Where It Began (21 page)

It’s the Valley; it is eighty-eight degrees in April; and all I want to do is swim out of there in a conveniently deep river of sweat. Why couldn’t I just paddle over to some Westside courthouse where the big question would be what the hell a girl like me was doing in the Valley in the first place, even if it was Songbird Lane in Hidden Hills, which is gated and where all the houses have
acres of grassy lawns, black-bottom swimming pools, koi ponds, and a horse?

Leaving aside those pesky questions that are sure to come up in maybe five minutes (if Mr. Healy ever shows) about (1) the drunk driving, (2) the Beemer, and (3) why someone who did what I did should get out of trouble just by having her enormous lawyer bludgeon people.

What I don’t want to be doing is the thing I came here to do: get arrested. Or maybe re-arrested, this time adding the element of consciousness.

It turns out that there are quite a few other things I don’t want to do, such as getting fingerprinted.

Such as having mug shots taken with numbers on the bottom. Such as surrendering my driver’s license—graciously returned to us by the mom of the kid who threw the party on Songbird Lane by FedEx, my wallet still nestled inside my bag and nothing missing—into a big mustard-colored envelope with my number on the front.

Such as getting a date and an actual time on a real day in June to show up in juvenile court.

So I hold my breath and get logged in to the system, with Mr. Healy standing around drumming his fingers as if he’s bored and all of this is no big deal. And I say, “I don’t remember,” in response to every question other than the one about my name and address.

No, I have no firsthand knowledge of where the party was or who threw it or if there even was a party or how I got the liquor
or if I drank it of my own free will or if there even was liquor, which I don’t remember and therefore I can’t admit I drank. Artfully avoiding words like “stole” and “Billy.”

The detective looks annoyed as hell but he has the doctor’s report about the tree and its effect on my head right in front of him on the table so he can’t exactly come out and say
liar, liar, pants on fire
to try to get me to tell him what he wants to know. He keeps cozying up to words that have a great deal of SAT potential such as “stonewall” and “intransigent,” but Mr. Healy keeps murmuring “closed head injury,” and I just sit there, amazed by the depth and breadth of what I really don’t know, and hoping I look dazed and brain-dead enough for them to leave me alone.

What I want to know is why Billy didn’t tell me this part of it, the part where you’re sitting in a metal chair in a windowless room and it feels like you’re an inch away from being sucked up into a whole other life—not in a distant universe, but in a squat, shabby building, with cells and linoleum floors and pissed-off detectives, that you never even knew was there before.

Explain that.

And when I am finally home, alone in my room, all I can think is,
Man, if I did have a drinking problem, this would be the magic moment.

And then I think:
What the hell?

And I go into the bar in the living room and get out some vile-tasting twelve-year-old scotch and some ice.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DRINKING A GREAT
deal of scotch on the rocks when you’re alone in your bedroom is that, in addition to making you feel somewhat less preoccupied with the sorry state of your abysmal, completely wrecked life, it makes you uncoordinated and a sentimental sap and somewhat more stupid than usual.

Which might cause you to drink even more scotch on the rocks in order to take the edge off feeling stupid, et cetera.

So basically I sit on the edge of my bed hugging the ice bucket, drinking twelve-year-old Glenlivet and feeling like a moron. Vivian is getting over her traumatic afternoon in the Valley by getting her nails wrapped in Santa Monica and I, actually
be
ing a sentimental sap and also stupid, start rummaging through the Billy Nash memorabilia in the top drawer of my dresser.

There are movie ticket stubs and shells from the beach outside
his parents’ place near Point Dume and a ratty wrist corsage that I probably should have pressed instead of shoving it whole into a drawer where the petals are turning into mini-compost.

There are little boxes that used to contain an assortment of Belgian chocolates that Billy bought for me only because he wanted the semi-sweet truffles and if he bought the whole box for me, he didn’t have to feel like a goof standing in line at Godiva Chocolatier buying himself romantic candy.

There is the Rule the Pool water polo booster baseball cap that seems like a good thing to be wearing only because by that point in the bottle, I am seriously judgment-impaired.

It seems like a good idea to ponder all the lined up little presents Andie Bennett has mailed me since the accident, and then it seems like an even better idea to kiss the little plastic Flower the Skunk figurine with the pencil sharpener embedded in its belly that she sent last week, only I don’t even think about how a person could nick her lip on the metal strip where the shavings get sliced off the pencil.

By the time Anita calls to see if I want her to come over so we can quiz each other on SAT words, I am impaired on several other dimensions too, and she says, “Are you all right? You sound awful.”

I say, “I’m fine.”

“I don’t know,” Anita says. “Are you crying? Should I come over?”

“I just cut my lip on a pencil sharpener. Don’t come over.”

You can hear Anita taking a breath. “Gabby,” she says, “if this is wrong, I’ll never bring it up again, but are you drunk?”

This seems like the most hilarious thing I’ve heard all day, which isn’t saying much. The only tiny scrap of self-control I have left staunches the impending giggle and leaves me sort of snorting into the phone.

“I’m not drunk,” I say, in a vain attempt to sound as if I’m not. “Maybe I went to the dentist so my tongue is numb.”

“I thought you were going to see that lawyer.”

“Maybe I went to the lawyer and the dentist. Did you think of that? Maybe I went to the dentist and the lawyer and a police station in freaking Reseda. Maybe I should go to sleep.”

“Because if you’re drinking, if it’s more than that one time, you need to talk to someone.”

“Anita, all I do is talk to people. And it was just that time and this time. And now I really have to lie down.” To demonstrate, I lie down and the Rule the Pool hat falls off onto the pillow.

“Do novocaine and alcohol even go together safely?” Anita says. “I’m going to look this up on the Internet. I’m going to text Sanjiv. Hold on.”

But before I have time to hold on, I am asleep.

IF YOU’RE A FAN OF IRONY, MS. FROST’S FIRST
project for me, in the quest to look like I am halfway to being rehabilitated before the Department of Probation gets its hooks into me, is going to AA, and Vivian tells me about it when I am still lying on my bed next to the Rule the Pool hat, sauced.

I am pretty sure that Billy would appreciate the irony, but not only has he forgotten to mention AA in the first place, he has been exiled to his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito, sharing a room with his nosy little cousin and bereft of electronics, because Agnes had to go to New York on business and doesn’t trust Billy at home without heavy-duty adult supervision after it supposedly took him two hours and forty-five minutes to get to Kap’s house for the Spanish book, and given that his dad is about as present and as capable of providing supervision as
John, except that his dad is MIA at Murchison Nash Capital rolling in enormous bundles of cash as opposed to passed out in the den.

Fortunately, Billy manages to convince his aunt that he can’t stay there for the whole three-day weekend because if he misses any more practice with the water polo team, he’ll end up benched and attending a giant state college full of riff-raff, and she has to let him go home.

“Just go,” he says, whispering into a prepaid cell phone that he bought at a mini-mart in Oxnard on his way back down the coast while his uncle’s driver pumps the gas and cleans the wind-shield and Billy hides out in the men’s room. “Just go this one time and don’t say anything. Just sit there. Keep your mouth shut and don’t get a sponsor. No sponsor, got that? Gotta go.”

What do you even wear to kid AA?

Vivian drives me down the hill and into Brentwood, and she drops me off in front. She seems perfectly happy to consign me to two hours in a room full of alcoholics. But it only takes me thirty seconds in the church hall before I am 100% sure that AA isn’t happening for me, even if it is in this very plush church with exceptionally nice-looking refreshments. As much fun and games as it might be to fake out all the sharing caring adults who want to help me solve my so-called problem, it doesn’t exactly seem realistic to bank on faking out a whole room full of kids with actual drinking problems.

I mean, it’s not as if their bullshit meters are nonfunctional because of an alcohol-induced stupor.

Not to mention, some of them look vaguely familiar and have pretty much the same Marc Jacobs flats and pseudo-military jacket that I have, and might actually turn up unexpectedly in my real life, and then what? My big night of drinking untold amounts might be filed somewhere in the Amnesiac Archives, but other than that, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not about to start lying about it in front of a large, sincere audience.

Not to mention my personal plan, the Gabs and Billy plan, is to suck up to my highly paid professional helpers but trot rapidly in the opposite direction with my lips locked if anybody else wants to Talk About Everything. This is an entire church filled with people who look like they’re dying to talk their little hearts out.

What am I supposed to do?

For maybe twenty-nine seconds, I think how probably half the other kids there are in the same stupid situation as me, got caught bombed at a party, downed a bottle of scotch in their bedrooms one time, and
zap
: Go Directly to Twelve Step. Do Not Pass GO. A stop along the way to getting their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Only then they open their mouths and pretty much no, they’re really into it. I feel like a sleazoid Peeping Tom hiding out in the bushes waiting to cop a peek of naked people through his neighbor’s bedroom window.

It is actually kind of sad. People who drink before school every day and spend first period sucking on mentholated cough drops to clean up their breath. And who look twelve years old.
And feel like their lives have nothing to offer. And I’m thinking,
No, you’re so cute, you could definitely get a boyfriend. You could end up like me, with a totally screwed-up life but, hey, no drinking problem.

This is probably the only problem I
don’t
have.

But no, here are people who can’t get out of bed or go to sleep without it. People who are incredibly proud they just spent sixty-eight days without it, even though they constantly want it and think about it all the time and show up at meetings where all they do is talk about it, and have to call up other kids to talk them out of using it.

And I really would have helped them stop it if I had any idea of how to get anyone to do anything. I’m sitting there thinking:
You go, fourteen-year-old drunk boy, get a grip, go another sixty-eight days, call up your fifteen-year-old sponsor
(if kids even get a kid sponsor which, thank you Billy, I don’t plan to stick around long enough to find out)
and smoke a lot of cigarettes because if you think this is bad, wait until you grow up and it turns out you’re exactly like my dad.

And then I think, big revelation, giant whoop, silent You Go Girl from the helpful helping professionals who sent me to this godforsaken pastry smorgasbord and confession-fest:
John is the alcoholic. Not me, John. Why isn’t
he
here?

But it doesn’t seem as if it would go over too well to explain that I just drink at parties a couple of times a week, not unlike everybody else at the parties except for the people who just blaze their way into oblivion with weed, and if I belong at this so-called meeting, then we might just as well sink the church
into the ground under the sheer weight of the gazillion other kids who all get plowed at the same parties as me and, hello, they aren’t alcoholics either.

So maybe there are a couple of other places where I drink, such as at lunch in the Class of 1920 Garden, such as at meals other than breakfast where, give me a break, you really do have to be a drunk to drink anything other than a mimosa, which is at least appropriate with eggs. So send for more chairs. Enough so, say, the entire population of France (where they do drink wine with breakfast; I have personally witnessed this) will have someplace to sit in the Brentwood Unitarian Church.

But I don’t say this. Not to people who drink Stoli out of their thermoses in study hall at Paul Revere Middle School. I wish them well. All I want in life is to find some nice way to get out of there without anyone noticing.

Except, of course, that everyone is looking me over, waiting for an opportunity to spring out of their chairs and sidle up to me and make me feel all welcome.