American Girls(13)

Sometimes when Birch was doing something accidentally hilarious like trying to eat a shoestring, I’d ask my mom what I was like when I was his age. She told me that she wrote everything down in my baby book, but I wanted to hear what she remembered. Well, she said, You were terribly smart. We could tell that from day one. And we could always see what you were thinking. Your eyes would get wider and brighter and you’d lunge for something, or start dancing like a lunatic, and your father and I would laugh and laugh and laugh.

I could sort of see myself being like that, but the thing I couldn’t picture was my mom and dad laughing like she said they did. It was like someone telling you about a trip they had taken, somewhere far away and fabulous, only when you went to visit it yourself the weather was lousy and all the good places were closed. I thought about the movie my sister was working on, and how it sometimes felt like my life was the transplanted part of everyone else’s life. Something that could be cut out, or grafted on, but didn’t really serve a purpose on its own.

“It’s not the five hundred dollars, is it?” I finally said.

Lynette was silent for a long time. I listened to her take a deep breath.

“If you need to come home,” she said, “just let us know.”

Five minutes ago I’d wanted nothing more than to stay in LA all summer, but the longer I talked to Lynette, the less it felt like paradise. What I wanted, maybe, was for home to be real, for it to be as easy as taking a plane ride home to make anything better. But it wasn’t, and I think we both knew it.

“Okay,” I said. “Can I send Birch pictures?”

“Of course. Send him anything you want.”

After I got off the phone, it was still working but I didn’t feel like calling anyone. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything except for staring out my sister’s big open window and wishing there were someplace out there for me to land.





4

A garbage truck outside the bedroom window woke me up at six forty-five. My sister was already in the shower, and it was good to know there were signs of life on the roads other than stalkers leaving late-night messages. All the houses on my sister’s street had high fences and thick trees, protecting private pools and tennis courts. Cars cruised the streets but half the homes seemed like the lights were on timers, the garages closed for the season. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t neighborly.

I checked my e-mail and found the note from my history teacher that Lynette had told me was coming. Mr. Haygood was about a million years old, and he taught the one elective that I was allowed to choose—History and Culture, an excuse to read books, watch movies, and talk about America. He was bald and always wore polo shirts where you could see his outie of a belly button poking through, but he made history a thousand times less boring than in a regular class. When we studied the 1920s, he pretended that cell phones were illegal and made half the class narcs, and then he had us read The Great Gatsby. We spent most of the year talking about things like the Red Scare and the American dream, and whether or not America’s really that great after all. Doon’s dad said all the teachers at my school are communists. Delia, who had Mr. Haygood when she was in school, said he was an “acid casualty.”

At first I thought that there was nothing attached to the e-mail he had sent, a mistake or an academic get-out-of-jail-free card. But then I saw there were two sentences: Talk to me about something in the last fifty years that really changed America. Duh, that was too easy. Hello, 9/11. Then after that he’d written, And while you’re at it, what’s so great about Los Angeles? This is why I didn’t want to leave my old school, because Mr. Haygood wasn’t afraid to ask a question that a person might actually enjoy answering.

Mr. Haygood said that we shouldn’t be afraid of ideas or words or things that challenged us—not in movies or in the news or in school. When we finished The Great Gatsby, the last day of class, he asked, all sly and crafty, “While we’re on the topic of all things prohibited: Is there any chance that Nick Carraway was in love with Gatsby?” You could practically hear half the class snickering, not that it was funny. I technically had two moms, and I could have told all of them that it wasn’t exactly stand-up comedy. But Mr. Haygood waited the laughter out, and by the end we wondered if maybe he wasn’t right. Gatsby sure was more interesting than Daisy, or that weird golf pro who was always lounging around and passing herself off as a love interest.

There were no classes like Mr. Haygood’s at Doon’s school, the school where I was headed in the fall since my parents had decided that sending me to private school was a waste of their ever-evaporating money. I knew what Doon read in her classes—boring books approved by the state of Georgia. She was always telling me about some book that got banned because a parent thought it was a scandal to read the word “damn” or “booger” or something stupid like that. All that was left in the library, Doon claimed, was young-adult lit as written by Barney the Dinosaur. No thank you. And there was no way they talked about which team Gatsby was batting for. Not on this earth.

“Worry about that later,” my sister said, pointing at the door. “Move. Now.”

Her boyfriend was back in town, and she was all hot and bothered.

Overnight, the BMW had vanished and the Jetta that my mom had sold my sister after Birch was born had materialized in the driveway. Delia didn’t say anything about the switch, so I didn’t ask. The inside of the Jetta reeked of cigarettes. Delia spritzed on some perfume that smelled like window cleaner, shook her hair out of the ponytail, and reapplied the plum lipstick that she had wiped off for the shoot with Roger that had evidently taken place before I even woke up. My sister may not have been a zombie, but she definitely didn’t sleep.