Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  This is so not turning into the best extended spring vacation ever.

  XXII

  THE ONLY PERSON WHO MANAGES TO GET THROUGH to me, despite Vivian’s best efforts to keep everyone away until my skin goes back to being unbruised and lifelike all on its own, is Lisa.

  “The hospital said you weren’t there anymore. Thank God! You’re out of your coma. You remember me, right?” She sounds exactly the same.

  “Duh. Who said I was in a coma?”

  “Your mom. Kind of. And Gabby, people gossip. Everybody knows. Are you all right?”

  It is hard to know which aspect of not all right to start with. “My face looks like it belongs in a body bag, but yeah. And no coma. I just don’t remember the crash.”

  “Well, people can probably fill you in.”

  “Yeah, people in police uniforms. I crashed Billy’s car, so apparently they’re interested.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lisa says, clueless as ever. “I’m coming over there, okay?”

  “Are you sure your mom will drive you over now that I’m Evil Delinquent Girl?”

  “Gabby! You are not an evil, delinquent girl,” Lisa says, delusional but perpetually supportive.

  But even if she refuses to believe I am a wayward, felonious teen, evidently I still qualify as a charity project, because her parents are letting her jump into the Saab every day to come see me, which is a little unnerving because they only ever let her drive it to community service and youth group at her church. Not only that, she is bringing Anita, who is generally only allowed to sit in cars driven by moms and people over the age of twenty-five who are related to her and have Volvos with front, back, side, rear, floor, and roof air bags.

  Lisa seems to find this all extremely amusing. She says she hopes I’m ready for a whole lot of salvation because unless she brings me some on a regular basis, she is probably never going to get to drive a car somewhere other than church again until she graduates from college, gets a job, and buys herself one, a fact that she seems weirdly fine with. Then she starts beating herself up about how she’s a twit to talk about herself when I’m bedridden and mangled, and at the point when I am pretty sure she’s on the verge of hauling out our Lord and Savior, I tell her it’s okay but I’m too tired to talk.

  Meanwhile, Anita keeps sending me text messages about how worried about me she is and am I having cognitive problems and do I want her to show me how to meditate or go back over the SAT flash cards we’ve already done. She doesn’t sound amused at all.

  I’m not all that amused either. In fact, Anita’s text messages are making me crazy, not because there is anything inherently annoying about them, but because every time my phone makes its little got-a-text bleep noise, I think it might be Billy but it isn’t.

  Meanwhile, Lisa and Anita show up at the front door with one of those Save the Children blankies they make for godless, impoverished children with no electricity or blankies, with my name embroidered on the yellow silk border.

  “You don’t have to let them see you,” Vivian whispers, sticking her head into my room when they are pounding on the front door. “It’s not too late. Nobody has to see you like this. Do you want to put on more concealer?”

  She is in the Vivian version of maternal frenzy, seriously concerned that my so-called friends will ditch me if they notice I’m not pageant-ready, trying to save me from this sorry fate—completely ignoring the actual looming disaster in which somebody shows up and arrests me for DUI and grand theft auto.

  But I am only thinking Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy, so much so that all other thoughts, scary thoughts, no-lawyer-and-the-LAPD-is-on-its-way-with-sirens-blaring-and-handcuffs-at-the-ready thoughts, oh-no-I-look-like-crap-and-my-friends-won’t-like-me-anymore-and-I’ll-be-a-Bashed-in-Face-Pariah thoughts—except, whoops, that last one is Vivian’s thought, not my thought—have no space to hang out.

  Vivian is prepared to barricade the door on my behalf, but eventually, still unconvinced, she gives way for the gift-wrapped goodies, the fuzzy knitted scarf, handmade dangle earrings, and a bunch of pastel aromatherapy candles with names like “Sea of Tranquility” and “Mellow Morning.” And all right, as miserable a cynical bitch as I feel like, boyfriend-less and very likely re-invisible, it still feels kind of good to be with people who actually don’t care how I look or what I did and still like me. Even if Vivian thinks they’re a couple of losers, not unlike the reappearing Old Me with the purple and green bruises that clash with the currently nonexistent New Me’s autumn season earth tones.

  And did I mention board games?

  “When I’m sick, I love to play board games,” Lisa says. “And you’re really good at board games.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Grumpy, aren’t we?” says Anita, making a face that is supposed to cheer me up and cajole me out of grumpiness but doesn’t. “Sanjiv says closed head injuries can affect your mood.”

  “You talked to your brother about me?”

  Anita shrugs and looks somewhat sheepish.

  “Come on, Gabby,” Lisa says. “You got hit on the head. This is your excuse to kick back and be a kid again! Don’t you want to play Boggle?” Well, no. Battleship? No. Connect Four? Parcheesi? Candyland? Chutes and Ladders? Hungry Hungry Hippos? Checkers? Chinese Checkers? Mah-jongg? Chess?

  “We should play Husker Du?” Anita says. “After a closed head injury, we should work on your memory.”

  And it’s no better when Huey tags along, either.

  Because Huey, as it turns out, is such a wreck in the presence of a banged up, debilitated person such as me, he can barely hold it together for long enough to figure out who done it in a game of Clue. Or maybe it’s just the shock of being in a girl’s bedroom.

  “I’d leave him out,” Lisa says, “but he really wants to see you. And I might not get to be semi-alone with a boy in a car again for years.”

  “You do know that your mother is insane, right?” I say. “No offense.”

  Lisa sighs but doesn’t seem all that worked up about it.

  “You call that insane,” Anita says. “Hello. Have you met my mother? She’s trying to establish a perfect simulation of small-town life in Punjab circa 1958. Only in Beverly Hills. And we all know how sane that it.”

  We have all been so severely indoctrinated to respect insane cultural differences that Lisa and I don’t know what to say.

  “Well, at least you don’t have to cover all your hair like Asha,” Lisa says weakly.

  “Admit it’s insane,” Anita says.

  We do.

  Ironically, Asha, albeit covered head to toe, gets to jump into Huey’s car every time they have to go do yearbook business because Huey drove down to Culver City and had a meaningful dialogue with her dad.

  Whereas the mere sight of me has reduced Huey to cringing in my desk chair, barely able to push Colonel Mustard around the board.

  “Boys are such babies,” Lisa says.

  “You look like you’re in so much pain,” Huey says, as if this or some variant of this is the only conversation starter he can think of. “How do you feel about . . .”—he scrapes Colonel Mustard into the library where he’s been before and doesn’t need to go again—“. . . everything?”

  How do you feel about everything? You have to figure that if Huey had been born into my family, Vivian would have drowned him back when he was still a pup.

  “And what’s up with your left arm?” he says.

  “Huey!” Lisa says. “She’s going to make a full recovery. She’s lucky it’s not worse.”

  “Lucky!” Huey basically howls. “Sorry, Lisa. I admire your outlook. No—I’d say I love your outlook. But lucky is not on the list of words that describe what happened to her.”

  “Hello, I’m right here. Hello. Bed to Huey . . .”

  “She’s a potter and look at her left arm!” he bellows.

  Just to show him that there’s nothing to discuss, I do the wrecked person’s version of slithering out of bed
. All right, so I have to will myself to smile when my feet graze the floor. All right, so I am somewhat limping. But if I suck it up and make myself put weight on my left foot, my walk isn’t noticeably all that weird. And it isn’t as if this is keeping me out of jazz dance ensemble. To keep being who I am, I just need both my hands to work.

  I try to button up my robe, but this does not turn out as well as you would hope.

  And I go, Gabriella, you don’t need to run around buttoning things up to show off. You can always tie the brace on your left wrist. Just not in front of anyone.

  Huey, who is watching me make my way across my bedroom to the bathroom, for once puts down the camera.

  He says, “How could you let this happen to you?”

  I say, “I don’t know.”

  Also, “Shut up.”

  There are days of Clue and Monopoly marathons that I am pretty sure Lisa and Anita are conspiring to let me win. Days that last so long my mother makes Juanita stay late and cook us actual dinner instead of getting the bad Chinese takeout Vivian slaps on the table night after night. Days when I figure that I might actually die if Billy doesn’t call me.

  Not to mention, Lisa and Anita want to talk about everything too.

  “About what you told Lisa,” Anita says. “We should talk about it.”

  “About you crashing Billy’s car . . . ,” Lisa says.

  “Could we please, pretty please, pretty pretty please not talk about it?” I say. The thought of Anita trying to devise a scientifically perfect way to kick my brain into gear while Lisa prays for me is more than I can take.

  “Not that we want to be pushy or intrude on your privacy,” Anita says. As if it didn’t take until tenth grade for her to blurt out that if her mother made her spend another Christmas vacation at a theme park, national park, or slogging through the Getty Museum showing off her Hindi language skills to an entourage from New Delhi one more time, she was going to run away by Greyhound bus and hide out in her brother Sanjiv’s co-op at UC Berkeley.

  “We know that you’re a private person,” Lisa says, even though she, herself, has never uttered one single word about what she and Huey have been up to since seventh grade. Despite the fact that Anita and I are more than slightly curious.

  “We want to support you,” Anita says. “But some things don’t make sense—”

  “Can’t you just accept that I don’t remember anything and I’m not planning to remember anything any time soon and just leave it there?” It is the embarrassing and horrifying truth.

  Lisa and Anita exchange looks and gape at me.

  “Gabby, please just think about it—”

  “We want to help, but—”

  “I mean it,” I say. “So there’s nothing to talk about. And there isn’t going to be anything to talk about either.”

  So Lisa and Anita just keep letting me be the tiny Monopoly top hat, and we just keep playing.

  XXIII

  AND THEN, JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, A FEW MINUTES after Anita gets into Lisa’s mother’s Saab and they tool back up Estrada with their board games rattling around on the backseat, Billy’s screen name shows up on my laptop.

  I am drunk on the possibility of bliss.

  pologuy: hey baby. how r u?

  And I go, Stay cool stay cool stay cool. Just try to be somewhat amusing.

  gabs123: life sucks. lying around getting turned into a geisha with a makeup mask.

  pologuy: geisha? verrrrrrry interesting. what r u wearing geisha?

  And I go, Stop whining. Stop it. Do you want him back or not?

  gabs123: makeup. lots of makeup. don’t even have to get out of bed for it. vivian delivers.

  pologuy: wish i could c

  gabs123: so come see.

  Why not? I know he won’t.

  And then I think, OMG what are you doing, Gabriella? Do. Not. Cling. Do not ask him where he’s been or what he’s been doing or why he didn’t call sooner.

  I am just so far back there in that awful place of not quite knowing, it’s as if I just met him. It is as if I am back where I don’t even know him again.

  pologuy: did u have ur fun talk with the cops yet?

  gabs123: FUN?!?!?!?!?!?!

  pologuy: i’ve had several fun talks. i have my own personal policeman

  gabs123: what did u say to ur probation guy? r u ok?

  pologuy: u first

  gabs123: what can i say to them anyway? i don’t remember.

  pologuy: r u serious? r u still gonna say u don’t remember?

  gabs123: seems like a plan.

  pologuy: yowza! they’re gonna go apeshit

  gabs123: y?

  pologuy: r u kidding me?

  gabs123: what am i supposed to do about it? all i can do is say sorry 500 times and cry. what can they even do about it? if someone could make me remember, they already would have.

  pologuy: hold up. u actually said u don’t remember to the cops? they really hate that. does ur lawyer know about this?

  gabs123: i don’t have a lawyer remember?

  pologuy: and they bought it?

  gabs123: nash, i don’t even remember when i told them that i don’t remember. but that’s what i’m going to say. y wouldn’t they buy it?

  pologuy: u r freaking amazing

  gabs123: duh

  pologuy: and this is the plan?

  gabs123: it’s my plan and i’m sticking to it. do u have some alternate plan?

  pologuy: i need to c u

  Yes yes yes yes yes! I have become a makeup-application fiend waiting exactly for this. I am the reigning queen of camouflage. Yes!

  gabs123: me too.

  pologuy: i’d climb through ur window if ur house wasn’t on freaking stilts

  gabs123: big letterman. u could scale a stilt. romeo would have scaled stilt.

  pologuy: romeo ended up dead in crypt, whereas i’m going to play polo at princeton. broken neck scaling gf’s stilt is not in my plan

  GF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  gabs123: ok, do u have a non-fatal plan?

  pologuy: behind the castle? can u get there?

  Like there was any place or time or way I wouldn’t go see Billy.

  Like this wasn’t the first time I’d felt like a halfway real person with a halfway real life since my actual life went up in smoke with Billy’s Beemer.

  Like maybe if I could just avoid looking desperate and drooling all over him, I could get my life back.

  XXIV

  IN THE MORNING, IT IS TORTURE WAITING FOR VIVIAN to get ready to roll down the hill to get her hair styled so I can spackle on my makeup and get out of there. The only real question in my mind is if I should go with all the concealer so I’ll look halfway cute or if I should let some of the bruises show through so I’ll look battered yet brave.

  I go with the concealer.

  And as soon as Vivian pokes her head in to say she is going, looking slightly guilty but pretty much as eager to get out of there as I am, I lower myself gently into the tightest possible sweats and head out through the back of the house, through the laundry room, and down into the canyon toward the castle, trying to walk like a human being.

  The castle is what we call this enormous old Spanish house at the end of a cul-de-sac off Via Hermosita. It has been under reconstruction but mostly abandoned, half-finished, for my whole life. The place is gated tight from the street, but if you climb down the bank from the house next door, you can slip through the gate by the pool house. The pool is empty and there’s graffiti in it, but behind the pool, the yard is terraced and wooded, so even if somebody did show up to work on the main house, they wouldn’t see you down there unless they came looking.

  I wait on a stone bench out of the sun, not for the coolness of the shade, but because I am afraid my face will look as if it’s covered with putty in full sunlight, and I watch for Billy.

  And it really does feel as if I were abducted by aliens, sucked into a time warp, and returned to planet Earth a long time later, looking (almost)
the same, but entirely different. Like I can’t quite remember how to breathe, and my heart isn’t sure how to beat in the right rhythm, and I don’t know how to focus my eyes so I can take it all in, and I can’t tell how to feel beyond the rush of seeing him coming toward me finally.

  It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve seen him, and climbing down the neighbor’s embankment, he looks as if having his car wrecked made him get even more gorgeous. He is wearing a dark, dark green T-shirt and these perfect jeans and ratty old black Converse without socks. I swear, his footsteps have to scorch the path.

  “Oh, Babe,” he says before he hugs me, looking at me through those blue eyes, through those dark lashes, the sun in that pale hair. “You look like you’ve been through it.”

  So much for the makeup. Carefully holding my head a little bit away from his cheek so he won’t get plastered with a big, greasy splotch of opaque beige glop, the rest of me feels so good, so at home, pressed up against him.

  And I think: Don’t cling don’t cling don’t cling.