“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 anything 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.
XIV
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.
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 yea
rs 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 Princeton.”
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.
Where It Began Page 6