American Girls(64)

The band headed for the stage, and Olivia walked in my direction. Without shoes, she was exactly my height, and I scanned the room, looking for an exit.

“Anna,” she said, and threw both her arms around me, and kissed me on both cheeks, like I was her freaking iguana. “I love that you’re here, Anna. You and my f*cking brother. I love this kid.”

Then she turned to Jeremy and kissed him. He flinched like someone had scorched him with the end of a cigarette.

“Thank you for taking care of my babies,” she said.

Then she looked at both of us and said, “I love you both so much. Love is the only way to cut through the garbage.”

I wondered for a minute if she’d ever taken Leo or Karl back to her place, if maybe they’d gotten the idea for the waste-ridden moonscape after sitting for an afternoon in her bungalow.

Freekmonkee had begun their encore, and Olivia grabbed my hand and started to walk me back in the direction of the crowd.

“Do you love them as much as I do?” she asked, and she squeezed her fingers against my palm. When she pulled her hand away she’d left behind a small tab of paper. I held my hand close and squinted to get a better look at it.

Jeremy put his hand on my shoulder.

“Can you find a ride home?” Jeremy asked me, not even judgmental, but keys in his hand, like he was leaving either way. “I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t want to ruin your good time, but I can’t take this scene.”

And for a minute, just a second, I seriously thought about staying. If there were one more thing to add to the long list of things I would do over if I could, not leaving that very instant would be on it. I should have dropped Olivia’s hand and bolted for the door. Instead, I waited. I waited so long, in fact, that by the time I was running to catch him at the door, I had almost lost him.





18

We drove from the party through a series of winding roads up a mountain, and Jeremy was driving fast, like an actual person. I didn’t ask where we were going. I should have been happy, but instead, I was starting to feel just the opposite. I had this sinking feeling that somehow I had done everything wrong this summer, made all the wrong choices. I shouldn’t have been at a Freekmonkee concert tonight, or even at some stupid wrap party. I should have been alone somewhere writing Doon the longest, saddest, sorriest letter about how I’d never meant to hurt her feelings. There was no reason for me to be in LA, with people I barely knew and a sister who only tolerated me. I’d missed out on my brother, on my actual best friend, on my real if not glamorous life. The feeling was terrible, the kind I used to get at the end of summer camp, like I was losing the thing I was experiencing even while I was still in it, like life was beautiful and there and passing me by. I knew then that I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to do it in front of Jeremy. I didn’t want him to think that it was about his sister, and I didn’t know how to explain what I was really feeling.

“You want to hear the crazy thing?” He paused a long time. “Just before the wrap party, Olivia called begging for me to go to the concert. She and Karl had some kind of fight, she was convinced that her house was bugged, she sounded crazy. And then we show up, and there’s that scene.”

“Did you know she was DJing?”

“Is that what you call what she was doing? No, I didn’t.”

“But she seemed so happy.”

“Happy?” He squeezed the steering wheel harder and leaned forward. “That’s an interesting word for how she seemed. Probably not the first one I would pick.”

I remembered the tab she had put in my hand right before we left, a tiny monkey head on a hole-punch-size piece of paper, and then I felt even dumber than I had when we got in the car. “Sometimes I wish I could do this whole summer over again. I miss my brother, and my stupid mother, and even stupid, stupid Lynette. Do you ever feel like you make all the wrong choices?”

“Definitely,” he said, and then rounded a corner so sharp that the whole earth seemed to fall away. “Was this summer really that bad?”

For a minute I almost told him that the only thing good about my summer had been getting to know him. And that part was so good that it almost made up for the rest of the nonsense. He had little bits of glitter in his hair and he was so gorgeous that he all but glowed. No, my summer was not all that bad. Not by a long shot.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just wish I could have had this summer without missing the other summer I could have had.”

“I get that.”

We drove for a while in the night, and I loved the way in Los Angeles, no matter how miserable you were, you could disappear into something beautiful. The ocean. The mountains. The moon as wide and hypnotic as anything in the Freekmonkee landscape.

“Can I tell you something in confidence?”

“Sure.”

He waited another minute or two before continuing as we climbed higher and higher up darker and darker roads.

“I don’t know if you’re into that kind of gossip, but do you remember last year when there was a piece about Olivia being hospitalized while she was filming in Japan?”

“She was hospitalized for exhaustion,” I said. “I remember. What, was it drugs or something?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Her dad lives in Japan. We don’t have the same dad, and I don’t think Olivia had seen him in, like, ten years. So she wanted to meet him again, and it was this big thing because she’s even more popular in Japan than she is here. There are girls who have plastic surgery just to get Olivia eyes. There are contact lenses in ‘Olivia gray.’ It’s freaky.”