American Girls(37)

“No, he can’t. They don’t want to see old people on kids’ shows.”

“It’s not a kids’ show, and you’re twenty-six. That’s not old.”

Then she lifted her face and pulled a lone black hair out of her chin. I almost threw up in my mouth.

“It is a kids’ show, and for a kids’ show, I am old. Those are the facts. I don’t really have any more time to make it. I have to keep swinging. I have to.”

And suddenly she looked determined. Creepy-determined. I always thought of things coming easy to my sister, of life handing her whatever she wanted. Two years ago she was almost cast as a Bond girl and filmed a sitcom pilot that never aired. She worked with Roger, but she was definitely doing him the favor. Now she was strictly B movies and reality TV, with Roger’s stupid film suddenly at the top of her priority list. Maybe I just didn’t like to think that Delia could fail, but for the first time I could see that she’d thought about it. Thought hard. Even with something as stupid as the herpes commercial, there were probably a hundred other girls who’d be just as geared up to pretend to have herpes.

“I hope you get herpes,” I said.

My sister finally cracked a smile in spite of herself.

“Me too,” she said. “And if not, there’s always gonorrhea, right?”

“Or the clap. Or is that the clap?”

I couldn’t wait to pack my bag and sleep in that big, insulated condo building where you could hear your neighbors walking heavily across the floors above you, their weird sex noises muffled through the walls. I was triple-locking the doors and never leaving again.





11

By July, I’d spent most of my summer reading about people doing things so horrible that they seemed almost unbelievable. On the other hand, in this very same world there were things so amazing, so completely unlikely, that they sounded just as made up when you tried to tell them to another person. How could I text Doon, “Jeremy Taylor whisked me away from the set today to spend the afternoon with him. Just him,” without sounding like a pathological liar? A delusional lunatic? Still, that’s exactly what happened. When Dex and I arrived on the lot, we didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before Jeremy came up and asked if he could “borrow me” for the morning. Borrow me? He could have flat-out stolen me for the next two months and I wouldn’t have complained.

“I thought about you this morning,” Jeremy said. He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his plaid shorts. The shorts plus the pink polo shirt he was wearing meant that the “Chips” had been “playing golf” on deck. I had on a flowered sundress patterned with oversize red flowers and emerald-green vines, one of my sister’s choices from the consignment shop on Melrose. I felt absurdly overdressed, but Delia was right, Jeremy didn’t seem to notice. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about my grandfather.”

“Oh,” I said, not exactly sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Where does he live?”

He opened the door for me, and I climbed into a fortress of a vehicle, similar to Olivia’s but even larger. I buckled my seat belt and willed myself not to act as nervous as I felt.

“He died a few years ago,” Jeremy said after he started the car and slowly drove us out of the studio compound. “He was a great character actor in the seventies. If you’ve seen any of those old gangster films, he’s the skinny one with the droopy eyes.”

I was drawing a complete blank. I hated gangster movies.

“I’d probably know him if I saw him.”

“Definitely. He was hilarious. I still think about him almost every day.”

I’m pretty sure that he was thinking about him right then, because he got quiet and for a while we sat there in silence, moving through a part of LA that I hadn’t visited before. As much fun as it was to be on the set, I liked the neighborhoods outside the make-believe world of Hollywood, the thirty different LAs hidden inside of LA. And the neighborhoods could change so fast that if you weren’t paying attention, you could close your eyes and miss one. I was worried for a minute that Jeremy was like my sister, that he was disappearing into a bad mood that was somehow going to wind up being my fault, but then he started humming along to the opening chords of a song that had just begun to play. He turned the volume up.

“Who is that?” I asked, pointing at his stereo. “If I didn’t already know every song they ever recorded, I’d say that sounded like Freekmonkee.”

“You like Freekmonkee?”

“Um, yeah. That would be an understatement. My best friend, Doon, knows more about them than their own parents.”

“Cool. Josh hates them.”

“He hates Freekmonkee? And you let him live?”

“He’s working on his rap CD. I guess they’re the wrong kind of Freek-ee.”

If my dad had made a comment like that, I would have groaned, but Jeremy’s jokes were cute even when they bombed. And the thought of his brother making a rap album was actually hilarious, though I was pretty sure that being the first to laugh at that idea was not a strong move.

“So what is this?”

“It’s the new Freekmonkee. Lost in Space. They have the same label as Olivia, so she got me a copy.”

“Get. Out. Get, get, get, get out.”