Where It Began (30 page)

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“So,” she says. “Charlotte says you’re still on Council, and you’re still on decorating committee, so I wanted to see if you were still coming to Fling committee.”

“Yeah.” Three beats of leaving Brynn McElroy hanging there. Three beats of thinking, if I can vanquish Cliché Man, why would I go along with this? And what would be the point of going along with these bitches, anyway? To create happiness in Muffin World? “Why wouldn’t I be?”

You can tell, even on a cell phone with the bad reception you get in a canyon, that Brynn didn’t anticipate idiot resistance. I feel so pissed off and so like such a righteously indignant moron simultaneously.

“Um, I guess everyone was hoping you were up to it,” she says.

And then I say to myself,
Shit, Gabby, even though you are now the reigning queen of assertiveness and will no doubt soon be the elected idol of Winston Women for Equality, you have to stop it. Do. Not. Get. Carried. Away. You do not want to get into a pissing contest with Charlotte Ward and Aliza Benitez.

Close your mouth and stop screwing with the Fling committee.

“That’s really nice,” I say, trying to figure out how I’m going to fix this when she knows and I know and whoever forced her to make the phone call knows what’s going on and how not nice it is. “I’m doing great. Thanks for the concern.”

“Oh. You’re welcome,” she says. “You know that Charlotte scheduled the meeting for six thirty in the morning, so it wouldn’t conflict with the jazz ensemble dance rehearsal, right?”

And also so a person with no legal means of transportation other than legs can’t actually get there because last time I looked, there was no six a.m. bus. “So what’s happening at six thirty, anyway?”

“No big deal,” Brynn says. “Finalizing the decorations and the king and queen.”

“You’re getting up at five thirty in the morning to set up another election? You just need someone who can count to two hundred. Get Kaplan and sleep in.”

“Kaplan? Not likely. No one is up for another election this late in the year. People just nominate themselves and Charlotte picks.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It makes Piersol happy because he doesn’t have to force any teachers to monitor the polls and okay the election posters.”

“You know what,” I say, which seems kind of anticlimactic after vanquishing Piersol and hanging on to Council, but there is only so much unhappiness a person can create in Muffin World and survive. That and I feel so kind of past it. “I’m going to sleep in. Finalize it without me.”

“You do know we went back to classic colors, right?”

“Disco balls and tinfoil?”

“I know,” she says. “I voted against it. They redid the posters with baby pink.”

“They put pink on my posters?”

“Sorry,” she says. “They’re still good posters. They’re at the printers.”

“I was supposed to take them to the printer to do the color check.”

“Gabby, you weren’t here and Nash didn’t know if you were ever coming back. We didn’t know what else to do.”

gabs123:
did u tell brynn mcelroy u didn’t know if i was coming back to winston? i just had a very weird conversation with her.

pologuy:
y would i even talk to brynn freaking mcelroy? don’t know what jack is doing with her. other than the obvious thing to do with her. u have to take care of yourself and NOT talk to people like her

gabs123:
fling committee screwed up my posters.

pologuy:
ok I get this. char wanted to know how long she had to get disco balls or something rammed through committee before u got back and stared her down. this is y u can’t talk to people. info gets twisted. everything gets twisted

gabs123:
i wish someone had told me this.

pologuy:
babe u were in the hospital. ur mom was telling people u were in a coma. didn’t think you’d care about party decorations. y do u want to b on that committee anyway? i’m not even on it

gabs123:
exactly. i’m not going to their lame meeting. too early anyway.

pologuy:
smart move. shit. gotta bounce. AP tutor barking at the gate. FML. miss u

WHEN I AM SITTING IN FRONT OF MY COMPUTER
screen, I can somewhat get myself to feel that pologuy is missing gabs123. But seeing Real Live Billy grinning his way across the ordinary people’s lawn to get to the Class of 1920 Garden, his back to me, looking over his shoulder, his eyes skimming the top of my head, which prickles as if I could feel the very tips of his fingers along my part, is not getting any easier.

The Aliza and Billy sightings—which he says, in his backhanded way, mean nothing because I’m the one, that it just makes the world at large and his mother in particular believe that he’s down with his probation and not with me so maybe someday she’ll loosen her Satanic grip and we can sneak around—are still miserable. And the Courtney Yamada Phillips and Billy sightings, even though I guess they prove he isn’t really with Aliza Benitez, which is supposed to make me feel fine when he pats
Aliza between the knees for godsake, are not much better.

Courtney, even though she’s a sophomore in the
very
firm,
very
young flesh category, is in my Honors Spanish class and I have to watch her heated up and panting about him with Rose Lyons when she comes racing in from the semi-hidden nook behind the teachers’ lounge.

“He is so hot,” Rose says.

“Awesome,” Courtney says.

Awesome.
Great. He’s publicly nibbling lips that say “awesome” constantly.

And I go,
Suck it up, Gabriella. Wake up and smell the chocolates. You’re the one.

But it is actually a relief to go into painting with Mr. Rosen, who at least doesn’t want to have a meaningful dialogue about anything, and whose studio windows face the soccer field so there is no risk of a Billy sighting. Even though I never feel like I’ll ever paint anything good enough for Mr. Rosen, at least I’m better than everyone else in there, and he seems to be fine with that.

Mr. Rosen, you have to figure, is just going to keep sitting there in by-permission-only advanced painting, not noticing who I am, having no idea whatsoever about what’s going on with me apart from my portfolio.

Not that we’re actually
painting
in Mr. Rosen’s eleventh grade painting class. Since last semester, we aren’t. Just before Christmas break, Mr. Rosen told us that we sucked and we had to start drawing again before we were ready to paint because we had no
sense of form. Therefore, we’ve spent this whole semester drawing a succession of objects Mr. Rosen throws on the little tables in front of us, and there are no paints in sight.

Every couple of weeks, a delegation of earnest artsy girls goes up to Mr. Rosen’s office where he sits with his eyes closed listening to music and looking as if he has a headache while they explain in detail how they really really feel about not getting to paint. According to Sasha Aronson, who is head of the petition brigade, no matter how respectful and convincing they are, Mr. Rosen never even opens his eyes.

So naturally, the minute I get back from my vehicular crime spree, Mr. Rosen, who you would think you could rely on not to make a big production about anything short of pure genius, makes a big production out of giving me back the paints. Not the acrylic paints, either.

Oils.

You’d like to think that mixing oil paint on a palette and painting my little heart out would just magically take my mind off things and make everything, if not A-okay, maybe semi-okay. And that I would create gorgeous, angsty art.

But I don’t.

I spend a week trying to get the light right on this little table with the remnants of a tea party or something (so not my idea, and the pastry is starting to get moldy and change color) and it just keeps getting grayer and darker until I’ve completely scrubbed any possibility of life off the canvas. I feel like my paintbrush is going to jump out of my hand, slide down
the leg of the easel, and hop out the door in protest.

At least it gives me something to do that doesn’t involve scanning the horizon for Billy Nash, both wanting and not wanting to spot him.

Finally, Mr. Rosen comes up behind me and stands there for about five minutes.

“I think you’re finished with this,” he says. He bundles up the junk on the little table in the tablecloth and takes the paintbrush. Then he scuttles over to his desk and takes out a little framed sketch. Real, and from the Renaissance, a woman sitting in a chair, draped in diaphanous cloth, just done in pencil, perfect.

“Copy this,” he says, propping it up.

So great, now that I’m a juvenile delinquent who can’t even paint a moldy croissant with rancid butter, Mr. Rosen is preparing me for life as an art forger. Just great. At least it would give me something lucrative to do, something to do other than being at Winston School, where this little sketch is the only real piece of art worth forging.

“Don’t think,” he says. “Just draw. You’ll feel better. You want music?”

He goes back to his desk and sticks a tape into the world’s most primitive tape deck. “Young people like this, yes?”

And this is how, for the first time in history, everybody in advanced permission-only painting has to listen to odd German techno all period. And how I find out I’m a really good art forger. Which at least gives me something to do other than visualizing Billy pawing other girls.

“EXPLAIN THIS TO ME AGAIN,” ANITA SAYS, EATING
her icy pop at break. “How is it that Courtney Phillips going down on him in the parking lot is supposed to make you feel better?”

“Anita! Just because she’s gnawing on his face—”

“Sorry, Lisa.” And then to me, even though they can see that I’m tearing up over my icy pop, “Are you completely demented? He’s not with other girls to be nice to you and prove he’s not with any one of them, he’s with other girls because he’s an incorrigible player.”

“SAT word?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t one. And it doesn’t prove he’s not with Aliza, either, it just proves he’s a jerk.”

All right, so they despise Billy and there isn’t much I can do about it.

“Why don’t you just tell him how it makes you feel,” Lisa
says. (Right, that should work.) “Tell him to stop it.” (Even better.) “He says he’s still your boyfriend so it’s not like you don’t have a hold on him.”

But that’s exactly what it’s like—like I am powerless and pathetic. Like I’m powerless and pathetic and ridiculously perky and give really good IM. And even repeating
undying love
to myself every time I inhale and every time I exhale can’t completely drown out what I’m thinking.

And I say to myself:
Gabby, if you keep this up, you’re going to have a whole lot of bad self-esteem to make Ponytail happy. But perhaps you should avoid sharp objects and thinking.

pologuy:
whatcha doing?

gabs123:
not a lot. spanish homework.

pologuy:
same. do not take AP spanish language. slow death by magical realism. even tutor says so

gabs123:
is your tutor living there now?

pologuy:
now now. we all have our helpful professionals on the payroll. i’m stuck with him for company. ag is turning me into a hermit. boy needs companionship

gabs123:
not a complete hermit. i see u with ur little harem. courtney thinks ur awesome

pologuy:
r u saying i’m not awesome? well, i saw u with your scary little witches coven. again

gabs123:
that is so not funny again. not witches, bff’s. u know this.

pologuy:
no seriously. they look like they want to run
me down in the parking lot