American Girls by Alison Umminger Page B

wheel, and tried not to think about the fact that she hadn’t made any mention of the hundred dollars she’d promised me, let alone how to pay me back for the bag. And as we drove farther from the store, the prickly unease that I had been feeling became something hard and dark. I felt something that I’d only read about in books, the kind of cold that ices your insides when something terrible is just about to happen. I remembered a picture that Doon had said we should figure out how to send but never did, a fake selfie of Paige Parker with rope around her neck and whited-out eyeballs, and I wished that someone could have done the same to the so-called terrible pictures of Olivia Taylor. I knew that part of me wouldn’t have cared at all if something really bad had happened to Olivia—worse, part of me wanted it to. And just for a second, maybe because it was California and you could understand how truly vomit-worthy fame could be only when you were right up next to it, I almost, kind of, understood what it might have been like to be a Manson girl.

 
    7
    I was starting to wonder what I was doing in Los Angeles. As Olivia cruised past yet another billboard for Volt, I almost longed for the weird billboards of the South. It seemed like anyone in Georgia could afford to take out roadside advertising, and once you got outside Atlanta there was always some crazy billboard that let you know that people were made by God, not from monkeys, or that demanded the president’s birth certificate, or—my favorite—a six-year-old with a crossbow advertising the “kids’ corner” of the local gun store. Doon and I would text pictures of the best ones to each other, daring each other to call the number on the anti-evolution billboard and ask whoever answered to explain the hair on her chest, or to take Birch to the gun store to see if there was anything for toddlers. I wouldn’t have even bothered sending her the Volt pictures, they were such an obvious and boring kind of stupid.
    Besides, Doon was writing me less and less. I guess she was irritated with me for leaving her stranded. And it wasn’t just her. My mom was probably going to throw a party to celebrate her Anna-free life as soon as she started feeling better, my sister was constantly busy auditioning, and to the rest of planet California, I was all but invisible. Olivia dropped me back at the Chips Ahoy! set where—shocker—no one had noticed that I was missing. Dex was in a writers’ meeting, and the twins were playing Texas Hold’em with a few of the extras. I perched on a couch end near the edge of the game, trying not to take up too much space.
    â€œSo how’d it go?” Josh asked without looking up from his cards.
    I didn’t answer for a full minute because it hadn’t dawned on me I was supposed to field the question.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I think I just bought your sister a purse.”
    â€œI thought you were broke.” Josh still didn’t look up, but Jeremy did, probably long enough to see that I looked dazed, like I’d been hexed by a very beautiful person who’d cast a spell on me so that I handed over my father’s credit card without so much as a “Why?”
    â€œI guess I’m even more broke.”
    Jeremy laughed a little, and then he said, “Consider yourself lucky. The last person she took shopping bought her a car.”
    â€œSeriously?”
    He raised his arm like he was taking a Boy Scouts oath. It was a gesture that the “Chips” made all the time on the show, bleeding into real life or vice versa.
    â€œShe’s a whore,” Josh said, and Jeremy frowned like he was going to contradict his brother, but didn’t. I saw the same word from the letter on my sister’s door for a second and squeezed my eyes to make it disappear.
    â€œYou know how to play?” Jeremy asked.
    â€œKind of,” I lied. I knew how to