Where It Began (8 page)

Well, no.

“Tell Camera Boy, very fine resolution and well lit to show the luster.”

To which Huey, the aforementioned camera boy, is not going to object because he is slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen and because he gets to look all cool and technologically proficient in front of Lisa while she sits there trying to throw bowl after sorry bowl on her potter’s wheel.

Not that I’m not slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen too, sort of, but it is as if my slavish devotion compass has suddenly been thrown off course by an irresistible magnetic force and all I can
think about is whether I’m going to run into Force Field Boy again when class lets out.

Which I do. He is waiting for me after class.

He says, “Hey.”

I say, “Hey.” Thinking:
Do not screw this up, Gabriella. Do. Not. Screw. This. Up.

He says, “So, are you coming to Kap’s?”

I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Why would I go to Kap’s?”

Billy puts his hand into the back pocket of my tiny denim skirt. “Because his father scored a copy of
Gorgon III
.” (Which isn’t out yet. Which is supposed to have the world’s most gruesome special effects. Which up until that point I had no plan to ever see because I don’t care all that much about gruesome special effects.) “And maybe other reasons . . .”

I am leaning in toward him. I know and he knows and anyone in their right mind knows what other reasons.

I say, “What other reasons, Nash? Could you perhaps elaborate on that?”

The elaboration is the pressure of his fingers on my ass.

And even though I am the same person, living in the same place, going to the same school, and driving the same ratty Toyota, I am magically someone else.

“LOOK AT YOU,” PONYTAIL DOC SAYS, GRINNING AT
me like a drunken baby. “Wendy tells me you’re reflecting on your life, and your brain is going a mile a minute.”

Meaning: Not only did I remember to ask Vivian the day of the week when she came with some kind of remedial lip liner in a giant tube with a rubber grip this morning before Ponytail showed up, but I told Wendy to go away because I was thinking due to the fact that I was glued to
Gabriella Gardiner Presents
and I didn’t want to be interrupted. Then, when given no choice but to open my eyes, I told Ponytail it was Friday—when, ta-da, it
was
Friday—and she wrote it down.

I am just racking up the bonus points.

Except that all I want to do is keep my eyes closed and lounge in what appears to be my actual past with Billy Nash in it looking a lot like my actual boyfriend, as opposed to sitting here in
this strange, hospital present where Billy Nash is nowhere to be found.

But Ponytail’s unbridled enthusiasm for my progress as an ever-so-slightly sentient vegetable is unquenchable. “I saw your sketches,” she says. “And your mood chart is stellar.”

This is the chart on which I circle a number for my mood, from suicidal number 1 to buzzed-on-IV-morphine number 10. When you circle a number between semi-jolly 7 and drugged-out, ecstatic 10, people in white jackets stop coming by your room to cheer you up. But circle a 4 and there they are, trying to force you to ex
plore
your lack of cheer and making you take happy pills.

It’s not that I’m opposed to happy pills in principle, it’s just that they make it hard to work your way from one end of a thought to the other. Which makes you feel so sadly brainless, it pretty much defeats the purpose of the pill. You would think. Part of which I evidently say out loud.

But Ponytail, having lost Miss Congeniality to Wendy, is going out for Miss Empathy. “It can be hard to feel smart after an insult to your brain,” she says. “It’s common even for very smart people—”

I feel a precipitous dip below semi-jolly 7 coming on, but I am too completely whacked to keep my mouth shut. “How do you even know I’m smart?” I say.

Ponytail Doc looks stumped.

“Gabby,” Vivian asks in her Florence Nightingale, long-suffering nurse voice. “Do you know any little kids who might be calling
you? Do you tutor a small child for community service or something?”

I don’t remember anything vaguely like that, but who knows? Maybe I used to be a paragon of tutoring homeless kids with sad, incurable diseases. Maybe I’m the poster girl for Why Bad Things Happen to Good Teenagers. Maybe I just haven’t gotten that far in
Gabriella Gardiner Presents
.

Still, it seems pretty unlikely.

“Well, do you?” Vivian wants to know. “Because some little girl named Andrea keeps calling you.”

“Andie Bennett is calling me?”

“Is that
Heather
Bennett’s girl? The pretty one with the shoes?” Vivian is impressed. “Maybe you should call her back.”

Because if you’re pretty enough and you have enough different-colored pairs of quilted Chanel ballet flats, you are right up there on Vivian’s automatic speed dial.

“Did she say what she wanted?”

Vivian looks perplexed. “She sounds a lot younger,” she says. “And it was hard to understand her.”

My eyes close themselves and I am right back in my
After
—
after
I get made over into an adorable, hot girl;
after
I get Billy;
after
I become designated decorating slave on the Student Council decorating committee;
after
I start spending my leisure time in Kap’s pool house (which is more of a pool villa) with the future Ivy League water polo and lacrosse gang and trying to figure out what the hell Andie Bennett is even talking about.

The
After
that comes before the hospitalized
Present
.

The
After
I’m not even sure I’m still in.

I am right back to watching the Andies float across my brain in Technicolor splendor, lit up the same way they used to be when I stared at them at Winston from afar for all the years when I didn’t actually know them, back in my
Before
.

But the problem with the Andie and Andy reel of
Gabriella Gardiner’s Smashed Brain Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s
is that it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be some weird parody of Teen Luv or a creepy Lifetime drama about sick sick codependency or what.

Look:

There they are floating down the hall, their hands all over each other, so into each other that the only reason they don’t bump into people is that people get out of their way.

There they are in a tight little threesome with Billy, walking around with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, and whatever Muffin Billy is with right then is running along slightly behind them to keep up, no room on the walkway to be four abreast.

Back then, you had to wonder if the rumors were true.

Turns out, they were. Andy and Andie have been into each other since Sunny Hills Preschool where they spent their leisure time slipping snacks to Billy in time-out.

Turns out, Andie doesn’t actually have to dial or do
any
thing else by herself because Andy does it for her.

Turns out, Andy is very smart and gets Andie through all of her not-what-you’d-call-difficult classes (not even sub-regular
normal American Lit, but super-unbelievably easy Topics in Literature, in which Mr. Mallory stands on a chair and applauds if anyone finishes a book. Any book, including graphic novels and Classic Comics) by teaching her everything in really simple sentences and making color-coded index cards.

Andie is very well dressed, mostly in pink, and it has nothing to do with whether pink is the new black. Also, she likes getting little pink presents. This works because Andy likes giving her presents. A lot. What they don’t like is drama.

“Allergic to drama!” they say.

It’s like they’re the only good marriage any of us has ever seen. Even though all four of their parents have been married about nineteen times each, including once in the fifth grade when Andie and Andy narrowly escaped a future fraught with incest because Andie’s mom was married to Andy’s dad for about twenty minutes. This was not even long enough for Andie to pack up her little pink bedroom and move into the new joint house that never happened.

There she is, opening a set of Hello Kitty pencils in their own matching pink pencil case, only you can’t tell if this is a campy little joke or what she wants for real.

“They’re so nice! Thank you, Kaps!”

Then she looks over at Billy who is sitting with his legs draped across my lap on the low wall behind the Class of 1920 Garden loading up on Cabernet before AP Spanish Language.

“You should get Gabs a present,” she says. “How come I get all this stuff and she doesn’t?” She puts her hands on her hips and
makes a monkey face at him and the possibility that I am going to come out of this looking like present-free Pathetic Girl seems to be rising off the checkered blanket like the bouquet from the wine in the thermos and the Dixie cups.

“I don’t know, Bens,” Billy says. “We could get you pink shoelaces and you’d be happy, but she’s a hard one to figure.”

Andie rolls her eyes. “Well, you could always ask her what she wants, you know.” She looks over at me, dying on the blanket, pouring Dixie cups of Cabernet down my throat. “Well, he could, couldn’t he?”

And I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Could you?”

The thing is, by Christmas, he can ask, and by Valentine’s Day, he knows without asking, and when Andie gets another in a series of velvet, heart-shaped, lace-trimmed cushions that you figure her bed must be buried underneath by now, I get my little silver heart-shaped box with my initials on the lid and one slightly melted candy kiss inside.

Propped up on pillows in the small green room, I want to close my eyes to avoid the close-up of how pathetically choked up I was, fondling that candy kiss, but they are already closed.

Not to mention my current state of choked-uppedness because nothing makes sense: that Andie Bennett has figured out how to phone me in the hospital from Cute World while Candy Kiss Boy might just as well have been sucked into a black hole with no cell phone reception.

Explain
that
.

“You should call back this little girl when you feel up to it,” Vivian says. “Because she sounds like she’s going to cry if you don’t.”

Everyone in the whole world that I don’t want to talk to is just calling calling calling. And then there’s Billy, who isn’t. Who is, for all I know, out there sitting around with Andy and Andie and some shiny, new piece of firm young flesh that Andy and Andie have nothing to say about because they’re so into each other that they don’t even notice that she isn’t me.

I slip from Paranoid Fantasyland into Homemovieland without even a glitch in the continuity.

See:

It’s the first time I actually
meet
Andie and Andy
after
four years of being in school with them and just standing around watching them, that first lunch with Billy that first day of junior year on the lawn in the Class of 1920 Garden, and they don’t actually look up.

Not that I care.

I just keep smiling.

You have to figure that if I could smile through entire weekends of
Singin’ in the Rain
and a cavalcade of Disney classics with marshmallow-speckled fudge because that is what my actual friends like to do in their free time, there is no reason I can’t deal with
this
. Even though I know I don’t remotely belong on the perfect checkered blanket and even if I did, I could never be as
perfect a girlfriend as Andie because I will never be as cute or as nice or as rich or a congenital idiot.

You go, Gabs,
I tell myself in buzzed affirmation.
You’re just the second-cutest thing ever and you fit right in. Just let out your inner babe and no one will notice you’re just a sub-regular girl with good hair.

Right.

So then I go,
You go, Gabs. Billy Nash has his hand on your thigh, and that’s all anybody will notice.

Which turns out to be more or less true.

Not to mention, if Billy is the Andies’ oldest friend, then he has to be somewhat nice, right? He does start saying hello to my friends purely in honor of me by the end of the first week of eleventh grade, which is not what you’d call a challenge, given that there aren’t all that many of them. But still. He says, “Hey, Anita,” “How’s it going, Lisa?” all the time, not even looking over to see if the Slutmuffins are curling their lips. And he is already nodding his head whenever Huey bounces by, more, it seems, out of friendliness to my semi-buddy than out of recognition that Huey is another mega-rich boy from the same zip code.

All right, he is definitely somewhat nice.

MEANWHILE, MY PARENTS ARE SPONSORING A
Gardiners-Have-Made-It Fest complete with a great many banana daiquiris and pretty much everything except Mexican sparklers.