American Girls(41)

I had no idea what Jeremy was thinking, and I didn’t want to open my eyes and find out. “Anyhow, it turned out they weren’t anonymous like Doon had said, and I guess Paige liked to cut herself and had her phone open to the texts while she was doing it, and her mom caught her. Then her mom called mine, and my mom flipped out about the abortion pic. My mom said that if she was wasting money for me to become a bully, then she was flushing money down the drain. I couldn’t explain to her that I hadn’t even meant it with the fetus picture, that even that was kind of Doon’s idea too, but I knew that if I got her into trouble she’d never speak to me again. How was I supposed to know that perfect Paige Parker was a cutter? She was the popular one, what did she have to be mad about? After that my mom treated me like I was going to go buy a gun and shoot up the cafeteria. It was horrible. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I know they acted like they were changing my school because of money, but I think they just gave up on me. Who wants to throw money at a lost cause, right?”

I’d told him the ugly truth, my entire crappy past life in Atlanta. The parts that were all my fault and the parts that were only kind of my fault. And the awful thing was, even when I was talking about Paige Parker, I was still more mad at her than sorry for her. Maybe it was meaner than I’d thought, but it was still just a stupid picture. It’s not like I’d sent her an actual fetus. And now she was ruining my life from two thousand miles away. So much for Jeremy liking me. By the time I was finished we were back on the lot, I’d probably been talking forever. I opened my eyes to see what he was doing, but he was looking out his window.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I should have given you the short version. You probably think I’m a terrible person now.”

“No,” he said, turning toward me. “I wanted to know. I can tell that was hard for you to say. Thanks for letting me know the truth. Someone told me the other day that once you say something it loses its power.” He was starting to sound like Lynette or my mom. Not a great sign. “I’m glad you wanted to come with me. Is it okay if I drop you? I didn’t realize the time and I have to get to a meeting across town.”

Great. I had officially scared him off. Maybe there was a reason no one asked me about my life. I was like some prehistoric aunt that your parents forced you to visit once a year—blabbing like I’d just learned how to talk, carrying weird lists around in my pocket, and not even all that nice at the end of the day.

“Catch you tomorrow,” Jeremy said, and he looked for a minute as if he might reach over to hug me, but didn’t. I’d gone from sad puppy to untouchable. Double great. “It was fun, Anna. I’m glad you got to see my grandpa.”

By the time I crossed the thirty feet to the entrance of the set, Jeremy was long gone.





12

The next week was busy on the set with shooting and reshooting an episode where, I’d bet my last dollar, Josh was deliberately flubbing his lines. At night, Dex wrote and I tried to finish up my research for Roger’s movie. I told Roger that I was done pretending to be a Manson girl, it was too weird, and he raised my salary to fifteen bucks per hour and told me to focus on the details around the murders. He had the girl figured out, but he wanted more background.

My sister claimed to have two auditions and then I think she was meeting Roger, but I had started to assume that she only told me what she thought I wanted to hear. If I lied, it was usually because I had a reason, but I think Delia lied for the sake of lying—it made her feel like she had a leg up on everyone. She was a strange one, my sister.

Dex was rewriting his pilot, and I helped him decide which parts sounded best. It was a drama about a single mom, a white lady in New Orleans whose husband, a black man, had been lost during Hurricane Katrina. She was raising their biracial kid and trying to figure out whether her husband was still alive or not—because his body was never found. Dex told me that he grew up in New Orleans, and his mom raised him, and he wanted to make a show that would be like a giant thank-you to her. He also said this was the ninth pilot he had written in three years, so he wasn’t exactly counting on anything.

I had stopped feeling like the 130-pound weight Delia had dumped on Dex’s doorstep. Dex and I had gotten good at working side by side, and I found myself wishing that he and my sister would be forever. I even searched the top of his dresser for a ring, but I guess that was wishful thinking. When Delia showed up, Dex talked a lot more, but they bickered about how much she was gone. My sister bickered with everyone she ever dated, so that wasn’t a shock or anything. In our family, conflict was a form of affection. Still, there was something easy about the times when it was just me and Dex, like we were family already.

“You still reading about Chuckles Manson?”

“I am. It’s pretty depressing.”

Dex laughed and thumped me over the head with the folded pages of a script, like, Duh, genius, what’d you expect it to be? Uplifting?

“I know,” I said. “I know.” For longer than you’d think possible, I’d avoided reading more about the actual murders and just read about the girls, the trials, the crazy that came before and after. But now I was knee-deep in the awful thing itself, and it made me feel dirty.

“I have a question,” I said. “Do you think he was psychic? I know he was crazy and all that, but how does a person do what he does? I don’t mean just the awful part, but making all those girls do those things.”