American Girls(21)

I liked Dex, because he never asked me what I was writing about, or told me to get off the phone. At eleven he picked me up, then doughnuts, then Chips. I met Josh and Jeremy on the first day, and they were typical actors in that they were both shorter and more handsome than they looked on TV. Everyone on staff seemed to realize that Chips Ahoy! was like the chest acne of children’s television, best covered up in the hope of growing out of it soon. I guess if you have sixteen-year-olds making a show where they are supposed to be twelve-year-olds and marketing it to six-year-olds, there’s bound to be some major rolling of the eyes.

However stupid the show was, the set was impressive. All the action took place in one of three locations—the deck of the boat, the living quarters down below, or an ever-changing island location that was really just the same place, only they moved the palm trees around. The three spaces were always brightly lit when they were shooting, but the minute the lights went out everyone deserted the set for a winding maze of half-furnished rooms where they did table readings and played video games. When they weren’t filming, I liked to walk around the set, trying out the chairs and sofas for size like I was Goldilocks. Sometimes I took pictures to send to Doon so that she could show them to Birch: me outside the building where they filmed, making wacky faces, a lizard that wandered inside, or the spread of cupcakes on the snack table.

One afternoon, when everyone was on a break, I was snooping around the Chips living room set. I sat on the rocking chair where the butler/steward napped while hijinks ensued, and there was a lump under the pillow so big and uncomfortable that I was sure I’d broken something. I put my hand under the cushion and pulled out a rubber penis the size of a banana. I’d never even seen a penis except when Doon and I would sneak-watch the porno channels, and I couldn’t help it, I threw it off the chair like it was someone else’s used tissue. It bounced three times before landing next to Josh.

“What’s wrong, you don’t like Pinky?” he said, picking it up and waving it between his legs. “Did you know that makes you today’s lucky winner?”

He’d never addressed me directly before, and it sounded strange, to hear him talking about a fake penis like we’d known each other forever. Like we knew each other at all.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really. We hide it somewhere every episode to keep from dying of boredom. You find it, you get to hide it next.” He held it out and handed it to me like it was no different from a deck of cards. I took it, to prove I could, and tried not to look too hard at the details, the veins etched across the outside and the dirty pink lines that marked the ridges. I walked over to one of the bookshelves and placed it there sideways and dick-end-out so it would look like a toy or a weird bookend from the audience.

“Nice,” Josh said. “You get extra points if the audience can actually see it.” Then he walked away like we’d been talking about the weather.

From what I’d seen, Josh was the more chatty of the twins and spent most of his day playing host to various hipsters who lounged around and smoked cigarettes when they weren’t filming. I hated cigarette smoke, and hid out in one of the hallways when I wasn’t with Dex or watching them shoot. Every once in a while, Jeremy would come into the hallway as well and play video games on his computer. He was quieter than Josh, and when I looked up he would smile at me and ask what I was reading, or how things were going.

The other day we’d had an actual conversation about LSD. I told him about something crazy I’d read that afternoon, about how in the fifties the United States government had allowed tests to take place on unsuspecting people where they gave them so much LSD that the drug completely erased all memories of their past. And not only that, the doctors then convinced one of the men that they’d brainwashed that they’d killed his mother, even though she was perfectly fine. X-Files crazy and totally true, and Jeremy said it figured that the government would do something like that. The LSD talk was the longest conversation I’d had with Jeremy, and I think I held up pretty well. I pretended not to notice that television did not even kind of do him justice, that no matter how much I made fun of Chips Ahoy! with Delia, part of me was stupidly, ridiculously happy that he was talking to me.

Technically, Josh was the better-looking of the twins—he was about a half inch taller, and his features were perfect. Jeremy had a sliver of a scar over his right eyebrow, and his skin broke out along his hairline from the makeup they wore—tiny flaws that were visible in person, but not on-screen. But Jeremy had the better voice, low and calm, and when he smiled he raised the eyebrow with the scar. By day three on the set, I had developed an embarrassing crush.

The twins were part of a Hollywood dynasty. They had just turned sixteen to little fanfare in March, I guess because with their fan base it paid to seem younger. I had thought they were twelve or thirteen, but I really didn’t watch Chips Ahoy! Their mom was a famous groupie who had written a tell-all about all the men she’d slept with in the early nineties. Doon and I had passed her mom’s old copy of the book around at the pool last summer because the sex scenes were pretty detailed. It was strange looking at the twins and thinking, I have read about your mom’s genital warts. I know which eight-thousand-year-old Rolling Stone your mom went down on. I am trying hard to forget that you were conceived in the back of a tour bus during an AIDS relief show.

And they had an older sister, Olivia, who was the result of a fling with a Japanese rock star that ended in a house burning down. Olivia Taylor was so popular when I was in elementary school that Doon had two Olivia Taylor lunch boxes, and convinced her mom to buy tickets for every night of her show when she played Atlanta. Only last week, she’d been in the tabloids smoking pot and pulling her eyes into an over-the-top Asian slant, which she said was not racist, since she actually was half Japanese, but it still wasn’t doing anything to bring her half-dead career back to life. The twins were the ones on the rise, and you could almost see in the pictures on the gossip sites how much she cared, that it was killing her to see these two little shits riding the wave of her success, cashing in while she was going broke.