Where It Began (10 page)

“What opportunities?”

Like we both don’t know what my one and only opportunity is, and what kind of car he drives. I just want to make her say it out loud.

“What opportunities?” I whine.

“Just to be with people who might be more, uh, fun for you,” she says, not looking up, lying as fast as she can while measuring the flour. “Just to have the chance to be a little more, uh, out there. You know, The New You. So more people can get to know how wonderful you are.”

I don’t think she even said anything like that to me when I was a tiny kid at the young age when everybody really
is
wonderful. Or maybe I’m just not wonderful enough, or my head is too
bashed in, to remember. Maybe I would remember better now if I hadn’t smashed my head against a tree, greatly reducing my wonderfulness as well as my crowd of fun people.

Not that I exactly make a bunch of fun new girlfriends once being with Billy turns me into who I was before I ran his car into a tree.

The obvious people to be my new girlfriends are Aliza Benitez and Charlotte Ward and their little pack of Slutmuffin hos and maybe the whole taste-impaired Student Council decorating committee once it turns out that Anita is right, and I get elected even though the only thing anybody knows about me is that Billy has his hand down my back pocket.

But Billy had dumped Aliza Benitez, popular ho royalty, just before he hooked up with me. So: The princess posse is even less likely to throw a Welcome to Our World party for some outside, unpopular, clueless girl they’ve never heard of, no matter how good I look and how good I am at slinging crepe paper after they relegate me to the status of newbie slave on the Council decorating committee.

Actually, one of the good things about moving into Billy Nash World from total obscurity is that I don’t have to worry about getting tight with a whole lot of new friends I could screw it up with.

The Andies are so busy with every detail of each other that they just sort of accept I’m there and go back to gazing into one another’s eyes. And the Slutmuffins aren’t exactly begging me to make time for little shopping trips down Montana Avenue with them.

I actually think that the fact I’m not brown-nosing around makes me somewhat less abhorrent to them than if I’d been a more obvious wannabe, panting around their thin, tan ankles, all eager and wagging my tail. Not to mention I am completely terrified that if they do get to know me, they’ll figure out how sub-regular I am and tell Billy.

They sit right in front of me, three of them sprawled on the corner of the Andies’ checkered blanket in the Class of 1920 Garden and have what passes as a conversation while looking straight at me but acting as if I’m not there. Not so much an invisible person like before, but more like the Serbo-Croatian-speaking crazy lady who can’t be expected to follow even the simple English dialogue of brain-dead hos.

I could just reach out and knock them over, but I don’t.

“Are you coming to shop at Ron Herman or not?”

“Not. I have my French tutor.”

“So blow him off.”

“What does Ron Herman have anyway? Those dresses are heinous.”

“Crimes against humanity.”

“I thought you were coming.”

“I’ll wait for you at CPK. I’m too gross to try on right now anyway.”

“So you’re going to binge on CPK barbeque chicken pizza, skank? Come try on.”

“No, they don’t even like me in there. That big redheaded salesgirl—”

“The one with the split ends?”

“She just keeps following me around like I shoplifted a T-shirt or something.”

“No way! Why?”

“Because she shoplifted a T-shirt or something.”

“I spend so much money in there, they ought to be
giving
me T-shirts.”

This is not as hard to take as you would think, given all the Chardonnay I consume with my egg salad sandwich. Still, you would think that after breaking up with Billy, Aliza would maybe want a little more distance, or at least, if she is going to jiggle her T and A in his face on the same blanket, you’d think she would want to come across as halfway appealing and marginally gracious. But apparently she is just so secure in her God-given place as Slutmuffin bitch queen that she doesn’t even care.

When I actually have to show up and try to get the decorating committee not to make things look any uglier than they have to given the large quantity of gaudy balloons and tinsel they have stockpiled, when all they will say to me is basically, “Please pass the glue gun,” I just go,
Gabriella, you do not have to hang with these bitches, you have actual friends. You have Billy and they don’t. Everything is Perfect. Back away from the glue gun and go make a crepe paper flower and shut up.

They go back into their little huddle, as if they think they’re magically inaudible. Or maybe they just don’t care.

“Kaps says Nash wants us to let her do the posters.”

“But we’re already tracing the Elvis poster.”

“Just because he’s hooking up with her, she doesn’t get to take over.”

“It’s just a poster, Char. And she’s got plenty of time for it. It’s not like she’s in AP Physics.”

“Yeah, and do
you
want to tell Nash no? Because I don’t.”

I just keep telling myself that as long as I keep Billy happy, I can ignore them back. I can just wander around glowing faintly with light from his star.

Which makes me more noticeable.

All of a sudden, I am cuter
and
smarter. Dr. Berg says that I’m “building up steam” in non-AP, non-honors, sub-regular track chemistry (although I have to say not as sub-regular as Andie, who is taking Topics in the Environment for which she gets extra credit for figuring out how to send away for a poster of a humpback whale from Greenpeace) when I am doing exactly the same as always.

Sure
I’m building up steam; I am smoking from hotness by association.
Sure
I have a whole lot more going for me, the entire whole lot consisting of Billy and my new wardrobe. If Billy likes me, suddenly everybody but a few stray Muffins like me. Not that they actually
like
me like me, they just act like they like me. And it isn’t as if I mind all that much.

Mind—
please
. I want more all the time. When Billy walks by in the library when I’m sitting there with Anita trying to figure out the workings of the periodic table and he bends down and blows just faintly on the top of my head and ruffles my bangs with the tips of his fingers, I have to bite my lower lip just so I won’t shiver with joy in too obvious a way.

IF I HADN’T BEEN SO CRAZED ABOUT MAKING SURE
that Billy would keep liking me around the clock, it could have been completely fun.

It definitely eliminates any shred of boredom or dead time in my life because the thing about being with Billy is that you have to be made up and ready to roll 24/7. He likes to drive and he likes company.

“How is it you’ve lived in L.A. all your life and you’ve never been anywhere?” he says.

And he doesn’t mean chic places on Sunset with bouncers, where I also haven’t been. He means the best Pho 999 for Vietnamese noodles so far out on Sepulveda, it is almost at the far end of the Valley; he means hickory burgers on the red faux-leather stools at the counter at the Apple Pan on Pico; ribs with bikers who seem to have dropped in from a 1950s time warp at Dr. Hogly Wogly’s;
Versailles for Cuban plantains and black beans in Culver City; and tacos at La Canasta, which is somewhere so far south and east of downtown that it looks like some whole other country. He means that field in Westchester where you can lie on the hood of the Beemer and watch the planes taking off from LAX at night and the Cajun place at the Fairfax Farmers’ Market that has homemade yam potato chips fried up and ready to eat by ten a.m.

I remember that perfectly: the taste of the yam chips and their crunchiness and the grease on my fingers, how you couldn’t get enough, and at the end, you dig the last little shards out of the corners of the little paper box they come in.

“How do you know all these places?” I say. “Do you just cut school and drive around Monterey Park looking for pork bao?”

“I get bored easily,” Billy says. “You want to roll?”

He likes to tell Agnes that Andy is helping him study for precalc. And then driving up to Santa Barbara for hotdogs and sauerkraut at the only dive on State Street open after midnight, then turning around and driving back. He likes telling Agnes that he is doing community service (Condition of Probation #17) at a fictional downtown homeless mission and then driving to San Juan Capistrano to listen to ska at a bar—only, he has to bribe the ticket guy because even though Billy has the excellent ID of an actual twenty-two-year-old guy named Lars from St. Cloud, Minnesota, I don’t.

He could have told Agnes he was going on an overnight NASA expedition to Mars and she would have bought it.

I, on the other hand, don’t have to make up anything. I just
say, “Going with Billy. See ya.” Vivian couldn’t have cared less if I had my head in his lap all the way to San Diego on a school night, which I didn’t, just so long as the stick shift wouldn’t mess up my makeup and reveal the un-cute Old Me lurking underneath, thereby jeopardizing my girlfriendhood and metamorphosis into a kid she actually might want.

“How is it that you’ve never had a corn dog in Eagle Rock?” he’d say.

And I would say, “Beats me.”

And he would take down the rag roof of the Beemer and that would be our destination.

The other thing is sports. Endless sports. Obviously, I have to attend water polo matches near and far, which turns out to be a not un-fun game to watch, with a whole lot of splashing and yelling, and muscular boys in Speedos. It soon becomes apparent that Billy’s one area of school spirit involves sitting around at all Winston varsity events and patting his friends on the butt. Who knew that all varsity jock boys have a fixation that makes them watch all other varsity jock boys play all other sports except golf? This includes fencing, where they all pump fists for the other team’s guy by mistake half the time because they can’t figure out who made the touch.

“How is it that you go to Winston and you’ve never been to a home game?”

“I’m not that into sports, Nash. I mean, I like them now. I like watching you rule the pool and all. I just wasn’t that into it before you enlightened me.”

“Well, what are you into, Gardiner, other than eating international junk food and decorating things?”

“
I’m
into international junk food? Have you ever noticed who’s leading these fun expeditions to Rooster Shack to eat fries with the Crips?”

“That would be Americana,” he says. “Have I taught you nothing?”

“I’m into art,” I say. It kind of comes out of nowhere, but once it’s out, it’s out. Okay, I am into art.

And it seems like he can handle it because he says, “Well, I hope you’re very good at art, because you are currently hanging with the undisputed king of water polo.”

Apparently, this is not one of Billy’s more egregious exaggerations. On our late-night jaunts, sometimes we end up at Sam Deveraux’s fraternity house at USC, which seems to have a permanent, twenty-four-hour party going on, and where we are always welcome because Sam was the water polo equivalent of a linebacker back when he was a senior and Billy was a varsity starter in tenth grade.

“Yo, you gotta come
here
,” Sam Deveraux says, more than slightly drunk but dead serious. “Fight on! We’re number one!” His also more-than-slightly-drunk college water polo buddies stick up their index fingers in agreement. “We need you, man. Don’t you want to be number one?”

“Dude. Nothing would make me happier than staying in town,” Billy says. “But, man, I’ve gotta go to . . .” (drumroll drowning out even the permanent, twenty-four-hour party music) “Princeton. You know how it is.”

“
Damn
Agnes.” Sam drapes his arm around Billy as if Billy could somehow steady him, which, I can tell you from my vast experience with my dad lurching through the house beyond help, is by that point in the evening totally useless. Then he turns to me, which is slightly frightening since he is extremely large and I figure he could crush me if he fell on me, which seems like a strong possibility.

“Whadda bout you?” Sam says. “Don’t you wanna come here and be a Theta and Billy can be king?”

And you know, even though the thought of spending four years at Crazed School Spirit U and being a Theta (if I could have gotten in, which I couldn’t) kind of makes me want to go throw myself into a ditch, if Billy was going to be king of college at SC instead of Princeton, all hunkered down and happy in his dad’s old eating club, I totally would have signed right up.

Billy sticks his shoulder between me and Sam, which could have saved my life if so much as a slight breeze had hit Sam from behind, causing him to pitch forward. “She doesn’t do sorority chick crap,” Billy says. “She does
art
.”

Sam runs his hand up the wall as if he is looking for a handle. “Theta could do art,” he says. “She
could
. ’Member Becca French? Theta does product
de
sign. Tolja.”