American Girls(56)

“No,” I said. “We went to this crazy film shoot. It was just. Crazy.”

“Same movie she was on when she got mugged? Already?”

“Don’t tell,” I said, lowering my voice. “It’s her ex-boyfriend who’s directing it. So she doesn’t want Dex to know because she thinks he’d get jealous.”

“That guy was her ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

He mulled it over for a minute. “I guess that explains it.”

Who knew what he was thinking? If Roger explained anything about my sister, I didn’t want to know.

It was late afternoon, and the traffic was heavy as we inched across town. Jeremy had one of “his people” trace the license plate, which was evidently less of a big deal than I thought it would be. A perk, he said, of having to deal with stalkers. The address wasn’t terribly hard to find, block numbers on the side of a curb, but the house itself was far removed from the road, guarded by hedges and a wide gate. Jeremy parked his car a block away, and we pretended to be walking, slowly casing the joint like a pair of unarmed teenage idiot detectives. The neighborhood seemed deserted, like so many LA houses during the day, the swimming pools abandoned, the lawns perfectly manicured for no parties, no sitting.

“I think we could climb the side,” Jeremy said, pointing to the sloping hill next to the gate. “And peek down from there. See if the car is in the driveway. If it’s really the place.”

“And then what?” I picked at the side of my nail, the way I did before tests.

“I don’t know. We could knock on the door and tell them we’ve called the police.”

“And that we’ve trespassed and then wait for them to do something even weirder?”

“Let’s at least take a look. That won’t hurt anything. There’s no one around.”

I looked at the embankment, at the totally inappropriate open-toe sandals I was wearing, at the dirt and debris and potential for sliding on my face. Then I thought about the chances that the people on the other side of the gate would have guns, dogs, surveillance cameras. I was like the opposite of a Manson girl, unarmed, unprepared, and these were the opposite of Manson times. Now most homeowners were armed and jittery, just waiting for the chance to pick off a kid who walked on the wrong lawn at the wrong time with a bagful of something sinister, like Mountain Dew. Or maybe I wasn’t so different from a Manson girl, ready to execute some incredibly stupid plan just because a boy I liked was telling me so.

“Just to be safe,” I said, “how about this. You keep watch and I’ll climb up, and I’ll let you know if the coast is clear.”

“How about if you keep watch and I climb?”

I pointed to his clothes. “You wore your set clothes. And we’re due back in an hour. They’ll have your head if they’re dirty. How are you gonna get dirty in the middle of the ocean?”

“I can take this off,” he said, stripping off his shirt before I could stop him. He was even more beautiful half naked. I was going to climb a cliff for this boy, possibly get eaten by Dobermans and thrown in jail, and for what? To help my sister, who didn’t even want to help herself.

“Ouch,” he said, starting to climb. “I guess we wear clothes for a reason, right?”

“That’s probably the idea.”

It wasn’t too far up the hill, a short climb, and frankly it made the gate by the entrance seem a little bit silly, unless the idea was to slow someone down on their way back out who’d decided to steal a car. From the top of the hill, it was easy to see the house, a flat-topped super-modern pad that hugged the side of a cliff. Three cars were parked beside the house. A blue BMW, its convertible twin, and a red Honda hybrid. The Honda was the one I had seen outside my sister’s house, but that wasn’t what made my breath catch in my lungs. The BMW and the convertible had the same magnets on the back, passes to some country club, which looked familiar to me, though I couldn’t quite make the connection.

“Duck,” Jeremy whispered, pushing me down against the embankment as a woman wandered out of the house, talking loudly on her cell phone. She didn’t appear to notice us, though we were barely hidden, and it was obvious she was upset about something. Jeremy inched closer to me, pushed my head down a bit more, and made a sign against his lips to be quiet. Like I was really going to talk.

“I’m going to check the license plates,” Jeremy said.

“Are you crazy?” I whispered as loudly as I could, but he just put his index finger against his mouth again to shush me, and every time the woman turned away from us, he moved farther down the hill. He was going to go inside the house. He was officially insane.

I’d read about how people think they can hear their own heartbeats when something really scary is going on, and I was pretty sure I could hear that plus every other weird thing my body was doing—blood rushing to my head, my mouth as it dried up, my palms beginning to sweat. I clutched my cell phone in my shaking hand, wondering if someone inside was going to catch Jeremy. He had disappeared into the open door when the woman wasn’t watching.

The next five minutes must have been forever, because no sooner had Jeremy gone inside than the woman yelled into her phone, shut it off, and headed back into the house. For all I knew, she was getting ready to Taser Jeremy and drag him to some rich-person dungeon where she’d slice him up and serve him for dinner to her Paleo coven. Best-case scenario, she’d only call the cops. How would I ever explain this to anyone without the two of us looking like juvenile delinquents, the kind of sketchball teenagers that parents warn their children about becoming?