American Girls(50)

*

The next day Delia woke up groggy and said that Roger was picking us up. She must have texted him in the night, because I hadn’t heard her on the phone.

“Did you call Dex?” I asked.

“I called him this morning. He’s coming over tonight.”

I was worried for her. Worried that Dex would start to realize that my sister had more fantastic stories than the zaniest of pilots, that he wouldn’t like her face, that I wouldn’t get to go back to the Chips Ahoy! set.

“How did he sound?” I chewed on my thumb, afraid of her answer.

“You should care about me, not him,” Delia snapped.

She was right, but she was also painkiller pissy, so I just shut my mouth.

Not even Roger could pretend that her face wasn’t a mess. He’d probably been practicing some spiel in the car about how amazing she looked, how well she was healing, but it was definitely “worse before better” territory, and when he saw her, he froze.

“That’s great,” Delia said. “We’ve finally found a way to keep you from lying to my face. Change my face.” She popped a pill and rubbed her head. “I’m still not clear on what we’re doing.”

Had it been any other day, I would have said that made two of us. But Delia was freaking me out, because her nose was so busted that not even her voice was right. As lousy an option as Roger was, riding with him was better than being alone with my sister.

“Where are we filming today?” she finally asked, but it sounded like despair, like one of those questions you ask after you’ve just had the world’s hugest fight with someone that you’re still going to see every day. My mom used to do that with my dad, before they finally split. Things would be totally biblical-apocalyptic between them, explosive arguing that not even my bedroom door and television could block out, and then when I went in the living room, my mom would look at my dad and say something like “What’s for dinner?” in his direction, all dead and defeated. Like I was deaf. Like they were these amazing actors, which they definitely weren’t.

“Darkroom,” Roger said.

“Good. Maybe it will hide my face.”

After that, Delia nodded off to sleep until we reached our destination.

“I could not get the actual space,” Roger told me, “but this is nearby. William Richard Bradford killed, who knows, maybe fifty women, and before killing them, he took their pictures. He told them that they should be models. He was going to make them famous.”

Sounded like someone else I knew, but I kept my mouth shut.

“He would cut off the tattoos, so they were, how is it you say, Jane Doves?”

“Jane Does,” I said.

“There were pictures of over fifty women on his walls.”

“So this isn’t the actual darkroom?”

“No,” he said. “I have friends who have another space. Do you think Delia…?”

He didn’t finish his sentence. I shrugged my shoulders. His guess was as good as mine as to what we were going to get when she woke up.

“Ohmigod,” she finally groaned, pulling out a bottle of pills. “What the hell have I been taking? I feel like my skin is coming off my body. These pain pills are worse than pain.” She passed the bottle to Roger.

“Percocet,” he said.

“Just throw them out the window.”

Roger rolled the window down and tossed them out.

“I didn’t mean literally, you *!”

“What?” Roger said. “I can do nothing to please you.”

“You can start by not paying to have me mugged and deforming my face. Do you have anything for pain, Anna?”

“I don’t,” I said. I was trying not to get yelled at. My sister was mental.

“We are here,” Roger said, pulling into the lot of a run-down apartment building.

Delia wouldn’t get out of the car. “How do I know you haven’t paid someone to stab me?”

“Please,” Roger said. “I promise you. You will be beautiful. This movie will be beautiful. I have it now, the whole thing came to me last night. Like God had answered a prayer. This film will be my way of saying how sorry I am.”

I didn’t care how many sketchballs were loitering in front of the building, I got out of the car. I could see my sister and Roger arguing through the window, and even the silent-film version of their relationship was depressing.

“So you’ll have a full script for me by Monday,” Delia said, exiting dramatically.

“I will do nothing else until it is finished.”

“Okay,” she said. “You take a piss, you call me first.”

“Can we please shoot?” Roger lowered his voice, like he was coaxing a rabid dog into its cage.

The apartment building was like a more populated incarnation of the Bates Motel. Long and slender, it probably had peepholes in every wall, cameras mounted in every corner. Roger unlocked the door and the inside was worse. Top sheet on the bed from the seventies (when it had probably last been washed); dead roach on the floor; the sound of someone’s music pounding through the wall.

“Can you film with all that noise?” I asked.

“Sound is later,” he said. “I am still gathering images.”

I couldn’t decide which was worse, the canned stupidity of Chips Ahoy! or the dressed-up stupidity of Roger’s image-gathering. But I did know which gave me a bigger headache. A much bigger headache. I wished I had Pinky the Penis from the Chips set to hide somewhere in the room. I could have bunny-eared it over Roger’s head when he started shooting my sister.