Where It Began (32 page)

“I’m going to get your friend some tea,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking at me quizzically, still in rescue mode. This involves silently telegraphing to the other maid that she’s supposed to make a cup of tea appear in front of me with a scone and a pot of jam.

“She’s upset about her boyfriend,” Huey says. It’s hard to tell if this is for parental consumption or if he thinks this covers it.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Hewlett says, in the parental mode of being deeply concerned but even more deeply not getting it. “I was always upset about my boyfriend until I met Jeremy Jr.”

Mrs. Hewlett is still pretty without makeup at the age of fifty, wearing jeans and a sweater covered with ferret fur and wet spots you don’t even want to think about, a gazillionaire from birth, and married to a fellow gazillionaire who likes the Grateful Dead, writes music for a living, and puts up with a house full of rodents and farm animals because he loves her so much. It’s hard to relate to anything about her.

“Remember Buddy Murphy, Huey?” she says. Buddy Murphy is this two-hundred-year-old former studio head who everyone has heard of. “I was crazy about him, and then it turned out he was allergic to dander!” Mrs. Hewlett smiles with the faraway look of a woman imagining old Buddy Murphy doubled over and sneezing uncontrollably. Then she scoops up a cat and plops it on my lap.

“There,” she says. “That always makes me feel better.”

There you have it. Billy and Aliza are going to be coronated
at Fling and I have a one-eyed cat on me, licking my scone. I can’t exactly throw her against the wall. She’s a one-eyed cat. So we all sit there at the grotesquely long table watching the cat eat my jam. It so does not make me feel better.

I don’t know what’s supposed to happen upstairs, and I only like surprises that involve candy, but I hand Mrs. Hewlett back the cat.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yearbook,” Huey says.

And I can feel his mother watch me somewhat limp away, trying to figure out if she should report my condition to the Humane Society.

HUEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM IS A BIG, SUNNY
octagonal place in the top corner of the house with a skylight and a black-and-white tile floor. It is the kind of room you design on purpose, because you want to be able to sit in exactly that space with those windows and that cold, hard floor whenever you feel like it, not a room you just end up with because it’s in the cheapest house on a ritzy street and you can just kind of afford it so you buy it and you’re stuck with it no matter how dreary it looks.

The room is filled with folding tables and metal shelves and cardboard bankers’ boxes labeled by year with the names of events and holidays, like he has records of every Christmas, Easter, and Fourth of July for his whole life. His equipment is strewn over a big, old fluffy couch covered with a faded yellow quilt and sat on by a couple of cats named Pinky and Cocoa Puff. Actually, it’s all sort of perfect.

And it’s not that I’m jealous thinking of Lisa sitting in this room with Huey doing whatever it is that Lisa and Huey do, which probably entails playing Boggle and Parcheesi and Monopoly and feeding ferrets for all I know. It’s just that it’s so nice in there.

Huey says, “Wait here.”

I walk to the bay window in the corner, which curves in a semicircle and lets you look down to the coast, out to the slate-blue water, and it just strikes me how happy Vivian would be to see me there. I might be a well-dressed slut of a drunken car thief with an unimpressive GPA and no Ivy League prospects whatsoever, but hell, if I didn’t mind suffocating Lisa, I could be queen of the castle. So then I stand there thinking about what a bad friend and really bad overall person I am to even be having this particular fantasy, but at least I know I wouldn’t actually
do
anything like that.

And then Huey comes back with the album and that particular chapter, the chapter where I knew what I knew and felt what I felt, ends.

IT’S ONE OF THOSE CHEAP ALBUMS FROM RITE AID,
the little plastic kind with cellophane sleeves that holds the pictures back-to-back. Labeled “April 11, Songbird Lane.” Neatly organized. You can tell that Huey is the prince of good organization, and he probably has hundreds of these little albums all lined up in order, and he could just pop open the Cataclysmic Disaster box and there this one would be.

So many of the pictures are shot from behind, you can tell the whole thing involves Huey skulking around and sneaking up on people, blowing his breath down toward his camera so they won’t feel him breathing on the backs of their necks. It’s creepy, but the pictures are creepier.

First, there is the house. A big, fake Tudor with maybe thirty kids on the front lawn with red plastic cups and bottles. The front door is hanging wide open and you can make out the shapes
of more bodies in there, in the white light that seems to have engulfed them and blurred their edges.

“Is it coming back to you at all?” Huey asks.

“This isn’t some freaking Alfred Hitchcock movie, Huey! It isn’t coming back, all right?
Ever.
Do you want me to look at these or not?”

“You want to look at these,” he says.

Huey likes photographs with bodies crammed together in the frame, or maybe that’s all the party had to offer. Bodies curved and leaning into one another, arms dangling over rounded shoulders and around necks, hands and wrists and forearms disappearing into the dark folds of each other’s clothing. Bodies curved toward each other in doorways, leaning toward one another like arches, shapes with faces melting into darkness.

But you can always pick yourself out. Even years later, photographed from a distance in a group photo at summer camp, you can still tell that that’s the left side of your little-kid-self’s back in the Camp Tumbleweed T-shirt. Even two months later, you can tell it’s your profile, drinking in a corner in a chair and it looks as if you’re crying, sobbing actually, at a party you can’t remember.

“You need to look at them in order,” Huey says.

Why is that? Flipping through them backward and forward, from either direction, they tell the same story.

There I am from behind with Billy and the Andies, weaving our way through the crowd on the front lawn, heading toward the open door.

There we are in the kitchen, going for the bottles arranged
helter-skelter on the counter, the only light reflected off the bottles and my earrings and off Billy’s pale hair.

There’s Jordie Berger mixing margaritas.

There’s Andie dancing for Andy in another corner, a dark expanse of silky skin between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her baby tee.

There are the Slutmuffins, all Louis Vuitton bags and attitude, standing by the pool house, lighting up with boys all around them, their personal fan club. Their heads all bent together, it is hard to tell who’s who.

Aliza Benitez on the deck chair with no blouse, breasts and arms and nipples darkened blurs, leaning into someone’s shoulder, on top of, under, and entangled with some boy, the boy with light glinting off his pale gold hair.

I appear to be yelling.

I appear to be crying.

I appear to be drinking straight out of a bottle like some bum under a freeway bridge. It is too dark to tell exactly what I’m doing. There I am drinking some more, only the bottle is a different shape. There I am drinking some more.

There I am, being hauled into the Beemer, half-carried, waving my bag in the air. Dropping my bag. Andy has me under the arms and I seem to be made of splayed rubber limbs and a big gash of a sad, drunk mouth.

There I am, getting into the car with Billy and the Andies, with Aliza Benitez kind of sitting on the trunk with her legs hanging over the back. There I am draped over Andy and Billy,
who are maneuvering me into the front seat, the passenger seat, no seat belt, all of us looking exceptionally drunk, Billy trying to toss my purse in after me but missing.

There’s Billy, walking back around the car, sticking his hands wherever Aliza wants them, sticking his tongue down her throat.

There’s Billy opening the driver’s side door, holding up the keys, waving good-bye to Huey maybe.

Waving good-bye to me now, to everything I knew and wanted and believed about him and me and everything. Because I knew it was bad all along. I knew it was really bad. I just didn’t want to believe it. And I sure as hell didn’t know that it could get as bad as this.

And what’s worse is the simple fact of what must have happened next. What must have happened after Billy drove the car into the tree. What must have happened just before the sirens started and the police pulled up and I was lying on the ground with the keys in my hand and Billy was gone. Billy and Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez were gone and I was still there, passed out on the ground.

“Who knows?” I say.

Huey does not look up, flipping forward and backward through the story of my life.

“Pretty much everyone,” he says.

“Everyone meaning the computer nerds and the manga club or everyone
us
?”

“Who’s us?”

It’s true. There is no us. There is my former us. The us in
the pictures, the us I poured an entire bottle of vodka down my throat in front of. “Billy and the Andies and the Slutmuffins . . . you know.”

“Geez,” he says in this sarcastic tone of voice. “I don’t know. . . . Do you think they got hit on the head too?” Huey starts pacing around, completely overheated. “Do you think they came down with amnesia too? Do you think so? Because otherwise, yes,
us
knows.”

“You knew? Lisa and Anita knew?”

“Everyone knew. I thought you knew. Everyone knows and everyone thinks you know too. Everyone thinks you’re doing this on purpose to save Billy’s ass.”

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I am hitting Huey and he’s going for my arms and he says that he’s sorry and I don’t even care.

I am pretty sure I’m pounding the steel pin out of my ulna, pain is snaking through my shoulder, and I pound on him and I wonder, if I keep going, if I demolish the bones in my forearm, if I smash them, if fragments of bone splinter off and slice into my nerves, will I feel better?

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Huey says, “Don’t say that.”

I say, “Shut the fuck up.”

Then I throw up in the waste basket. Lunch. Breakfast. The lime chunks from an icy pop. Then nothing and nothing and nothing.

And this is the good part. The part where I’m a girl with an excellent grasp on the nature of life, who is not, in fact, a moron dupe. Because: I get what happened. Although it is also the part where the only way to feel better would involve being dead because that would be the only way to stop feeling anything.

To stop feeling this.

To stop feeling.

He
played
me.

He framed me for an actual
CRIME.

Beyond cheating, beyond lying, beyond not loving me.

I am so stupid.

I start to slam Huey, but my left arm feels as if the bones already exploded.

I slam him anyway and then there’s nothing left, not the old me or the new me or any form of me but stupid stupid nothing me and I can’t even throw a fucking pot because I just wrecked my wrist.

Oh Jesus Christ, I really did.

Yeah, I’m the one.

This is the bad part.

HUEY DRIVES ME HOME WHERE I SO DO NOT WANT
to be. There I sit, in front of my house, cradling my arm in my lap.

Huey says, “I’m sorry. Call me if you want to talk.”

Like that’s going to happen.

Like I could think or talk or have a conversation.

Billy Nash has taken over my head, his face is sunlit just behind my eyes, and I am going,
How could you?
How COULD you? HOW COULD YOU?

And I can’t even call him. I can’t even ask. Because I already know. Because listening to him lie some more would only make it worse. And worse than that, unbearably worse, would be listening to him tell me the truth.

I can’t do anything.

My arm hurts and it hurts to cry. It hurts to lie down and it hurts to sit in a chair. My room is hideous and when I see myself in the mirror on the closet door, my makeup looks like primordial ooze, like what would happen if the La Brea Tar Pits were beige instead of black and offering up random eyes and chins and noses instead of prehistoric bird bones.

Vivian spends two days tag-teaming with Juanita, trying to get me to eat food, upping the ante from egg salad sandwiches to delivery pizza to takeout buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto tartine from Le Pain Quotidien.

“You have to eat!” she yells through the door. “You have to tell me what happened to you!”

“I thought you had that all figured out!” I yell back.