American Girls(57)

And then finally, moving a lot faster than he had on the way down, Jeremy opened the door and closed it silently behind him, and made his way up the hill. He was halfway to where I was waiting when the door flew open, and the woman emerged. Jeremy flattened himself against the hill, and she scanned the landscape.

“I have a gun, you know,” she yelled.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep my body from trembling.

“I’m calling the police,” she shouted and held her phone in the air.

Then she went back inside, maybe to get her gun, but we weren’t waiting that long. Jeremy had made his way farther back up the hill than I had thought, and he squeezed next to me and whispered, “I left a note.”

“You left a note? Are you insane?”

“And I moved around some of the things on the counter. Like you were telling me those people did in that experiment.”

He was remembering everything wrong. There was no experiment, just the Manson family practicing their creepy-crawling, breaking into homes and watching people while they slept, moving their furniture around and leaving without a sound.

“What did the note say?” I asked.

“‘Stop,’” he said. “They’ll know what it means. They’re not the only ones who can leave notes, right?”

Next to me, Jeremy felt warm, and I would have sworn that I could hear his heartbeat as well. And while I was lying there, waiting for the cops to show up and drag us away, I remembered why I recognized the stickers on the back of the convertible, “HH” and “SSI.” It was the same car my sister had been driving around LA the week of the zombie shoot, before Dex came back into town. We were at the nameless producer’s house, or he was inside. And if there was some jealous vixen stalking my sister, she may well have been the producer’s wife. Whoever she was, I’d have bet my life that she had her reasons and that my sister knew exactly what they were. I had to remind myself to breathe.

Finally, what felt like a million years later, the woman drove the red Honda down the long driveway and away from us. Jeremy gestured at the car.

“Look,” he said. “The plates match.”

But I wasn’t looking at the house anymore. I was looking farther down the hill, across the lanes of traffic that bisected this area from the area where my sister lived. I wasn’t great with directions, but even from this far away, I recognized the gaudy lilac paint job on my sister’s back porch, almost DayGlo in the sunlight. And then I looked harder at the house, and something clicked, some sixth sense that let me know something that I didn’t need to see from the front for proof. That the windows in the front of that house were wide and open. That the clear view up and down the canyon cut both ways. The porno house. This had to be the porno house that my sister was always pointing up the hill and laughing about, an inside joke between her and herself, and I was just one more person on the long list of people to whom Delia liked to lie.

“It’s not the car,” I said.

“It is the car.”

“It’s not. We have to go back.”

“They’re the stalkers. We should go back in and move a sofa or something.”

I looked at Jeremy, shirtless, earnest, and so tragically gorgeous, and I realized that he was treating this like a sitcom, like something that was going to have a neat ending where the doors opened and the good guys won. But there weren’t any good guys, not from where I was sitting. No good girls, either.

“Please,” I said. “I want to go back.” My face was about to rain down a total loser cocktail of snot and tears. I started climbing back over the hill, no longer caring if anyone inside saw us. I just wanted out of there. Jeremy followed, saying something about how he knew lawyers who would know what to do next. He was still excited. Even TV people got excited when you did something that seemed like it would be on TV. Only it wasn’t TV, because then I could have turned it off.

“Are you okay?” he said when we got back to the car.

“I’m not. I just want to go home.”

“Your sister’s place?”

“No. That’s not my home.”

“Dex’s?”

“No. That’s not my home.”

Knowing there was nowhere to go just made everything worse. My dad had called last night, excited that he and Cindy were engaged, that the trip to Mexico had been, as he put it, a “success.” He was mad that I used his credit card, but not as mad as he should have been. He was too excited about his future. But I wasn’t.

When my dad first split up with my mom, during his weepy and needy phase, I was his best friend. We’d watch Turner Classic Movies all of Sunday, and my dad would explain who all the old actors were, why the movies were important. After Cindy showed up, everything changed. If I got a meal alone with my dad, it was like some kind of international peace treaty had been signed. I was supposed to be so grateful; she was supposed to be so generous. And now I was going to be stuck with her, forever. She was probably knocked up already and they were just slow-playing it for fear that I’d run away for good. That’s probably why my dad suddenly didn’t have any money. The only thing left for me in Atlanta would be my mom and Lynette and their house of sick and weird.

It felt like my mom, my dad, my sister, they could all just take one relationship, trash it, and go on to the next thing, start building again, and expect everyone else to be excited. To throw a freaking party. But what about me? I was the leftover from my mom’s second marriage, about to get promoted to being the leftover from my dad’s first.