American Girls(29)
I decided to do neither, but had the sense to stop arguing.
Still, for as much as the two of them drove me crazy, sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I worried that my mom and Lynette were rubbing off on me. Neither of them wore much makeup, and they tried not to shop at the mall. Lynette had a friend who spun her own wool and made sweaters, and they were super soft and comfortable, but they weren’t exactly fashion-forward. Lynette probably would have made a good Manson girl. I could see her picking “perfectly good food” out of garbage bins and embroidering her own shirts, weaving fringe out of her stringy, unwashed hair.
If any of my clothes said “Made in China” on the tag, I got a lecture about the conditions of the kids who had to cut the patterns or work the sewing machines. And it was a tragedy, I got that, but lately when I looked at my wardrobe I wondered if that wasn’t some kind of social injustice as well—a crime against what I could look like with normal moms. And since Jeremy Taylor had taken to asking me what I was reading, or how long I was staying this summer, I was starting to care. My jeans were the wrong length for what people were wearing, and when I cuffed them I just felt like Huckleberry Finn, some ragamuffin from the South slumming around the corners of the set. I wanted something tight and knee-length, like Delia was wearing, and some T-shirts that fit better. I probably needed a haircut, too, but since I couldn’t really even afford new clothes, that was out of the question. I knew I’d never look like Delia, but if she took me shopping, there was a chance that I could be Delia-lite, the affordable model to her sports vehicle.
“Looks like Delia’s home,” Dex said. Her car was parked in Dex’s other space, even though she was supposed to be gone until ten.
“Good,” I said. “I need to talk to her about something.”
And it wasn’t the Manson girls.
8
When we got inside, Delia was already there looking like death’s torn-up sister. Half of her face was bloody, and maggots that seemed almost three-dimensional were eating out the side of her jaw. I knew that Delia had been reshooting some scenes from the zombie flick, but usually she had washed and changed by the time I saw her. Evidently, the director had gotten food poisoning, so the actors went home early. She’d kept on the makeup because she said that it made drivers much, much nicer in traffic. The sickest part was, she looked an almost creepy kind of sexy—bugs and all.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” she said to me, laughing.
It wasn’t her nicest laugh. Technically, we were still in kind of a fight. The night before, she’d dropped me off at her place, which I was liking less and less by the evening. No more notes had been taped to the door, but I heard noises in the driveway at weird hours and the nights felt long and lonely. Delia said the noises were probably squirrels, or some dog loose in the neighborhood, but that’s not how it sounded when there was no one else around. And last night, there had been a bona-fide knock at the door, then a louder knock, which I didn’t answer because I could hear the woman outside saying, “I know you’re in there.” Maybe pre–Manson project I would have considered cracking the door, but after what I had been reading, no way. So I hid, and the woman said louder, “I saw you in there. I saw you by the door.” I almost cried, I was so scared. I talked myself through how I had double-locked all the doors, then I remembered that the doors of the Tate residence had been locked the night of the Manson murders, but they had left a window open to allow the newly painted nursery to dry. I prayed that there were no weak points in my little fortress and called Delia from the bathroom, trying not to breathe because I was sure psycho-lady could hear that through the door as well.
Delia came home and while I guess she wasn’t evil about it, she wasn’t exactly nice. She pointed out that there was a roaring party two houses down, and couldn’t I hear the music or was I going deaf as well as crazy? She figured it was just a lost partier who got the address wrong, and yes, that was probably scary, but maybe not scary enough to interrupt her evening. But that’s what they said about Manson as well, that the people he murdered just happened to be at the wrong address. I told her as much and she said I was being hysterical, and that if she didn’t get some time alone with Dex she was going to lose her mind or at the very least, her relationship, so could I please be more considerate. I thought about mentioning the note I wasn’t supposed to have read, but worried that she’d ship me back home, whether my mom wanted me or not. I told her that she would probably be making excuses for how safe her house was as they chalked my outline across her apartment floor. She stayed the rest of the night, but left before I was up the next morning. I hadn’t seen her since.
“That makeup is freaky,” I said. “I don’t remember it being that gross before.”
“It wasn’t.” She was quartering an apple and cutting out the core, the same way she’d always eaten apples. “I guess they’ve decided to go a little more oozing with the zombies. Our fearless ‘director’”—she circled her fingers before landing the air quotes—“is panicking because people were laughing at the rough cut. I’ll probably still be getting calls to reshoot when I’m old enough to need the organs myself.”
“Good,” Dex said, and kissed her on the gross side of her face. “Let him suffer. I haven’t seen you in daylight in a week.”