American Girls(32)

“Don’t they sell jeans?”

“Of course they do, but I want you to stand out. I’ll bring jeans, too, but keep looking at the dresses, see if there’s anything that you could tolerate, okay?”

There were racks and racks of dresses in my size, some used and some new, and I tried to find five or six that seemed like something I would not ridicule if I saw them on another human being. Sometimes I do better if I can pretend that I’m someone else when I look at myself in the mirror, just unfocus my eyes and act like I’m some random person wandering down the street, bumping into some chick named Anna who just started my school, then I’m usually a little more okay with how I look. I’m not actively offensive—in fact, there are times when I’d even say that I look nice, if it’s not me doing the talking. So I shopped like I was shopping for alterna-Anna, this chick who landed in Hollywood and played poker with the stars. What would she wear?

I must have been deep in the delusion, because I bumped arms with a fellow shopper.

“Excuse me,” the man said, giving me a super-creeper grin. The dude from the vegan café, with nothing in his arms and no reason to be up close and personal, not in this place.

I turned to look for Delia, who was across the store, flipping through rows of jeans.

“Is she your sister?” he asked. “She’s very lovely.”

I didn’t say anything. I beelined for Delia and told her that we needed to leave. Now.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “After you’ve begged me all week to take you shopping? Are you sure you’re not on drugs?”

“It’s just—” I started, but by then the creeper was right beside us. He held his hand out to my sister, who ignored it until he dropped it by his side. But he didn’t stop staring at her, like his inner carnivore had found the steak of his dreams. For all I knew, he was the one leaving notes on her door. I didn’t like it, not one bit.

“I couldn’t help but notice you,” he said, sidling even closer. “Are you represented? Because I think I could do wonderful things for you,” and I would have bet my last dollar that he wasn’t talking about movies.

My sister, for her part, kept looking at the jeans, avoiding eye contact and acting as if this was business as usual.

“She has an agent,” I said. “Okay?”

He ignored me. The cashier was checking something on her phone, oblivious. Then, without so much as a glance in the creeper’s direction, Delia said in her most matter-of-fact voice: “I think you can see that I’m shopping for a friend’s birthday, and you can respect that this is something I intend to finish this afternoon.”

No muss, no fuss. The creeper didn’t leave.

She kept ignoring him, talking to me like he wasn’t even there.

“These are great jeans,” she said. “Have you tried them? I think they fit almost well enough to justify the price.”

Finally, the creeper relented. He exited the store, still checking back to see if my sister was looking.

“That was awful,” I finally said. “What was wrong with that guy?”

My sister shrugged like he was some pesky mosquito.

“If you ignore them,” she said, checking the price tag on one of my dresses, “they generally go away. My shrink told me once that for some people, all attention is positive attention. I don’t give creatures like that my attention.”

What a strange way to live. No wonder she barely rolled her eyes when I mentioned the car parked outside her house the other night, or the crazy lady who was definitely not just confused about the address of some party, or when I wanted to talk about our mom’s surgery. Either she was a Zen priestess or she was completely delusional.

“Now try these on,” she said, pointing to the pile of dresses in my arms. “I want to be amazed.”





9

For the next two weeks, it seemed like my sister was never around. She claimed to be auditioning for a pilot and reshooting more of the zombie flick, but I had a hunch she was trolling around with Roger. Dex would send me on errands on the Chips set to keep me busy, and then we’d hang out and wait for Delia in the evenings. There was no way I could forget about my family, but I did start to forget about school. I forgot about it so epically that when I got an e-mail from Mr. Haygood, subject line: FINAL?, it took me a good two minutes to figure out whether or not it was spam. It wasn’t. Mr. Haygood wanted me to “stay on track,” as August was “rapidly approaching.”

“Shit!” I said, and then, “Sorry. I mean crap.”

Dex shrugged his shoulders. “What gives, young one? You gonna let me in on why the only books you read are about serial killers?”

The question threw me enough that I told Dex my first lie. I said, “I’m supposed to be writing a final paper for my history class about Los Angeles and some event that changed America, so I picked Charles Manson.” He gave me a funny look, and then I added, “And I’m supposed to find out everything I can about all the people who were involved.” Dex got that peculiar squint around the eyes that adults get when you can tell that they’re not sure what’s happening in schools anymore, and then he smiled and said he’d help me brainstorm. One thing I know about grown-ups—they’ll believe anything is a real assignment if you say it with conviction. I could have said, “I’m supposed to be pretending to be a Manson girl for my drama class and writing it up,” and he probably would have gone along with that as well.