American Girls(2)
1
I would never have gone after my mother with a knife, not while a credit card was cleaner and cut just as deep. It’s not like I was going after her at all—mostly, what I wanted was to get as far away from her as possible, and her wife’s wallet was sitting on the dining room table with the mail, just waiting to be opened. A person can only take so much. My mom had saged the house the week before and told me that she couldn’t even enter my room, the energy was so vile. She spent all her time with my new baby brother, talking about how he was the real reason she must have been put on this earth, that the universe was giving her a “do-over,” which made me what? A “do-under”? Once I added in the whole nightmare at Starbucks the week before—where my parents sat me down and put a price on my future like they were getting ready to list me on eBay—it seemed to me more likely that she wanted me to take the credit card. Was begging, even.
My sister, Delia, an actress in Los Angeles, told me last summer that everyone needs a “thing.” She’s beautiful, with silver-gray eyes and ink-black hair that goes halfway down her back, and a voice that sounds like she makes dirty phone calls for a living. She was almost cast as a Bond girl, but she told me that beauty isn’t enough. Everyone here is gorgeous, she said, so you have to figure out something else. You’ve got to be good at at least two things, and known for one. She’s a decent gymnast and can still cartwheel on a balance beam, so being able to do her own stunts is her “thing.” I visited her last summer, and she took me to a boutique in Santa Monica and helped me pick out a new pair of glasses for when I started high school. It is safe to say that being beautiful is not what I am going to be known for, but she told me that with the right glasses I could rule the world of “nerd chic.” I think she forgot that nerds are not, nor will they ever be, chic in Atlanta, or maybe in any high school in America. I bought a pair of thick black frames that you normally see on blind old men and wore the reddest lip gloss my mom would let me leave the house with. Flawless, my sister had said. Very French. The only person who noticed my makeover was my best friend, Doon, and she pointed out that I had lip gloss on my teeth. I didn’t get beat up, but I didn’t get asked to homecoming, either. I think my sister forgot that I don’t live in a movie, or even in France.
Stealing, contrary to my mother’s latest take on me, is not my “thing.” Now, if you asked my mother, she would probably make me out to be a criminal of the first order. To hear her tell it, I’m no better than those actresses who shoplift from Saks and whine on the news about being bored with their lives. Blah, blah, blah, You can’t be trusted. She was actually crying when my sister gave me her phone at the airport. Blah, blah, blah, How could you have violated Lynette’s privacy like that? (Ummmm. Easy?) Blah, blah, blah, I wish I’d known more about how I was raising you when I was doing it. Like I’m some kind of paragraph she wishes she could delete and rewrite, but she already accidentally e-mailed it to the world.
The good thing is that I was now in Los Angeles, while my mother was still in Atlanta with her awful wife and my new brother, Birch. How? my mother asked. How did anyone let a girl who’s barely fifteen through security at the Atlanta airport? Are you on drugs?
She yelled at my sister for a while, who pulled the phone away from her ear and stage-whispered with her hand half covering the receiver, “Don’t think this means you’re not in a huge pile of shit, Anna. Because you are.”
But huge piles of shit are relative, and it was hard to feel threatened in the Hollywood Hills, not in my sister’s apartment, at any rate, which was all mirrors and white light. The space was carefully underfurnished. The living room had a Zen fountain, an oversize white sofa, a coffee table, and not much else. The doors between the living room and bedroom were translucent, and they slid to open. Her bedroom was like a crash pad from The Arabian Nights, with embroidered pillows and velvet curtains and a bed that sat close to the floor. I think if my sister were less pretty, her apartment would have seemed kind of ridiculous—there were too many pillows and candles in the bedroom and too few decent snack-food choices in the kitchen for your standard-issue human being. Instead, it felt like the inside of some Egyptian goddess’s sanctuary, full of perfumes you could only buy in Europe, expensive makeup in black designer cases, and underwear that was decidedly nonfunctional. It had crossed my mind that my sister might be a slut, but a really nice-smelling, clean, and carefully closeted slut. Even I knew better than to ask if that’s one of the two other “things” that she was good at, though Doon and I had some theories.
“Can we go shopping tomorrow?” I asked.
“Are you deaf? You’re in some serious trouble,” my sister said. Then she laughed a little; she couldn’t help herself. “So you stole Lynette’s credit card.”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“Have you considered law school? You stole the number.”
“I used the number,” I said, annoyed that she even wanted to talk about it. “It was under five hundred dollars.”
She kept an eye on me like I might make a break for the door as she leveled green powder and yogurt into a blender. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“What’s that?”
“Greens and probiotics,” she said. “Fish oil, B vitamins, acai berry juice, and herbs from my Chinese doctor. It’s like licking the bottom of a compost pile, so let’s hope it’s doing something besides bankrupting me.”