Where It Began (27 page)

Just thinking about having to face Miss Cornish in her art room with the kilns and the potter’s wheels and the blowtorch and the mallets, where everything smells like warm clay and acid that could expunge anything, makes me stop breathing.

Miss Cornish is always going on and on about how she wants me to nourish my rare gifts and apply for the Interscholastic Art Awards, the Ceramic Federation Honor, the Ovation Fine Arts Scholarship, and the Nobel Peace Prize while I’m at it. But by rare gifts I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean my remarkable ability to play beer pong or turn sports cars into scrap metal. She wants me to infuse my art with my life, but the idea of her finding out anything about the part of my life I am now famous for makes me want to throw up.

It is already hard enough to hold it together, but the minute she spots me slinking through the door to the ceramics studio, she comes scampering up to me and gives me this big, sincere hug in front of everybody in double advanced ceramics and, basically, I want to die.

Miss Cornish drags me into her office, which is this little cluttered storage room off the main art room—unlike Mr. Rosen, who gets a real office with a stained glass window and real furniture upstairs—and she propels me into a metal folding chair.

“I am very proud of you,” she says.

I sit there looking moronic and thinking this is probably
not the moment for her to be proud of me. Maybe before I got artificially cute and started hanging out with Billy, it might have helped. Maybe before I got drunk and stole a car and crashed it. Maybe when I was some whole other person who was potentially going to turn out to be someone different from who I am now.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she says.

The thing is, I do believe she thinks I’m just some wonderful young specimen of womanhood. I just think that either she’s an idiot to be proud of me or maybe she just doesn’t know who I actually am.

I sit there trying not to cry and not to think about how sad this is.

“I’m proud that you came back to school after spring break,” she says, gazing into my eyes as if she were kind of daring me to look away. “I’m proud that you’re back here taking care of business. I’m proud that you’ve developed into such a wonderful artist, and no matter what was going on in your life, you never stopped doing the work.”

I nod my head but keep my mouth clamped shut. I so don’t want to disappoint her, and I’m pretty sure that if she knew me, she wouldn’t exactly be so thrilled with me.

“Gabby,” she says. “I don’t care what happened. You’re a wonderful young lady and a wonderful artist. Sometimes at this school it’s very easy to lose track of how talented we are and what wonderful people we are. I want you to use this class to express yourself and to use the materials the way you need to use them.”

Right, like maybe if I smush enough clay, I’ll feel better.
Maybe if I take a nice blue BMW M3 and turn it into a creative, abstract, tree-hugging piece of found art hanging off a eucalyptus tree on Songbird Lane.

Or maybe not.

So I spend the next fifty minutes sitting between Lisa and Sasha Aronson mixing glaze and pretending that everything is all right. Looking down at what I’m doing and not looking up at the windows that overlook the fountain where the Slutmuffins hang out. Not looking up and trying not to see Billy. Trying to see him and trying not to see him. Knowing that it’s going to be like this every day and not knowing if it’s going to get better or worse.

Seeing him with his arm around Aliza Benitez, seeing his hand slipping just below her waist as they walk toward the lockers. Thinking,
I know this isn’t real. You’re the one is what’s real, I know he isn’t actually with her, but how am I going to live through this?

IT IS DEFINITELY TURNING INTO ONE OF THOSE DAYS
that runs on nightmare time, the kind of nightmare where you start to experience everything in slo-mo, just walking down the sidewalk takes hours, just lifting one foot is like pulling it up against the force of a hundred wads of perfectly chewed gum adhering to the sole of your shoe, and everything is stretched out and takes forever.

So naturally, before I can make it through the parking lot and get onto the bus—which would at least let me be by myself because only kids who live in the hinterlands of Calabasas or Glendale or Hancock Park take the bus, so the local bus is totally empty except for the occasional seventh grader whose nanny has an emergency dentist’s appointment—Andie plants herself in front of me.

All right, you have to give her credit for not totally avoiding
me given her aversion to drama and the fact that I didn’t return her four hundred phone calls or send thank-you notes for the dozen little presents she’s mailed me in the past month. And the truth is, all I want is to be back on the checkered linen blanket on the grass in the Class of 1920 Garden with her and Andy totally into each other and totally uninterested in me and Billy, sitting there drinking Chardonnay from Andie’s Dixie cups—
not
standing around feeling awkward and watching her try to talk coherently.

But she looks as if she’s going to cry and the Must Help Andie instinct kicks in and I go, “Hey, Andie,” given that I don’t have any helpful substances to give her if she goes into her catatonic crying state.

“Why didn’t you call me back?” she says, looking completely miserable.

“Uh, I didn’t know what to say, I guess. Sorry.”

Andie blurts, “I feel like it’s my fault. I just wanted to tell you that. Billy says you don’t want to hang out with us like before,” (which, although I instantly understand why he had to say that, is not the funnest topper to what has to be the least fun school day of my life) “and I understand, I really do, but I just wanted to, I don’t know, say hi or something.”

She stands there gazing at me, looking guilty as all hell, which is a new look for inhabitants of Cute World.

“Are you feeling okay?” she says. “Are you still in pain? Do you need anything for it? Maybe I could help you.”

Even the thought of Andie Bennett skipping across campus
with an adorably wrapped little bottle of Vicodin does not make this conversation any more bearable. I am in the just-say-something-and-get-this-over-with mode. In the I-don’t-want-this-to-be-reality, I-want-to-slip-into-the-alternate-reality-in-which-I-turn-around-and-drive-the-Beemer-back-to-the-party-and-slip-back-inside-and-go-to-the-beach-house-with-Billy-after-he-tells-his-mother-he’s-spending-the-night-cramming-for-AP European-with-Andy-and-I-tell-my-parents-basically-nothing-and-everything-stays-exactly-the-same mode.

I am nevertheless not entirely un-curious as to where she is going with this.

“So how is it your fault?”

“Gabby!” she says, widening her eyes, as if of course I know, in a sort of “duh” move. “I was supposed to be the designated driver.” She looks down at her hands, which she is kind of wringing in front of herself, as if she could gain comfort from her manicure. “I’m not trying to make an excuse. But Jordie was making those really good margaritas. I mean, who drinks margaritas? But you were drinking them and they looked really good and I guess I kind of started drinking them too.”

This is all just so incredibly stupid and lame, and I am already so completely wigged out, I just don’t know what to say.

I mean, it’s not as if I’m the world’s biggest fan of drunk driving, and if you’d ever sat in the backseat while John careened up the hill from Sunset toward Mulholland, straddling the middle line all the way up Roscomare and scraping the bottom of the Benz over the speed bumps, you’d completely believe me.
Because: I don’t have a death wish or the delusional belief that cute drunk boys with car keys who say they can handle it can handle it.

And this, boys and girls, is why God invented taxis and Andy Kaplan’s pool house.

All right, it’s true that occasionally, in a spurt of conscientious zeal, we’d come up with a designated driver, but the only person who ever actually abstained when she was supposed to drive was Andie, which became completely irrelevant when Andy got his Porsche because Andie couldn’t turn it on or shift the gears, which put the possibility of Andie driving the Porsche in the basket with ha-ha-forget-it and impossible.

And, anyway, if you’ve ever wondered why there are no cabs in L.A. late at night, it’s because they’re all ferrying the rich drunk kids from the Three B’s to coed overnights at the houses of whoever’s parents are the most clueless or on location in Cambodia. Or occasionally the sharing caring slobbery kind of parents who think it’s a testament to their grooviness that their kid and her slightly impaired friends are passed out at home and not in some low-class gutter in the Toy District after a rave.

Andy Kaplan’s father is the first kind, which is better; once we ended up in Sasha Aronson’s rec room and her father wanted to
rap
, leading Billy to conclude that maybe consuming a truck-load of hash in the ’60s really could rot your brain. Andy’s father, on the other hand, leaves us completely alone out in the pool house, presumably so he and the fifth Mrs. Kaplan can play naked freeze tag all over the hacienda without being interrupted by
pesky teens padding down the hall in search of a toilet to throw up in. He is so grateful that we are out cold in the pool house, he sends the housekeeper with trays of brunch-like goodies at noon the next day.

The point of which being that Andie screwing up when she was supposed to be the designated driver of a car that Billy would never let her drive in the first place was kind of irrelevant.

“Right.”

I am incredibly tempted to say something really nasty to her.

At that particular moment, it is hard to see a downside to being as nasty as I feel like being, as nasty as I’ve felt like being all day, and even more so after Billy’s hand slipped onto Aliza Benitez’s butt and into her pocket while I was innocently staring at the back of his head from behind a pillar.

What was Andie going to do if I just broke down and went for it, drum me out of Cute World?

Get me on the Slutmuffins’ blacklist?

“I don’t blame you if you’re mad at me,” she says, scratching her right calf with the toe of her left Chanel ballet slipper, proving the utility of really expensive shoes in times of trouble.

“For godsake, Andie,” I say, wanting to be mean but the cute little foot in the cute little shoe is just getting to me and realizing that it isn’t
her
cute little butt I want to kick. “It’s not like you could have done anything about it. I wasn’t exactly looking for a designated driver at the time. It’s not like you did anything to me.”

Andie says, “It’s not?” She bites her lower lip and sniffles. “You are so nice. I never even realized how nice you are. You’re like . . .”
(Try to imagine Andie struggling with deep thought.) “Joan of Arc or something. What you’re doing is totally amazing.”

No, what I’m doing is trying to live through the day so I can come back for more tomorrow. This is probably more stupid than amazing. Or amazingly stupid.

Andie is yammering on and on, goo-goo eyed. She thought she was loyal but I’m the most loyal person
ev
er. I’m like a golden retriever, like her golden retriever Duchess who died but she was really a good dog, like a guy in the army who throws himself on a—what do you call it?—hand grenade for you.

This girl is so sweet and so without brains, it’s pathetic.

Because, truth be told, I am the hand grenade and
not
the person who throws herself on it. Because if Billy comes near me, his probation will blow up, the shrapnel will rip through his life, and he’ll be in Juvie Hell.

I’m not back at Winston School to grow and change like some sort of life-embracing, leafy vegetation turning toward Ponytail’s imaginary sun. It’s a total fraud.

I’m back because I want everything to stay the same.

My everything being Billy.

Me and Billy.

Because even though I get it, I understand, I’m not brainless, still, my heart does not understand. My body does not understand in the least. Skin, eyelids, fingertips. I want him to play with my hair and the hell with Princeton. Would Romeo give up Juliet for a really good shot at the Ivies? I don’t care if Billy blowing in my ear is some form of felony. I want it and it seems to me as if,
if I just hang in there and he sees me and my ear is right there in his face, then he’ll want it too. He did at the castle, so why not at Winston, every day, just like before?

Because I am the grenade is why.

Because if I get too close to him, I’ll mess him up.

I am the grenade and I just have to roll away down the hill and stay away and somehow get by not talking to him or brushing arms with him or holding hands or sitting with him for three more weeks of junior year.

BY THE TIME THE BUS DROPS ME OFF ON ESTRADA,
I am feeling too much like a person who just crashed a car to drag my backpack home.

It makes you wonder if
maybe
I wasn’t emotionally ready to go to Winston, not that I thought anybody ever was, and Ponytail Doc, big surprise, missed the boat on my actual condition. Or maybe, like Billy says, my parents really are paying all these happy helpers to do what I say I want them to do without regard to whether it makes sense, such as sending me back to Winston so I can watch Billy paw my favorite Slutmuffin whenever I look up.