Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  This is what I remember:

  How everything leading up to the party is nothing special.

  Me and Billy in the front seat of Billy’s car.

  Billy pulling onto the front lawn of the house on Songbird Lane. Heading toward the big front door that opens and then shuts out three and a half hours of my life.

  My life, which, by the time I wake up on the ground clutching the car keys with my head bashed in, is pretty much over.

  Only I don’t know that right away.

  “A terrific read! Ann Redisch Stampler puts you in Gabby’s head and keeps you there until the gripping conclusion. A writer to watch!” —ALEX FLINN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beastly

  ANNSTAMPLER.COM

  Sometimes the end is just the beginning.

  Gabby lived under the radar until her makeover. Way under. But when she started her senior year as a blonder, better-dressed version of herself, she struck gold: Billy Nash believed she was the f lawless girl she was pretending to be. The next eight months with Billy were bliss. . . . Until the night Gabby wakes up on the ground next to the remains of his BMW without a single memory of how she got there.

  And Billy’s nowhere to be found.

  All Gabby wants is to make everything perfect again. But getting her life back isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. Because nothing is the same, and Gabby’s beginning to realize she’s missed more than a few danger signs along the way.

  It’s time for Gabby to face the truth, even if it means everything changes.

  Especially if it means everything changes.

  Where It Began marks Ann Redisch Stampler’s YA debut. She is the author of several picture books, including The Rooster Prince of Breslov. Her books have been an Aesop Accolade winner, Sydney Taylor Honor and Notable Books, a National Jewish Book Awards finalist and winner, and Bank Street Best Books of the Year. Ann lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Rick.

  Jacket designed by Jessica Handelman

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Getty Images

  Author photograph by Sonya Sones

  Simon Pulse

  SIMON & SCHUSTER, NEW YORK

  Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at

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  where it began

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition March 2012 Copyright © 2012 by Ann Redisch Stampler All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.

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  Designed by Mike Rosamilia The text of this book was set in Bembo. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stampler, Ann Redisch. Where it began / by Ann Redisch Stampler. — 1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After she is in a horrific car crash when drunk, Los Angeles high school student Gabriella Gardiner assumes she stole her rich boyfriend’s car and smashed it into a tree, but she cannot remember anything about the events of the evening.

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2321-3 (hardcover)

  [1. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 2. Alcoholism—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. Peer pressure—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.S78614Wh 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2011011726

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2323-7 (eBook)

  For Rick and Laura and Michael,

  again, still, always

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Part Two

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Part Three

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Chapter LXIII

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Chapter LXVI

  Chapter LXVII

  Chapter LXVIII

  Chapter LXIX

  Chapter LXX

  Chapter LXXI

  Chapter LXXII

  Chapter LXXIII

  Acknowledgments

  where it began

  part one

  I

  THIS IS HOW IT STARTS: SOME HAPLESS GIRL IN A skanky little tank top lying on her back in the wet grass somewhere in Hidden Hills. She is gazing at the stars through the leaves of a eucalyptus tree. The trunk of the eucalyptus tree is wrapped in Billy Nash’s blue BMW. Midnight-blue. The girl is trying to figure out what’s going on, beyond the more obvious facts: a mouth lined with a sick combination of beer and stale vodka, a crunched-up car with black smoke pouring out of it, a night sky filled with glassy constellations and a big white moon.

  There are certain unavoidable conclusions.

  Even so, the girl is trying to remember the particulars. The keg, maybe. The crash. She is trying to remember who she is and what happened to whoever that person might be.

  She is trying to remember she is me.

  When I wake up, I am wired to machines. Everything looks somewhat gray. I check to see if my toes can wiggle and I start counting my fingers, which proves to be more challenging than you’d expect. I’m pretty sure they’re all there, but I keep having to start over around finger number six.

  Someone speaks, but it doesn’t make sense, pieces of words and random syllables. It occurs to me that I might be on some fairly serious drugs. Then I go back to counting my six fingers.

  Just after this, or maybe way later, it is hard to tell, someon
e else says, “Good morning, Sunshine.”

  I start to say, “Good morning,” but I end up throwing up instead. Which is evidently a good thing. I am surrounded by happy, blurry, celebrating people in scrubs.

  Someone grabs my hand and yells “Good morning!” again, enunciating all the consonants in case I’m deaf or speak Serbo-Croatian. My name remains a mystery of life, but I do remember this horrible story about a gray-haired old lady discovered locked up in a mental hospital in Chicago or someplace, where she’d been stuck since she was sixteen years old when a policeman found her wandering the streets speaking Serbo-Croatian. Only nobody knew it was Serbo-Croatian so they decided that she must be crazy and locked her up basically forever.

  Whoever I am, I’m pretty sure that I’m not her.

  Then it occurs to me that all these greenish-gray, blurry-looking figures I’ve been thinking of as people might actually be space aliens doing a bad job of pretending to be human. I try to go back to counting the fingers, but this is hard with the big happy alien clutching my hand as if she is afraid that I might make a break for it and cut out of the mother ship if she let go.

  I try to get my hand back, which is cause for further celebration.

  The hand-grabbing alien is wearing a V-neck scrub shirt with bunnies all over it. “Can you tell us your naaaaame?” she yells over and over.

  I am still trying to reclaim the hand.

  I hear myself saying, “Bunnies.”

  They all echo me and someone writes it down, or writes down something. I can hear the ballpoint scratch against the paper, harsh and loud.

  “That’s very goooooood!” someone else says. I have made the space clones ecstatic. “You’ve been in a car accident, Bunny,” she shouts cheerfully.

  The car. I sort of remember the car.

  “You probably feel a little sick, but you’re going to be fine. Dear? We need to know your last name too. What’s your last name, Bunny?”

  By now I am overwhelmed by the mystery of the situation. Although, I am in command of several key facts:

  1. My name is not Bunny.

  2. I have ten fingers, or at least I have six, and none of them actually seems to be missing.

  3. I might or might not be in a hospital somewhere.

  Ideas float through my head like big, goofy cartoons. Elephants and bunny shirts and bags.

  “My ID,” I say.

  “Heidi!” they say. “That’s great! Are you Heidi?”

  “ID,” I say. “Look in my bag. Give me my wallet.”

  All right, so I have no idea who I am, but at least I’m not stupid. This is something of a relief.

  “I’m afraid the paramedics didn’t find it, honey,” Bunny Shirt says. “Let’s see if you can tell me what day it is today.”

  This seems like an exceptionally stupid, random question under the circumstances.

  “Calendar,” I say.

  They seem to be missing a lot of important items around here, such as calendars, and where is my bag? I remember my bag. It is the small, black fabric Prada bag, the kind with the leather strap and not the woven cloth one. The kind you can buy somewhat cheaply on the Internet and look somewhat richer than you really are. Unlike Louis Vuitton bags, which are always fake on the Internet and everyone can tell you bought some cheap, fake bag and you just look like a poseur.

  There: car accident, toes and fingers, no name, no ID, and an encyclopedic knowledge of bags. I try to think about bags. What else do I know about them? I know I want mine back. Did they leave it in the car?

  “Look in the car,” I say.

  The aliens chirp and huddle, letting go of the hand. I think about escaping, but I don’t seem to be able to move. Also, there are tubes coming out of the back of my hand and the crook of my elbow. There are wires glued to my chest.

  “Okay, Heidi,” Bunny Shirt says, turning back with a great big toothy smile that makes her look like she might want to suck blood out of my neck. “The car you were driving is registered to Agnes and William B. Nash. Could you be Agnes?”

  “Billy!” I say.

  I remember Billy. Billy Nash. William B-for-Barnsdale Nash. I remember him in glorious and perfect detail, his hair and his shoulders and the salty smell of him.

  “Is Billy all right?”

  The nurse-like creature strokes my arm. “You were the only person by the car, dear,” she says.

  All right. So just after I was in some car crash that I don’t remember, I was kidnapped by helpful aliens. The first part makes about as much sense as the second part. And oh, right, I did all this without my bag, which I ditched somewhere just before losing my mind.

  “Can you tell me your whole name now?” the nurse asks, still stroking my arm. “Can you remember who you are?”

  How could she know that the second I remembered Billy, I knew who I was too?

  So I tell them my name and they all go scurrying off someplace to celebrate without me.

  II

  MOSTLY I SLEEP THROUGH ENDLESS DAY. THE ROOM is always light and everybody still looks slightly gray. Every time I open my eyes, I expect to see Billy—only he would be golden. He is, when my eyes are closed.

  But it’s just Vivian.

  She is sitting in the corner on a green plastic chair, maybe too far away for me to see her clearly. Or maybe in her quest to look as if she’s made of ten-years-younger, wrinkle-free plastic sheeting, my mother has found a way to get herself permanently, cosmetically airbrushed so nobody can see her all that clearly.

  I think about her face melting into a fuzzy, greenish blur, and then I start thinking about the mass quantity of drugs that must be dripping into me through the IV and about how to speed it up.

  This is when Vivian puts down her magazine and wafts across the room to loom over my bed. I can see that she is wearing her tasteful mauve and plum makeup with the matte finish and matching mauve, no-sparkles nail polish she wears for funerals and teacher conferences, and it hits me that I might actually be in a real hospital on the verge of death.

  I wonder what would happen if I just sort of reached up and squeezed the bag that’s feeding the IV tube.

  What I say is, “Where’s Billy?”

  Vivian gives me her strained imitation of a cheery smile.

  “Hey, Gabby,” she says, as if she were some happy, sappy character from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as if she were pretending to be somebody’s mother. “Let’s take this one step at a time, okay? Let’s just get you okay and out of the hospital.”

  Brain-dead as I am, I know and she knows and everyone who ever laid eyes on me since September knows that I’m not going to be okay without Billy.

  For a second I have this horrible thought that maybe the nurse is lying and something bad happened to him. Maybe Billy was run over and is crushed and dead and laid out behind a William Barnsdale Nash plaque in the Nash family crypt where we made out, Billy dressed up like a vampire and me a cross between a really slutty French maid and a zombie, on Halloween.

  Otherwise, why wouldn’t he come see me?

  “Where’s Billy?”

  Vivian leans over the railing that’s supposed to keep me in the bed. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you plowed his car into a tree,” she says softly, as if this could pass for some form of a helpful suggestion.

  I can tell that I am crying because a tear is blazing an acid trail down the side of my face.

  “Don’t touch!” Vivian lunges through the tangle of tubes and wires toward my seriously bandaged hands.

  “What?” I say. “What happened to my face? Oh God, do my hands work? What did I do?”

  The bed bobs and lurches like a space raft floating in the gray-green sky. I can tell that the nurse is injecting something soothing and potent into the tube that goes directly to my veins. I can tell that Vivian is saying something soothing and insincere. I open my eye and Vivian whirls into the distance in the plastic chair, her hair streaming behind her. The doctors multiply in kaleidoscope formation,
at the center of which is the tiny white light that they shine into my eye.

  Before sunrise, when the room is vibrating with pale fluorescent light, I can see the space debris that’s been floating in the corner of my eye is a bouquet of ugly Mylar balloons. The watercolor clouds are flowers, mostly half-dead, showy ones, with cheesy stuffed animals stuck in the crooks of branches stiff with curled, dry leaves.

  I have been here long enough for flowers to wilt.

  I rattle the railing on the side of the bed, wondering what happens when my feet touch the floor. If I can walk away.

  As it turns out, I can’t.

  Bunny Shirt and her minions tuck my legs under a warm blanket so tight I can’t move. Then they crank up the railings.

  “Gabby,” Vivian whispers, “do you remember what you did? Even the tiniest, teensiest detail?”

  Nope.

  “Well, the doctor says that with this kind of head trauma and all those, um, substances, you might not remember . . . I guess you might not remember yet.”