Where It Began (33 page)

“You have to go see Dr. Berman!”

“No,” I say, because even if I wanted to go, which I don’t, this would involve taking a shower and getting dressed and putting on deodorant and figuring out how to hold my face in an expression that looks like someone who’s not posing for Munch’s
Scream
. “I don’t have to and I’m not going.”

I hear her caucusing with John in the hall. She thinks he should get out of the den and do something. He doesn’t.

Finally she gives up and goes shopping.

I can’t get off the bed.

I am completely and in every way humiliated.

My arm throbs and throbs and throbs and swells around the wrist and all my fingers curl in protest. You can be unnaturally stupid and still know that this can’t be good. If I have actually
wrecked my wrist, it’s going to be like the assisted suicide of the only slim aspect of me that ever had any real reason to get off the bed.

The landline keeps ringing, and John keeps pounding on the door, standing in the doorway, the receiver in his hand. “These are your friends,” he says.

I just wait for him to close the door.

“I know,” he says. “Sometimes things just creep up on you and then
wham
.”

He is wan and pathetically sober with his eyes blinking too much in a state of utter cluelessness. At least he got the
wham
part right.

What I say is, “Could you drive me to the hospital?”

We tool down to the UCLA ER where I look like such shit that I get prioritized ahead of the crystal meth guy with the stab wound and police escort.

The doctor prods my arm and shuttles me off to x-ray on a gurney.

“So what happened to you?” gurney guy wants to know.

“Car crash and then I fell.”

“You
fell
?” the doctor says, when she is signing off on the discharge sheet, when she is giving me prescriptions for three kinds of anti-inflammatory drugs and a sling. When she is telling John exactly how much this is going to hurt and how I can’t have any more narcotic pain pills and how I’m not a credible historian. When there is no b.s. about accordion playing, or throwing pots, or my secretarial future, and no stuffed marsupials to blunt the
blow. The doctor rolls her eyes, “Well, whatever you did, don’t do it again.”

And I go,
Listen, Gabriella, if by some miracle Huey was too soft to permanently trash your hand against, things can only look up. Think about it. Really.

Only then I have to go back to school.

GETTING OUT OF THE CAR JUST LIKE ALWAYS AND
walking across the lawn, climbing the stairs just like always and walking through the domed entryway, all the familiar stateliness of Winston’s fake-Gothic architecture and the walk through the familiar buildings does nothing to neutralize the Carnival of Weirdness, tilted floors and fun-house mirrors feel of going to school on Monday.

Knowing what everybody else knew all along and thought that I knew all along makes everything look different, all of the faces more cynical and the buildings as formal and unfriendly as they really are but I’d been pretending they weren’t.

I had been back for two weeks, and in two weeks I had been so I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it-blah-blabitty-blah that I’d managed to avoid finding out the
main
thing, the simple fact that would make everything different and worse. I had missed the
Big Kahuna of simple truths. The salient point, as Mr. Monahan would say in history. When you analyze the passage, ladies and gentlemen, be sure to identify that salient point. Underline that salient point. It will be on the test.

I, on the other hand, seemed to have failed that particular test and unwittingly stumbled on the perfect method to evade all those pesky yet salient points. It was a simple three-part plan in which:

1. you run your head into a tree when you’re not wearing a seat belt, erasing all relevant memory

2. you share this unfortunate fact with your boyfriend, after which

3. your boyfriend sets you up with the assistance of his helpful posse of adorable Andies, a marauding Slutmuffin, and the entire student body of Winston School.

And Winston School, no-snitch Paradise, was the perfect spot for this simple plan. Everybody knew and everybody believed I would throw myself under the bus for Billy.

Nobody believed I didn’t remember, so nobody told me the truth; they all thought I knew the truth already.

No wonder Billy didn’t want me to have a meaningful dialogue with anyone.

All of this admiration and bizarre respect I was getting was because of the unfounded Saint Girlfriend aspect of it and,
here comes the salient point
, Billy knew it
all
, knew every bit of it, and now he was spending his time “protecting” me by telling people I didn’t want to talk about it while sticking his hands in some
other girl’s Wonderbra. Not because he loved me and liked me and wanted to protect me, but because he didn’t.

Because I was completely expendable as long as it kept him out of trouble.

This is my salient, impossible fact.

I SIT THERE AT ONE OF THE WHITE METAL TABLES
on the back patio looking out toward the Class of 1920 Garden and there they are, dripping in salience and conspiratorial friendship. Andie, seeing me, smiles her big smile and gets up and comes prancing up toward me, waving something orange at me. You could see Billy trying to keep her there and frowning, turning his head away.

“Hey, Gabby,” she says.

She looks so adorable and harmless and completely evil. And she is giving me PEZ. Not just a candy, a whole Pebbles Flint-stone PEZ dispenser. It’s like giving me presents is the adorable, harmless-looking, evil girl’s new hobby.

“It’s for you,” she says. Duh. There is no one else here. “Don’t you like it?”

“Just stop it, Andie,” I say. “Go back to your garden.”

Andie says, “I don’t understand. You were Pebbles for seventh grade Halloween. I thought you’d like it.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Yearbook,” says Andie, just beaming away. “I love yearbook. Huey takes very good pictures of us, don’t you think? I love Halloween. Don’t you love dressing up?”

“Andie,” I say. “You have to go away.”

“Billy keeps reminding me you don’t want to talk to me, but I just wanted to give you—”

“
What
, a criminal record? Being cute doesn’t give you a free pass, Andrea! You might be cuter than Mrs. God but I
know
what you did and I don’t like you.”

“What?” I can see the catatonic cry face coming on. Andie scampers off to get Andy, and I watch as Andy gets up and comes toward her with a Dixie cup of
vin du jour
directly from his dad’s wine cellar while Billy collects his things and just leaves.

He sees me coming and he leaves basically for the rest of the day.

Because I am following Andie back into the garden with a look on my face that Billy Nash has never seen before. Yes, in pursuit of the salient point, I get up and I walk across the ordinary people’s lawn and into the Class of 1920 Garden, which is almost empty because it’s so early, and I stand there as Andie slurps down the contents of her Dixie cup.

“Do you want some?” Andy says, offering breakfast wine.

“Haven’t you heard? I have a drinking problem.”

“Right. Sorry,” Andy says. He rolls his head around as if his neck and shoulders were sore. “Sorry about
every
thing.”

“Gabby doesn’t like me anymore,” Andie says, by way of explanation.

Andy looks horrified, maybe because Andie is sniffling and squinting and her face is getting splotchy, and maybe because the idea that a human being is walking the face of the Earth who doesn’t adore Andie is too much for him to take.

“What
every
thing would it be that you’re sorry about?” I say. “The one where you set me up and then you gave me PEZ?”

I so don’t want to be doing this.

I so want to just live through to the end of semester.

“What is she talking about?” Andie says, looking doe-eyed up at Andy as he stands there pouring himself wine out of his thermos.

They look completely baffled, although guilty as hell.

“I’m not saying I expected you to be my actual friends—”

“I am too your actual friend,” Andie says. “Tell her.”

And Andy runs his fingers through her hair and says, “What’s this about? It’s cool what you’re doing for Billy, but why are you mad at Andie all of a sudden?”

“Were you just going to let this keep on going and never tell me and just hope I never found out?”

“Okay, Gabby,” Andy says. “I feel really bad you’re the one who got caught, but what is this about?”

So I tell them.

“We thought you knew,” they chant over and over, like it is now the lyric of their special song.

Andy, seeing the look on my face, in a vain effort to prevent
further drama, says, “Truthfully, at first we thought it was a misunderstanding, and then we thought you knew.”

“We thought you were like the coolest person on Earth throwing yourself on a land-mine-thingy to save Billy,” Andie says.

“And your sorry little butt,” I say.

Andie, dumb as Bambi, says. “What do you mean?
Billy
was driving.”

“
We
were in the car,” Andy says quietly.

“Do you mean we could get in trouble?” Andie asks, all googly-eyed.

“Let’s see,” I say. “You dragged me out of the car I wasn’t driving and stuck the keys I didn’t steal into my unconscious hand and you totally set me up.
May
be you could get in trouble. No wonder you kept your mouths shut.”

“What keys?” Andie says, looking up at Andy, who is staring at the ground. “What’s she talking about?”

Andy says, “I swear it wasn’t like that. We pulled you out of the car because you were passed out and we were afraid it would catch fire. You were passed out before he skidded and you got really banged up. We didn’t want the car to blow with you in it, but you started to heave so we put you down. That’s all it was.”

“Gross,” says Andie. Like she never heaved into a cardboard box in the back of the limo on the way back from semiformal.

“Don’t forget the part where you ran away and left me there,” I say.

“We just went to call Billy’s mom on his cell,” Andy says. “Because she’s a lawyer. And then we heard the sirens and we stayed
out of sight. That’s all it was. It wasn’t personal. And I don’t know how the keys got into your hand because I didn’t put them there.”

He thinks for a minute until his face takes on this amazed and horrified frown, and this time I can tell it’s not about whether I like Andie. “That sucks,” he says almost to himself, twining his fingers in her curls.

They are so dumb and earnest and into themselves and slimy. Still, it is hard to picture the Andies exchanging looks and prying open my fingers and slipping the keys into the palm of my unconscious hand.

It is hard to see them sitting down over a nice joint and going, “Hey, I know, let’s tell Gabby she stole Billy’s car. That’ll keep her quiet while we go to Dartmouth.” (Or in their case, while
he
packs up his lacrosse gear and goes to Dartmouth and she goes to Hanover, New Hampshire College of Fun and Games or wherever girls like that go.)

It is hard to see Andie even understanding the whole complicated plot and it is hard to see Andy making color-coded note cards to explain it to her. How to set up Gabby: Memorize this.

Probably he had figured it out by now, could have figured it out all along if he had given any thought to it. But why would he? He’s smart, but why would he even want to know?

I
didn’t even want to know.

Because as bad as it is to be a drunken teenage felon, it’s worse to be a drunken heaving dupe.

Billy’s drunken heaving dupe.

I GO HOME ON THE BUS, I MARCH INTO MY EMPTY
living room, I pour myself a glass of John’s Glenlivet, and I drink it straight up. Then I pour myself another one and in a seriously cheesy move, I throw the glass into the fireplace where it breaks into purple splinters, spraying a plume of scotch that smells a lot like a petroleum product across the room. And right on cue, before I can throw up or cry or pass out on the wet chaise, the phone rings.

“So. Kaplan says that you remember part of it,” he says instead of hello. “That’s good, right?”

And I think of what we’re studying in psychology, how when you’re shocked beyond what you can take, when your body is flooded with adrenaline, you feel like there’s a ten-foot, hulking grizzly bear blocking your path.