Jeremy laughed, and when he touched me his palms were damp on my arm. It seemed outside the realm of the real and possible, but he was nervous. Before I could say something to get him off the hook, Jeremy took my face in both of his hands and gave me a kiss so gentle, and then so firm, that it made me forget that he kissed women for a living. He pulled back and smiled, pushed my hair off my face, and kissed me again.
“Stop thinking about your paper. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
I wanted him to kiss me again, and he did.
“Is this because I’m regular?”
“It’s because you’re beautiful.”
“I thought you said I was interesting.”
“Interesting is beautiful, put that in your paper.”
I didn’t care that it sounded like a line out of a movie. I didn’t care that no one would believe me, or that it would ruin it even to tell. I sat there under the Hollywood sign and made out with Jeremy Taylor like we were the happy ending of a really foul-mouthed romantic comedy. If a roving band of hippies had come out of the mountains and tried to cut us down, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have cared. And the only thing I can say is that it was nothing like I’d imagined. It was so much better.
“You go home tomorrow,” he finally said. “Just when we’re getting to know each other.”
“I know.”
He took his phone out and messaged me a number that he said never changed, in case I needed to get ahold of him and his cell didn’t work anymore.
“Look me up next time you visit your sister. This is going to be my last season on Chips Ahoy! I haven’t told Josh, but I can’t do it anymore.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m going to apply to colleges next year, see if I’m good at anything.” Then he smiled again and looked me dead in the eyes. “Or maybe I’ll just do more of this?” Then he leaned his body into mine and kissed me again.
If those were his future plans, they were fine by me.
19
Jeremy dropped me back at my sister’s house the next morning. I’d only stayed up all night once, when I was in summer camp, to watch the sun rise, but never with a boy and definitely not with Jeremy Taylor. He offered to drive me to the airport, but I needed to pack, to have a minute to sit and let the evening sink in, to make it real for myself before time or having to tell it to another person screwed up the moment, pushed it a little further away.
“If you change your mind about the ride,” he said, “just call.”
“I will,” I said, waving as I stood outside my sister’s apartment.
As he drove off, I tried to take a mental snapshot of the moment, the orange of the flowers blooming by my sister’s doorway, the electric hum underneath my skin. Dawn shaded the sky a dusty pink, the same color the sky had been when the cab dropped me off by the set the night before.
Day and night had no real meaning in Los Angeles. Where last night ended and today began was anyone’s guess. Morning was pinker and smelled fresher, but it didn’t really signal the start of anything. I imagined that could be as disorienting as it was wonderful, that in LA life always just seemed there for the taking, even as it was passing you by. Every week you looked up and there was another blonde with a gun on the billboard—another pair of green eyes staring into space, begging to be noticed, then disappearing as mysteriously as they had appeared. Another night meant another club opening. Another grisly murder. Another love story.
And then I went to unlock my sister’s door and realized that it was already ajar. My stomach dropped. Delia was careless, but not careless enough to leave a door open.
“Delia,” I said, trying not to sound scared. Then louder, “Delia?”
No answer.
I pushed the door open and stepped back. The inside of my sister’s apartment was trashed. Black-and-white photographs of what looked like naked bodies were on the floor. I still hadn’t seen my sister.
“Delia!”
Something moved.
“I’m calling the police,” I yelled, and tried to steady my hands to find my phone.
“Don’t,” a voice whispered. My sister’s voice.
“Delia! Are you okay? What happened?”
My sister was in the middle of her couch, cocooned in blankets and staring at the wall. She shifted, rubbed her eyes, and continued to look intently at absolutely nothing.
“You scared me to death,” I said. “You’re kind of scaring me now.”
She held an oversize cup of coffee between her knees, and she looked tired.
“What happened?” I asked. “That lady. Did she come back?”
“You could say that,” Delia said.
“Where’s Roger? Or Dex. Should I call Dex?”
“We broke up,” Delia said.
“Oh, crap. Did you tell him about Roger?”
My sister laughed, that laugh that crazy people do in the movies before they sink their teeth into the flesh of the living.
“Nope, not Roger.”
“Then why?” I asked.
“Look around,” my sister said. “Take a wild and crazy guess.”
By my feet was half of an eight-by-ten photograph that had been ripped in half. The part that I picked up showed the torso and bare thigh of a woman, wrapped around a man’s very unsexy, pale, and hairy torso. The thigh had a small cursive D tattooed in the center. My sister’s thigh. And the torso? Not Dex’s.
“What happened?” I asked.
My sister closed her eyes like the question itself gave her a headache. “Dex and I went to the wrap party. Then we went out. Then we came home and that crazy bitch had plastered my whole door with pictures.”
I felt scared and embarrassed for my sister.
She kept her eyes closed while she talked. “I would say that it took about two minutes for Dex to go from really worried to really, really pissed. We had an extra-super-shitty fight. Things were said, pictures were ripped, glasses were thrown.” She gestured around her apartment as she talked, like she was directing the scene. “And now he’s gone.”
“You need to call the cops,” I said. “She’s dangerous.”
“I’m going to move,” Delia said. “I’ll change my number. I called her asshole husband, again, and he’s changed his number, so it’s in the air. She’s already wrecked my life, the ten percent that Roger didn’t get. That’s what she wanted.”
I shook my head back and forth the whole time she talked. “That’s not enough, Delia. What if she’s violent?”
Delia handed me two intact pictures that had been facedown beside her.
“I can’t call the police.”
The first picture was of Jeremy walking around a kitchen without his shirt. I didn’t recognize the kitchen, but I knew what he’d been wearing that day. The entire place must have been rigged with security cameras. And the second photo was of a girl with her eyes closed hunched down in grass on a hill. It might have been tough to prove in court, but Delia and I both knew that it was me.
“Oh no,” I said.
“I’m not even going to ask,” Delia said. “Because it doesn’t matter at this point.”
“Is she going to have us arrested?” I was feeling sicker by the minute. “Does this mean I’ll never get into college?”
Delia laughed. “She’s not interested in you. Truly. And don’t beat yourself up too much, because calling the police probably wouldn’t matter anyhow. I thought about it, and then I heard myself saying that someone was taping pictures of me and her husband on my front door. You think the police care about things like this? I had a guy follow me to my door once, like, the kind of thing where I ran inside and closed the door and called the police, and the cop who came over accused me of being delusional. You think anyone in this town gives an actual, honest-to-God shit about me? Guess again.”
Dex did, I wanted to say. That 10 percent of your life, you ruined yourself.
But what was the point? It was nothing she didn�
��t already know. And I cared. I actually did.
“We were trying to help,” I said. “Not that it matters.”
There were other pieces of Delia across the rug. I didn’t know if she’d torn them into shreds, or if Dex had. Her perfectly manicured hand looked like something peeking out of the corner of a crime scene photo. It made me think of Olivia’s hand, wrapped almost possessively around Karl Marx’s forearm, before he unwrapped her and handed her off to his bandmate.
It seemed like everything in LA that was whole could be broken down and sold off in pieces. And maybe one day Olivia would wake up and regret her time with the band, the way my sister regretted her time with the producer. The way the Manson girls eventually regretted their time with Manson. Maybe the situations weren’t the same, not even close, but from where I was sitting they didn’t seem so terribly different.
“I did almost call the police, to see if they could find you,” Delia said.
“And said what, that you abandoned me outside a bar in LA?”
The minute I said it, I wished that I could take it back.
My sister shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want the summer to end badly because of last night. I shouldn’t have kissed Roger. I wasn’t thinking, and it was stupid. And God knows you shouldn’t have to see pictures of your sister’s sordid and ancient love life. Not that I’ll ever convince Dex of that now.”
Understatement.
She looked out the big open window while she talked, glancing up the hill every once in a while in the direction of the producer’s house, and then back at the coffee cup between her knees.
“I know you can’t stand Roger, but we have a history. I think it’s partially that he’s my ex, and that sometimes makes me feel like I have a grandfather clause for making out, not sleeping together, and I know Dex and you both would never understand, but it just doesn’t seem like anything to kiss Roger. Then—and I know that he says he wrote a role for me, but the fact that Dex’s pilot got picked up, and my nose is a disaster, I just wanted to wreck it first. He can’t cast me just because he wants to, and even he knows things don’t work that way. I won’t be the person left behind. I can’t explain what I did with that producer to him. I just can’t. People like to imagine that they get a girl who’s been depressed, or confused, or desperate, and it’s so romantic and exciting, but they definitely don’t want to imagine what she might have really done. Trust me. I know of what I speak. Tragic is interesting but only if there was no collateral damage, and there always is.”
My sister was matter-of-fact, even when her life lay in pieces around her.
“Dex wouldn’t have left you.”
She looked at me now instead of the landscape.
“But he would have. He really would. Anyone can leave anyone. And you’re probably right, he might not have left me this week, or even this month, but this is not a town built on lasting relationships. We’ll probably talk again. He might care that I have an explanation for the photos, he might not. How could I tell him about Roger after that? What purpose would it even serve? I don’t love Roger. It won’t happen again. Who’s really better off by knowing?” She gestured at the garbage at her feet. “I’d say he’s already seen enough.”
I didn’t know why my sister did the things she did. I couldn’t match the Delia on the couch up against the Delia in pieces on the floor any more than I could match the Manson girls against their crimes. Maybe she really did love Dex, and she was being stupid and afraid. Maybe she had slept with half of Hollywood, but it suddenly didn’t seem like my business to be calling her a slut. I felt bad about the way Doon and I had joked about her. I wanted Dex to forgive her. I wanted her to get a second chance, whether she deserved it or not.
“Don’t you still have to film with Roger?”
“I do, but I can control myself around Roger, believe it or not.” She gave an eye roll of self-disgust. “I even told Dex that I’d been shooting with him, before we came back here, of course. And about Mom.”
Mom.
I needed to pack, but I just wanted to sit down. My sister moved her feet and I curled up on the other end of the sofa.
“What did he say?”
“He said that I must really not trust him. Irony, right?”
“But you don’t, do you?”
“I don’t trust life,” she said.
My sister tossed her baby-blue blanket in my direction. The fabric smelled faintly of vanilla, her perfume, and I felt for a minute like I was going to cry, like I wanted to bottle that scent and take it home with me, to keep a little part of my sister close, no matter how big a disaster she was. I felt that way when I smelled the top of Birch’s head as well. He had that powdery baby smell, and I wanted to hug him so hard when he was sleeping that I sometimes worried I would break him. I could remember smelling him like that, but I couldn’t get the scent, the same way I knew that by the time I was on the plane I would have lost that feeling around the smell of my sister’s blanket.
Maybe she wasn’t the disaster. Maybe I was.
“Are you ready to go back?”
“I’m almost packed,” I said. “I pack really fast. I promise.”
She shook her head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
I knew what she meant.
“I don’t know. I kept thinking Mom would apologize at some point. And now Doon is mad at me too. I miss them all so much, and I want things to be like they were before, way before, and I know that’s not even possible because it doesn’t exist anymore. I just feel like Mom can be the nicest person and then the craziest too.”
“Because she can be.”
“But does the crazy make the nice not true? I read about all these awful families this summer, and I know ours isn’t that bad. It’s not like Dad’s a pervert or Mom locks me in a closet, but sometimes I still feel like neither of them is really trying that hard. And then I think to myself, ‘Well, it’s not like it’s their job to try,’ and then I think after that, ‘But wait a minute, yes, it is,’ and then I just get so mad at both of them that I want to run away again, only someplace farther away and with more money. Don’t look at me like that, it’s not like I’m going to do it. I want to see my brother and I want to figure out how to survive this new, stupid school, but I also want my parents to just work a little harder at being my parents. And then I just feel like a jerk.”
Delia waited before she spoke. “I think you can’t expect more from people than they’re able to give. And you’re happier if you don’t hate them for it.”
I thought about it for a minute. It was the kind of thing people said that you knew was probably true, but still didn’t help very much.
“And if all else fails,” she said, “I can loan you my credit card and you can come back next summer.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I gave her the hardest hug I’ve probably ever given her in my life, and she hugged me back just as tightly. I wanted someone to love her, too, to keep her safe.
“I almost forgot,” she said, breaking away and getting her bag from across the room. “Dex said to give you this.” She tossed a T-shirt in my direction. “Too Many Rich Crackers.” “He said to wear it the first day of school and to think of him.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll make sure to have a backup form of social suicide, though, just in case.”
Delia yawned and laughed at the same time, then went back to her place on the sofa.
“If you ever talk to him again, tell him thank you.”
“I know he’s a good guy,” my sister said. “That’s what makes it harder, believe it or not. I spent half my life swearing I would never end up like Cora.”
Her voice was soft. I thought for a minute that she was going to cry.
“Jeremy and I were talking last night,” I said. “He said the hardest thing in life is figuring out how to be regular.”
“Because he’s clearly an expert,” Delia said.
“And haven’t I been nice in not asking you where your pants are?”
“You said this was a dress.”
“Obviously, I was wrong. So where did you go? Did you two lovebirds have fun?”
I thought about trying to explain the whole night to her, but it seemed like it would just sound like the most fantastic lie.
“We did.”
“Should we have a talk?”
“It wasn’t that fun. Scout’s honor.”
I gave her the Chips Ahoy! salute and sat next to her on the sofa. The house was quiet and still, like the morning after a hurricane blew through town. Adrenaline was rapidly giving way to fatigue, and I slumped against my sister’s side, which was softer and more pliant than I’d imagined. She wrapped an arm around me and rubbed the top of my arm, slowly and rhythmically, humming a song that our mother used for Birch. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. I was almost asleep when my sister stopped humming.
“Anna. I’m not trying to make you mad, so please don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”
I woke up a little but didn’t open my eyes.
“I know Mom owes you an apology, and I know the two things aren’t comparable, but”—she paused, trying to be careful, I guess—“did you ever apologize to her? It’s not that easy waiting on a couch all night for someone, even if you are furious at said person.”
I didn’t say anything and she started to hum again, but I couldn’t fall back asleep.
“I’m not trying to be a jerk,” she said.
“I know,” I whispered.
20
My sister claims that I fell asleep again, but all I remember is sitting on her couch one minute, and the next finding myself in her car with my bags packed, looking out the window as I said good-bye to her apartment, to the summer, to Los Angeles.
On the way to the airport, my phone twitched. A one-word text appeared from a number that I didn’t know: “THNX,” followed by a picture of a tiny pink rabbit waving a sparkling wand dancing next to the letters. I scrolled through my address book when it hit me. Paige Parker had written me back. I won’t lie, I’d hoped that it was Jeremy, but at the same time, those four stupid letters and bunny made me feel ridiculously okay. The universe seemed to be saying: Thumbs-up, Anna, you don’t suck all the time!
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