American Girls(61)

“Don’t confuse actors with friends.”

“Don’t confuse my life with yours.”

Roger was leaning against the bar, watching us. I wanted to mail the producer’s wife a key to my sister’s place and Roger’s apartment and an informational copy of Helter Skelter.

“Why do you have to be so mean?” I finally said. “Just drop me at the set, okay? You can do what you want. I don’t care.”

“I can just drop you at the set. Like I’ve just let you live with me this whole summer. Like I’ve just shared my home, and my relationship, and jobs, and my life with you. And do I get so much as a thank-you? You want to get to the set? You call a cab like anyone else. Okay? And don’t go looking in my purse for the fare.”

I stormed out of the stupid tiki lounge into the dry heat of the early evening. An angry red sun parked just above the horizon, and I clenched my fists into balls and tried not to scream, tried to keep myself calm, tried to remind myself that I had left places worse than this one with less money in my pocket. If I never saw my sister again, it would be too soon.





17

The party was mostly over by the time I made it across town. My cab fare cost the better part of what I’d won the last week at poker, and Dex had already left to meet someone, probably my sister. Nice that she hadn’t called to make sure that I showed up. Nice that she wasn’t worried about me at all. Jeremy was laughing with two of the crew members, but when he saw me he waved and broke away.

“I thought you’d skipped town,” he said. “Don’t miss your last chance for a genuine Hollywood party.” I could tell that he was kidding, that on his party scale, this one was probably lame squared. I still wished the cab had moved faster.

Josh was talking to a girl that I hadn’t seen before, her legs wishbone slender and as toned as a dancer’s. The two of them were laughing and looking at the giant Chips Ahoy! cookie cake with the twins’ pictures etched across the surface. Then he pointed across the room at the steering wheel of the boat, where Pinky was wedged atop its wooden hub. The girl laughed and pushed him playfully on the shoulder, and he pretended like she’d really hurt him.

“I guess the fun is mostly over,” I said. “I wanted to make it. My sister was filming. It’s a long story.”

“You didn’t miss all the fun. This is LA. The real fun hasn’t even started.”

Going out at night wasn’t on the list of things that I did on a regular basis. Maybe one of our parents would drop Doon and me at a movie, but not with boys.

“My sister will kill me.” I thought about it another minute. “If I don’t kill her first.”

“Sisters are a challenge.” Joshua and the girl he was with disappeared, but not before he dragged Pinky through the icing atop the cake and licked the creamy sludge from its tip like he meant business. “Brothers too.”

“Have you ever gotten in a fight where the other person did everything wrong, and you still felt like you were the bad guy?”

We walked over to what was left of the giant cookie cake. Pinky had taken half of Jeremy’s face, but Josh’s sugary image remained untouched. Jeremy broke off his brother’s nose and half his cheek and handed it to me.

“You’re not weird about germs, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“What did you fight with your sister about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. And I sounded exactly like Delia. “She kissed another guy. Her ex-boyfriend. Please don’t tell Dex. I saw her do it, and it was so stupid. He’s the worst guy on earth. But then the whole thing became about what a dishonest, lousy person I am. Don’t ask me how.”

“Is he the guy who broke her nose?”

“Basically.”

Even for me, the cookie was too sweet, or maybe Delia was right—I was poisoning my system and it was finally catching up to me.

“Whatever she said, I’d try to forget about it. Was any of it true?”

“I don’t even know,” I said. “Maybe I am a thief. I read something I shouldn’t have read. Is that stealing? I only read it because she never tells me anything.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t want to be an awful person. I feel like everyone thinks I’m this terrible human being, but when I do things, I’m not trying to be horrible. I’m really not.”

I didn’t tell him the worst part, that in the cab, on the way to the set, I got an e-mail from Doon. Usually we texted or one of us called, so I was kind of surprised to see a regular message from her, titled: “TALK.” I almost didn’t open it because sometimes e-mails like that are from Russian ladies who want husbands or African “kings” trying to give you part of their nonexistent inheritance. But I opened it. She told me that she was disappointed in me as a friend, that I only talked about myself, that since I had been in LA I didn’t even ask how she was doing. Since I hadn’t asked: her dog was sick and her brother was thinking of joining the army. She said that she wasn’t going to be checking on Birch again because she wasn’t my servant and that I should call my mom myself if I wanted to talk to him. She said that my mom was sick and missed me and that I was being selfish all around, and that she hoped when I came home I had plans to make some new friends.