American Girls(9)

Whore.

The handwriting was ugly and aggressive, like it had been scratched with a knife, and I wished that I hadn’t opened Delia’s bag because that word was impossible to unsee, impossible now not to wonder who despised my sister enough to drive to her house in the middle of the night and leave personalized hate mail. Doon and I had joked about Delia being a slut, but the letter was hardly funny. And I had been sleeping in the living room while someone was just outside, doing what? Peeking in the windows? Waiting behind the bushes to see when Delia read it?

For a second, I thought that I was hallucinating hot-stalker-breath just behind me, but it was just Roger.

“I have something for you,” he said. “I did not mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay.” I folded the paper quickly and put it in my own pocket, nervous now that Delia would claim her bag before I could replace the letter. “So, genius,” he said, “I hear you have time on your hands and need money.”

Wow. Euro-subtlety there.

“Thanks, Delia,” I said. “Maybe I should get a business card.”

My sister took her phone back and wandered away from us. I pretended to be helpful, grabbing her bag for her, and slipped the paper back in when Roger turned to look in the direction she’d gone.

“I was joking,” he said, half looking at me, half ignoring me. “You know, but really … you are not so different from these Manson girls. You steal money, take a plane, head out for California.”

He handed me a worn copy of Helter Skelter, and then looked at me like he was waiting for a thank-you. Delia had wandered over to the water towers and was covering her phone with her hand while she texted—like anyone was looking.

“So what’s your point?”

“I think you know my point.”

My mouth felt dry, and as I looked at the ice-blue rings of his irises, it was like Roger was trying to work some mind-voodoo on me, to make me as blindly obedient to his so-called vision as my sister was. I might have borrowed a credit card number, but that did not make me a Manson girl. Not even kind of.

“You forgot the murdering-pregnant-women part,” I said.

Roger waved me off, slipping further into his genius-at-work mode. Or just being his usual rude self. A rat bolted past us from beneath one of the water towers, and before I could react, Roger kicked it out of the way like he’d been kicking rats his whole life.

“I will pay you. You read about these girls for me. I am interested in how you see them, how they feel to you. Maybe you will let me know what was in their hearts. Or you make another one up, create a history.”

“I don’t want to read about murders,” I said, trying to keep track of where the rat had disappeared into the shadows. A total lie. What I meant was: I don’t want to read about murders and then have to talk to you about them. “And I don’t see how I’m supposed to figure out what’s in their hearts. That’s just weird.”

“Suit yourself. But I will pay you ten dollars an hour for research. You keep the billing.”

“You can buy your own breakfast,” Delia said, suddenly ten feet closer and stupidly cheerful. “Besides, last I checked, you love things that are graphic and disgusting. You seemed excited enough to hang out on the zombie set.”

“That’s because zombies are absurd. I’ll bet no one on the zombie set accuses me of being a zombie.”

For the second time since I’d left for California, I thought about Leslie Van Houten and how she’d started out a nice person, how something in the desert air outside Los Angeles had changed her.

“Oh for God’s sake, Anna. Roger isn’t saying you’re some kind of cultish drone; you can stop being so melodramatic. And if you can’t stand to hear what you did simply put, maybe you should think about behaving differently.”

I hate, hate, hated when my sister tried to tell me what to do, like she was so perfect. I should have told Delia what she looked like from the cheap seats, but then she was already getting letters on her door with the same information, so what was the point?

Roger just smirked.

“Bisous,” my sister said, kissing Roger on both cheeks.

“Bisous.” He all but tongued her cheek.

They were gross. Whoever this Dex guy was, I already felt sorry for him. We took the stairs and then the elevator back to the lobby in silence.





3

The next morning, my sister let me use her phone to call Doon. Delia pretended to water her one sad plant for about fifteen minutes so that she could listen in, but being monitored was better than not getting to talk at all. I needed my cell phone situation remedied in the very, very near future.

“I have a hit out on you,” Doon said. “You picked the worst week of my life to run away. I think my parents are shopping for bars for my windows. My mom just threatened to ground me until you get back from California. You are coming back, right?”

Doon was eating cereal. I could tell because she kept slurping between sentences, and whenever she and her parents were fighting she’d eat ten bowls of Corn Flakes at a time.

“I guess,” I said. “It’s that or move in with my lunatic sister forever.”

I was a little nervous that Doon wasn’t telling me something, that she’d been dead serious when she joked that I was a “traitor” the other night. A few weeks ago, I’d taken the fall for a bunch of texts that the two of us had sent together, texts that had been Doon’s idea to begin with. Sending anonymous messages was the kind of thing that didn’t seem so terrible at the time, but made my mom grow another head when she read what we’d written. On the scale of terrible things, if a one was sticking your tongue out at someone and a ten was flying a plane into a building, I think that what we wrote rated a 1.5. Maybe a two. But to my mom it was like an eleven. She waved a stack of printed-out messages in her hand and practically wailed at me, “How could you have such cruelty in you?” Like it was even my fault! If I’d really broken it down for her, all I’d done was let Doon use my phone to send maybe fifty words and a couple of pictures to one of the most popular girls in my school, Paige Parker, because Doon swore she knew a code where they couldn’t trace your phone. Which, as it turned out, she didn’t. If Doon hadn’t spent half her life with her phone privileges revoked, it wouldn’t have even been an issue.