American Girls by Alison Umminger

totally for-real scream, because Olivia almost drove us into a streetlamp by the side of the road.
    â€œAre you completely psycho?” she asked. What I could now see was a large green lizard had jumped from my head and onto her lap. “You’re going to give Iggy a nervous breakdown.”
    â€œIggy?” I said.
    â€œIt’s okay, Iggyyyyyy .” She kissed the lizard on the head. “This is Anna. She didn’t mean to scare you.” The lizard perched on her leg, and she stroked its head delicately. I checked the backseat for more reptiles and tried to quiet my heartbeat. Olivia pulled the car into a parking space marked “Employees Only” behind a strip mall, and tucked the lizard under her arm.
    â€œYou have a lizard,” I said.
    â€œAn iguana,” she corrected me. “Did you know they can live as long as people? And unlike people, they never, ever fuck you over.” She gestured for me to get out of the car. “You do have a credit card, right?”
    The way she was looking at me, I seriously thought that she might leave me in the car if I answered wrong.
    I had a card from my dad, just for emergencies, and there was a good bet it was still working since I hadn’t heard from him since he went to Mexico last month. I could hear his voice while Olivia was still talking: I can ’ t take the time I need to get away with Cindy? Not even a weekend? This is what happens? Why doesn ’ t anyone tell me anything? And then my mother, who’d probably look on this as an opportunity to remind him just how much he sucks at being a dad: It ’ s a month you ’ ve been gone, not a weekend. And you are still technically her father, so you could tear yourself away from your piña coladas, blah, blah, blah.
    â€œIt’s just for emergencies,” I said.
    â€œWell, this is an emergency.” She’d led me to a hole-in-the-wall boutique with a thick glass door and spare, headless mannequins in the windows. “You’ll buy with your credit card and I’ll pay you back. It has to look like we’re shopping for you.” After we entered the store, one of the women who worked there locked the door behind us. Olivia put her lizard on the ground, and he ran underneath the sale rack. The normal rules no longer applied. We had entered a parallel universe where her arrival meant that some whole other secret set of rules went into effect: Iguanas, good. Other customers, bad.
    The store walked the line between chic and totally destroyed, and the clothes looked like they could have been from Goodwill, if Goodwill charged a hundred and fifty bucks for a T-shirt.
    â€œThis would look amazing on you,” she said, holding up what I thought was a shirt but soon realized was a dress. “You would look like someone deserving of a solid bang on the third date, am I right? I heard that southern girls were all sluts at heart. Back-door gals because the front’s for Jesus or your husband or something.”
    She stopped short and looked at me. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
    The salesgirl nearest me was trying not to laugh. It was so embarrassing to hear it, and in that exact moment, as I felt the heat spread like brush fire over my face, I hated Olivia Taylor. She was a horrible, horrible person. I hoped my credit card was declined. I hoped someone scanned her toxic-waste-heap of a brain and leaked that to the press.
    She, on the other hand, had already moved on.
    â€œThis,” she said, and handed me a duffel bag with a geometric pattern across the front, two large metallic straps that went over the shoulders. “This is the one you have to have. I told you it would be perfect. Flawless. Love, love, love it.”
    She wasn’t even looking at me, or anyone else in the store when she talked, she was like a tornado, swirling and touching down, but it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that her movements were arbitrary,