Where It Began (15 page)

gabs123:
so come see.

Why not? I know he won’t.

And then I think,
OMG what are you doing, Gabriella? Do. Not. Cling. Do not ask him where he’s been or what he’s been doing or why he didn’t call sooner.

I am just so far back there in that awful place of not quite knowing, it’s as if I just met him. It is as if I am back where I don’t even know him again.

pologuy:
did u have ur fun talk with the cops yet?

gabs123:
FUN?!?!?!?!?!?!

pologuy:
i’ve had several fun talks. i have my own personal policeman

gabs123:
what did u say to ur probation guy? r u ok?

pologuy:
u first

gabs123:
what can i say to them anyway? i don’t remember.

pologuy:
r u serious? r u still gonna say u don’t remember?

gabs123:
seems like a plan.

pologuy:
yowza! they’re gonna go apeshit

gabs123:
y?

pologuy:
r u kidding me?

gabs123:
what am i supposed to do about it? all i can do is say sorry 500 times and cry. what can they even do about it? if someone could make me remember, they already would have.

pologuy:
hold up. u actually said u don’t remember to the cops? they really hate that. does ur lawyer know about this?

gabs123:
i don’t have a lawyer remember?

pologuy:
and they bought it?

gabs123:
nash, i don’t even remember when i told them that i don’t remember. but that’s what i’m going to say. y wouldn’t they buy it?

pologuy:
u r freaking amazing

gabs123:
duh

pologuy:
and this is the plan?

gabs123:
it’s my plan and i’m sticking to it. do u have some alternate plan?

pologuy:
i need to c u

Yes yes yes yes
yes!
I have become a makeup-application fiend waiting exactly for this. I am the reigning queen of camouflage.
Yes!

gabs123:
me too.

pologuy:
i’d climb through ur window if ur house wasn’t on freaking stilts

gabs123:
big letterman. u could scale a stilt. romeo would have scaled stilt.

pologuy:
romeo ended up dead in crypt, whereas i’m going to play polo at princeton. broken neck scaling gf’s stilt is not in my plan

GF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

gabs123:
ok, do u have a non-fatal plan?

pologuy:
behind the castle? can u get there?

Like there was any place or time or way I wouldn’t go see Billy.

Like this wasn’t the first time I’d felt like a halfway real person with a halfway real life since my actual life went up in smoke with Billy’s Beemer.

Like maybe if I could just avoid looking desperate and drooling all over him, I could get my life back.

IN THE MORNING, IT IS TORTURE WAITING FOR VIVIAN
to get ready to roll down the hill to get her hair styled so I can spackle on my makeup and get out of there. The only real question in my mind is if I should go with all the concealer so I’ll look halfway cute or if I should let some of the bruises show through so I’ll look battered yet brave.

I go with the concealer.

And as soon as Vivian pokes her head in to say she is going, looking slightly guilty but pretty much as eager to get out of there as I am, I lower myself gently into the tightest possible sweats and head out through the back of the house, through the laundry room, and down into the canyon toward the castle, trying to walk like a human being.

The castle is what we call this enormous old Spanish house at the end of a cul-de-sac off Via Hermosita. It has been under
reconstruction but mostly abandoned, half-finished, for my whole life. The place is gated tight from the street, but if you climb down the bank from the house next door, you can slip through the gate by the pool house. The pool is empty and there’s graffiti in it, but behind the pool, the yard is terraced and wooded, so even if somebody did show up to work on the main house, they wouldn’t see you down there unless they came looking.

I wait on a stone bench out of the sun, not for the coolness of the shade, but because I am afraid my face will look as if it’s covered with putty in full sunlight, and I watch for Billy.

And it really does feel as if I were abducted by aliens, sucked into a time warp, and returned to planet Earth a long time later, looking (almost) the same, but entirely different. Like I can’t quite remember how to breathe, and my heart isn’t sure how to beat in the right rhythm, and I don’t know how to focus my eyes so I can take it all in, and I can’t tell how to feel beyond the rush of seeing him coming toward me finally.

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve seen him, and climbing down the neighbor’s embankment, he looks as if having his car wrecked made him get even more gorgeous. He is wearing a dark, dark green T-shirt and these perfect jeans and ratty old black Converse without socks. I swear, his footsteps have to scorch the path.

“Oh, Babe,” he says before he hugs me, looking at me through those blue eyes, through those dark lashes, the sun in that pale hair. “You look like you’ve been through it.”

So much for the makeup. Carefully holding my head a little
bit away from his cheek so he won’t get plastered with a big, greasy splotch of opaque beige glop, the rest of me feels so good, so at home, pressed up against him.

And I think:
Don’t cling don’t cling don’t cling.

I say, “Ya think?”

“Are you all right, G? You look so
thin
.”

Like this is a bad thing.

“I just want this all to be over. . . .”

“I know you do,” he whispers in my ear, so close I can feel his breath, feel it blowing my hair over my ear. “But it’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be over and in the past.”

“Billy, it’s not in the past yet! What happens if I tell the police I don’t remember and they don’t believe me? What if they want to put me in prison for stealing your car?”

“You didn’t steal my car,” Billy says. Snorts, actually, as if the idea that I did what I did is so ridiculous, it’s snort-provoking. “No one in his right mind would believe you stole my car. Come on.”

Except that I
did
.

“Your mother hates me,” I say.

“Not that much,” Billy says. “Not enough to tell the police you stole my car.”

Billy starts to rub my shoulders, which kind of hurts, but I let him do it anyway. I want it to feel good. I want to believe that Agnes will go along with him and I won’t be up for the part of hot-girl icon in Grand Theft Auto any time soon, but if he has so much power over her, then why are we hiding out behind the castle?

“What if they want to know the story of my life?” Meaning my life since the first day of junior year, given that before then I didn’t have anything that you could call a life. “I can’t just say I don’t remember anything ever.”

Billy keeps rubbing, only faster, so it feels as if the skin is going to peel off my shoulder blades leaving just bones and nerve endings. “Maybe you could,” he says. “You got pretty smashed. Maybe you could just pummel the bitches with your drinking problem.”

“What drinking problem?” This is so not what I need to hear from him. “You want me to say I have a drinking problem and I’m like permanently blacked out?”

“Whoa,” he says. “Don’t get defensive. You were pretty smashed is all I meant.”

“Jesus freaking Christ, Billy!” I can tell that yelling is not a good thing, but I can’t exactly help myself. “
Everyone
gets pretty smashed! It was a party. Everyone gets smashed at parties. The stoners blaze and we get smashed.”

“You were kind of unusually smashed,” he says. “You could hardly walk.”

“Well, obviously I could walk well enough to get into your car and drive it into a tree,” I say. Billy just looks at me. It is impossible to tell what he is thinking. “It would help if I could remember anything.”

“Whoa,” Billy says, eyeing me as if he were one of the detectives Vivian won’t let me talk to. “You
really
don’t remember anything? Not
anything
.”

“Duh.”

He stands there staring at me. “But it’ll come back to you sometime, right?”

“Gone forever,” I say. “That’s what my dimwit doctor said. Some combination of my so-called binge drinking and the head injury.”

Billy says, “
Whoa
. So you’ll never remember what happened? It’s gone forever? They can’t even hypnotize you?”

“Gone forever,” I say.

Billy just stands there looking kind of dazed but like he finally gets it.

All I know is that if I don’t do something right away, if I don’t make him want me right away, it is pretty much over. I know it before he even starts to elaborate on how being with me is a probation violation, which I already know and so do not want to hear about. How he’s beyond grateful that I didn’t finger him for being at the party, but unless his PO is a bigger moron than he thinks, he has to keep the guy from figuring it out and nailing him, and he can’t have a girlfriend with a drinking problem who parties blahblah because he’s on probation for
his
so-called drinking problem and his many DUI’s that his mom got him out of, and it’s different for me because this was my first offense blabitty-blah but if he screws up again, he’s screwed and he can kiss (drum roll) Princeton good-bye because he’s going to be incarcerated somewhere with bars and Eight-Trey Gangster Crips.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says. “It has to at least look like I’ve cleaned up, or I have to kiss everything good-bye.”

It is so obvious that he’d rather kiss
me
good-bye.

It is so so obvious that I have to find a way to keep that from happening.

I keep trying to tell myself what a wonderful person I am and how any reasonable boyfriend would just have to see that and just want me, want me, want me, but this is such a complete crock that it only makes me cry more.

“Don’t, Gardiner,” Billy said. “Shhhh. It’ll be all right. Like I said, we just have to act like we’re over until things settle down.”

I don’t even know what that means. Am I supposed to be hanging around Winston School pretending it’s over when it really isn’t over? If Billy can’t see me or talk to me or be with me, how is it
not
over?

Billy takes my hand and gazes at me as if he is actually sad. “Look,” he says. “Are you sure you even want to come back?”

“What?”

“You look so fragile and everything. And with me not being able to take care of you in public and everybody at Winston looking at you and trying to talk to you about it and everything . . . Would you be better off at Holy Name?”