American Girls(68)

Delia handed me two intact pictures that had been facedown beside her.

“I can’t call the police.”

The first picture was of Jeremy walking around a kitchen without his shirt. I didn’t recognize the kitchen, but I knew what he’d been wearing that day. The entire place must have been rigged with security cameras. And the second photo was of a girl with her eyes closed hunched down in grass on a hill. It might have been tough to prove in court, but Delia and I both knew that it was me.

“Oh no,” I said.

“I’m not even going to ask,” Delia said. “Because it doesn’t matter at this point.”

“Is she going to have us arrested?” I was feeling sicker by the minute. “Does this mean I’ll never get into college?”

Delia laughed. “She’s not interested in you. Truly. And don’t beat yourself up too much, because calling the police probably wouldn’t matter anyhow. I thought about it, and then I heard myself saying that someone was taping pictures of me and her husband on my front door. You think the police care about things like this? I had a guy follow me to my door once, like, the kind of thing where I ran inside and closed the door and called the police, and the cop who came over accused me of being delusional. You think anyone in this town gives an actual, honest-to-God shit about me? Guess again.”

Dex did, I wanted to say. That 10 percent of your life, you ruined yourself.

But what was the point? It was nothing she didn’t already know. And I cared. I actually did.

“We were trying to help,” I said. “Not that it matters.”

There were other pieces of Delia across the rug. I didn’t know if she’d torn them into shreds, or if Dex had. Her perfectly manicured hand looked like something peeking out of the corner of a crime scene photo. It made me think of Olivia’s hand, wrapped almost possessively around Karl Marx’s forearm, before he unwrapped her and handed her off to his bandmate.

It seemed like everything in LA that was whole could be broken down and sold off in pieces. And maybe one day Olivia would wake up and regret her time with the band, the way my sister regretted her time with the producer. The way the Manson girls eventually regretted their time with Manson. Maybe the situations weren’t the same, not even close, but from where I was sitting they didn’t seem so terribly different.

“I did almost call the police, to see if they could find you,” Delia said.

“And said what, that you abandoned me outside a bar in LA?”

The minute I said it, I wished that I could take it back.

My sister shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want the summer to end badly because of last night. I shouldn’t have kissed Roger. I wasn’t thinking, and it was stupid. And God knows you shouldn’t have to see pictures of your sister’s sordid and ancient love life. Not that I’ll ever convince Dex of that now.”

Understatement.

She looked out the big open window while she talked, glancing up the hill every once in a while in the direction of the producer’s house, and then back at the coffee cup between her knees.

“I know you can’t stand Roger, but we have a history. I think it’s partially that he’s my ex, and that sometimes makes me feel like I have a grandfather clause for making out, not sleeping together, and I know Dex and you both would never understand, but it just doesn’t seem like anything to kiss Roger. Then—and I know that he says he wrote a role for me, but the fact that Dex’s pilot got picked up, and my nose is a disaster, I just wanted to wreck it first. He can’t cast me just because he wants to, and even he knows things don’t work that way. I won’t be the person left behind. I can’t explain what I did with that producer to him. I just can’t. People like to imagine that they get a girl who’s been depressed, or confused, or desperate, and it’s so romantic and exciting, but they definitely don’t want to imagine what she might have really done. Trust me. I know of what I speak. Tragic is interesting but only if there was no collateral damage, and there always is.”

My sister was matter-of-fact, even when her life lay in pieces around her.

“Dex wouldn’t have left you.”

She looked at me now instead of the landscape.

“But he would have. He really would. Anyone can leave anyone. And you’re probably right, he might not have left me this week, or even this month, but this is not a town built on lasting relationships. We’ll probably talk again. He might care that I have an explanation for the photos, he might not. How could I tell him about Roger after that? What purpose would it even serve? I don’t love Roger. It won’t happen again. Who’s really better off by knowing?” She gestured at the garbage at her feet. “I’d say he’s already seen enough.”

I didn’t know why my sister did the things she did. I couldn’t match the Delia on the couch up against the Delia in pieces on the floor any more than I could match the Manson girls against their crimes. Maybe she really did love Dex, and she was being stupid and afraid. Maybe she had slept with half of Hollywood, but it suddenly didn’t seem like my business to be calling her a slut. I felt bad about the way Doon and I had joked about her. I wanted Dex to forgive her. I wanted her to get a second chance, whether she deserved it or not.

“Don’t you still have to film with Roger?”