American Girls

by Alison Umminger

  “Shiiit,” Jeremy said. “I forgot about Olivia.”

  “Lucky you,” Josh said without a touch of humor.

  “I’ve gotta get out of here.” Jeremy looked at the time on his phone and then at me. “Want to come with?”

  Jeremy and I hadn’t talked much since the day we went to the cemetery, so I assumed that he had written me off as a terrible, possibly pitiful human being best kept at arm’s length.

  “Sure,” I said, trying hard to sound cool, but I think I accidentally used my computer voice instead.

  “I have an idea,” Jeremy whispered. “Top secret.”

  I pretended to lock my lips and gave him the Chips Ahoy! salute. If there was one thing I knew how to do, it was keep a secret.

  * * *

  Once we were in the car, Jeremy told me his sister was leaving town for Vegas, where she was sponsoring a series of parties on the strip. He was supposed to feed the snake and iguana while she was gone. The way he saw it, I could get back the purse I’d bought her and return it for cash, right a wrong, and the best part was that she was so loaded up with crap and unopened swag that she wouldn’t even miss it.

  “Have you seen her place?” He signaled and practically stopped driving as he rounded the corner to her street, but then he picked up speed. “I’m just warning you, it’s not what you think.”

  “Okay,” I said. But what ever was?

  Olivia Taylor lived in a super-posh subdivision with a friendly but armed guard who greeted us at the gate before we drove to her bungalow. It wasn’t a mansion, which I guess I had been expecting, but was definitely too big for one human being. The outside had a rock garden with benches, a small, squarish fountain, and an atrium with a clogged pond and a few sluggish fish bobbing on the surface.

  “You ready to see how the other half lives?” he said, smiling like he knew something that I didn’t.

  A faint beeping noise droned from inside Olivia’s house, and when Jeremy opened the door, a catatonic-eyed Pomeranian clawed halfway up my leg like it had lost its actual mind. The beeping was much louder and shriller inside. After flipping the switch on a light that wouldn’t turn on, Jeremy punched the keypad on her security system until the alarm stopped. The dog hobbled down two steps before peeing in a puddle between its legs. Who knew how long he’d been holding it.

  “Jesus,” Jeremy said, picking the dog up and rubbing its head. “She forgot Mr. Peabody. Poor bastard.”

  The inside of Olivia’s house was dark, and after three more useless attempts to find a working light, Jeremy opened the wall of curtains in the living room, letting in enough sun to show that Olivia had probably left in a hurry. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see that the downhill went far and fast. White furniture, black floors, black fireplace, white chandelier. It was like someone got all their decorating ideas from staring at a checkerboard. And then, along the sides of the house, boxes and bags, bags and boxes. Olivia Taylor was a high-end hoarder. I recognized the shopping bag from our excursion, tossed atop a pile of the same that led into the kitchen. Box upon box of Chinese takeout containers littered the counters. This was the picture the paparazzi needed. Piles of unpacked clothes cluttered the sofas, a dog-gnawed piece of pepperoni pizza sat abandoned on the floor, and the air smelled like animal piss and vinegar. For a hot star, she’d left an even hotter mess.

  I didn’t know what to say, or what I was supposed to do, so I asked Jeremy if we should clean up.

  “No,” he said. He pushed a stack of cotton-candy pink and baby-blue leotards onto the floor, sat on the sofa, and stared at the pizza box on the coffee table. Then he let out the kind of sigh that parents make when they’re so disappointed, they’ve actually given up, the kind of soul-gutted exhale that was a million times worse than any kind of mad. “It’s her mess. But someone needs to clue her in that she left the dog and her electricity is off. I should have known this place would have gone to shit. She always said that Vegas was for washed-up reality stars and ex-groupies. Guess she’ll fit right in.”

  I thought about sitting down next to him and putting my hand on his leg, attempting the kind of “It’s okay!” gesture that beautiful girlfriends make in the movies before their boyfriends kiss them tenderly and wordlessly express their thanks and understanding. But I wasn’t his girlfriend. Still, we were in an empty house together, and even though it was trashed, there was something that made me feel like that had to mean something. I pretended he was the much older version of Birch and sat next to him and said, “I’m sorry. It’s really nice of you to look after her.”

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe that’s how it seems,” he said. “I used to think so. It would be nice it if helped, but it doesn’t. But then there’s the dog.” The dog was standing over the pizza and licking the pepperoni. Every few minutes he let out a rancid fart. People food wasn’t doing him any favors, but the poor bastard was practically dry-humping a piece of stale crust now that he’d had a chance to pee. Jeremy shook his head and took the pizza away from him.

  “I wonder if she even owns dog food,” he said. I was sitting close enough to smell that he had probably washed his hair that morning, close enough that I could have reached over and traced the three freckles lined along his jaw like a wide triangle. He stopped staring at the mess and put his hand on my shoulder, and I thought for a minute that he might kiss me. I really did, and then it seemed like he’d awakened from a trance, and instead he stood up and kicked the pizza box off the table, kicked it so hard and far that it landed next to the shopping bags lined against the windows.

  “Fuck,” he said. “She’s still my fucking sister.”

  “Careful,” I said before I could help myself. “You don’t want her thinking we came and trashed the place.” For a minute Jeremy didn’t say anything, and then he started to laugh. Even more than the thought of kissing him, his laughter felt like a gift. Like I registered, and I mattered.

  “We couldn’t have that, now could we?”

  He wouldn’t have believed me, but I knew exactly what he meant about Olivia. And then, like someone had written it into the script, the iguana bolted from Olivia’s bedroom across the floor, its feet and long green tail slapping the floor like a toddler playing the drums. I couldn’t help it, I was cracking up.

  “Iggy!” Jeremy chased him to the corner. “Iggy, if this were not so completely depressing, it would be hilarious. You realize that, don’t you?” Iggy wriggled out of Jeremy’s hands and ran back into the bedroom. Jeremy closed the door behind him. “Who am I kidding? It’s a comedy of sad.”

  The dog had burrowed into Olivia’s clothes and rested his head on a pair of her bikini underwear. Jeremy talked to him like he was the dog’s therapist. “And you,” he said, “you actually miss her. You might want to think about your choices, little dude.”

  Then it seemed like as fast as the whole thing had become funny, it wasn’t anymore. The dog rolled over and let Jeremy rub his belly.

  “You mind doing me a favor, Anna? Could you hold your breath and dig through the kitchen closet and see if there’s anything in the way of kibble that we could feed this animal? I’m going to give Olivia a call and see if she even knows that she left Mr. Peabody.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  “And if you can find Iggy and get him in his cage, he’d probably thank you, you know, if he could.”

  “I’m sure even iguanas have their ways,” I said, and he pointed a “gotcha”-style finger at me.

  Part of me wanted to hear what he was saying to his sister, but I didn’t want him to think I was being nosy, so I decided to hunt for Iggy first. I’d never seen Olivia’s bedroom. For a minute, I thought about something I’d read about the Manson family, that before the murders they broke into people’s homes, sometimes while they slept unaware, and rearranged their furniture without taking anything. “Creepy-crawling,” they called it. I’d thought that the whole point was to scare the unsuspecting residents when they woke up, but walking ar
ound Olivia’s house, I wondered if there wasn’t a thrill to poking around the house itself. Going through someone’s drawers could be as intimate as reading their diary, and I was about to see not just Olivia’s room, but also in some weird way, a part of Olivia herself.

  Before I opened the door, I thought about episodes I’d seen of Hoarders where even the bedrooms were overrun, where some crack team of investigators found the outline of where a human being could sleep on a bed otherwise piled to the ceiling with newspapers in triplicate and mold samples that had to be identified by outside laboratories. Another part of me imagined it might be an even more sexed-up version of my sister’s bedroom, with padded walls and a secret sex-dungeon entrance. But it was neither. It was messy, for sure, but most of it just looked like a regular-girl bedroom, maybe even the bedroom of someone younger than either of us. Her comforter was ballet-slipper pink, and her bed had the kind of lavender canopy over it that I had begged for when I was eight. She hadn’t made the bed, but she’d last slept next to an oversize stuffed iguana, and three or four other stuffed horses were tucked beneath the blankets. Iggy had perched himself on the back of a well-worn plush unicorn. I snatched the lizard before he knew what had happened, and once I got ahold of him, he relaxed and felt softer than I’d imagined. I could almost see why Olivia liked him.

  When I went back into the living room, Jeremy was cleaning dog shit off his shoes and talking to his sister on speaker. I don’t know what they’d been talking about before, but whatever it had been, she was furious.

  “Would you please quit being a douche and get my electricity back on? I’ll pay you for it when I get back.”

  “You can pay for it now,” Jeremy answered. “You can look up the number.”

  “Don’t,” she said, like the word had teeth, “use that AA bullshit on me. You’re not above this. You spent three nights in jail, if I remember correctly. How would you like it if that little truth was magically revealed to the press? Save your self-righteousness for meetings. I don’t buy it.”

  Three nights in jail? That was the first I’d heard of that one. I couldn’t tell if Olivia was telling the truth, or if the truth bothered Jeremy. If it did, it didn’t bother him enough to take the phone off speaker. He shook his head and threw the cloth he’d been using in the garbage, and then he pointed to the iguana and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “We’ve got Iggy,” he said. “Now if you could tell me where you keep the dog food.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” she asked. “Did you bring someone with you? I don’t want your whores in my house. Hellooooooo,” she yelled cheerfully.

  “It’s Anna,” he said. “You met her. And she’s not a whore. She just found your iguana and put him back in his cage, so you might want to thank her.” He slumped forward onto the counter where he’d laid his phone down, and shook his head like she could see him. “You’re so angry. I don’t get how you do it.”

  “I’m angry? How are you not angry, is the better question. How are you not outraged every second of your life?

  “Anna,” she said, her voice lower and suddenly sweet, “you know he’s in AA, right? You know that in that stupid cult they have a rule that you have to do one nice thing every day and not get caught. My guess is that you’re that thing for Jer-Bear here. Otherwise, from what I’ve seen of you”—and she might as well have been looking me up and down when she said it—“you’re not his type.”

  “Enough,” he said, in a voice so adult that it sounded like it belonged to someone else. “No more. The crazy thing is, Olivia, most days I try to do something nice for you, and I don’t get caught because you don’t even notice.”

  Then there was a silence like someone had slapped her across the face. Then the beep-beep-beep that she had left the conversation.

  I wanted to disappear as much as I’d wanted anything in my whole life. I didn’t care about the stupid purse anymore, or about helping Jeremy clean Olivia’s apartment, or that her electricity was off. I didn’t even care that I’d been stupid enough a few minutes before to think that Jeremy had brought me there because he really liked me. If Olivia had called me a hag, it wouldn’t have felt any worse. Not his type. I didn’t have to speak “bitch” fluently to know exactly what she meant. She meant ugly, and the word felt a thousand times more embarrassing than if she’d paraded me around in my nonmatching underwear. I wanted out of there, but I didn’t know how to ask.

  Jeremy had found the dog food and placed it by the door. Beside it was the bag from the store where I’d bought Olivia the purse.

  “I found this.” He lifted the bag toward me. “The receipt’s still in there. It has your dad’s name on it. I’ll bet you can return it.”

  I took the shopping bag, but I couldn’t look him in the face. Olivia’s dog licked my ankle, and when I reached down to pet him I could feel how small and fragile his head was beneath all that fur, that he had a slight shake even when he was trying to be still.

  “You can’t pay attention to her,” Jeremy said.

  “Sure,” I said. “No. I’m not.”

  More than anything I wanted him to stop talking, and almost like he could read my mind, he offered to take me back to the set. Mr. Peabody sat on my lap and we listened to music as we rode. I didn’t recognize any of the songs, but they were low and sad, like they’d been dipped in the darkest of blues. Maybe it was the music, but when we got to the studio, Jeremy touched his hand against my face before I got out of the car.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said, and before I could stop myself, like a total idiot, I said, “Thanks.”

  He looked at me like I was sadder than Mr. Peabody. At least he had the sense not to say you’re welcome. And at least I had the sense to leave.

  * * *

  The rest of the week I played sick. I had to stay at my sister’s place, because otherwise Dex would know that I was faking, but I couldn’t go back to Chips Ahoy!, not until Jeremy had at least a week to forget that his sister had all but called me a hag. Delia said he probably wouldn’t even remember, but that was only because she hadn’t been on the receiving end of the beat-down I’d taken. I’d rather have risked Delia’s psycho neighborhood than endure further humiliation. Not even a contest, really.

  Delia brought me a stack of movies from Dex’s place, including one that he’d snagged from the set: Kandy Kisses: From Olivia Taylor to You, the Real Olivia Taylor Story. “In case you get tired of working on your history final,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether Delia was being nice or just messing with me. I’d seen the movie twice with Doon when it first came out. We even talked her mom into taking us to a midnight screening “slumber party” the night that it opened. At the time, Olivia Taylor had seemed like the prettiest, nicest, funnest person you could ever trade stickers with, but now I knew that she was a spiritual wolf in Malibu Slut Barbie’s hand-me-downs. Then I remembered that the twins were in the movie, and that more than anything made me load it up.

  The movie came out right when my parents were first having problems, and part of the reason that I loved Olivia Taylor so much was that her own dad had never been a part of her life, and some of her mom’s lunacy couldn’t help but leak onto the screen. Her family wasn’t crazy in the same way that mine was, but it was definitely crazy. The movie opened with a group of fans, teenage girls, talking about how much they loved Olivia Taylor, how she made them feel like someone understood them, how no matter how sad they were, they knew that happiness was just a “kandy kiss” away. Then, surprise, Olivia Taylor came out of her bus, showering them with air-kisses and high-end candy, telling them that they were her inspiration. The movie followed three months of her tour, three months of her and her mom fighting about her costumes, her boyfriend, the size of her ass. Her brothers had just gotten cast in Mouse Around the House, a show that ran for about ten seconds and might have been even worse than Chips Ahoy! Still, it was pretty obvious that Mom had her eyes on the newbies, that Olivia was going to be on her own soon enough, fighting or no fighting.
Right after the movie came out, the court case when Olivia sued for emancipation started.

  But the funny thing was, in the movie, Olivia had so many friends. There was her best friend from her neighborhood, the girl she met in dance class and would never leave behind, who tap-danced (badly) through her “Rock Pop Rocks” number, not to mention a posse of managers, stylists, and choreographers who claimed that they were just a bunch of big love-balls orbiting Olivia. Selfless fans with nothing but her best interests in mind. The movie closed with Olivia looking at the camera and saying, “If I can make one person happy, I’ve done my job. I just want to make the whole world a little sweeter.” Air-kiss and fade to black.

  Jeremy texted me as the credits rolled: “Does the iguana get to live?”

  I wrote back: “I don’t know. Do you call that living?”

  Jeremy responded: “LOL. Hope ur feeling better.”

  And that was it.

  I decided that I had camped out long enough. The next day I would put on my big-girl pants and go back to the set. It didn’t matter that I still felt embarrassed, that I had no idea what I was going to say to Jeremy when I saw him. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do with the stupid handbag; the fine print of its receipt read: Can only be returned for store credit. Not even kind of helpful. But if watching Kandy Kisses taught me anything, it was that you couldn’t trust what you saw, no matter how beautiful it looked. And if everyone was going to pretend to be a little better off than they actually were, a little more sure of their place in the world, I might as well join the party.

  14

  I was trying to make myself inconspicuous on the set, tucked in a hallway and reading a book that was supposed to be from the perspective of Sharon Tate’s family. The book imagined how all of Tate’s relatives were just going through the motions on a regular day when they got the news about their daughter, their sister. She was murdered the night before what was supposed to be her baby shower; presents had been wrapped: baby boots, blankets, a bassinet. And then the phone rang and their lives changed forever. The Manson murders took America by surprise, and in particular, this one family. I knew what it was to hate the telephone, to have this low level of dread every time the phone rang or a message showed up at the wrong time of the night. Since my mom told me she was sick, all news was potentially bad news.