Where It Began (26 page)

pologuy:
U HAVE TO CUT THEM OFF BEFORE IT GETS THERE. close them down. all my people know not to bother u but u have to watch out for the loose cannon dorks

He sounds seriously seriously worried.

And I’m thinking,
Maybe I should be feeling more seriously worried instead of just numb.

And then I think,
No, numb is probably a good thing, because if Billy Nash is freaking out, I would be dead on the ground and mainlining Glenlivet if I was actually feeling this.

And I go,
Okay, Gabriella, take a deep breath and calm the hell down. Keep your eyes on the prize. If you want your life back, you have to go back there and get it. You don’t have to feel a damned thing, you just have to go.

pologuy:
r u there?

gabs123:
i’m here. i get it. u don’t have to worry about me so much. i can handle it. i vant to be alone, dahlink.

pologuy:
yeah but nobody really vants to be alone and i can’t b with u there. r u going to be ok? can u do this?

gabs123:
i get it. ur with me now and I’m fine with it. i can totally do this.

Only what if I can’t?

I would so have had a wooden nose all the way out the window and across the street if I were a magic puppet. And I say to myself:
Oh Gabriella, you are such a genius relationship strategist, good breather, and all-round desirable girl, he’ll be with you in no time.
At which point the Pinocchio nose extends itself further north, up toward Mulholland Drive.

pologuy:
oh and u should check outside ur laundry room

gabs123:
?

pologuy:
just do it

I go clomping down the stairs so fast and loud that John yells, “Be careful!” from the den, which has to be an all-time first. I plow through the dark laundry room and just outside the back door, at the edge of the redwood landing, there’s a gift bag, the understated ritzy kind with leaves woven into the thick paper of it. Inside the bag, there’s a square, gold box that’s filled with rows
and rows of heart-shaped Belgian chocolates, just the dark mocha ones that I like, and not Billy’s usual little box missing the pilfered truffles. This box is entirely full of perfect candies, perfect hearts, completely perfect. And on the gold-striped paper that lines the lid, he’s written, “You’re the one.”

And I think,
Okay, maybe I can do this.

I’m the one.

THINKING THIS IS MAYBE NOT THE BEST TIME TO
offend Lisa or Anita by picking one and not the other to carpool with, I say my parents are going to take me to school, even though my parents are not what you’d call thrilled to get out of bed when it’s still dark out. Amazingly, John shows up in the kitchen looking like he’s dressed for high school circa 1962, in the navy blue blazer and khaki pants, to drive me to Winston.

He keeps saying “Gabs,” so at least he has my name right, but I am already so wigged out, the thought of having to live through another bizarro conversation that involves tears running down his face is more than I can take. So I just stare straight ahead of me and clench my teeth when tempted to answer.

He is using his GPS, which gives you some idea of how often he has driven to Winston since seventh grade, when carpool turned out not to be a business op. Navigating the carpool line is
completely beyond him, so he pulls into the student parking lot where the clay-waxed German cars get to hang with their own kind. Where I get to watch everybody else get out of their car-pools still drinking their coffee and eating their Starbucks pastries.

And I go,
Gabriella, you’re the one. You can totally do this.

But even though Vivian’s hairdresser came to the house and re-streaked my hair and I have three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick makeup from my hairline to my collarbone, I still look like a mutant being.

“You’re going to do fine,” John says, reaching into the backseat to get me my backpack, patting me on the shoulder. Which still hurts. Which makes me wonder, as I climb out of the car and into the open where everyone can see the beige cover-up ooze down my cheeks in the direct sunlight, where they can stare at me as I try to find an unbruised spot where I can put the shoulder strap of the backpack, exactly how horrible this is going to be.

As it turns out, returning to Winston School as a famous screwup is more than slightly horrible in weird ways I never even anticipated. In the first place, there isn’t enough oxygen and I keep having to gulp air to the point that reminding myself to breathe is completely irrelevant, and in the second place, walking around makes my legs shiver as if they were cold, only they aren’t, and I just want to go sit down somewhere far far away, such as the rings of Saturn.

But I can’t sit down because, in the third place, kids I don’t know and don’t want to know keep coming up to me and expecting me to talk to them between gulping deep breaths.

Not only am I no longer Billy’s public girlfriend, which is bad enough, but I’m suddenly approachable.

Back before I was Billy’s girlfriend, unwanted attention wasn’t exactly my big problem. Now, even though “I don’t want to talk about it” is my new mantra, I can’t keep people away from me. Kids I barely know the names of have a strange compulsion to share what screwups they are so we can feel bad together between classes.

Like Jenna Marx, who used to be bulimic. What possibly could have made her want to share this with me? By the candy machine in the gym on her way to tennis?

Like Roy Warner, who smokes pot in the chapel before school on a daily basis, who reeks of it, and is still in Winston School only because he is possibly the richest semi-smart person in the history of the world despite the fact that he’s stoned maybe 100% of the time and because his dad keeps giving Winston large checks. Extremely large checks. So Roy Warner tells me that he understands completely where I’m at, yeah, hey man, he does, oh yeah, he really does, and I just stand there in a state of stupefaction, going, “Thank you, but I just don’t want to talk about it.”

The only people who actually seem to want to get away from me as fast as they can without bumping into something and embarrassing themselves are the decorating committee girls, who grimace ever so slightly and go scuttling off in the other direction. The less civic-minded Muffins just kind of look me over and walk away.

I want to tell Billy, just to see him cock his head and raise
one eyebrow and be amused by this bizarre turn of events, but it quickly becomes obvious that that isn’t going to happen. I might be the one, but not so anybody else would notice.

I keep looking for him, sensing his presence across rooms when he isn’t there, glimpsing someone else’s shoulder sliding around a corner and thinking it’s his shoulder, getting a scent of warm salt and Cuban tobacco and turning, but no one is there.

The first time I actually spot him is when I see the back of his head walking down the hall toward the language lab between classes. When I am sure he has to feel my presence and somehow know that I’m there, and he will have to stop.

But he doesn’t.

I feel like the cheesy heroine trying to find her boyfriend in a crowded railroad station in an old-timey World War II movie, only when Cheesy Heroine sees Dashing Boyfriend, he’s already on the train and it’s rolling away down the track and out of the station and he doesn’t even know that she’s there. The Cheesy Heroine who racks up offers of monogrammed cloth hankies and faints into the arms of total strangers because she’s such a pathetic loser cow whose boyfriend can’t even get it together to look out the train window and find her for Pete’s sake.

And I say to myself:
Oh Gabby, you are such a spiffy, not-pathetic loser cow, you can totally do this. You can so totally avoid him and not have to deal with this until you stop being such a cringe-worthy whack job. Only perhaps you should stop lurking behind pillars and staring at the back of his head. Like now.

And it isn’t as if I have to skulk around to avoid surprise
encounters with him either. He and the Andies and the Slut-muffins still hang by the fountain in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden; I don’t.

They go to their lockers during the long breaks; I haul so many books around, it feels as if my right shoulder is going to fall off.

In stupid track chemistry, which is the only class we have together, Dr. Berg had already made us stop being lab partners back at the beginning of fall semester because we talked too much. So Billy and Neil Chun are in the back row and I am in front with Lily Branner, who is for some reason so highly motivated to get an A in stupid track chemistry, she couldn’t have cared less if I’d turned into a werewolf over spring break as long as I could still use my hairy paws to do the experiments right.

All she wants to know is whether I studied for SAT IIs over vacation, and it’s embarrassing to admit that Vivian just got me a prep book like a week ago, as if there isn’t a lot of point to me prepping for SATs. When I tell Lily I didn’t, she kind of mutters that it figures, and loses all interest in anything other than whether I’m pouring the right amount of solution into the beakers she has all lined up.

And Billy is just busy busy busy with his Bunsen burner, too busy to look over and see me sneaking looks at him. Which is good because that level of being a pathetic stalker cow has to show and I don’t want him to notice.

“Aren’t you making a lot of new friends?” Huey says at lunch, when Lisa and Anita are nowhere to be found and I’m not about
to text them and make them eat with me, and I’m standing in the cafeteria trying to figure out where in God’s name I’m going to sit. Huey walks me to an empty picnic table on the deck above the ordinary people’s lawn and snaps what turns out to be a photo of Roy Warner looming over me adjusting his crotch while I sit there looking like I just swallowed a live mouse.

Huey says, “Hey, Roy. Did you do the Latin yet?”

Roy mutters something about Virgil and shuffles away.

“Are you all right?” Huey says, just kind of staring at me.

Yes, boys and girls, as if things weren’t bad enough, now Jeremy Hewlett III is finding me lunch tables and feeling sorry for me. Ever so briefly, I wonder how I’d look in a Holy Name plaid jumper, and how short they let you wear it.

“My parents are paying hundreds of dollars an hour for professional dimwits to ask me that,” I say. “Could we possibly talk about your athlete’s foot or something?”

“I don’t know,” Huey says. “I noticed that suddenly you’ve become friendly, so I was worried about you.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, taking a sip of the cafeteria lemonade, so sweet and cold the first hit gives you sugar shock so bad it makes your head ache. “I was always friendly. I can’t help it if everybody wants to turn themselves inside out in front of me all of a sudden.”

“Friendly! You’ve only ever spoken to half a dozen people in the past four and a half years. Now you’re gabbing it up with the masses. Gabbing. Gabby. Get it?”

I got it.

“Yeah, well I got mashed on the head. I can’t help it.” Huey is just staring at me and it is spectacularly weirding me out. “Stop it, Huey. I always talked to anyone who talked to me, such as you.”

Only we can’t continue the conversation because Jenna Marx and her whole stick-like band of girls who, now that I notice, are pretty much eating only lettuce leaves for lunch, sit down near us and seem to want to stare at me sympathetically in between calculating how many calories there are in a level plastic teaspoon of fat-free cottage cheese. Ashley Haas, who is too skeletal even for extra-small Juicy Couture tube tops, looks deeply into my weirded-out eyes and tells me that they all support me.

Huey doesn’t even look up, but you can see his face getting flushed. And then he snaps a picture of five girls with 2% body fat.

THE PERSON I LEAST WANT TO SEE IN MY NEW ROLE
as well-known juvenile delinquent is Miss Cornish. Art is the only class I ever wanted to go to all the time, no matter how I was feeling or what I was going through.

But not today.

It’s hard to know how my main art teacher since seventh, who managed to survive my metamorphosis from invisibility to whatever, is going to adjust to my new role as penitent thug.

The problem is, Miss Cornish is personally interested.

Deeply deeply interested.

Deeply and sincerely interested. Not faking it, either. She likes to talk to us artistic young people and it is sort of difficult not to sort of like her. Not to mention I’ve taken every class she teaches that fits into my schedule, and it turns out she even saw the dorky portfolio my elementary school principal at St. Thomas
Aquinas made for me when I applied to Winston School in the first place since he knew my grades sure as hell weren’t going to do the trick.