American Girls(45)



“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

“And if you can find Iggy and get him in his cage, he’d probably thank you, you know, if he could.”

“I’m sure even iguanas have their ways,” I said, and he pointed a “gotcha”-style finger at me.

Part of me wanted to hear what he was saying to his sister, but I didn’t want him to think I was being nosy, so I decided to hunt for Iggy first. I’d never seen Olivia’s bedroom. For a minute, I thought about something I’d read about the Manson family, that before the murders they broke into people’s homes, sometimes while they slept unaware, and rearranged their furniture without taking anything. “Creepy-crawling,” they called it. I’d thought that the whole point was to scare the unsuspecting residents when they woke up, but walking around Olivia’s house, I wondered if there wasn’t a thrill to poking around the house itself. Going through someone’s drawers could be as intimate as reading their diary, and I was about to see not just Olivia’s room, but also in some weird way, a part of Olivia herself.

Before I opened the door, I thought about episodes I’d seen of Hoarders where even the bedrooms were overrun, where some crack team of investigators found the outline of where a human being could sleep on a bed otherwise piled to the ceiling with newspapers in triplicate and mold samples that had to be identified by outside laboratories. Another part of me imagined it might be an even more sexed-up version of my sister’s bedroom, with padded walls and a secret sex-dungeon entrance. But it was neither. It was messy, for sure, but most of it just looked like a regular-girl bedroom, maybe even the bedroom of someone younger than either of us. Her comforter was ballet-slipper pink, and her bed had the kind of lavender canopy over it that I had begged for when I was eight. She hadn’t made the bed, but she’d last slept next to an oversize stuffed iguana, and three or four other stuffed horses were tucked beneath the blankets. Iggy had perched himself on the back of a well-worn plush unicorn. I snatched the lizard before he knew what had happened, and once I got ahold of him, he relaxed and felt softer than I’d imagined. I could almost see why Olivia liked him.

When I went back into the living room, Jeremy was cleaning dog shit off his shoes and talking to his sister on speaker. I don’t know what they’d been talking about before, but whatever it had been, she was furious.

“Would you please quit being a douche and get my electricity back on? I’ll pay you for it when I get back.”

“You can pay for it now,” Jeremy answered. “You can look up the number.”

“Don’t,” she said, like the word had teeth, “use that AA bullshit on me. You’re not above this. You spent three nights in jail, if I remember correctly. How would you like it if that little truth was magically revealed to the press? Save your self-righteousness for meetings. I don’t buy it.”

Three nights in jail? That was the first I’d heard of that one. I couldn’t tell if Olivia was telling the truth, or if the truth bothered Jeremy. If it did, it didn’t bother him enough to take the phone off speaker. He shook his head and threw the cloth he’d been using in the garbage, and then he pointed to the iguana and gave me a thumbs-up.

“We’ve got Iggy,” he said. “Now if you could tell me where you keep the dog food.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” she asked. “Did you bring someone with you? I don’t want your whores in my house. Hellooooooo,” she yelled cheerfully.

“It’s Anna,” he said. “You met her. And she’s not a whore. She just found your iguana and put him back in his cage, so you might want to thank her.” He slumped forward onto the counter where he’d laid his phone down, and shook his head like she could see him. “You’re so angry. I don’t get how you do it.”

“I’m angry? How are you not angry, is the better question. How are you not outraged every second of your life?

“Anna,” she said, her voice lower and suddenly sweet, “you know he’s in AA, right? You know that in that stupid cult they have a rule that you have to do one nice thing every day and not get caught. My guess is that you’re that thing for Jer-Bear here. Otherwise, from what I’ve seen of you”—and she might as well have been looking me up and down when she said it—“you’re not his type.”

“Enough,” he said, in a voice so adult that it sounded like it belonged to someone else. “No more. The crazy thing is, Olivia, most days I try to do something nice for you, and I don’t get caught because you don’t even notice.”

Then there was a silence like someone had slapped her across the face. Then the beep-beep-beep that she had left the conversation.

I wanted to disappear as much as I’d wanted anything in my whole life. I didn’t care about the stupid purse anymore, or about helping Jeremy clean Olivia’s apartment, or that her electricity was off. I didn’t even care that I’d been stupid enough a few minutes before to think that Jeremy had brought me there because he really liked me. If Olivia had called me a hag, it wouldn’t have felt any worse. Not his type. I didn’t have to speak “bitch” fluently to know exactly what she meant. She meant ugly, and the word felt a thousand times more embarrassing than if she’d paraded me around in my nonmatching underwear. I wanted out of there, but I didn’t know how to ask.

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