American Girls(55)

“You need an extra pillow?”

I nodded.

“Just knock on the bedroom door if you need anything. And if your sister ever gets like that again, promise me you’ll call me before she spends a day on a film set. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I curled up beneath the pile of blankets on the sofa and slept eleven hours straight.





15

It had been a week since he’d taken me to the hospital when I saw Jeremy again. Delia and I had pretty much moved into Dex’s, and she spent most of her time sleeping, massaging the area around her nose, and driving to acupuncture appointments to get the blood flowing and facilitate healing. When Dex was gone, she’d waste hours on the phone quizzing various friends of hers on their favorite plastic surgeons. I pretended not to hear.

During that time, if she wasn’t thinking about her own appearance, she was working on mine. She started with my hair, showing me how to braid it into a kind of funky side ponytail, thinning it out so that it had a better shape when I wore it over my shoulders. She went through everything we’d bought together and everything I already owned and lined up outfits for me like I was a toddler. She insisted that the next time I saw Jeremy I should wear the slinky black top and cuffed jeans that we’d bought on our shopping trip. She even lent me a long, vintage necklace that she said would save me from looking like I was too dressy, or trying too hard.

“Trust me,” Delia said. “That boy is not driving you all over town because he can’t afford a pet. You need to step up your game and act interested.”

“I do act interested!”

“You act like he has smallpox. I’m not saying to stop, because it’s obviously working, but you might switch it up a bit since the summer’s almost over.”

I trusted her because I had no other choice. There was no telling how Jeremy really felt about me, but she was right that in the unlikely event that he did like me, I needed counseling on what to do next.

“Perfection,” Delia said, before sending me into the world to practice my new flirting skills (smile; make eye contact; quit calling myself a “troll from Middle-Earth”). “And don’t forget to let your hair out of the ponytail when you get there and fluff it, okay?”

I nodded.

*

Josh and Jeremy were shooting when Dex and I arrived. They were dressed in these absurdly formal seersucker suits, and the butler was running around the set, jumping in fear of an imaginary mouse. “For this,” the actor who played the butler had told me the first week in his best British accent, “I went to the Yale School of Drama.” The hair people had gelled both of the twins’ hair identically to the side, and it was almost impossible to tell them apart.

“I didn’t write this,” Dex whispered.

“That’s encouraging,” I whispered back.

When the scene ended, Josh immediately started to brush the gel out of his hair, cursing underneath his breath. The jacket he wore was on the ground within seconds, and one of the crew members scooped it up like it was what she’d been put on earth to do.

Jeremy headed straight for where I was sitting, suit and hair firmly in place.

“Anna. Where have you been? Do you never check your phone?”

Something Delia had done must have been working, because Jeremy Taylor was all hot and bothered, and I appeared to be the cause. I was so nervous that I twisted the necklace Delia had lent me tightly enough that I almost choked myself.

“What? I always check my phone.”

He pulled out his own phone and shook his head.

“Undelivered,” he said. “My bad. So after I left your sister’s place—” He lowered his voice, looking in Dex’s direction. “After I left, I was worried, so I parked my car and waited to see if that Honda came back.”

“And?”

“It did.” He talked with his hands, pointing ahead like we were in the car together. “I tried to follow it, but whoever was driving went really fast.” His face reddened. I knew exactly how “fast” he drove, but it was cute that he was embarrassed.

“The car is always gone before I can even get the plate,” I said, helping him out as best I could.

“But I got the number.”

“Seriously?”

“And,” he said, with the face of a conqueror, “I have a name and address.”

I felt a little dizzy.

“And, we’re taking a break so they can rewrite the rest of this episode. Even for this show, it’s ridiculous today.”

“You think?” I said, and we both started laughing.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s go check it out. If they see us go they’ll make me stay.”

No one noticed that we were leaving. Josh’s entourage had melted out of the darkness and onto the set the minute he wasn’t shooting. The writers were huddled together with Dex in the center, the quarterback of a losing team. Once we were clear of the set, we jogged to the car, probably moving faster than we would be once the car started to roll.

“So how’s your sister?”

“Worried about her face,” I said. “I had an epiphany. I realized that my sister on painkillers is kind of like your sister on Vitaminwater.”

Jeremy laughed. “Did you go shopping?”