American Girls(35)
“Remind you of your cult days?” I asked Jeremy.
He did his best dead-eyed hippie impression and said, “There were no fries with my burger,” and he sounded just like Barbara Hoyt. The guy could act when he wanted to, and even though it didn’t even make sense, we cracked each other up the rest of the afternoon asking for burgers and fries.
I told myself that I wasn’t falling for Jeremy just because he was beautiful, because then I would have been as bad as anyone else out here, right? Dex moved his mouth while he was reading the lines he was writing, for possibly the world’s stupidest television show, and I kept wondering if there was some planet on which Jeremy was on some other couch, thinking about how when I turned eighteen he could fly me out to LA to live with him. Mars or Jupiter, maybe. Pluto. Not even a planet. Because I didn’t look like Delia. Beauty was such an unfair advantage. In the great balance scale of life, whatever I had to offer was always going to come up short next to someone like her. Everything was so much easier for her, and she didn’t even have the gratitude to stick around for her awesome life. It almost made me want to break the bad news to Dex: “My sister is probably cheating with her ex.” Or at the very least: “My sister is lying to you.”
That would have solved at least one of my problems—I can just about guarantee I’d have had a plane ticket back east.
10
Reading about the weird and savage Hollywood that came out at night was starting to get to me. When my sister dropped me at her place, I would lock the doors and then move a chair in front of them. Since our shopping trip, I felt like I should at least try to stay out of her hair in the evenings, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to admit that I was more spooked by the night, that the wind could sound as sinister as a hand rattling a doorknob, that I felt like at any moment there could be a pounding at the door, and I’d be huddled in the bathroom again, party or no party. I hated that I never sat on her porch and watched the moon, the way Delia talked about doing when she was alone and wanted to feel at peace.
One night my sister was in such a hurry to get out the door that she left her computer up and running, her opened e-mail spread across the screen just daring me to read it. I resisted the urge to eyeball the messages from her obviously lengthy history of Internet dating, but I opened the ones from Roger. And I wasn’t spying on her because I was nosy. I was nervous. Too much reading about the secluded nature of 10050 Cielo Drive, how people down the hill from the house said that they had heard nothing, but others reported that the screams had carried for three or four miles. And then there was the fact that the same car kept idling outside the house at night. I saw it once, a boxy red Honda that sped away when I peered out the front window. My sister said they were probably just lost, but I knew better. If she didn’t have the sense to be scared of the people around her, I did.
Roger’s e-mails to Delia were about as short as the ones I got from him, and just as badly written. It is like blood, this hurt I have for you. You and my art are the same, ripped from this place I do not know. How would I be without either? I wonder. I have no answer. Crappy English, but I knew creepy even in translation. And Roger spoke the universal language of sketchball. Fluently. The last one he had written Delia early last week: You are like a haunted place I cannot exercise. I hate and am drawn to at once. It took me a minute to get to exorcise, which made the whole thing funny but not. And my sister never wrote him back. Not once. The last one had some weird quote about “the devil making the light more real” attached to the bottom. I closed her computer and hid it under a pillow. For all I knew Roger was hexing us both.
When I was a lot younger, my mom took us to church all the time. We went to this super-evangelical church until I came home one day singing, “I’m no kin to the monkey,” and my dad said that was the end of that. The churches we went to after that were a lot less scary, but I still remembered the things we’d been warned about at the church: Satanists, Ouija boards, reading the wrong book or listening to the wrong song and accidentally letting the devil in. My mom, who was otherwise pretty new-age friendly, didn’t think anyone should mess with Satan, and the more I read about the Manson case, the more I didn’t think anyone should either.
At night, my sleep was all messed up. I had nightmares about the white nightgown soaked red, these happy, smiling vegetarians who thought nothing of putting a knife in the belly of a pregnant lady. And they probably weren’t any different from the long-haired actress wannabes at Whole Foods making sure that their meat was cruelty-free. I worried that I shouldn’t have been reading about the murders at all, that I was catching some sinister wave and something might happen to Birch, or my mother. Maybe my mom was right in keeping me a whole continent away from her while she recovered. I felt like telling my sister and stupid Roger to forget the whole thing. It’s not like Olivia Taylor was going to show up and pay me for the bag, plus interest. The thousand dollars I owed felt more like a million.
My sister almost caught me reading her e-mails the morning I told her I’d had enough with playing Home Alone. I slammed her computer shut and practically winded myself running to the sink to get a glass of water when I heard her keys at the door. Even though the clock blinked seven forty-five, she had the messy hair and flushed cheeks of someone who had been up since before dawn, working out. She flopped onto the couch and stretched one leg into the air, close to her nose, then the other.