Where It Began (22 page)

I figure that hanging out in the ladies’ room for the next hour and a half would be a bit obvious and somewhat insulting, so I just sit there in my folding chair leaning as far back as possible without tipping over, not making eye contact with anybody, pretending to listen.

Every time another one of them starts talking, I glance up, very fast, and every time they stop, I wonder if this is when they’re going to shout out a big Kid AA howdy to all the new people—or for all I know, just me, for all I know, I am the only
new person—and force us or just me or whoever to stand up and say something.

I just slink down further in my chair, sliding my eyes over every corner of the room, checking out the emergency exits just in case.

When it is over, I run out of there, not saying hi to anybody, just jumping into Vivian’s car and closing my eyes, light-headed and completely clammy.

gabs123:
i cannot go to AA anymore. get me out of AA. i mean it.

pologuy:
shit aa. this is not good

gabs123:
kill me now. i’m supposed to go all the time. i mean constantly. daily. i am not going to stand around and talk about myself. did u have to go?

pologuy:
long time ago. tiny tot fake aa. i think i got kicked out

gabs123:
how does a person get kicked out of tiny tot fake AA?

pologuy:
i think i hit someone. doofus buddy geiss. hate that kid

gabs123:
buddy geiss!!! wait. isn’t this supposed to b alcoholics ANONYMOUS? thus the second a.

pologuy:
ok some doofus kid identical to buddy geiss. not hit. knocked over his chair when he was in it

gabs123:
y?

pologuy:
who the hell remembers back to tiny tot aa? maybe he took my donut

gabs123:
i don’t know if i’m up for knocking over a doofus to get out of this. what do i do? i’m not a sharing caring gabfest kind of girl.

pologuy:
and that is what we love about u

What we LOVE about you?!?!?!?!

gabs123:
?

pologuy:
ok just tell ur social worker u can’t do it

gabs123:
right. that’ll make her happy. frost is the one who’s making me go and she reports to my lawyer. it’s supposed to impress the hell out of probation. remember probation?

pologuy:
think of something else to impress them. it’s not that hard. like i told u before. boo hoo and dig in ur heels. boo hoo queen frostine I can’t go to aa because . . .

gabs123:
because y?

pologuy:
it could b anything. b creative. try again. boo hoo queen frostine i can’t go to aa because . . .

gabs123:
if anyone sees me there my name will be mud all over candyland? did u know mudd was some
guy who supposedly helped john wilkes booth shoot abraham lincoln?

pologuy:
thnx for the fun fact. will it b on SAT 2’s? i’m being forced to memorize all words in english language. and an all purpose essay

gabs123:
u wrote an all purpose SAT essay?

Even though it isn’t too hard to figure out that life is going on without me in it, the idea that Billy was sitting around writing an all-purpose SAT essay while I was out in the Valley getting mug shots taken is somehow mind-boggling. The idea that he could just sit there and concentrate and write essays about his most emotional moment and his most inspirational hero and his most compelling hope, dream, or extracurricular activity, and soon I am going to have to write about how getting past my Problem made me a Better Person to try to get everyone in some sub-regular college admissions office to love me. The idea that I’ve wandered into this horrible, alternate world and have to do all this weird stuff to get back, but everybody else is still sitting there in the real world writing their SAT essays and memorizing the Latin roots of SAT words.

pologuy:
tutor wrote it. i memorize it and adapt it to 200 stupid prompts. it’s inspirational. how i’m on student council and martin luther king and gandhi

gabs123:
can u adapt it to getting me out of AA?

pologuy:
y not? u need 5 compelling paragraphs. need
reason from literature or ancient history, current events, and deep personal crap that u get to make up. u can make up the whole thing. u can say ghandi was the first indian guy on the atlanta braves, and that’s where he met MLK. u can say that you’re on council even if ur not. tutor says. what a scam.

gabs123:
the deep personal part is i’ll die if i have to go again.

pologuy:
very compelling. did u make that up?

gabs123:
i am not making this up! do something!

pologuy:
calm down. tell frosty NO AA. you’d rather have therapy

gabs123:
she’s already supposedly giving me therapy.

pologuy:
ok tell her u need to get super intensive therapy because ur super intensively deranged

gabs123:
just kill me now.

pologuy:
listen. ur paying the bitch to do what u want and make the court like it. just be smart about it. i can’t go to AA because . . .

gabs123:
sorry if I’m repeating myself here nash but BECAUSE WHY?

pologuy:
ok because being there makes u want to cut yourself. that sounds nice and girlie

gabs123:
i want to CUT myself? right, with the plastic knife from the coffee cake on the dessert buffet in the back of the church.

pologuy:
makes u want to eat up all the coffee cake,
stick your finger down ur throat, barf, and then cut yourself

gabs123:
ew. like she’s going to buy this.

pologuy:
u r paying her to buy this. her job is to buy anything u tell her to buy. trust me on this

So I call her up and cry. And he’s right again.

LISA SAYS, “WHERE WERE YOU? I CAME OVER WITH
Anita and your mom was very squirrelly about where you were.”

“AA.” It just slips out.

“Wow,” Lisa says.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anymore.”

“No,” Lisa says. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, it could be good for you. You give your worries over to a higher power.”

“No offense, Lisa, but I’m not giving anything over to a higher power.”

“Well, no offense, but it might be better than giving things over to Billy Nash.”

“Did you just say that?”

“Yeah, well, sorry, all I’m saying is that if you’re having a problem with drinking, AA wouldn’t be the worst place for you to go.”

“You can talk when you’ve been there. I’m going to go to constant psychotherapy instead, are you happy? Could we please talk about something else? Could we talk about you instead? Pretty, pretty please with a rum ball on top?”

“Pretty please with a
keg
on top is more like it,” Lisa says.

But as it turns out, she is dying to talk about something else. She is, in fact, dying to talk about Junior Spring Fling, which sounds about as weird and alien to my current life as a potato sack race on Mars but beats hearing one more person weigh in on my so-called drinking problem.

Although it is somewhat odd that now that—instead of festooning the old gym with rolls of crepe paper and watching the Muffins pitch a fit about how much they like pink, silver, and black—I am expanding my range of my fun high school experiences by becoming a lowlife, arrested north of Ventura Boulevard followed by hours in a church full of drunk kids, now Lisa wants to expand her range of fun high school experiences by shopping for a new dress and going to Fling.

You have to wonder what we even have to talk about anymore.

“Huey wants to go,” she says. “So I just said I would without thinking and now I’m feeling like maybe this is a mistake.”

“Huey wants to go to
Fling
?”

“I know. You wouldn’t think he’d want to do anything that conventional. It kind of took me by surprise.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t just want to use you as cover so he can take pictures that make everybody look like decadent
slobs for yearbook?” Huey is a big fan of smoky, black-and-white, decadent slob pictures. Only, nobody can tell he’s making fun of them. They think they look gorgeous and artistic.

“Come
on
,” Lisa says. She sounds horrified.

“Sorry. I was joking.”

“No you weren’t.”

“Okay, it’s not that I don’t think Huey would want to take you to a dance. It’s just that you’d think he’d be repelled by a rhyming-name dance at Winston.”

Lisa sighed. “Well, it’s the only dance that’s available. Except for his cousin’s debutante ball in Paris.”

“He invited you to a deb ball in Paris?”

“Like my mother’s going to let me go to Paris, France, with Huey? I don’t even know if she’s going to let me go to Spring Fling.”

“You should one hundred percent go. Tell her it’s a sock hop, for godsake, with poodle skirts and socks, and all the really old teachers are chaperoning because they like Elvis and all that old stuff. They’re going to be dancing the twist. It’s going to be completely harmless.”

“My mom is pretty sure someone will slip me a rufie.”

“She’s completely unhinged. It’s the Junior Spring Fling, not a frat party.”

“I know. I just don’t want to stick out in a bad way.”

“All you need is a tight sweater.” Although not, perhaps, a Little Mermaid sweater. “I’ll go shopping with you.”

“Thanks. Are you going?”

My first thought is,
of course. Of course I’m going
. Because I’ve gone to every Winston School social event large and small since September. Because I’m on the committee that has planned and decorated every event large and small since September. Because Billy likes going to parties with a girl who looks damned good and so, of course, I go to parties and I look pretty damned good.

But, of course, I’m not going anymore.

“Doubtful,” I say. “I just have to focus on staying out of any form of juvie jail.”

“How could you go to jail?”

This makes me remember why I’m not talking about any of this stuff with anyone but Billy and people who are paid to listen and keep quiet about it.