Where It Began (9 page)

Watch:

The first night Billy pulls up to my house in the midnight-blue Beemer and Vivian spots him getting out of the car and slinging his little black daypack over his shoulder and flexing his back, she is pretty much ready to fall to her knees and yell “Hallelujah!”

She doesn’t even try to hide how excited she is. For years I’d been this disappointing nonentity, a sorry clothes rack for expensive little wrong-season outfits from Sunset Plaza, but now I have a pretty damned cool approximation of a boyfriend.

Hallelujah, all right.

My dad, who pretty much hasn’t said squat to me on a regular
basis since father-daughter Indian Princess at the YMCA broke up in second grade and we retired our stupid leather Indian Princess medallions, says “Nice ride.” While making eye contact.

It’s unnerving.

Somewhere out there, somewhere in the Midwest maybe, with cornfields and silos and sheep, there are parents who are all concerned about the age when their children should go on a date, all worried about whether they’ll kiss with tongue before marriage. These are no doubt the same people who think that having a cute lime-green bra strap sticking out of your tank top puts you one step away from working in a brothel in Hong Kong.

Or maybe these parents are in Hong Kong and in their minds the brothel is here in L.A.

Or maybe these parents are from Utah and their imaginary brothels are littered all over the other forty-nine states.

Wherever they are, they don’t have kids at Winston School.

Unless they’re from some exotic land filled with ethnic diversity, but clueless about pimping your kid for popularity. But still, you can tell that even Anita’s mom is eyeing that cute Derek Dash Sharma when he rolls through the Winston gates in his nice little red tricked-out Audi TT, so who knows? Although you can’t help but notice that Anita’s mom is afraid Derek will ravish Anita at four in the afternoon if his mother isn’t home to stop them, whereas Vivian would drop everything to drive me straight over there if Derek Dash Sharma—whose family is in the
richer-than-God category that she and John are so fond of—so much as cocked his head in my direction.

There stand my parents, grinning like grateful idiots when Billy comes through the front door of Casa Gardiner. He is golden, with that pale blond hair reflecting light. He says, “Hey, Vivian. How’s it going, John?” And it is as if they are turned on.

But not as turned on as me, the original grateful grinning idiot.

He is so absolutely, undeniably perfect. I go:
Why me? Why me? Why me?
about six hundred times in the five seconds it takes me to walk across the living room to the front door. And then, by the time we are out the door, by the time his arm is draped around
my
shoulder, I don’t even care why or how or anything. And the only thing in my mind, arranging myself in the passenger seat of the midnight-blue Beemer, tying my hair back so the wind won’t blow it into the shape of a tumbleweed, is my increasingly insistent mantra, the one about how I’d better not screw this up.

Lisa and Anita are completely nonplussed. Even though I am pretty sure that everyone else kind of wants to have what I suddenly have—cute skintight clothes and a spot in the Class of 1920 Garden drinking wine out of paper cups at lunch with Billy Nash—I have somehow managed to cozy up to the only two friends who are a special case. They seem more amazed than covetous, like they want anthropological field reports of the inner
workings of hot, elite circles that they themselves don’t actually want any personal part of.

Sitting in a group study room trying to teach me SAT II math facts, Anita says, “It’s just that I see you with someone more, I don’t know, more arty.”

Before now, the idea that she saw me with anyone at all would have been highly flattering and also highly unrealistic.

I say, “Huey is arty.”

“Someone
normal
and arty. Someone, I don’t know, more intense.”

“Billy is intense.”

“Not that kind of intense. Not jock intense.”

I’ve barely known him for a month, but I am pretty sure that he’s the perfect intensity. I am pretty sure that even if this is like Zeus coming down from Mount Olympus to frolic with some clueless shepherd maid, I don’t want to wreck the frolic with major analysis or—yay Vivian and the power of positive thinking—think one single negative thought to mess it up.

“It’s not like he’s a
dumb
jock,” I say. “He is going to
Prince
ton.”

Anita slams her ten-pound AP Bio book down on the table. “Don’t be naive,” she says, as if anyone could stay naive for five minutes at Winston. “It’s not like people who know they’re going to Princeton fall of junior year are getting in because they’re Albert Einstein.”

“Anita!”

“Some people actually have to study and get a four-three
GPA and build a nuclear reactor in their basement to get into an Ivy. And some people don’t.”

Which is obviously true. Which is why Peyton Epps, famous for being mean and stupid but whose whole Epps dynasty has large buildings named after them at every high school, college, and hospital in Southern California, is going to Brown instead of Cal State Bakersfield.

“At least Cal doesn’t have a quota on Asians,” Anita says.

Which is why Lewis Wing, who actually got a prize for taking and acing more APs than anybody else in the history of Winston School, is going to Cal instead of Brown.

“Okay,” I say. “I get it. Life is unfair and also sucks. But my life, for once, doesn’t suck and it’s not as if the ticket to Princeton is his fault.”

“I’m just saying,” Anita says. “Don’t go confusing him with Wallace Schaeffer.”

Wallace Schaeffer has been taking engineering courses at UCLA since he was fourteen. There are completely credible rumors that Wallace Schaeffer got a likely letter from MIT when he was still a sophomore. The only reason Wallace Schaeffer is even at Winston and not hanging around with all the other certified geniuses at Harvard-Westlake—which Winston tries to pretend is our crosstown rival, ignoring the tiny facts that (1) it is not across town, and (2) it is better than us in basically everything except equestrian team and cheerleading—is that the Harvard-Westlake middle school carpool line is routed past his house and his mom’s hobby is waging war to make them stop blocking her
vast, circular driveway.

But Wallace Schaeffer is not the one driving me around in his midnight-blue convertible:

That would be Billy Nash.

Lisa and Anita try to be nice to him. When we drive past them in the parking lot, they wave while looking at their feet.

Not that there’s any way that I can tell them what I’m doing with him up in his bedroom, when he knocks the homework off the bed with his bare feet and strokes my hair, and my forehead, and my eyebrows, and my eyelids. When he runs his fingers down the back of my neck and down my spine under my blouse and I want more and he wants more and I just want to give him more. Because: Even though getting him off like that might not technically be sex, they would still be completely grossed out.

But there we are, by the side of the bed, his fingers on my shoulders, me unzipping him, me with my clothes still on because every time I think about taking them off, all I can think of is Billy looking down at my naked self going,
Jesus, what was I thinking?
And the whole time, I’m going,
Whoa, Gabriella, this is actually more than somewhat fun
.
Whoa. This is freaking amazing.

And trying not to look so into it that he’ll think I’m a skank.

Only you have to admit, Billy is Gorgeous Boy from Planet Irresistible.

Eating frozen yogurt together after sculpture, Lisa says, “I
wouldn’t mind sculpting that.” That being Billy from behind. Also, not being totally unobservant, she says, “Watch your back, okay? Not that you have to.”

She is thumbing through a college catalog from Davidson that she got from the college counselor—the one who I never go to visit and am pretty much planning never to go visit. The one whose official job is to make pronouncements about how your sub-regularity severely limits your future options, college choices, happiness, success, viability as a resident of the Three B’s, and potential for shopping at stores other than Ross Dress for Less once your parents stop supporting you.

“What’s Davidson?” Anita asks.

“It’s a really good college that I’m not going to attend,” Lisa says.

“How is anyone supposed to make decisions from a catalog anyway?” Anita says.

“Great catalog,” Lisa says. “I just have other plans.”

“My plans don’t extend beyond this weekend,” I say.

Lisa sighs. “You’re an artist, so you’re in a completely different category than the rest of us. Your portfolio is going to be amazing.” Lisa thinks that any doodle you aren’t outright embarrassed to sign is amazing, which makes her very supportive but not entirely realistic about my stature as an art goddess. “Do you know where you’re going to send it?”

Well, no.

Whatever brains I once had have been sucked out through my new and time-intensive good hair, my energy devoted to
precision blow-drying and Billy. But even if I’d still been skulking around Winston with sub-regular hair and no boyfriend, it is not as if I would have been out there whoring it up with extra-sexy extracurriculars to fill out great-looking lists for the (close eyes and wince) sub-regular, second-tier colleges that would even consider a person like me.

The portfolio seems like a bizarre little sideshow to keep my mind occupied so I won’t have to contemplate how fast I’m going to plummet in a highly entertaining yet predictable nosedive from the high board into a very small bucket during the main event. How I am going to spend the spring of senior year congratulating everybody else for getting into (loud applause from God Himself) Harvard while I pretend I want a gap year.

Anita says, “It’s junior year. Shoot me if this sounds too momish, but don’t you need to start making a plan?”

Well, no.

How much strategic planning does it take to get rejected from Penn, laughed out of the Wharton School of Business applicant pool, and left rotting and Ivy-free up on Via Estrada with only your totally shattered dad who has run so amok with his stupid, unrealistic plans for your future that even a pitcher of iced margaritas is not going to take the edge off?

My only plan is to climb onto Planet Billy and only occasionally glance back down at the debris of my soon to be previously sub-regular life. Because even though I can tell that high school is only temporary, I just don’t care.

Anita says, “You know, Gabby, you should run with this. You
should go out for student government right now.”

Which is not as bizarre as it might sound. Because: Student Council is always getting both halves of cute couples elected to it. And because Winston has its Student Council elections at the start of the school year instead of in the spring, presumably so that if someone gets fat or their social status suddenly tanks during the summer, the cool kids on Council won’t be stuck in a room with them all year.

And right then, two weeks into being with Billy, a meteoric rise to super-regular Student Council Girl Appendage to the Gorgeous Hot Boy seems as unremarkable as crossing the street.

“Right now,” Lisa agrees. “Not that you have to.”

Right now, before you screw it up with Billy Nash, is what I hear. Which is
so
not happening. Because pretty much my whole way of life involves thinking about how much I adore Billy Nash, and adoring him, and doing all this cute domestic stuff to keep him happy and not screwing it up.

I AM MAYBE THE WORLD’S BEST ASPIRING GIRLFRIEND.

Billy likes blue Pilot pens; I always have one handy. Billy wants to cut out of school and get coffee at Starbucks or some boysenberry/wheatgrass thing at Jamba Juice; I am out of there in a flash. Billy likes fat oatmeal cookies with currants and not raisins; I am a fat-oatmeal-cookie-with-currants-and-no-raisins baking machine.

Vivian even helps me. We have mother-daughter pimp-your-kid bonding over cookie sheets and baking powder.

“Don’t think you don’t deserve this,” she says, spraying sticky nonstick grease onto the cookie sheets.

I say, “Huh?”

“You look darling,” she says. “And you’re a very sweet girl. People like that.”

And for like thirty seconds, kneading the dough for sugar
balls, standing next to Vivian in a cloud of powdered sugar, I am in a state reserved for actual darling-looking, sweet girls whose mothers really like them. I am beaming and inhaling sugar and Vivian is sort of looking at me strangely.

And then I go,
Shit,
Gabriella. Really? Are you freaking delusional?

Because: It is more than slightly difficult to forget the part where I was the slightly less darling-looking, sweet girl she didn’t like all that much before she got me slightly reupholstered and I got such a hot boyfriend.

“People like what?” I say.

“Oh crap, Gabby,” she says. “Don’t do this. Let me support you, all right? I just don’t want you to squander your opportunities.”