Where It Began (31 page)

gabs123:
lucky for u they don’t have cars.

pologuy:
gabs! when did u get so harsh?

gabs123:
when did u get ur harem?

pologuy:
this is a joke right?

gabs123:
duh. i totally understand. i do. u know i do. i’m just getting punchy with all this online cavorting. i miss actual cavorting.

pologuy:
me too. miss u Miss G.

gabs123:
i’ve gotta go to sleep. no more irregular verbs. xx

pologuy:
u know it

I do know it. But as it turns out, some of the things I know are less true than others.

Because while I am sleeping, drifting through space in solo orbit so far away from actual events on planet Earth that I can’t see what everyone is doing well enough to understand anything at all, while I am dozing off thinking that nothing worse could happen, not even noticing when six thirty a.m. comes and goes, I am undone by a rhyming sock hop with poodle skirts.

IT IS ALL JUST
SO
STUPID BUT I AM COMPLETELY
unhinged. It’s like having an emotional breakdown over an advertising jingle about aftershave or having your heart ripped out by the Pillsbury Doughboy. And it isn’t even the Spring Fling itself, the actual dance, which, when you think about it, has all sorts of genuine dramatic possibilities:

Maybe Huey would grope Lisa, maybe he would play with the buttons of the horrible sombrero sweater that her mom is so attached to, and she would experience extreme moral conflict over slightly spiked punch.

Maybe Anita would break out of her house, show up with her bra straps hanging off her shoulders, and introduce us to the cute French guy from Marseilles who, having renounced his priestly vocation, was holed up at the Bel Air Hotel feeding torn up croissants to the black swans and waiting for her to run away with him.

Maybe I’d lose my mind and go stag and maybe I’d see Billy across the room and maybe we would slow dance to “My Blue Heaven” and we would both remember who I am, swaying to Elvis, and maybe he would want me.

What does not cross the mind of the orbiting space cadet,
my
mind, is that he would nominate himself for King of Fling and not even mention it to me, and Aliza would run for Queen of Fling with not one single other Slutmuffin nominating herself, big conspiracy, so you know that the crowned and anointed couple dancing to “My Blue Heaven” is going to be pologuy, live and in person, with Aliza Benitez and
not
gabs123.

Thank you, Brynn McElroy, for your highly organized and complete Fling committee minutes, distributed to all committee members, present or innocently sleeping through Charlotte Ward’s planning extravaganza.

“This sucks,” Anita says. “This is a bit much even for him.”

We are sitting in the Winston School darkroom, Huey’s private domain, where we all go sit in the dark so we can eat inside somewhere other than the cafeteria on rainy days, with the glowing red lights and timer buzzers going off and Huey bouncing around hanging up wet, newborn photos by little clothespinthingies while Lisa gazes up at him and Anita and I try not to look at each other.

Only it’s sunny, and we’re hiding out in there because I know if I have to see Billy with
anybody
else, I’m not going to survive the day.

“Wait a minute,” Huey says, dipping photographic paper into
a tub of chemicals. “Are you saying you still want this guy to be your boyfriend?”

“Leave her alone,” Lisa says. “She’s having a hard enough time.”

“I’m just saying, I think you’d have a lot easier time if you’d take care of yourself. Like if you’d take care of all the legal things . . .”

“Huey,” Lisa says. “She doesn’t want to talk about the legal stuff. Leave her alone.”

“I am taking care of the legal stuff!” I say. “I’m doing everything my lawyer says I’m supposed to be doing.
Punc
tiliously! I’m staying away from Billy and I’m going to therapy and I’m having a meeting with the Probation Department and I’m pretending to get over my so-called drinking problem and soon I’ll have my record expunged, okay?”

“Not okay!” Huey shouts.

Lisa says, “Don’t raise your voice, Jeremy.”

Huey says, “I’m talking to Gabby.”

Lisa and Anita sit planted in their folding chairs.

Huey crosses his arms. “I need to talk to Gabby. Do you
mind
?”

This is a new, improved and updated, Ferocious Huey that I’ve never seen before. I have the feeling this is the most conflict he and Lisa have ever had in their entire relationship, such as it is—that she refuses to get up out of her chair. So I say it’s all right with me and watch Lisa and Anita march out of the darkroom, glaring back at him.

HUEY SAYS, “I THINK YOU NEED TO SEE ANOTHER
lawyer.”

“I already have a lawyer,” I say. “What’s your point?”

“I mean a lawyer who isn’t related to Billy Nash,” he says. “Also, I think you should see a lawyer who isn’t brainless.”

“I don’t see how having Albert Einstein for a lawyer could help,” I say. “The facts kind of speak for themselves.”

“Well, they don’t have much choice, do they?” Huey shouts at me. “Given that
you
don’t seem interested in speaking for yourself!”

“What am I supposed to
say
, Huey? Give it a rest. I don’t remember anything.”

“Right,” says Huey, hitting himself on the forehead with an exaggerated, dopey look on his face, his tongue hanging out. “You don’t remember anything! How could I forget?”

“Duh. And I don’t see how anyone could fix it at this point
even if I did remember. I just have to pretend I have a drinking problem and then I have to pretend to get cured and then I have to pretend to grow and change and then my record gets expunged and it all goes away. Even a brain-dead lawyer could figure out this one.”

Huey looks amazed. “Is that what your lawyer told you?” he says. “Did someone actually tell you that that’s what you’re supposed to do? This is almost as mind-blowing as the part where you don’t have a drinking problem. Did he tell you that too? What is wrong with you?”

“Stop it, Huey. Just stop it! The lawyer thinks I’m fixing my so-called drinking problem and then he can feel all warm and fuzzy about himself when he gets my record expunged. It’s not rocket science.”

“Did your lawyer even ask if someone checked the steering wheel for fingerprints? Or did Agnes Nash pay him off before he got to that question?”

“Why would they want to do that? There’s no big mystery. It’s not like I was wearing gloves.”

Something in the darkroom buzzes and Huey starts swooping around sloshing things in big pans of liquid. The only light is this eerie red color and it looks as if he is a red angry burning spirit.

Huey hangs up two sheets of paper with clothespins and he sits down again and he says, “All right. How much do you really remember?”

I say, “Nothing. Nada, niente, zero, zilch, zip, zippity doo dah. This isn’t news. Everybody already knows this. Did you
miss something when you were locked up in here playing with chemicals?”

“What everybody knows is that you’re saving Billy’s ass while he’s back with Aliza Benitez.”

“Are you insane? And he’s not really with her. He’s the one who’s saving
my
ass. In case you didn’t figure it out, it turns out that technically I stole his car. Just before I totaled it. For which the Nashes are not pressing charges. Colleges would love that one.”

Huey shoves his face so close to my face, my breath could have steamed up his glasses. “Don’t you remember anything?”

“No! Don’t you get it?
No!
I got hit on the freaking head when I wrecked Billy’s Beemer, just after I stole it! Why is this so hard for you to comprehend? I went spinning out drunk in the Valley, all right? There’s nothing
to
remember.”

Huey shakes his head. Then he takes me by the wrist and he pulls me out of the darkroom. He is such an exceptionally odd person, it’s hard to know what he has in mind.

Huey walks me through school and out to the parking lot and into his dopey-looking, ecologically good little car. People are staring at me the whole way. I’m not sure if this is because Huey is dragging me around by the wrist or because I’ve been crying so much that my eye makeup has run and I look like a raccoon.

A raccoon that’s about to cut sixth, seventh, and eighth periods.

WE DRIVE UP INTO THE HILLS TO HUEY’S HOUSE,
which is a giant tan stone château that some captain of industry brought to Bel Air stone by stone from France. It is the size of the Beverly Hills Public Library, and it has matching dogs, three tan mastiffs that come racing and panting up to the car to jump all over Huey and drool on the ecologically good paint.

“This certainly takes my mind off things,” I say, trying to open the car door while a large dog pushes on it from the outside.

“Down, Daisy!” Huey says, causing the dog to wag her giant tail and hyperventilate, but not to get off my door. “Yeah,” he says, “I live in a parallel universe.”

Over by the side of the house, I swear I see a lamb. Two lambs, just walking around eating the grass.

“Is there a shepherd?” I say, only partly a joke, since I figure
that if there is a shepherd, he could maybe pull the dog off my side of the car.

“My mother does animal rescue,” Huey says. As if this isn’t already a well-known fact. Then he climbs out of the car and grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck.

We crunch up the gravel path toward the house with the three dogs and a really pushy lamb. The front door is so tall, it seems as if you would need the eighteen-inch keys from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to unlock it.

The inside of Huey’s castle involves a lot of sweeping, curved staircases and tapestries you could always use to tent normalsized houses when you spray for bugs and vermin. We climb up a bunch of these staircases while a uniformed lady follows at our heels, offering snack food. Through an open door on the way up, we see Huey’s mother in a room with a big table and cages and baskets, feeding what looks to be a tiny ferret with a baby bottle.

She says, “Hi, sweetie,” not looking up. You can’t tell if she’s talking to Huey or the ferret.

Huey says, “Mom? This is Gabby.”

This causes Mrs. Hewlett to look up fast.

“Yearbook,” Huey says. He doesn’t actually say
what
about yearbook, so it’s not like he’s technically lying.

“Well, keep your door open, Hewbo,” she says.
Hew
bo? And then she registers my face and the rivulets of eye makeup and the red eyes, and maybe I remind her of a wounded raccoon or maybe I’m just more pathetically enthralling than the ferret and a box of baby moles put together because she wipes her hands on
the sides of her jeans and she hands her little ferret to the accommodating lady with the snack tray.

She is in animal rescue mode for sure and I am the unfortunate mammal.

“Madeleine Hewlett,” she says, extending her sticky hand, and all at once she’s got me in her grip, pulling me in for a hug. “Hello, dear.”

“Gabby Gardiner,” I say into her shoulder.

“My cousin Lolo used to visit Gardiner Island!” she says. “Lovely!” As if I were in line to inherit the place, or was in touch with rich and famous Gardiners, or knew them, or could recognize them in a crowd.

“Well then,” she says. “Tea!”

You can tell from Huey’s whipped demeanor that there’s no point in fighting this onslaught of maternal involvement no matter how weirdly crazed he is to haul me upstairs. He kind of leads me back down to his kitchen, which is the size of my house, and sits me down at a grotesquely long rustic table where Louis XVI probably had orange juice with his entire court dressed up as shepherds.

Only probably Marie Antoinette didn’t open the backdoor for the pushy lamb to come in and pour it a big bowl of livestock kibble.

The room is filled with black-and-white photos, Mr. and Mrs. Hewlett when they were still young and still hippies, posed in front of what appears to be their house when it was still in Europe, and a bunch of candid photos of someone
you have to figure is either the Pope or a highly skilled Pope impersonator.