American Girls(39)

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea. Do you need some water? Should I call Dex?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I really am. I’m glad I saw this.”

And I was, because it was important. Because I needed to keep those murders as real and sad as they actually were, or there was no point in any of it.

“But can we go see your grandfather?”

“Sure,” Jeremy said. “And we can say howdy to the Count while we’re at it.”

“If he’s there,” I joked, trying to pull myself out of the space I was in.

“Your color’s coming back,” Jeremy said. He gestured at the bottle of water he’d been carrying. I took a sip, and my mouth flooded with saliva. I willed myself not to pass out.

“I’ve never seen someone’s face really turn white. That was wild.”

“Great,” I said. “Good to know.”

*

On the ride home from the cemetery, I wrote the name Paul Richard Polanski on the sheet of paper that I had taken to carrying around with me, next to the name of his mother, Sharon Tate Polanski, and alongside Jay Sebring, Rosemary LaBianca, Leno LaBianca, Steve Parent, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. The names of the dead, which, like the gravestones themselves, could be lost all too easily in the clutter around them. I refolded the piece of paper and put it back in my pocket.

“What’s that?” Jeremy asked.

“A list,” I said. “Some names I need to remember.”

He smiled and looked at me like I was a puppy.

“It’s cute that you make lists and carry them around.”

“Really? My mom complains that it ruins the laundry when they disintegrate.”

“Can I ask you a question?” he said. We were stuck in traffic, but he looked at the convertible in front of us instead of my way when he asked, “And you don’t have to answer. Did you really steal five hundred dollars from your parents?”

He didn’t ask in a judgy way, like my sister, but I could tell that he wanted to know. I started to formulate a lie in my mind, but just as I was about to tell it, I realized that if I started down that road, I was going to wind up exactly like my sister. So I told him the truth. I broke the whole scene down for him in cinematic detail, so that if he decided that he liked me, that he wanted to keep hanging out with me, at least he’d know who he was dealing with.

I started at the beginning. The week before I took the card, my mom and dad had shanghaied me with a “family meeting” at my favorite Starbucks. I told Jeremy about how when they first split up, if either of them was late for a pickup, I would sit in the corner and listen in on people’s first dates, or the baristas bitching about who they thought was throwing up in the ladies’ room. I loved to put on my headphones and pretend to listen to music and spy. My parents decided it was a good neutral spot when they first separated, when they yelled constantly about “their needs” and who was doing what wrong and screwing me up for all eternity. Starbucks introduced the public shame factor. They learned to hate each other politely and with the volume dialed down.

“My dad and mom only communicate over e-mail,” Jeremy interrupted. “When Josh and I were kids, they would have their assistants trade us off, kind of like we were secret documents. Josh would joke that it was because if they caught us with the other one, they’d have to kill us.”

He said the last part in a spy-movie Russian accent, and I laughed.

“I’m pretty sure that if my parents could have afforded assistants, they would have been all over that.”

I could remember the details of the meeting exactly. My dad had worn a pink shirt, the button-down kind that his new girlfriend, Cindy, probably bought him. She’s a stylist, which means that she gets paid by adults to dress them in age-inappropriate clothing and then tell them that they look “hip.” Atlanta is full of tight-assed, bleached-blond women who look twenty from behind and turn around to reveal their Botoxed, eight-thousand-year-old, veiny-handed glory. Those were Cindy’s clients.

“My dad met her on the Internet, the same Internet he was always warning me about,” I said to Jeremy.

“Parents,” he said. “‘Physician, heal thyself,’ right?”

I nodded.

My mom had looked tired, but then she always looked tired. She had left Birch with Lynette, which meant that she was fiddling with her boobs to see if they were going to explode.

“Mom!”

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I forget sometimes.”

“You forget all the time.”

She closed her eyes for a minute and then opened them. I don’t think she even heard me.

“Anna,” my father said in his sad, authoritarian voice. Pink shirt, soy-latte Dad, I cannot take you seriously. “You have to start treating Lynette with respect, and Cindy as well.”

Poor, poor step-dults. My parents both looked so earnest, like they really cared whether or not I pretended not to hear Lynette when she wanted me to play Cinderella for an hour, or that it hurt Cindy’s feelings that I didn’t want to go with her to buy overpriced purple jeans for some third-tier hip-hop star. I had almost convinced myself that I could leverage the situation into a new phone, when my mom came out with this beautiful and well-rehearsed number: