American Girls(34)

“That movie,” I said. “Why is it a cult classic? Because Sharon Tate was in it?”

“Probably.” He finished typing and closed his computer.

“I guess it works for my paper. But I didn’t like watching Sharon Tate. It’s too depressing.”

“More depressing than reading yourself blind about the Manson girls?”

“Yes. But it shouldn’t be, right? Does that make me a terrible person? And half the time I can’t even remember the names of the other people who were murdered. I can remember Abigail Folger, because it’s like the coffee, but other than that? It’s like they just evaporate. Why are the murderers the famous people? If Sharon Tate weren’t really beautiful and already famous, I probably wouldn’t remember her name either, right? That’s messed up.”

“Indeed it is.”

“That’s it? I thought you’d have something smarter to say.”

Dex gut-laughed, which made me smile even though I hadn’t meant it as a joke.

“From a narrative perspective,” Dex said, “maybe it’s because the stories of the victims are already over. And because they hadn’t done anything wrong, there’s really nothing left to learn from their lives, right?”

I wasn’t sure that he was wrong, but it seemed like a terrible thing to say.

“But the story of the murders doesn’t really make any sense. It’s crazy how these girls killed all these people, isn’t it? And they look all smiley and hippie-friendly in their pictures. It’s just weird. I thought girls only killed their boyfriends and husbands or rapists. Definitely not pregnant ladies. What’s the lesson there? Women are secretly batshit?”

“Secretly?” Dex said, giving me his best faux-teacher tilt of the head. “Anna, what ever made you think that women are nicer than men? Has high school changed that much?”

I thought about Paige Parker again, and then I made myself stop.

“I guess not. But it’s kind of different, isn’t it? And why do you think they’re always talking about how pretty these girls were—not Sharon Tate, but the killers? I think they look crazy. Look at this: ‘Some thought Susan Atkins was the prettiest.’ What does that have to do with anything?”

“It doesn’t. But Sharon Tate was fine.”

I kept going back to that part of the murder, a bunch of okay-looking girls killing the really beautiful one. Not because it was creepy, but because it wasn’t so terribly hard to imagine after all. I had to remind myself that murders hadn’t been planned like that. The Sharon Tate part was an accident, a twist of fate.

“This paper. You going to write anything about race?”

“I think it’s just supposed to be about the girls.”

“But you know they were a bunch of white supremacists, right?” Dex propped his feet on the table and leaned back.

“Kind of. I hadn’t really been reading that part.”

And then I felt embarrassed, like a big, shallow, white-girl disappointment.

“Charles Manson thought he was going to take all his white ladies to some hole in the ground and then rule all the black people left after the great American race war.”

“Seriously?”

“How long have you been researching this?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks.”

“You need to be reading some different books.”

He was probably right, but I knew that Roger wouldn’t care. All he would care about is that my sister looked beautiful and haunted and had some artsy, made-up past. If I mentioned a race war to him, he’d probably start cursing me in Polish.

“Do you think Olivia Taylor is ever going to pay me back?”

“Olivia Taylor? Not a chance.”

“Seriously? But she’s rich.”

“You think rich people stay rich by giving away their money?”

“But I don’t have any money. And my dad is going to kill me when he finds the charge for that stupid bag. How is it that I’ve allegedly stolen a thousand dollars and now I don’t have any money and everyone is mad at me?”

“Young one,” he said. “You are going to have to ponder that yourself. Doughnut?”

Dex knew even better doughnut shops than my sister. He told me that he only ate the ones she brought to be nice, but the really good stuff, the crazy flavors, were at Do-Joe, which was in an even more sketchball part of town than the places where Roger filmed. But the doughnuts were otherworldly. I was hooked on a bacon-and-salted-caramel twist.

“I gotta do my work, kid,” Dex said, and that meant it was time for me to pretend to read my book. I tried not to be obvious while I watched him on the couch.

If I thought about it just right, I could pretend it was Jeremy sitting there, reading one of the meditation books he toted around and smiling at me and asking how I was every once in a while. Jeremy, who yesterday afternoon had watched a video of Barbara Hoyt with me that we found together on the Internet. She was the Manson girl who ate the hamburger that was supposed to kill her, and I’d told Jeremy that she had testified against her former friends during the trials. She hated them so much that she still showed up to make sure Leslie Van Houten didn’t get parole, forty years later. But here’s the scary thing, when we watched the video, Hoyt looked every bit as crazy as the crazy girls. If you had told me that she was one of the killers, I would have said, “Of course, she’s clearly out of her mind.” She giggled about the trials and acted like she’d just made it to the finals in some idiotic reality show.