American Girls(25)

7

I was starting to wonder what I was doing in Los Angeles. As Olivia cruised past yet another billboard for Volt, I almost longed for the weird billboards of the South. It seemed like anyone in Georgia could afford to take out roadside advertising, and once you got outside Atlanta there was always some crazy billboard that let you know that people were made by God, not from monkeys, or that demanded the president’s birth certificate, or—my favorite—a six-year-old with a crossbow advertising the “kids’ corner” of the local gun store. Doon and I would text pictures of the best ones to each other, daring each other to call the number on the anti-evolution billboard and ask whoever answered to explain the hair on her chest, or to take Birch to the gun store to see if there was anything for toddlers. I wouldn’t have even bothered sending her the Volt pictures, they were such an obvious and boring kind of stupid.

Besides, Doon was writing me less and less. I guess she was irritated with me for leaving her stranded. And it wasn’t just her. My mom was probably going to throw a party to celebrate her Anna-free life as soon as she started feeling better, my sister was constantly busy auditioning, and to the rest of planet California, I was all but invisible. Olivia dropped me back at the Chips Ahoy! set where—shocker—no one had noticed that I was missing. Dex was in a writers’ meeting, and the twins were playing Texas Hold’em with a few of the extras. I perched on a couch end near the edge of the game, trying not to take up too much space.

“So how’d it go?” Josh asked without looking up from his cards.

I didn’t answer for a full minute because it hadn’t dawned on me I was supposed to field the question.

“Oh,” I said. “I think I just bought your sister a purse.”

“I thought you were broke.” Josh still didn’t look up, but Jeremy did, probably long enough to see that I looked dazed, like I’d been hexed by a very beautiful person who’d cast a spell on me so that I handed over my father’s credit card without so much as a “Why?”

“I guess I’m even more broke.”

Jeremy laughed a little, and then he said, “Consider yourself lucky. The last person she took shopping bought her a car.”

“Seriously?”

He raised his arm like he was taking a Boy Scouts oath. It was a gesture that the “Chips” made all the time on the show, bleeding into real life or vice versa.

“She’s a whore,” Josh said, and Jeremy frowned like he was going to contradict his brother, but didn’t. I saw the same word from the letter on my sister’s door for a second and squeezed my eyes to make it disappear.

“You know how to play?” Jeremy asked.

“Kind of,” I lied. I knew how to play, and I knew the first rule of knowing how to play is pretending that you only kind of know how to play.

“I’ll buy you in,” Jeremy said. He tossed a fifty-dollar bill across the table to his brother, who handed me a stack of chips.

My mom was a pretty serious gambler back in the day. She made it to the final table at the World Series of Poker once, and we played poker growing up the way other kids played Old Maid. I didn’t really think of myself as a competitive person, but the minute someone passed me two cards facedown, I became a shark.

“I know the rules,” I said. “But do you have a cheat sheet for what beats what?”

I was the only girl at the table and I knew that they would humor me. They would be on the lookout from then on for beginner’s luck, but I could tell that the “Ohmigod, like, is that a spade or a club?” angle was going to go far. The nice thing about poker is that lying isn’t really lying in poker, it’s just playing a game. If you let on that you’re a shark, that doesn’t make you a nice person, it makes you an idiot. There are some great female poker players, and they might have played with a few, but I knew they wouldn’t expect it from me.

I bet like a total moron and played extra dumb for the first two hands.

“I’ll help you if you want,” Jeremy said.

“No help,” Josh replied. “You bought her in. That’s it.”

I shrugged my shoulders and Jeremy gave me an “I tried” kind of half smile in return. He had the same almost fluorescent-blue eyes that made Olivia’s face so impossibly beautiful. Only his eyes were kinder, the eyes of a seer, not a judge. If I hadn’t been in shark mode, I would have felt bad that I was about to take his fifty dollars.

I started to play a little more carefully, won a few hands, and then lost big. Really big. I had three kings, but Josh had a full house. It was a miracle hand; he had an ace and the other king in the hole, and he cleaned me out except for my last three chips. I was barely going to have enough to make the blind.

“Sorry,” Josh said, but I could tell that he loved it, cleaning out the already cleaned-out girl across the table from him. I almost said, “Golly gee, shucks,” just to be an *, but I still had three chips and a chance. And in poker you make your own fate. In the next hand, I doubled my pile and then a few hands later tripled it again. Nothing crazy, but by playing tight I was holding my own while still being able to look “lucky.”

Jeremy was dealing and I got a pair of eights facedown. There was an eight on the flop and a pair of tens. It was almost a dream hand, and I knew it but couldn’t let it show. The twins were watching me like a pair of falcons. I willed my hands not to shake.