just declared his extremely exaggerated love, and the other of whom I had just cleaned out.
“You bitch,” Josh said, turning the slur into a term of great respect. “That’s impossible.”
“Possible,” Jeremy said. “Happened.”
“Shut up, douche bag.”
I tried not to gloat as I moved the pot in my direction.
“I gotta go,” one of the extras said, pointing at his phone as if that explained everything.
“Cool, bro,” Josh said. “Later?”
“Mos def.”
They bumped fists, and then Josh excused himself.
“That was evil,” he said, turning around and pointing a finger at me. “How long are you here, again?”
“Most of the summer,” I said.
“Rematch. Beware and be ready. No cheat sheets next time.”
I smiled and shrugged like I had no idea what he was talking about. Jeremy stayed behind and I gave him the two hundred and fifty dollars that I had won.
“Thanks
for spotting me.”
“Dude, I would have paid five hundred dollars to watch that beat-down. How long you been playing poker?”
“I don’t know. Since I was born?”
Jeremy made a dramatic “Thank you, God” gesture at the ceiling, and handed the money back.
“You won it.”
“But it’s not mine.”
“An honest thief,” he said. “We’ll split it.”
He handed me $125. I would have framed the bills if I didn’t already owe everyone I knew.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked. “Really. We know now that you’re a card shark. Are you some kind of media plant, too? Writing a story about the ‘troubled Taylors’?” He tucked his chin into his chest and used his best old-man newscaster voice when he mentioned his family, like he was trying to make them something imaginary, something he wasn’t really a part of. I knew the feeling.
“God, no,” I said. And I must have sounded shocked enough for him to believe that it was the truth. Had he really been thinking I was some kind of mole?
“But you are a writer, right? Are you working on a screenplay?”
In LA everyone was working on a screenplay, and in a way, I guess I was.
“Kind of. I’m helping”—I had to think about this one—“my sister’s friend. I’m doing some research. And I have this paper I need to write for school.”
“I figured,” he said. “You’re always reading.”
He smiled and tilted his head to the right. As he pushed his shirtsleeves up his arm, one at a time, for a minute I saw my life from a distance and I couldn’t believe it was really mine. How could I have been missing Georgia? Nothing like this ever happened there—not in Atlanta. Not to me.
“I’m not always reading.”
“You read a lot. What are you reading about now?”
“Cults,” I said. “You know, the kind where there’s someone in charge and people listen.”
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