Where It Began (11 page)

“She doesn’t do that kind of art,” Billy says. “She does real art.”

Okay, so you would have to conclude that he does know something about me, right? And even though I am pretty sure it’s all about the incredibly expensive hair extensions and the perfect
makeup and the gravity defying Wonderbra, something like this would give a reasonable person cause to think he actually did kind of like something about me that my mother didn’t spend the summer buying for me. Right?

Which is what makes it so hard to tell if the eucalyptus tree on Songbird Lane has done some actual damage to my chest, or if I am just some metaphorically heartsick, delusional bimbo in a hospital gown with no sense and, coincidentally, no boyfriend.

Explain that.

He has completely vanished. I am lying in a mechanical bed with the sides up while he is no doubt out at Johnny Rockets eating a medium-rare burger with curly fries with his water polo boys and girl school prostitots from Holy Name.

Only, it is hard to reconcile any of this with what I actually do remember, which I am pretty sure is true.

THIS IS HOW A PERSON FALLS IN LOVE WITH BILLY NASH.

The part of the
Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s
where a person wants to slow it down to keep it from lurching precipitously toward the mysterious and annoying Now, to hold it on pause and watch it slowly, frame by frame, in an imaginary present in which we, Billy and I, are both in the same room.

Unlike the
actual
present, in which we aren’t.

By October of junior year, I know that it is right in front of me. He holds my hand by the lockers more often than he doesn’t. He plays with my hair on the Andies’ blanket every day at lunch time, casually, as if it were a natural and easy thing to do, and I just have to keep breathing, or at least not stop breathing so much that anyone would notice.

I tell him, “Stop it,” but I don’t really mean it and he looks at
me and I smile at him and he knows I don’t mean it and he says “Really?” and I say “Not really,” and he doesn’t stop playing with my hair and behind my ears and the back of my neck out in the open where anyone can see that he is claiming me.

After school, up in his room, we lie there on the floor doing homework, and on the bed, not doing homework, throwing darts at his conditions of probation, just rolling around and kissing and kissing and kissing. Sometimes he takes off his shirt, and he is muscular and pale and perfect, with a smooth swimmer’s torso and muscles that ripple when he raises his arms as if he were cutting through the water. And when I press my head against his chest, when he cradles my head there, his skin tastes like salt.

The issue of
my
shirt is more complicated. He likes to slide his hands underneath it, his fingertips feeling their way along the edge of my bra, and then over the edge, and then under it. I imagine us there, perfect and naked on his bed all the time, except that, of course, I’m not Perfect. I
really
am Not Perfect, and I don’t want him to see that I’m Not and go find someone else who Is. The thing is, as long as he can actually touch underneath anything he wants to move aside, he is happy. I wear extremely stretchy underwear on purpose. I am happy as hell.

And he says, “Hey, you want to go to the beach?”

I say, “Like the
beach
beach? Like now? You want to surf?”

“Like the beach house,” Billy says. “You want to go right now?”

And I say, “Yeah, Nash. I do.” And I do. I do. I so so do.

Billy drives us to the end of Sunset, speeding around the curves, and onto the Pacific Coast Highway. It is sunset and the
sky is pink and orange, orange flames reflected in the water just off the edge of the highway. The beach is just a little strip of sand with the tide pounding over the traffic noise, pounding in my ears.

And it feels as if after waiting forever, waiting my whole life sort of bored and ready for something else, I am finally getting my something. It is as if it is Billy’s sunset and he is feeding it to me with a big spoon. The ocean, too, all blue and roiling: mine. My day, my spoonful of sunset, my boyfriend, finally my boyfriend, and my decision.

Why not?

Billy and the Beemer and the ride up the coast. His parents’ beach house by the water near Point Dume with the glass doors open to the dark Pacific and the first stars and the big, white rising moon.

Mine.

We pull into the garage, and Billy turns off the car and gets out and opens my door. He kisses my neck.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “You’re very good at that, Nash.”

“You sure?” he says, pulling away. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty damn sure,” I say, and he does it some more, leaning over the car, leaning into the front seat.

It is getting dark. I am almost sure I could do it in the dark.

“We should celebrate,” Billy says, unlocking the door and taking me into the house with still enough light to see the ocean and the foam where the waves hit the beach. “Would the lady care for champagne?”

Champagne. All right, it’s a total cliché, but I completely don’t care. He looks so good and he tastes so salty. He gets two champagne flutes and he carries them upside down between his fingers and the champagne bottle in the other hand, up to the bedroom with its white bed and its pale-green comforter, silky and sweet-smelling.

There is the bite of the champagne, all those little bubbles, all that sweet liquid, and my camisole over my head. Billy’s body, which is pretty much perfect, and me. Billy is looking down at me, the lamplight shining off his pale, blond hair, his arms reaching for me, his fingers tracing my eyebrows and the edges of my face down the sides of my neck and across my collarbone.

And I reach over toward the lamp, to turn it off, so the bed will be a soft, dark nest for us, but he holds my wrist.

And he says, “Gabby, you’re so beautiful.” He is looking right at me in the yellow lamplight, he is seeing me in the yellow light, he is sliding my jeans down over my hips and I am arching my back and this time, I don’t distract him with some fun alternative. This time, it is both of us, together. This time, I don’t say stop it.

There it is, and I like it. He says yes and I say yes and he says yes and I say yes, and I just go with him, like he is taking care of me. The condom, obviously. I giggle at it and he looks at me and I shut up and go with it some more. And I say, “You are really good at this.”

And he says, “Beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

And that is all it takes.

I had never been beautiful before this moment, but now I am. I am beautiful because Billy says I am beautiful. I am beautiful
because Billy gave me that, and I am still beautiful from that, even now, underneath all this makeup, after everything, sort of.

I am beautiful, I am happy. Basically, disgustingly icky as they are, if we could have turned into Andie and Andy right then, I would have signed up for it. Right then, before I get my camisole back on even, before I comb my hair in Billy’s parents’ bathroom.

I feel like a love-crazed puppy, all wagging its tail and its tongue hanging out of its mouth, all love me love me love me. I want to lie around on the green comforter, just kissing him and looking at him and holding his face for days, not going to school, not going home, nothing. To hell with everything but him, just to be with him, on the bed in the beach house. Just clinging to Billy Nash, inventor of my beautiful.

But he doesn’t say, “I love you.”

And in the throes of my decision, when I am drunk and a virgin, I don’t care.

And then, when I am beautiful and drunk and completely in love with Billy Nash, I do.

Maybe I should have said it. Maybe I should have grabbed him and told him:
I love you forever. I’ll do anything for you. I swear to God, nothing else matters.
Maybe everything else would have turned out differently if I’d just told him and asked him and he’d told me one way or the other.

The thing is, I am not a complete moron. I know what every other halfway normal girl in the U.S.A. who ever watches TV or
reads
Seventeen
knows: Cling to Gorgeous Hot Boy and you’re dead in the water.

Even if you Do It, afterward, if you act like you want him too much or you need him just a little or you think he’s perfect, unless you’re Andie from Cute World with a free pass from God to worship Andy Kaplan right out in the open and Kaps still worships you back and gives you Hello Kitty earrings, the guy will run out the door and he’ll never even look back. Even if you’re beautiful. Even if you love him.

Especially
if you love him.

And I say to myself in half-crazed affirmation,
Gabby, you are just so secure and mature and wonderful. You don’t need him to tell you what you already
(kind of)
know. You are just the most secure and mature and wonderful girl since Coke in a glass bottle, so if you want to keep this going, you’d better just back the hell off.

Because: Everybody knows that no matter how much you need to talk to Gorgeous Hot Boy, if you phone him fourteen times between ten and ten thirty p.m., by the time he gets to the third message, he’ll hate you, and by message number fourteen, his mother will have a restraining order taken out against you and you’ll be in court-ordered Stalker Recovery Twelve Step before you even have time to make call number fifteen.

So I don’t call him. I don’t even try to cuddle. Not even.

So I don’t presume to follow Billy around or hang out next to him on Monday at school, curved into his side, hooking my fingers through his empty belt loops. Not me. I stumble around watching for him, longing for him. All I can think about is how
his body feels, smooth and naked and a little bit damp, pressed up against me. And when he passes me, when I am close to him, the faintly salty smell of him fills me up.

“Hey, Gabs,” he says in the cafeteria the Tuesday after that Sunday in the beach house. “Don’t you like me anymore?”

I am shaking. I am afraid I’m going to drop my tray.

“What do you think, Nash?” I say as casually as possible under the circumstances. “You think you own me now or something?” Thinking:
Own me own me own me
.

Billy reaches over and he put his fingers through the hair behind my ear. “Yeah,” he says into my ear. “Oh yeah, I own you now.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SECRETLY, CONSTANTLY
wanting Billy to own me and Billy taking actual possession is that now he just assumes I’ll be there, like his wallet and the keys in his front pocket.

It feels safe in there, like I am some indispensable but ordinary thing he can’t do without, because who doesn’t need pocket change and their school library Xerox card and gum? Who doesn’t miss that ordinary, indispensable stuff if they can’t find it? He would look up and there I would be, the everyday, always-there girlfriend.

I am Billy Nash’s girlfriend and even when he doesn’t have his hands on me, I am still her.

It’s perfect.

In my psychology elective, which is a lot less interesting than you’d expect, we are studying the minds of babies, how
when you put their toy behind a barrier so they can’t see it, they supposedly forget all about it and don’t even know it exists anymore. By Thanksgiving, though, I am pretty sure that even when Billy is at the Four Seasons in Maui and I am sitting at my Aunt Adrienne’s country club in La Jolla eating dried-out, room-temperature turkey because being associated with my mother’s side of the family is the kiss of death for edible food, listening to my father and my uncle complain about the weakness of the watered-down mixed drinks, even separated by three thousand miles of blue sky, I am still Billy’s girlfriend.

I have my cell phone in my lap under the table and he texts me and says so.

Billy: If I can’t get out of this room and onto a
surfboard soon I’m going to throw a coconut

Gabs: Isn’t it like 7 a.m. there? Y r u up?

Billy: Forced family bonding. Caitlyn wants to
teach for America. Grandfather thinks she’s a
commie whore

Gabs: Isn’t Agnes a big democrat?

Billy: Don’t tell grandfather that. Ok Caitlyn’s about to
throw tropical fruit

Gabs: Does throwing things run in ur family?

Billy: Yeah well I’m the one with the arm

Gabs: Ur Thanksgiving sounds a lot more
entertaining than mine

Billy: This isn’t Thanksgiving. This is breakfast.
Gotta get out of here before they move on to me

Gabs:?

Billy: Commie whore’s not on probation. I am.
Jesus here it comes