American Girls(27)

“You’re making that up.”

“Uh-uh. And Olivia was, like, five, and they made her dance with these crazy flowers in her hair, and they’d already picked out some old dude for her to marry. Only they didn’t call her Olivia,” he said, and then made a nonsensical sound that made it pretty clear that his career was going to stay in acting, not singing. “That was her name.” He paused and then made another ear-splitting noise. “And that was mine. I still remember.”

“Seriously?”

He started laughing.

“Nah,” he said. “But I had you going, hustler. My mom did almost make us become Scientologists a few years ago. But my dad threatened to sue her for custody.”

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think Jeremy was capable of making a joke, not a real one, at any rate. My sister was pretty and funny when you got her going, but I always thought that really beautiful people were kind of like stuffed animals, like they sat in corners and didn’t say much of anything, because people loved them anyhow. But Jeremy was actually funny.

“I gotta go,” he said. “I want to read the screenplay sometime.”

“Yes,” I said, “definitely,” and I tried to repeat the crazy noise that he’d made.

He gave me a high five, and headed for the parking lot.

I was $125 richer, but it felt like a million. Next time we went to the hippie grocery, I could spring for some serious organic chocolate. Jeremy Taylor had made conversation with me like I was his favorite person in the universe, at least for a minute. And while it felt great, all I could think about was whether or not I would look better if I took off my glasses, if there was some way to slide them over my head and show that, look, just like the movies, I was secretly a knockout underneath. Only I wasn’t one of those movie characters who wears glasses and pretends to be ugly, I was just a regular person who probably didn’t look all that different either way. Not that I would really know, because I couldn’t even see my own face clearly without my specs. I never could get used to putting contact lenses on my eyeballs, so the whole instant makeover hadn’t been an option.

Normally I didn’t care because I’d never known any different. I started wearing glasses when I was three years old. One afternoon my mom was playing with me, and my right eye just kind of rolled in toward my nose. Freaked her out. My parents took me to the doctor, scared that I had a tumor, but I had just started showing the signs of being as farsighted as I had probably been since birth. They got me glasses that were hip and cute, the kind adults like, but glasses are glasses. No kid has ever said: “Look at the hot new girl with the glasses. Maybe she’ll have braces and a clubfoot, too!” I think it made me cautious about other kids, because I was always one screwup from becoming “Four Eyes” on the playground. Those were the facts, like a card hand that you couldn’t fold. But beauty wasn’t everything. I could still be the kind of girl who beat a table full of movie stars at poker. If I couldn’t be dateable, I could at least be respected. I was like the lady Godfather of plain-girl self-awareness.

But in that exact moment, I wished I were just a tiny bit more lovely. I wanted Jeremy to cancel whatever plans he had for the rest of the evening so that we could go waste our winnings together. I wanted him to look at me the way men looked at Delia.

“You been sitting here this whole time?”

The writers’ meeting must have ended. Dex slapped me on the shoulder.

“Kind of?”

“You disappeared for a while. Not gonna ask. So long as I bring you home in one piece. And don’t let those players take you for all you’re worth.”

I gave him my most angelic, innocent look and said, “I’ll be careful.”

*

On our way home from the set, Dex and I usually ordered takeout or went through the cafeteria bar at one of the health food stores to make sure Delia was fed and watered when she got home. Whether she ate or not during the day was anyone’s guess, but I’d have put my meager winnings on no. Dex would let me sit in the car and read, or text Doon, or write notes to Birch while he shopped. I was pretty deep into my research for Roger. Every night I sent Roger an e-mail about what I’d been reading, and he’d send back some one-word response like “Received.” All warm and fuzzy. I wasn’t sure he was even reading my reports, but I was keeping a log of every hour that I spent working on the project. Last time I checked he owed me two hundred bucks.

Since I couldn’t pay for groceries with an IOU, Dex bought just about all the food. He never complained about springing for things, not like Delia, which should have made me feel like less of a mooch but did the opposite. Maybe he had signed up for one of those 1-800 numbers that came on late at night—his heart moved by pictures of starving actresses and their siblings. For thirty dollars a night, you could sponsor two ladies in Los Angeles. Before he braved the hippie grocery, I offered him some of the money I’d won. He waved me off like I was the crazy one.

While Dex was in the store, I read the last book Roger had given me and listened to an interview that Doon had downloaded where Karl Marx, the singer from Freekmonkee, was talking about LA. Karl Marx liked that LA was trashy around the edges. He said in a whisper-soft voice that LA was always pretending to be something better than it was, and that made it always the same. The music they were recording was about the emptiness in the air. The emptiness was inspiring. Fill the void with the void. At the end of the podcast he played a song they’d been working on, and it was so dark and beautiful that I closed my eyes and forgot for a minute that I was in a car in a grocery store parking lot. I hadn’t understood everything he’d said in the interview, but when I listened hard, I could feel that space they wanted to fill.