Where It Began (3 page)

You could see her making her assistant’s assistant go order this bouquet and this particular card, the most impersonal, meanest thing she could think of that wouldn’t make people jump to the conclusion that she was the Great Satan of the Three B’s—Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills—where, in my personal opinion, you have to try pretty hard to be the really Great Satan and not just some random devil due to all the competition.

Did I mention Billy’s mother doesn’t like me a whole lot?

Apparently, it takes more than a eucalyptus tree to bang this particular fact out of your head.

Agnes Nash’s face the first time I saw her.

Agnes Nash’s eyes the first time she saw me with Billy.

Billy, who walks three inches off the ground, is the mainstay of the Winston School water polo team, and gets anything he wants out of anyone he wants it from because he is just so charming and gorgeous and basically the first person you notice in a room full of people only you look away really fast because you don’t want him to think that you’re staring at him, which you are.

Every time Agnes sees me with him, she kind of looks me over and makes a little face like once again, she has considered
my many fine attributes, and once again, she can’t figure out what Billy is doing with me.

We have these generic little conversations in which she says, “So, Gabriella, are you thinking about college?” and I can tell I’m supposed to haul out some Ivy League fight song or start panting “Oh Stanford, oh Stanford, oh give it to me Stanford, oh
Stanford
!”

But instead, I just sort of stand there muttering something incoherent about art school. How there is a really good art school just down the road in Pasadena.

Big frown. Agnes is maybe as enthused about art school as my parents.

Well, Rhode Island School of Design is supposed to be good and it’s right next door to (bow head and genuflect) Brown, right?

You can tell she has to exert a lot of effort just to keep her eyes from rolling. You can tell she’d be a whole lot happier with Billy hooking up with the kind of girl who is going to cheerlead her Advanced Placement butt into (angels playing harps) Yale. Not the kind of girl whose reach school is some art school next door to (bow your head) Brown but not actually (well, you know) Brown, and who probably is going to end up in some pokey college in South Dakota with a bad art department because, in the first place, my parents would never pay for me to go to art school, and in the second place, no doubt even art school can figure out who is sub-regular.

The kind of girl who isn’t me.

Still, as long as I don’t interfere with Agnes’s plan for Billy’s
life—
Do Not get kicked out of Winston School; Do Not, no matter how plowed, do lines in front of Coach; Do Not get caught violating your probation; Get into
(drum roll)
Princeton
—she is happy enough to give Billy the keys to the beach house and look the other way when he takes me there.

Even trapped in this electric hospital bed, dizzy, smelling sour, and with Swiss cheese for brains, I can see where if she didn’t like me all that much back when I was just some ordinary, stupid excuse for a girlfriend, she might be even less happy with me now that I’m Billy’s drunken car-wrecker girlfriend.

Still, it seems north of cold that Billy is staying away from me now, which I suddenly decide—probably as a result of my bruised brain sloshing from one side of my head to the other and not as a result of actual thought—
has
to be because of Agnes.

Or, it occurs to me: Vivian.

What about that? Her Rule to Live By
is
that no one gets to see you when you Don’t Look Good. As far as she’s concerned, if you look fine and you send Everything-Is-Fine vibes out into the universe, then everything will magically
be
fine.

Right.

Only you’re not supposed to think
Right
in a dubious frame of mind. You’re supposed to go,
Everything is freaking swell.
Because: If you give the universe the slightest hint that things suck, such as by slouching around being realistic about the fact that your life actually
does
suck, then the planets will converge in celestial agreement and you’ll be locked in astrologically inevitable suckdom forever.

“This isn’t even from him,” I say, eyeing the gross Nash flowers. “Where is he? Did
you
tell him he couldn’t come?”

But Vivian is not the kind of mom who likes to sink into a club chair with a lovely cup of tea and gaze into your eyes and talk things over. She is the kind of mom who likes to pretend everything is fine until the badness of it hits her on the head. Then she turns into the kind of mom who runs around crazed, trying to fix things—which would actually
be
swell, except that her ability to size up any situation with me in it, let alone fix it, is severely limited.

Vivian glides to the railing of the magic bed and gives me this deeply deeply understanding caring sharing look. Farewell to
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
. Now she is trying out for the even more dramatically satisfying role of Florence Nightingale, Angelic Nurse. In the climactic scene when Angelic Nurse Florence figures out how demented and completely brain-dead Mashed on Head Girl is.

How brain-dead would I have to be to think that Vivian would do anything but toss rose petals and gorgeously wrapped condoms on Billy Nash’s path to my bed? Because: Being Billy’s girlfriend is the only thing I’ve done since I turned twelve years old and got into Winston School that comes close to fulfilling her destiny as mother of a daughter she can stand.

“HEY, SLEEPING BEAUTY,” THE DOCTOR WITH THE
ponytail says, completely on top of the Fantasyland aspect of the situation but apparently oblivious to the critical fact of the missing prince.

She is young and cheerful and inordinately pleased with herself.

Inordinately?

I am young and entirely cheerless, a bruised repository of random SAT words and fragmented memories that keep flashing behind my closed eyes like stray clips of some lame documentary:
Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s
.

Such as the scent of incense and Anita Patel holding up a vocabulary flash card, feeding me slices of plums roasted in honey and spice in a vain effort to turn me into the pride of Winston School.

Such as lying on my back on the hood of the Beemer next
to Billy in a field near the airport, holding hands and watching airplanes disappear into the darkening sky.

Such as Agnes Nash glaring at me.

The doctor flicks her ponytail over her shoulder and sits poised to see how much of her inane quiz I am going to fail this time. You can tell she was the pride of wherever
she
went to high school.

I keep meaning to cram for her questions with Vivian, to write the day of the week and the date and the numbers backward from one hundred by sevens on my palm, but I forget and fall asleep instead.

“So,” she says, making penetrating eye contact and smiling encouragingly, all the while bracing herself for my daily failure. “How are you doing with your name today?”

“Sleeping Beauty?” I say.

She smiles again, this time anxiously, not sure if this is a cute joke or perhaps the total breakdown of my grasp on concrete reality.

“Gabby Gardiner,” I say, going for extra credit. “Gabriella Bingham Gardiner. Gabster. Gardiner. Gabs.”

The doctor is grateful, but not grateful enough to go away. “And the day of the week?” she says.

I’m thinking Tuesday. I’m thinking there’s a one-in-seven chance that this will give me two for two. But it doesn’t. As for the month, if it’s still spring, maybe April?

I am vague on the name of the hospital, the president of the United States, which you have to figure I’d know, and a reasonable
version of how I ended up in an unnamed hospital, on an unidentified day of the week, unable to do simple math.

“It’s not coming back,” I say.

The doctor tells me not to worry and pats me on the leg. If my brain were vaguely capable of telling my legs what to do, I would kick her.

“Think of those rich images that keep popping up,” she says brightly. “Think of all the important things you’ve remembered.” It’s true, the whole array of kindergarten facts, the parts of the body and the names of all the colors in the big, jumbo box of Crayolas, is still in there. That and the complete, unabridged guide to Billy Nash.

But I am thinking more of the important things I
don’t
remember. Such as how this happened to me.

I say, “It’s not ever coming back, is it?”

“What?”

You have to wonder if she’s even paying attention.

“About the accident,” I say. “About what happened that I don’t remember.”

The doctor shakes her head. I watch her ponytail whip back and forth. Scrunching up her face in what’s supposed to pass as sympathy, she skewers the clasp of her clipboard with her pen. “Classic retrograde amnesia,” she says. “But never say never.”

But you can tell that is exactly what she’s saying.

VIVIAN, MEANWHILE, IS IMPERVIOUS TO THE SLIGHTEST
hint of any fact she doesn’t like. This is just how she gets through the day. She is waiting for my missing night to reappear, whole and perfect, in what used to be my memory. She is waiting for me to tell her all about it. She keeps leaning over the railing of the bed so the end of her nose is six inches from the end of my nose.

“Don’t give up! Try to remember!”

I try to remember, but the DVD that was my former life goes spinning along up to the big front door of the party house on Songbird Lane, splutters, and picks up, raggedy and dim, with me on my back in the wet grass three and a half hours later, a new movie with a whole new plot.

“Try to remember!” Vivian says, as if I’m holding out on her.

This is what I remember:

How everything leading up to the party is nothing special.

Me and Billy in the front seat of Billy’s car with the Andies making out in the backseat because Andy tried to teach Andie how to drive his stick shift and she stripped the gears, and now Andy’s car is at the Porsche mechanic’s semi-indefinitely and
Billy has to drive Andie and Andy everywhere.

Me wearing a black silk stretchy tank top and a bra with lime-green ribbons for straps. Which Billy keeps fiddling with and touching and getting all twisted up, his index finger tracing the green ribbon strap closest to him, as we drive out on the 101. That much I remember perfectly. That bra strap and my jeans. How I was wearing low, low tattered jeans that came washed thin and papery from ritzy Italian-designer washing machines, hand-shredded in designer shredders, tight as shrink-wrap.

Me pressing my hands up against the roof of the convertible that Billy puts up because it’s drizzling when we drive out of Bel Air. Billy kissing the underside of my arm. Me wondering if the underside of my arm is too flabby, but too blissed out to care all that much for once. The sound of one of the Andies unzipping something in the backseat.

Billy pulling his car onto the front lawn of the house on Songbird Lane under a security light. Girls in jeans and camisoles and high heels loping past toward the big front door that opens and then shuts out three and a half hours of my life.

My life, which, by the time I wake up wasted, lying dead drunk on the ground clutching the car keys with my head bashed in and heading for the hospital, is pretty much over.

Only I don’t know that right away.

Billy is gone and no one will let me look in a mirror, but I still can’t figure it out.

WHAT IF?

This is quite the scary game under the circumstances.

Given that Billy is not exactly famous for being with girls who Don’t Look Good: What if?

Vivian isn’t saying anything, but it doesn’t exactly strain the intellect to figure out what she’s thinking. It’s not as if she has that many Rules to Live By, and as far as I can tell, whenever I drift off, which is most of the time, she is out foraging for remedial beauty supplies that she stashes discreetly behind all the dying flowers in giant striped Sephora shopping bags.

I say to Ponytail Doc, “So, what’s the deal with my face?”

You can tell that she is clenching her teeth so as not to say,
Oh shit.

I say, “It’s not like I’m going to get upset and yank out the IV and die. Let me see.”

I watch her running back through the entire contents of Relating to Teenagers 101 in her mind, trying to come up with a really good way to say no.

I am clenching my teeth, but
oh shit
is the least of it.

She takes a breath. She taps her toe. She stares down at her pager as if she is trying to get it to beep through sheer force of will.