Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “You’re going to look more like yourself in a few weeks, maybe a month. And in a couple of months, my goodness . . . ,” she drones on. “As soon as you feel up to seeing your friends, you know they’re going to come support you through it. Believe me. A lot of patients feel this way, but your friends are friends with you, not with your face. People won’t care how you look.”

  People. Won’t. Care. How. You. Look.

  You could tell that she spent all of high school being home-schooled, studying honors bio on her kitchen table, not looking up long enough to notice the first thing about real life.

  Meanwhile, Gabriella Gardiner’s (slightly mangled) Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s is just rolling along in my head, jumping back and forth in no particular order from one bit of my real life to another.

  There it is, with a Before and After that make more sense than the actual present, which comes after the After, the after-After, shooting off in a whole other direction.

  I close my eyes, and there it is.

  Right there, the embarrassing Before, my own personal prequel.

  Look:

  There I am, getting into Winston School, ripping open the envelope and spilling the good news onto the kitchen counter. There is green and gold confetti in the envelope.

  Twelve years old and I’m thinking, Hey, Gabs, this is pretty damned great.

  But not so much as my dad.

  Zoom in on my dad, out on the balcony that overhangs the canyon and runs the length of our house, which is shaped like a big cardboard carton built into the downslope of a steep, ritzy hill in Bel Air, from which we get to look down on L.A. He is shuffling up and down the balcony congratulating himself while Vivian chases him around squealing and providing him with an endless supply of Bloody Marys.

  “I knew being a Gardiner had to mean something,” he crows, tossing the celery from his Bloody Mary into the canyon so some poor coyote can get plowed too. “I’m so proud of you.”

  Proud of me has been a long time coming, given how when I didn’t get into John Thomas Dye, kindergarten of the rich and famous, he went into deep mourning for the next seven years.

  Proud my last name is Gardiner, a clan filled with rich and famous members, not including us despite my dad’s efforts to play the Asian stock market at three a.m. Despite his efforts to sell zillion-dollar houses to foreign guys who don’t know any better, taking out really expensive ads in the Kuala Lumpur Daily Gazette or wherever, and driving the big Mercedes we can’t actually afford but looks good in carpool.

  According to my mom when she’s pissed off, if the über-Gardiners didn’t throw my dad a bone once in a while and use him as their real estate agent when they bought ten-zillion-dollar buildings in Las Vegas resulting in the occasional monster commission checks that keep us afloat, we’d be the only family in Bel Air subsisting on cat food and mac ’n’ cheese. We would have to move to the Valley where, according to her, we’d be like royalty in exile in a vast, smoggy wasteland. Unlike here, where it’s hard to miss the part that we’re the dregs of Upper Bel Air.

  But now Winston has opened its gates and I’m in.

  I can finally go to the right school, meet the right people, get into the right college, become incredibly successful, smart, popular, and rich, be star of the school play, captain of the soccer team, president of my class, homecoming queen, and valedictorian. I can be the cheerleading, honor roll, never-a-bad-hair-day girl whose papers get read aloud to classes years later as examples of super-galactic perfection.

  As if he actually believes that if only I’d be that girl and if he drove that big car over to Winston School, we would all be magically transformed. As if parents who pay the humongous tuition out of leftover pocket change would leap out of their even bigger cars, bang on the Mercedes’ slightly darkened side window, and beg him to sell them a strip mall in the Philippines.

  Because a guy with such a perfect kid must be hot shit.

  It is as if he’s never actually met me, an ordinary student with the normal amount of friends, who doesn’t like sports, and is somewhat good at art.

  Art?

  Did somebody say art?

  Hell no.

  After Winston, I would be attending the totally impossible college of my parents’ dreams. Biz school from the sound of it, between Bloody Marys. Because: Do you know what twenty-three-year-olds who graduate from Wharton make even in this economy? Six figures!

  Gabby Gardiner, shake hands with your totally impossible, not-going-to-happen future.

  VII

  IN ACTUAL FACT, THE HIGH POINT OF THAT YEAR AT Winston is when Miss Cornish, the art teacher who does the crafty part of art—ceramics and pottery and sculpture—puts my ceramic spoon holder on a pedestal outside the teachers’ lounge because it is an outstanding example of really good glaze.

  At my old school, I had always been this sort of regular person. At Winston, I figure out quickly that I am sub-regular. Basically, everybody else is either gorgeous or super-smart or incredibly good at something important, born with the popular gene or richer than God. And I’m not. So, big surprise, I do not get a whole crowd of popular friends and a round of applause when I walk down the hall.

  Look:

  There I am, telling myself all these helpful affirmations such as, Oh Gabby, you really are smart. Oh Gabby, you’re totally normal and everything is fine. Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most adorable thing that ever got out of bed in the morning?

  Only if any of this were true, it is hard to explain why I’m standing around Winston School watching Billy Nash and the Slutmuffins lounging in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden, owning benches and tables and patches of grass that are instantly cool just because they own them, watching the smart kids and the über- rich kids and the weird kids in the manga club all hanging out together in big happy clumps, while I am alone with my unimpressive grades and no one to talk to except for Lisa Armstrong and Anita Patel.

  “Your little friends called again,” Vivian says from what sounds like far away across the vibrating green room.

  Friends?

  You would think that after all these enlightening sessions with Ponytail Doc trying to get me to tell her all about myself, it would be easier to connect the dots.

  I open my eyes, but everything stays in a lot better focus when they’re closed. “Who?”

  “That Lisa and Anita,” Vivian says. “Those friends.”

  Making her little puke face as if having to be reminded that her daughter is once again reduced to counting these poor excuses for fashionable teens as her only friends makes her physically ill.

  As if she can’t stand to remember.

  What I remember is the smell of burnt, melted bittersweet chocolate and charred marshmallows. The backs of their heads—Lisa’s strawberry-blond fluff and Anita’s black braid—blurring in the smoke that billows from the wall oven in Lisa’s kitchen. Grabbing for the mitts and the fire extinguisher and waving magazines at the smoke detectors to try to get them to turn off.

  How long ago was that?

  There I am, thirteen years old and slouching around Winston School in the shortest blue uniform skirt in the history of man over tiny black bicycle shorts. The only cute thing about this skirt is the pocket on the butt. Anita is wearing a similarly truncated skirt over a pair of leggings, which is also, God help us, a Winston School style, except Anita is wearing them because her mother made her. Lisa is the one person still wearing the baggy khaki uniform pants that no other girl has ever worn to school after the first day of seventh grade. Lisa is also the one person at Winston School who admires me for something before I get Billy after four years of total obscurity.

  It is October of seventh grade and I have just figured out that art is the only thing I don’t suck at, but it turns out to be the only thing Lisa does suck at (apart from her apparent inability to shop for clothes that don’t have some Disney character or strange-looking appliqués on them) and that she really really wants to be good at. This is b
ecause her parents are seriously religious cinematographers who value art just a notch below how much they value God Almighty.

  It is November and Lisa has started following me to assembly and sitting next to me and Anita, who actually has the potential to be completely regular, except she has to take Hindi language class and Indian dance class and learn to play weird-looking musical instruments and entertain old ladies from her extended family who are visiting her from New Delhi for months at a time. She has to figure out how to modify her uniform in a way that keeps her mother happy but does not involve social suicide.

  At least the stuff she has to do to keep her mom happy doesn’t involve getting people to think she’s hot.

  There we are in December, about as hot as egg salad sandwiches or, in Anita’s case, completely vegan soy wraps. There we are, sitting three in a row, invisible enough to slouch there in the back of the auditorium eating contraband snack food, while Mr. Piersol, our idiot headmaster, slogs from one alarming story to the next in his mind-numbing weekly ascent up Cliché Mountain. Not to mention, Mr. Piersol would appear to be scrounging all his information on teen life off a shady website for urban legends.

  News flash: Boston high school girls caught in pregnancy pact!

  Oh no, boys and girls: Children having children! Look before you leap!

  “Children having icy pops. Look before you lick,” Anita whispers, gazing up at Mr. Piersol, hunkering down in her auditorium seat to eat the lime icy pop that she smuggled in.

  “Anita!” says Lisa. “That could have such double meaning.”

  News flash: Catty clique of mean cheerleaders in Texas cause sad, chunky cheerleader to leap from bridge!

  Oh no, boys and girls: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it!

  “If you can’t say something nice, welcome to Winston School,” Anita says.

  “That is so mean.” Lisa says. And then she snickers. “Are you by any chance a member of a catty clique?”

  “I want to be in the catty clique!” I say. I am not completely joking.

  “Sorry,” says Anita. “I think you might have to be pregnant first. And you have to look like a Slutmuffin.”

  We don’t look as if we’re members of the same species as the Slutmuffins, as if we are fit to inhabit the same planet, as if our skin is made of the same dewy membrane, or that our hairs were ever genetically programmed to spring out of our scalps and line up in perfect order like theirs.

  Cut to a montage of sleepovers at Lisa’s house with everybody sitting in their sleeping bags watching old Technicolor movies with Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds and making large sheets of semi-inedible marshmallow fudge, shooting at each other with Silly String.

  I don’t know. Maybe all over the country, this is what deliriously happy teenage girls are doing Friday nights, but it seems as if all of the people worth being at Winston are engaging in somewhat less boring activities involving sex and drugs and rock and roll.

  What I want is to be one of those people.

  But I am stuck in my Before and I have no idea, not a clue or an inkling, that I am even going to get an After.

  VIII

  I AM SO DEEP INTO GABRIELLA GARDINER PRESENTS Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s, trawling through it looking for some faint clue as to how I ended up like this, that it is seriously annoying when people show up to take my pulse and check my blood and squirt mildly hallucinogenic drugs into my IV bag.

  Ponytail Doc, possibly because she can’t stand the pressure of trying to keep me from getting a look at myself in the crystal of her watch or the lenses of her big retro Italian glasses, has sent in reinforcements. An occupational therapist named Wendy shows up in my room pushing a green metal cabinet on wheels through the door, grinning as if she hasn’t heard that (1) I am not in a good mood, and (2) I do not have an occupation.

  “This is a mistake,” I say. “I don’t need an occupational therapist. I go to high school.”

  But Wendy, it turns out, is a pediatric occupational therapist whose goal in life is to help little damaged, hospitalized children play. This is so sad that I can hardly stand to think about it.

  “I’m a playologist!” she says.

  There is some possibility that I am the oldest person Wendy has ever dealt with. To prove it, she hauls out coloring books, glitter markers, peg boards, and stickers with Elmo in a wheelchair. She has faded clay that is squishier than Play-Doh. She is so chirpy and perky that you have to figure even someone a lot nicer than I am would want to poke a glitter marker in her eye.

  Wendy tries to find some space to unload her stuff on the counter between the botanical splendor and the shopping bags of beauty supplies, but I end up with tacky kindergarten art supplies piled on my stomach.

  “You’ve got Barbie and Midge paper dolls,” I say.

  Wendy is over the moon that I can name Barbie and Midge. When I ask her if she’s got Ken and Skipper, she is one orgasmic playologist.

  It is so weirdly easy to please these people.

  She hands me a pair of blunt scissors and admires the way I cut things out. I cannot believe that I am lying here cutting out paper-doll clothes.

  “Do you have any actual art supplies?” I say after what seems like hours of this, when it seems like my right hand at least is somewhat functional and I could actually draw something. “Like real paper and good pencils or charcoal or anything?”

  Wendy admires how precisely I have cut out Barbie’s tiny high-heeled shoes, which I am kind of seeing quadruple but are nevertheless perfect.

  “I mean it,” I say. “I’m an actual artist.”

  “Of course you are, dear,” Wendy says.

  “Seriously,” I say. “I really am! Werner Rosen is my art teacher!”

  Wendy looks deeply impressed, but when I think about it, I remember how deeply impressed she was about the Barbie shoes, and I can’t even tell if she knows who Werner Rosen is. But she does go scuttling off to get more stuff.

  So I can sit there by myself with my auto-closing eyes and miss the art rooms at school. I miss Miss Cornish’s and Mr. Rosen’s art rooms, all right?

  Look:

  Me and Lisa and Lisa’s semi-boyfriend, Huey, hanging out in Miss Cornish’s art studio at Winston. Back when I think Huey is the artist and not me. Because photography counts but I am mostly good at throwing pots and glazing ceramics, which I kind of think doesn’t count much.

  Close-up of Huey running around with a giant classic camera from the 1940s strapped around his neck over his father’s ancient Grateful Dead T-shirt, which hangs on him like an old, raggedy dress.

  If Huey had given off the slightest hint that he cared what other people thought, the jocks would have ripped him to pieces before he had a chance to finish middle school. But what Huey wants is to take spectacularly weird pictures that fill the spectacularly uncool Winston School Wildcat yearbook and that hang in the Winston School gallery (aka the hall outside of the gymnasium) and that win prizes.

  We are all in the art room because Huey is briefly interested in making big papier-mâché animals out of computer-enhanced photographs. Lisa finally has a buddy who can’t paint either to hang around the easels with. Then they both start standing around watching me paint and throw pots, which is somewhat creepy. I am perfectly fine with Lisa hanging on my every brushstroke. I understand the part about not wanting to disappoint your parents so much it makes perfect sense to watch somebody else drag their paintbrush up and down a canvas for hours at a time. But Huey is taking pictures.

  “Jeremy Hewlett,” I say. This is Huey’s actual name. “This is creeping me out. You have to stop it.”

  “I’m recording the creative process,” he says.

  “Well, go record somebody else’s creative process.”

  “Maybe you didn’t notice,” Huey says, “but this is Winston School. Nobody else has a creative process. Except Lolly Wu, and the shutter clicking messes with her concentration.”

  Lolly Wu plays the cello. Why she
isn’t going to school at Crossroads, where they have an entire orchestra of kids who know how to hold their instruments right side up, is just another mystery of life.

  “Yeah, well, when I become an art goddess, you can compare me to Wu.”

  But I let him keep taking pictures. Leading Vivian to tell me that I can’t be a complete social leper if I have so many pictures of myself in the yearbook.

  “Right,” Huey says. “I’ll just sit here and finish up my swan until you change your mind.”

  This is the first time I see Mr. Rosen up close and personal, when he shows up in Miss Cornish’s art room in search of turpentine and a rag at that exact moment. He is like a hundred years old and a real artist, paintings in museums, the whole famous artist thing, who lives down the street from Winston, and somehow they convinced him to show up three times a week to Mentor the Next Generation. It is hard to imagine how a famous guy who deserves all his glory like Mr. Rosen—who, the headmaster keeps telling us, is some kind of official German national treasure—could fall for that, but he did.

  When Mr. Rosen spots Huey turning his hundreds of black-and-white photos of women into that papier-mâché swan, the camera swinging perilously close to the bowl of liquid paste, he marches up behind him and sucks in his breath.

  Huey just sits there frozen, holding a paste-soaked photo, gazing over at Mr. Rosen, with his googly green eyes open wide, as if he is waiting for spiritual enlightenment to come his way in a German accent.

  “Did you take these photos?” Mr. Rosen asks, thumbing through the stack.

  Huey says, “Yessir.”

  “Well, they’re very good.” Mr. Rosen waves at Miss Cornish. “Look, Elspeth, see what nice composition?” he says, blurring his w sounds toward v’s, pointing at the black-and-white grainy picture of a freakishly large woman getting on a bus.

  “You should take more photos,” he says to Huey. “Forget this duck.”

  “It’s a swan,” Lisa says.