Where It Began (28 page)

Dragging myself and all the books and the notebooks and the Xeroxed readers I need to make up all the work I missed up the hill to home feels like doing some pointless task on a chain gang in a really boring but disturbing movie just before the jailbreak,
dragging giant rocks around for no apparent reason with a sadistic sheriff waving his rifle at me to make me keep trudging uphill. And I’m thinking,
What is the point of this? What am I even doing there?

And then I get home, into the quiet house, empty except for John, barely there behind the closed door of the den, into my room, and onto the laptop, and
there he is, there is his screen name on my screen,
and
that
is the point.

pologuy:
u looked hot today

So what were you doing with your hand in Aliza Benitez’s pocket?
I so cannot come out and ask him, but what
was
that? All right, it proves to all the world that he isn’t still with me, but it’s not as if his probation officer is creeping around Winston School with a hidden camera, analyzing the footage to make sure that Billy gets not being with me right.

gabs123:
forbidden fruit. want some?

pologuy:
duh. only look what happened to adam

gabs123:
if adam had ur lawyer, he’d still b running around paradise and eve would still b naked eating apple sauce.

pologuy:
ur lawyer is fine. ag says. just don’t say anything that anyone could use against u. don’t talk to anyone. thought u were going to do ur garbo i vant to be alone don’t talk to me thing today but u were miss
popular with the freaks. is this wise miss fruit?

gabs123:
strange day. i’m the new patron saint of freaks.

And what were you doing with your hand in Aliza Benitez’s pocket?
I am so waiting for an opening on this one. And so trying to get myself to back off and not say anything and not care.

pologuy:
u r irresistible to one and all

Okay, sort of an opening.

gabs123:
tell that to benitez. i totally understand what ur doing with her and all, but it still somewhat sucks.

pologuy:
that must be why they call them slutmuffins. i miss YOU G

Okay,
totally
worth bringing it up.

gabs123:
me too. while u dine with benitez.

pologuy:
noticed u dining with baby huey and the stick girls. u got ur own thing going on

gabs123:
give me a break! and andie wants to be my little pal. pretty weird.

pologuy:
she KNOWS she’s not supposed to bother u. brainless twit. i’ll take care of it. no worries

Brainless twit?
Poor Andie. Drama in Cute World.

gabs123:
no biggie.

pologuy:
i’ll take care of it

gabs123:
shit 5:00. gotta go.

pologuy:
?

gabs123:
westwood. ponytail. again.

pologuy:
have fun. b sure to cross fingers behind back while curling up on couch. wouldn’t mind joining u on couch

gabs123:
she doesn’t have a couch. it’s a chair.

pologuy:
even better. easier to cross fingers behind chair. just remember not to tell her anything

gabs123:
there’s nothing to tell.

THIS TIME PONYTAIL IS WEARING A SKY-BLUE
pantsuit with a giant white lace ruffle at her neck. I feel kind of sorry for her, watching her wardrobe deteriorate. It’s a little hard to take anyone all that seriously in an outfit like that, no matter how expensive the designer buttons are, and you can only hope she isn’t planning to wear it when she tells the DA that I’m cured.

She doesn’t have any more cookies, either, so I offer to split my Dottie’s Sweeties cupcake and she says sure. You have to figure that at least she isn’t worried I’m some squirrelly person who might poison her strangely dressed shrink.

“First day back,” she says.

“Yup.”

“Everything okay in the art room? Hands functional?”

“Yup.”

“Any issues with taking in information?”

“Too much information.” I shudder a little with the image of Billy with his hand down Aliza’s back pocket.

“You’re thinking about something specific.”

All this cat and mouse is wearing me down. I just want to get my cheese back to the hole in the floorboards and not be harassed by someone who could make me do a ropes course if she felt like it.

The thing is, after you sit in their offices long enough, and you’re already totally stressed out, it wears you down. As militant as you are about spending hour after hour explaining you don’t have a Problem, it seems as if the time would pass a lot faster if you would just roll over and spill.

I’m sorry, but it does.

Not to mention how hard it is to balance the risk of making her hate me if I tell her any true thing about me versus the risk of making her hate me if I sit there and refuse to tell her anything at all. It’s hard to know, if I do tell her anything, if she’ll turn around and tell someone else in a chain of revelations that could end up with me in girlie youth jail and Billy in actual prison with underage gangbangers and a permanent record somewhere else.

“Okay,” I say. “Here’s the thing. If I tell you about something that someone is doing that might be wrong or like even illegal, do you tell other people about it?” I am staring straight at her. I figure that if she outright lies, I will somehow be able to tell.

“You have some concerns about whether I’ll reveal what you tell me and get someone in trouble.”

Duh.

So we play this inane game back and forth with her not coming out and answering the question and me not coming out and telling her anything. Because I sure as hell am not planning to tell her how Billy is perhaps still my boyfriend and perhaps not my boyfriend and perhaps sticking his hands down Aliza Benitez’s pants (which, when you think about it, is probably the only thing he’s doing that could actually benefit him, legally speaking) and get him perhaps sent to out-of-state lockup for violating his probation, where he definitely won’t be my boyfriend, until I get a straight answer.

And then finally she says, “Oh dear, I haven’t told you if you’re safe confiding this thing you’re wanting to talk about, have I? Which is so difficult with these juvenile court situations when you’re feeling stuck here, isn’t it? But let me try. If the illegal thing this person is doing is also illegal for you, for example if he’s selling you drugs, then I almost certainly have to mention it. But say he robbed a bank all on his own and then he told you about it, then no. Does that help?”

Talking to your hapless girlfriend online. Robbing a bank. You can’t help but notice the difference.

So I tell her, just to have something to say and pass the time.

Then I feel worse.

“Maybe I’m just not trusting enough. I don’t know. He
said
I’m the one. He said I look hot, so you’ve got to think he noticed I’m back. But if he noticed I’m back, what was he doing with his hands all over someone else’s butt?”

“You wanted it to be you,” she says.

Way to state the obvious. This is so not helping.

“It sounds as if you have to work to interpret what he does and says, but just talking things out with him is off-limits,” she says.

As if this were some amazing revelation.

As if there were a universe of teenage girls out there going:
Hey, boyfriend of my dreams, how do you really really REALLY feel about me and are you totally enraptured about being my boyfriend?

And all these boyfriends going:
Hey, insecure whack job of a girl who I’m about to dump, I’m glad you asked because I long to yap about how I feel about you day and night. Why don’t we share our feelings more often, perhaps instead of fooling around, because being interrogated by a clingy cow is more fun than sex on a stick.

As if.

“You’ve lost a lot of things very quickly,” she says, as if she thinks rubbing it in is going to help.

“You think I’ve lost him?”

“Well, what you’re telling me is that you’ve lost the ability to be with him openly and the possibility of intimacy.”

“You mean sex?” Which is an interesting point coming from someone who looks to be living in some strange, buttoned-up world in which people don’t care one way or the other.

Well, it is definitely lost, and I miss it all the time, even more when it looks like Aliza Benitez is getting what I want and I have to sit around and watch her get it.

The point is: I feel like another person when he touches me, and I miss being her.

THE SECOND DAY BACK, ANITA AND LISA CORNER
me and haul me off to a bench behind the ninth grade lockers where nobody ever hangs out because it’s 100% visible from the teachers’ office windows and faces the teachers’ parking lot, which, compared to the students’ parking lot that closely resembles a commercial for European Motor Cars of Beverly Hills, is not a pretty sight.

“Did Billy Nash break up with you?” Lisa says. “We didn’t even look for you at lunch yesterday and then it turned out you weren’t with him. You were eating with Huey.”

“And the stick girls,” Anita says. “If you can call what they do eating. And I swear if you say no to this, I’ll never mention it again, but you didn’t get this thin by purging, did you? Because I can explain the physiology of it to you, and it could kill you.”

“So true,” Lisa says. “It’s better to be fat. Not that you were ever fat.”

“No!” I say. “Ew. And I don’t see how you call this thin when I’ve been eating Dottie’s cupcakes twice a week.”

“Ew to Billy or ew to an eating disorder?” Lisa says.

“Bulimia, thank you. Like I would stick my fingers down my throat. Ew.”

Lisa puts her hands on her hips. “Did Billy Nash break up with you or not?” she says. Acknowledging, of course, that the notion I might break up with Billy Nash isn’t even worth considering.

“I really do not want to talk about it,” I say.

“All right,” Anita sighs. “Are you available for lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“He broke up with you!” Lisa yells. She looks as if her head is going to explode.

“Okay,” I say. “I seriously do not want to talk about this, okay, but sorta yes and sorta no, only you can’t say anything to anyone, okay?”

They are just standing there, steaming and speechless.

“Okay,” I say. “It’s not what it looks like. If he hangs around with me, it violates his probation. So we can’t be together or he could get his probation revoked and end up in jail somewhere out of state. He could spend the rest of high school in a prison rehab ward, okay?”

“Billy Nash in rehab,” Anita says. “No! What a concept.” But at least she remains slightly rational. “That sucks,” she says.
“That really sucks, and frankly, I don’t see why you’re going along with it.”

“Hello. Because he could end up in prison.”

“I just don’t believe this!” Lisa says. “I just don’t believe what’s happening.” She looks like she’s about to cry.