American Girls(24)

The store walked the line between chic and totally destroyed, and the clothes looked like they could have been from Goodwill, if Goodwill charged a hundred and fifty bucks for a T-shirt.

“This would look amazing on you,” she said, holding up what I thought was a shirt but soon realized was a dress. “You would look like someone deserving of a solid bang on the third date, am I right? I heard that southern girls were all sluts at heart. Back-door gals because the front’s for Jesus or your husband or something.”

She stopped short and looked at me. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”

The salesgirl nearest me was trying not to laugh. It was so embarrassing to hear it, and in that exact moment, as I felt the heat spread like brush fire over my face, I hated Olivia Taylor. She was a horrible, horrible person. I hoped my credit card was declined. I hoped someone scanned her toxic-waste-heap of a brain and leaked that to the press.

She, on the other hand, had already moved on.

“This,” she said, and handed me a duffel bag with a geometric pattern across the front, two large metallic straps that went over the shoulders. “This is the one you have to have. I told you it would be perfect. Flawless. Love, love, love it.”

She wasn’t even looking at me, or anyone else in the store when she talked, she was like a tornado, swirling and touching down, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that her movements were arbitrary, that I was nothing more than some trailer park she might destroy before disappearing back into the clouds.

“You have to buy it,” she said. “I know it’s just what your daddy would want you to have for your birthday. She’s turning sixteen.” She mangled “daddy” like it was the filthiest word in the English language, like she’d finally found something that caused her physical pain to say. The clerk pretended to care. She probably saw this kind of mania three times a day, seven days a week. I always thought that people in LA must be in awe of the fame, of the random interactions with the people you only saw on-screen. Now I could see that it was probably just exhausting.

I pulled out the credit card that I was supposed to use only for emergencies and bought a $498 green python bag. It was more than I’d ever spent on anything in my life, including the plane ticket before taxes. My hands shook as I forked over the card. I’d almost wished the card had been declined, but now that it had gone through, I had visions of my dad getting a call in Mexico that there was a strange charge from Los Angeles. They were probably alerting the credit card police even as the store clerk slipped the bag into a felt pouch, and then a larger bag, and handed me the package.

“Do you want the receipt or should I put it in the bag?”

I looked at Olivia, who was pulling her hair across her face and practically making out with her phone. She waved me off.

“I guess I’ll take it,” I said.

The clerk handed me the paper, and I half tried to pass the receipt to Olivia, who brushed me off again and kept talking. I put it in my purse, and got the weird feeling that I had done something very, very wrong.

I tried to ignore her, to figure out something to do with myself that didn’t look sad and idiotic and alone. The iguana was running laps around the front counter, and the salesgirls had stopped smiling.

I stood by the still-locked door to the store as two girls in cutoff shorts tried to open it, failed, peered inside, and moved on.

Across the street, above a salon that advertised fifteen-dollar manicures, another billboard for Volt blocked the sun. The same blond actress in the same white tank top stood with her hands in front of her, balancing a stethoscope against a handgun. She was trying to look serious and sexy and smart all at once, but mostly she just looked as fake as her fluorescent-green eyes—like every other actress on every other billboard trying to look serious and sexy and smart. My sister said that the show was about a neurosurgeon who had been hit by lightning as a child and could see the future when patients were dying. She could decide whether it would be better if they lived or died. At least, that was what the show had been about when she read for it. By now, Delia said, the show might just as easily have been about a nurse with an electric vagina. Looking at the actress’s face, it could have gone either way.

“Texting your friends?” Olivia said. “I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to tell them who you were shopping with. Did you send pictures?”

She took the phone from my hand, like she owned it, and read aloud, “‘Out shopping with Olivia Taylor.’ See? This is why I have to check everything. You can’t make any money for that, you know.”

“I left without telling anyone where I was going,” I said. “It’s to my sister.”

“Of course it is.”

She handed me the phone the same way she had taken it, like it was more hers than mine, like she was entitled to anything she could put her hands on, just because. As the salesgirl unlocked the front door, she gave me a “Good luck with that” kind of smile. I gave a “Pray for me” widening of the eyes in return.

On the way back to the set, I watched Olivia Taylor text with both hands and her elbows on the steering wheel, and tried not to think about the fact that she hadn’t made any mention of the hundred dollars she’d promised me, let alone how to pay me back for the bag. And as we drove farther from the store, the prickly unease that I had been feeling became something hard and dark. I felt something that I’d only read about in books, the kind of cold that ices your insides when something terrible is just about to happen. I remembered a picture that Doon had said we should figure out how to send but never did, a fake selfie of Paige Parker with rope around her neck and whited-out eyeballs, and I wished that someone could have done the same to the so-called terrible pictures of Olivia Taylor. I knew that part of me wouldn’t have cared at all if something really bad had happened to Olivia—worse, part of me wanted it to. And just for a second, maybe because it was California and you could understand how truly vomit-worthy fame could be only when you were right up next to it, I almost, kind of, understood what it might have been like to be a Manson girl.