Where It Began (34 page)

That’s how I feel.

And you have to wonder if there’s some chance that Billy
developed a Problem, such as terminal idiocy, when I wasn’t watching. Or if the fumes from the scotch are making me hear voices through my cell phone.

You have to wonder if we’re handing off fists full of terminal idiocy like a hot potato, first I had it and now that I am irrevocably smartened and wised-up, he has it instead.

Now he has it and he wants to pass it back to me only my hands are already burned and not exactly open and extended in his direction.

“How come you’re phoning me?”

“Gabs, this is important.”

“Important to who? Important that you don’t admit anything in writing?”

It isn’t even a question, that’s how obvious it is. I want to strangle him. But still, I want him to be all sweet and sorry, all Imaginary Boyfriend Billy so I can keep on being Delusional Girlfriend Gabby. And even though I can tell this is a sure sign of the proximity of the idiocy potato that I have my fists clenched against taking back, I can also tell that if he gives the slightest hint of wanting to be with me, they will open like pupils dilating in the dark.

“What are you talking about?” he says in his low voice, so quiet you could almost take it for sincere. “I’ve been messaging you online continuously since you got out of your coma.”

There, that sounded almost boyfriend-like, except for the part where you’d expect his lawyer to write a better script for him. That and the pesky, not-true aspect of it.

“I was never in a coma,” I say, exerting all possible self-control to make my teeth not chatter, that’s how hard I’m shaking.

“Well, that’s not what your mother was telling people.”

“Jesus, you’ve got it all figured out. Every angle on this. You’re freaking amazing.”

“Not, I assume, a compliment?”

“Sorry. No. Not.” And then:
How could you? How COULD you? HOW COULD YOU?
Screaming in my head, in my throat, and just behind my mouth. And I know with absolute and complete clarity, if I let it out, that’s the end of it, of some powerful, unnamed scary
it
, the end of something, and I have no idea what could possibly replace it, or if my body would just implode, cave in on the vacuum left in there at the former location of my lame, ripped-out heart.

“Listen,” he says. “I care what happens to you. I risked my probation to get you out of trouble. I walked you through every step. I snuck out to see you. Don’t you see that?”

“Well,” it is as if my lack of anger-management skills is eclipsing my lack of discernment-in-boyfriend-selection skills without me having to exert any good judgment whatsoever. “Let me be the first to point out that you wouldn’t have had to sneak around to see me because it wouldn’t have violated your probation to see me if you hadn’t made up your bullshit story about what I did.”

“Only, I would have been seeing you when you visited me in
jail
. Don’t you get it? Nothing bad was going to happen to you, first offense, cute girl from the B’s. And I knew you wouldn’t have let anything bad happen to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you would have remembered, I knew that you’d take care of it.”

And even if you’d been pelted by idiocy potatoes, even if you couldn’t think your way out of a bag full of a hundred pounds of moron spuds, you could tell this was probably the truest thing he’d said to me probably ever.

“So you just lied to me and you got everyone else to go along with it? That was the plan?” I say.

“Because you object to lying?”

“Where are you even going with this, Billy? I’m the one who got duped into thinking a lie was the truth. What am I supposed to do with that, anyway?”

There is a long pause and then he says, “You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut.”

“What, are you threatening me?”

“Jesus, Gabs. I don’t know where you got that. All I’m saying is you’ve got a whole lineup of legal people who think you’ve been telling them the truth all along. If you change your story now, they’re going to think you’ve been lying to them all along.”

“Billy—”

“I mean it, Gabs. No one is going to believe you. They’ll think you’re just out to get me because I’m back with Benitez.”

“Billy—”

“Give it up. Like you didn’t notice? Maybe we should talk or something. Castle?”

Because: Knowing me, you’d think I’d go. Because I want to
go. Because I almost go. And I say to myself,
Gabby, do not open your hand and take back that potato. Do not. Just ask yourself what fairy tale this is, and who this guy is, now that he’s not the prince.

Now that I’m not the princess.

Now that we aren’t going to live happily ever after until graduation.

And I hang up the phone.

THEN I PICK UP THE PHONE AND CANCEL THE ENTIRE
week of Ponytail, unlike the last session that I just didn’t show up for, because what am I going to say to her? She can leave all the cryptic, where-the-hell-are-you messages she wants. I don’t want to talk to Billy and I don’t want to talk to her. I want to talk to my real and actual friends.

“Thank God,” Lisa says as she plops on my bed. “I thought you were never going to speak to me again. I am
so
sorry. We called your house like fifty thousand times.”

At which point, Anita shows up with emergency fudge.

“You talked to Huey,” I say.

Lisa says, “We thought you
knew
. I swear to God, we never would have let this happen if—” She kind of peters out, tearing the fudge into little, tiny pieces.

“If what?” I say. “If goddamned
what
? You’re supposed to
be my best friends. What, did you think I was
lying
to you?”

Anita says, “We thought you were protecting Billy. You kept saying you didn’t want to talk about it. It kind of made sense.”

“It would have made more sense if you
believed
me.”

But I knew, I absolutely knew, it did make sense.

“Billy thinks I would have done it anyway if I’d remembered. He thinks I would have lied my way right into juvie for him.”

“What a self-serving asshole,” Anita says.

“Yeah,” I say. “But isn’t that what you thought I was doing, pretty much?”

That one just sits there.

“It’s not that we thought you were
lying
lying,” Lisa says finally. “It’s more like you never tell us anything. And you were so into Billy.”

“As if you ever tell me anything!” I say. As if I were some unnaturally silent sphinx and they’re two all-star blabber mouths. “It’s not just me. Like, are you doing it with Huey?”

“I’m not even
talking
to Huey,” Lisa says.

“How come?”

Lisa starts rolling the torn up fudge into balls. “He was right there,” she says. “He could have stopped you anytime for hours. He was taking
close
-ups of you. What kind of friend does that?”

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw fudge,” Anita says, stacking the fudge balls in a pyramid. “We could have stopped, you know, what happened next.”

“We should
crush
Billy Nash,” Lisa says.

“It’s this stupid school!” Anita says. “We should burn it down
for community service.” Four and a half years of watching Slut-muffins having a wonderful time, while not being allowed to date or go to kickbacks, dances, or unchaperoned parties, or hang out with evil American boys, has finally gotten to her. “I’d leave tomorrow if I wasn’t two days away from a five in AP Bio, which I need for Cal, and it would screw up my plan.”

Given that I’m not two days away from AP exams in anything, it’s hard to think of why
I’m
not taking off tomorrow. Except that being a disorganized person whose life is unraveling in a festival of messy loose ends, I don’t have any plans at all and no place to escape to.

“LISA SAYS YOU WANT TO LEAVE,” HUEY SAYS. HE IS
messing with chemicals in the darkroom where I am hiding out avoiding Billy, which is totally unnecessary since Billy is doing such an excellent job of avoiding me. “She says you don’t want to do senior year.”

It is true that my idea of a bearable future does not involve being a Winston senior, having a big old bittersweet year of pre-nostalgia just before embarking on our big Three B true-life college adventure.

“You still talk to Lisa?” I say because, even now, I’m still the mistress of deflection. “I thought you had The Big Fight.”

“You aren’t very observant, are you?” Huey says. “It’s lucky for you that your artistic interest is still lifes and ceramic bowls and not people.”

“I observe people,” I protest. “I notice things.”

Huey makes a face. “No offense,” he says, walking me into the outer photography room full of computers for digital pictures and the yearbook layout, all bright with buzzing light, “but if you noticed things, you’d be leading a completely different life.”

Then he snaps a picture of me with my mouth hanging open.

And it hits me: It isn’t that I don’t notice things. It’s that I don’t pay enough attention to the things I notice, as if the things I notice aren’t actually true or worth noticing. As if Billy was my boyfriend who cared about me. As if the people who actually do care about me don’t matter all that much, and the people who don’t like me, like me. As if drinking so much I couldn’t see or remember or feel anything isn’t a problem.

But mostly as if I didn’t know I was Billy’s pathetic love slave.

As if I didn’t know what everybody else had noticed all along and it makes perfect sense to the Andies and the Slutmuffins and even Huey and Lisa and Anita and everybody in the Western world that I’d toss my life out the window just so Billy could be on the water polo team at Princeton.

Because I don’t even have a life to toss out the window. I was just Billy’s well-trained dog, his tail-wagging bitch.

No wonder Billy went back to Aliza Benitez. At least she’s a human being. All right, a disgusting human being, but at least nobody ever accused her of not paying enough attention to all the things she had to know to be able to look out for herself.

Or drinking so much that she careened beyond the point of just being plowed and swerved into the oblivious place of not
noticing or seeing or caring or remembering or being the least bit able to take care of herself.

Not like me.

And it occurs to me that maybe I wasn’t 100% entirely lying when I copped to the teenage felon drinking problem. It just so wasn’t the problem the helpful helping professionals thought it was, so so not about peer pressure or an irresistible compulsion or an impulsive binge. It was pure, cold liquid escape from everything I so noticed but so didn’t want to notice. And I just so hadn’t paid any attention to it.

“I should have stopped you,” Huey says. “Lisa says if I had any balls, I would have stopped you. She thinks I’m like a morals-impaired news photographer watching people in flames jumping out of burning buildings and not trying to catch them because it would mess up his photo op. I should have stopped you. I wish I had.”

“So do I,” I say. “Duh.”

“Are you going to do anything to him?”

It isn’t as if I haven’t thought about this maybe constantly since hanging up on him, pictured the conversation, pictured myself screaming at him, screaming:
You were supposed to be my boyfriend! You were supposed to care about me just a little!
Pictured slapping his shining face . . . pictured myself crying and him holding me and him apologizing over and over and having make-up sex.

The lameness of my fantasy life is truly horrifying.

And I can’t even decide what the most twisted part is, the
part where I can actually picture him being sorry for what he did to me, or the part where I can picture myself believing he’s sorry and just ripping off my clothes all glad to have him back.

Even though I know who he is.

Even though I more than notice and I ever so slightly don’t even care.

Because: In the sorry, not-going-to-happen fantasy, I whip off my clothes for Billy just like that.

And I know, even with Huey standing there gazing at me expectantly, waiting for me to wise up and do the right thing, I’m not going to do a damned thing about what happened.

Because: Thank you, Billy, for pointing it out, there is no upside to nailing Billy Nash. Beyond pure vengeance, fun as that might be. But so what? After a bunch of drama, he would sink deeper into probation and maybe he’d have to toss his little water polo ball around a swimming pool in the Big Ten and not the Ivy League and so what? It’s not like four years at Giant Midwest State U is going to kill him, unless maybe he catches fatal cooties from someone with a dad in middle management.