By which I figure she has to mean something other than dyeing almost every hair on my body and becoming kicky, since it is hard to extract some big spiritual thing from hair dye. Vivian meanwhile is patting me on the hand and getting off on whose turn it is.
My turn for what?
To turn out like her, mother of a kid who needs an army of exterior decorators?
To live in Bel Air in a shabby house on stilts that is probably going to slide all the way down to Sunset Boulevard the next time the earth quakes or we get a really big rain?
To hang with some guy like my dad who can’t even make it from the bedroom to the den if there isn’t a pitcher of margaritas waiting for him on his desk by way of motivation, and who doesn’t even seem to like her all that much?
Oh yeah, sign me up for that.
The thing is, as totally fake as I know it all is, and as much as I don’t want to turn into some pseudo-pretty grown-up stuck in Three B Hell, I look really good. My eyes look huge and sleepy and my mouth is big in a good way, even if it is slightly orange. My eyelashes look like the lush tips of mink paintbrushes.
And the hair: It doesn’t even feel like hair. It feels like a silky rabbit. Somehow the hair-dye guru has managed to make it look as if light is radiating from my head, like a saint in a medieval painting.
And even if none of the carbs I am now supposed to forget even exist actually regroup at their intended location, a couple of hours at Victoria’s Secret and everything I have that can possibly be pushed up is pushed up and defying the minimal gravitational force that affects such small mass.
The only downside beyond feeling totally fake is that I am embarrassed that everyone will think that I’m trying too hard and I’m a deeply superficial person who only cares about the way she looks. I am embarrassed to walk around outside in case anybody sees me. Not that it isn’t embarrassing enough inside my own house. How totally crazed Vivian is to get me back to Winston so people can see her handiwork and how she keeps carrying on about the New You.
Meaning the New Me.
XI
THEN, AT THE END OF AUGUST, LISA AND ANITA GET home from their uplifting summers of fun that will look great on a college application, and Lisa starts phoning me.
I kind of avoid her phone calls until I can figure out how I feel about looking like someone else, but eventually I answer my cell phone when she calls from a blocked number, and I am trapped into girlie coffee in Westwood.
And here’s the thing: When I walk into Starbucks, Lisa and Anita look up—and then they look down again.
I’m not completely sure if my friends not recognizing me is a good thing or a bad thing, but I am sort of fixated on the bad thing aspect of it, thinking about turning around and leaving fast if I can just come up with a not too obvious way to do it, when Lisa yells.
Everybody looks up from their laptops and their lattes and the people they’re flirting with to stare at me. People no doubt come out of the bathroom to stare at me.
“Gabby, you look so different!” Lisa hurls her arms around me in some kind of a frenzy. All I want to do is to sit down and be inconspicuous.
“You look really, really good,” Anita says.
“You do,” says Lisa. “Not that you didn’t look good before.”
“You know what I mean,” says Anita. “How did you get your hair to even do that?”
They both sit there googly-eyed, staring at the New Me and I basically want to go into the bathroom and rip my face off, or more accurately, peel it off.
But I change the subject instead. “How was camp?”
Lisa had been on a religious Outward Bound where she learned how to survive if she ever gets stranded in Wisconsin with only dehydrated stew, a toothbrush, and a pocket Bible. She met a lot of boys with great tans and six-packs but, given that she was somewhat streaked with dirt and smelled sort of funky the whole time, she was not exactly ripe for romance.
“And then there’s Huey, of course,” she says, looking down.
All right. She has been hanging out with Huey, making the discreet, religious version of goo-goo eyes and getting her picture taken maybe two dozen times a day ever since seventh grade, the pictures lined up chronologically and perfectly cropped in little plastic albums that Huey, besotted and creepily well organized, buys by the truckload at Rite Aid and hauls to school to show her every time he fills a new one. But given that she would appear to be completely and unnaturally fine with the fact that she isn’t allowed to wear clothes that show any cleavage or go on car dates or think thoughts with body parts in them, and given that she is not exactly open about how she feels or what they’ve been doing together for the past four years, it’s hard to tell what, if anything, is going on.
Anita had volunteered to help out orphan children in New Delhi all summer where she lived with her grandma and learned once again that (1) she is Indian, and (2) things are a lot better back in L.A.
“But,” she says, sipping her mocha Frappuccino, “I met someone.”
Tragically, he is an extremely cute French guy from Marseilles who was in India emulating Mother Theresa because he is thinking about becoming a priest, which makes the chance of his taking up with an underaged Hindu girl somewhat remote. Which is especially annoying since the chance Anita’s parents will let her go out with some cute older guy they didn’t more or less pick out back home in Beverly Hills is even more remote.
“They wouldn’t even let me go to a kickback at Derek Dash Sharma’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon yesterday. Because his mother wasn’t home, if you please. But look at you,” Anita says. “You look like a completely different person! Also more confident. With very good hair.”
Lisa and Anita have both had these supposedly transformative summers doing all this deeply meaningful stuff that is going to change their lives and get them into college, but we can all tell that after three months of beauty salons, color consultation, and Pilates, I am the one who is transformed.
“I’ll bet your mom is happy,” Lisa says.
“Orgasmic. I look just like a Slutmuffin.”
Lisa and Anita shake their heads and deny what we all know is true. The whole Winston School Slutmuffin crew would have nodded to me in the street if they didn’t figure out who I was first. That is how hot and totally debauched I look.
Still, it’s hard to miss the part where Lisa, who has signed on for a life as Untouched Godly Girl, has Huey following her around, and Anita has to be forced to turn down invitations to cavort with cute Indian boys, while I, having spent the whole summer being doused with Elixir of Sex Appeal, only ever have physical contact with males who are working on my hair, and my hunky yet gay personal trainer.
“You know,” Anita says. “At the beginning of the year, so many people are at loose ends. You should run with this. Before things get organized.”
I just keep hoping I won’t screw this up before somebody figures out that I’m the same sub-regular girl with nothing going for her as before I showed up looking hot.
XII
AND THEN SCHOOL STARTS.
It’s that perfect SoCal scene with the matching Jaguars lined up in the carpool line, inching through the stone gates with their ivy and red bougainvillea and pink geraniums, sunlight glinting through the palm fronds and the flat blue sky that makes people from Back East want to throw up or move here.
The ironic thing is that we start off the year reading Thoreau in non-AP, non-honors, sub-regular English Lit. The part where he says you should beware of any enterprise you have to get new clothes for? Clearly, this does not apply to Winston School. I have two inches of cleavage, thanks to my slightly orange Wonderbra, and by lunchtime Billy Nash is looking down it.
“So, how do you like it so far?” Freaking Billy Nash is making eye contact with my chest. It’s a freaking miracle.
“Excuse me?”
Billy sticks out his hand like a politician who is pretty damned sure he is going to get my vote. Then he flashes me The Grin. The sm
oldering, adorable grin. Like he knows that I’m going to race from precinct to precinct and vote for him over and over all day long.
“Billy Nash,” he says.
“Uh, Gabby Gardiner,” I say. Why not?
“Whoa,” Billy says, with the faintest look of recognition. “You’re not new. I know you, don’t I?”
“Not really,” I say. This is basically the weirdest conversation I have ever had, although it does prove for all eternity that I really was invisible as plastic wrap with nothing in it until I streaked my hair and got professional eyelash consultation. Which I already know but do not exactly want to know.
“Weren’t you in my Spanish class?”
“Eighth grade,” I say, feeling the way you feel when you’ve just jumped onto a ski lift and it’s pulling you up quickly over the crowns of pine trees and the air is thin and cold and you’re afraid you might fall off and die but it’s just so amazing you really don’t care. “Who remembers?”
“Who wants to?” Billy says. Billy Nash, who has been bathed in golden light, as far as anybody knows, since birth. “Did you get a nose job or something?”
“No, I did not get a nose job or something.”
And I realize we are walking together, actually walking down the hall toward the cafeteria together, we are actually walking through the door and people keep saying hello to him and nodding to me, and I am actually walking around with Billy freaking Nash.
As it turns out, Billy has just broken up with Aliza Benitez, the queen of the Slutmuffins, and is trawling for firm young flesh. Or so he says. It is one of those jokes that isn’t really a joke.
“Aliza’s great,” he says. “But let’s face it, she’s very high maintenance. And, let’s face it, life with Aliza isn’t exactly a day with the Andies.”
I nod and try not to look as if I am memorizing it all. Slutmuffin: good.
High maintenance: bad.
Day with the Andies: good.
Day with Aliza Benitez: not exactly good.
Benitez gone: The firm young flesh sitting right next to Billy Nash in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden is Me.
My flesh: good.
I keep wishing that lunch would extend for the rest of the day, or possibly the rest of my life.
By the time I get to the art room for back-to-back ceramics and painting, I am in an altered state of consciousness.
Miss Cornish, although she doesn’t come right out and say it, seems slightly taken aback by the New Me. When Lisa comes in late and sits next to me in the chair I was saving for her, Miss Cornish beams and looks relieved that I’m not trailing Slutmuffins in my wake. Then she tells me that I should probably wear a smock, which somewhat defeats the purpose of free dress day, and I’m not sure if it’s the newly unveiled cleavage or the fact that the mega-expensiveness of the new blouse is obvious even to her, a woman who comes to school in large plaid shirts thrown over Lakers T-shirts.
Mr. Rosen, of course, doesn’t notice a thing. If I’d shown up naked, he probably would have figured that Winston had a radical new figure-drawing policy and made everybody sketch my naked body really really fast before some angry parent made sure the policy switched back and we only got to draw heavily draped figure models, who might just as well not have had any nipples for all we got to see of them.
He comes up to me and he says, “So! Gabriella, you’re working on portfolio, yes?”
Well, no.
Even though Winston School goes basically apeshit whenever anyone wins pretty much anything and our portfolios are constantly being pillaged by the prize-whore faculty and submitted to every contest in the galaxy, I am so so done with that.
I am done winning diddly art ribbons, the same tacky red ribbon as one hundred and fourteen other pathetic losers in L.A. County who can also draw a pastel bowl of fruit, while the bouncy, organizing-10K-walks-to-cure-obscure-diseases girls are getting commendations from the mayor, the governor, the Secretary General of the U.N., and the Queen of England, and everybody else is too busy to attend the commendation ceremony because they are all tied up becoming National Merit Finalists, AP Scholars, Presidential Scholars, and Masters of the Universe. And Lolly Wu keeps showing up at assembly to play the sonata that took the audience by storm and won her a gold medallion in Romania.
So unless someone is planning to crown me Worldwide Queen of Glaze: no.
Just no.
But I don’t tell him that, and he spends the period sticking stuff in front of me and making me draw it for five minutes, and moving it slightly and making me draw it again, and putting it in a glass bowl and making me draw it again. It is very hard to concentrate, given that all I can think about is Billy Nash.
“Oooooh! I’d love to draw the feather and those eggs,” Sasha Aronson says, staring at the ratty old objects on my still-life table as if they were pirates’ booty.
Mr. Rosen tells her to keep drawing her hand, which you have to figure is going to get old pretty fast.
“You have slides of all those pots you make for Elspeth, yes?” he says to me.
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.
XIII
“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 buzz
ed-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 explore 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.
Where It Began Page 5