American Girls Read Online Free PDF

thought she was going to be like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, right? So maybe it’s in my unconscious, this woman who is victim and sadist. Manson. Polanski. I feel it out there.”
    I had to hand it to Roger, he was good at acting like he had an audience even when the two of us were pretty clearly underwhelmed.
    â€œI’m a Manson girl?” Delia gave Roger her “Would you care to rephrase that while I melt your face with my mind?” look. I almost felt sorry for him. “Isn’t that a little obvious?”
    â€œNo,” he said, prickling. “Not a Manson girl, and not obvious. You are a child of California. All of those girls were children of America, reckless children. Heartless children. Cruel children who hated their parents. They confused love and hate, death and life. It may not be Manson, it may be one of the others at the compound, but it is part of that hot desert, that last summer of the 1960s. I need to think.”
    That was an understatement. I was starting to get cold, and I didn’t like the sound of his movie. He was just the kind to pitch someone off a roof as part of his method, to scare up publicity for his latest failure.
    My sister sucked in a long breath and exhaled. “Well, you need to shoot, because the light’s changing and I don’t think they’re going to want us up here all week. Dex gets home Friday, and the rest of this week is zombies. Once he’s back I can’t just shoot anytime you like. You need to pick a schedule and stick with it.”
    â€œDex,” Roger said, and left it at that.
    My sister turned her phone on and handed it to me.
    â€œJust keep the sound off,” she said, and gestured at a place for me to sit near where the elevator had opened.
    I pretended to be texting, because I didn’t want to give either of them the pleasure of finding what they were doing interesting, but it was hard not to watch my sister. I always learned more about my sister by watching her than by listening to her. If you ask Delia about her father, Mom’s first husband who left and never looked back, she’ll give her standard “That sonofabitch, I’m glad he’s gone” answer. But my mom told me that after he left, Delia cried whenever the doorbell rang. It didn’t make sense, according to my mother, because it’s not like he didn’t have a key. She would open her mouth and her eyes would get so open, and then they ’ d just shut. It was like a light went off, and she wouldn ’ t talk about it. That’s what my mom had told me. I didn’t get to see that much with Delia, any kind of openness, but she could bring it out when the cameras were rolling. I imagined that might have been what she looked like as she started wandering around the roof of that building, like she was waiting for a doorbell to ring, for someone missing to come home.
    I’d been using Delia’s bag as a pillow, waiting for her to let down her guard so that I could search the contents. If she saw me open it, she’d ship me back to Atlanta for sure. Roger had her posed at the edge of the building, sitting so close to the edge that it made my stomach drop just to look at her. They seemed to be disagreeing about which direction she should turn her face, so without moving any other part of my body, I slipped my hand into the side pocket of her bag and pulled out the paper that had been posted to her door. Inside there was one word, handwritten.
    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