I say, “Ya think?”
“Are you all right, G? You look so thin.”
Like this is a bad thing.
“I just want this all to be over. . . .”
“I know you do,” he whispers in my ear, so close I can feel his breath, feel it blowing my hair over my ear. “But it’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be over and in the past.”
“Billy, it’s not in the past yet! What happens if I tell the police I don’t remember and they don’t believe me? What if they want to put me in prison for stealing your car?”
“You didn’t steal my car,” Billy says. Snorts, actually, as if the idea that I did what I did is so ridiculous, it’s snort-provoking. “No one in his right mind would believe you stole my car. Come on.”
Except that I did.
“Your mother hates me,” I say.
“Not that much,” Billy says. “Not enough to tell the police you stole my car.”
Billy starts to rub my shoulders, which kind of hurts, but I let him do it anyway. I want it to feel good. I want to believe that Agnes will go along with him and I won’t be up for the part of hot-girl icon in Grand Theft Auto any time soon, but if he has so much power over her, then why are we hiding out behind the castle?
“What if they want to know the story of my life?” Meaning my life since the first day of junior year, given that before then I didn’t have anything that you could call a life. “I can’t just say I don’t remember anything ever.”
Billy keeps rubbing, only faster, so it feels as if the skin is going to peel off my shoulder blades leaving just bones and nerve endings. “Maybe you could,” he says. “You got pretty smashed. Maybe you could just pummel the bitches with your drinking problem.”
“What drinking problem?” This is so not what I need to hear from him. “You want me to say I have a drinking problem and I’m like permanently blacked out?”
“Whoa,” he says. “Don’t get defensive. You were pretty smashed is all I meant.”
“Jesus freaking Christ, Billy!” I can tell that yelling is not a good thing, but I can’t exactly help myself. “Everyone gets pretty smashed! It was a party. Everyone gets smashed at parties. The stoners blaze and we get smashed.”
“You were kind of unusually smashed,” he says. “You could hardly walk.”
“Well, obviously I could walk well enough to get into your car and drive it into a tree,” I say. Billy just looks at me. It is impossible to tell what he is thinking. “It would help if I could remember anything.”
“Whoa,” Billy says, eyeing me as if he were one of the detectives Vivian won’t let me talk to. “You really don’t remember anything? Not anything.”
“Duh.”
He stands there staring at me. “But it’ll come back to you sometime, right?”
“Gone forever,” I say. “That’s what my dimwit doctor said. Some combination of my so-called binge drinking and the head injury.”
Billy says, “Whoa. So you’ll never remember what happened? It’s gone forever? They can’t even hypnotize you?”
“Gone forever,” I say.
Billy just stands there looking kind of dazed but like he finally gets it.
All I know is that if I don’t do something right away, if I don’t make him want me right away, it is pretty much over. I know it before he even starts to elaborate on how being with me is a probation violation, which I already know and so do not want to hear about. How he’s beyond grateful that I didn’t finger him for being at the party, but unless his PO is a bigger moron than he thinks, he has to keep the guy from figuring it out and nailing him, and he can’t have a girlfriend with a drinking problem who parties blahblah because he’s on probation for his so-called drinking problem and his many DUI’s that his mom got him out of, and it’s different for me because this was my first offense blabitty-blah but if he screws up again, he’s screwed and he can kiss (drum roll) Princeton good-bye because he’s going to be incarcerated somewhere with bars and Eight-Trey Gangster Crips.
“I don’t have a choice,” he says. “It has to at least look like I’ve cleaned up, or I have to kiss everything good-bye.”
It is so obvious that he’d rather kiss me good-bye.
It is so so obvious that I have to find a way to keep that from happening.
I keep trying to tell myself what a wonderful person I am and how any reasonable boyfriend would just have to see that and just want me, want me, want me, but this is such a complete crock that it only makes me cry more.
“Don’t, Gardiner,” Billy said. “Shhhh. It’ll be all right. Like I said, we just have to act like we’re over until things settle down.”
I don’t even know what that means. Am I supposed to be hanging around Winston School pretending it’s over when it really isn’t over? If Billy can’t see me or talk to me or be with me, how is it not over?
Billy takes my hand and gazes at me as if he is actually sad. “Look,” he says. “Are you sure you even want to come back?”
“What?”
“You look so fragile and everything. And with me not being able to take care of you in public and everybody at Winston looking at you and trying to talk to you about it and everything . . . Would you be better off at Holy Name?”
My face is suddenly hot and I feel like I am going to pass out, and not in some adorable southern belle, gee-golly, Rhett-Butler-run-and-fetch-me-a-mint-julep-straight-up kind of way either.
“You don’t want me to go to Winston?”
“Christ, Gabs, it’s not about what I want,” he says. “I’m thinking about what’s best for you with everybody talking about it and bothering you and me not being able to help you. This is not going to be easy to pull off.”
Like the nuns at Holy Name are going to fall all over themselves taking in a teenage felon after Easter of junior year. Like they aren’t already busy enough explaining to their little coke whores how they shouldn’t drive around the curves on Mulholland in the open trunk of Billy’s car. A problem, come to think of it, that I have solved for them being as how now Billy doesn’t have a car.
Like I am going to leave Winston and, from the sound of it, never see Billy again, but hey, it’ll be good for his probation.
Like I am going to hang around in a Holy Name plaid pleated jumper for a year and a half and never see him at all, not even have the slightest chance of running into him, of catching a glimpse of him turning the corner in the hall.
Like I am ever going to let that happen.
“I can deal,” I say. “I’ll just say I don’t want to talk about it. Because actually, I don’t.”
And I say to myself, Gabby, what a rare genius you are, you are already saying you don’t want to talk about it before anyone else thought of it. You can so totally do this.
“I’ll just be very Greta Garbo: I vant to be alone, dahlink,” I say to him. “You so don’t have to take care of me.”
Billy reaches over and puts his arm around me tight. It hurts like a bitch. He looks really concerned.
“Just think about it,” he says “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
“What could be worse than what’s already happened?”
Billy runs his fingertips up and down between my shoulder blades. “Listen, would you break something if we, you know—?”
And I think, Whoa! and I don’t even care what breaks.
XXV
BILLY DRIVES ME HOME IN ONE OF HIS DAD’S OLD classic Ferraris which you would think would undermine a person’s ability to sneak around effectively, only around here it doesn’t. He drops me off a few houses up the street, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one but a couple of gardeners out blowing leaves down the hill with their illegal leaf-blowers spots him, and he kisses me again before I stumble back home.
It’s the middle of the day but I am too tired to even undress. I fall asleep weirdly happy, and when I wake up, it’s completely dark and my mother is trying to haul me into the living room as if I hav
e to hurry or I’ll miss the Second Coming of Christ.
“Vivian, I want to sleep. Just let me sleep, okay?”
She is spluttering and hissing, but I am too tired and too buried under plaster of paris makeup and too weirded out to get that Agnes Nash has turned up without warning and is standing on the front porch staring right into our house.
My parents are embarrassingly awkward—like they can’t figure out that they’re supposed to invite her in. It’s unnerving.
Actually, Agnes seems inexplicably smiley given that I just burned up, what, $75,000 of Nash family sports car and got her baby boy into deep shit with his probation officer.
My dad takes her coat and then sort of forgets about it and drops it behind the ratty chaise. My mother can’t even look her in the face.
“Can I get you something?” Vivian asks, leading Agnes nervously across the living room, scooping up stray pieces of clothes and sections of old newspapers that are strewn all over the place because Juanita is back to coming two days a week, and the other five days, stuff just piles up.
“Nice view,” Mrs. Nash says, looking outside since it’s pretty clear that her looking around at the inside of the house makes my mother cringe with shame over the state of our dilapidated box on stilts.
My mother pours gin and tonic into a purple tumbler and shoves it into her hand. Agnes Nash looks down at it as if it might be contaminated. Then her whole body gives a little shake, as if she has to pull herself together, and she looks up with an even more beatific smile.
“You know,” she says, “Vivian, John, you have to believe that I know how godawful this is. Because, believe me, we’ve been there.” She takes a slug of the contaminated drink, still holding it away from her body, and makes a little face.
My mother snatches the glass. “Can I get you a refill, Agnes?”
Mrs. Nash shakes her head no, but my mother refills the glass anyway, stirring frenetically with a purple glass straw. Agnes is mesmerized.
I am thinking, Where did we get all this ugly stuff? and wondering why I never noticed how tacky it is before.
Mrs. Nash takes the drink in its nasty purple tumbler and makes a face at it, so just in case it didn’t know how nasty it was before, it knows now.
“I can’t even count how many times we’ve been there.” She looks at me, slouched in my extremely tight sweat suit that probably still has Billy’s fingerprints in the nap of the velour, folding myself into the smallest possible size on the ottoman, trying to pretend I am somewhere else. “Gabby probably knows. Gabby, how many times would you say we’ve been there? How many, exactly?”
I have no idea, not the faintest hint, of what I am supposed to say to her or why she is here. I have no idea how many times Billy screwed up.
“Um, I guess we’re all in this together,” is what I finally say when it’s clear that no one is going to stop looking at me until I say something. It is one of Mr. Piersol’s favorite all-purpose clichés. Who says I’m not taking advantage of all the life-changing educational opportunities at Winston School?
“So,” Agnes says, downing drink number two, “you’re telling the police you don’t remember?”
The idea that Billy is actually having conversations with his mother in which he talks about me and tells her how I’m somewhat saving his ass by not telling the cops he attended what must have been quite the fun party is not totally unpleasant. I kind of wonder what else he’s told her about me. I wonder what other meaningless clichés I can come up with so she’ll stop looking at me like that.
A stitch in time saves nine?
United we stand, divided we fall?
The early bird gets whatever?
What I say is, “I haven’t talked to them since before I remembered what my name was. But what else am I going to say?”
Agnes squints and peers at me, thrusting her empty purple glass in the direction of Vivian. Then she looks over drink number three and beams at me. All right, it is definitely a more-than-slightly-strained beam, but it is an undeniable beam. Given that Agnes has never even so much as slightly smiled at me before, I am completely discombobulated.
Unless there is some diabolical plot afoot and she is secretly here to take me down and I’m just too wrecked to figure it out, this has to be a good thing.
“All right, then,” she says. “Let’s roll up our sleeves and make this whole thing go away. I’m going to say the same thing to you I said to Billy when he started down this trail. You have a problem: Deal with it.” She starts ticking things off on her fingers until it becomes clear that if she makes any more points, she’ll use up so many of those fingers she’ll have to put down drink number three.
“There is a tried and true way to make this go away,” she says, staring at me. “You have to take this seriously or it could seriously derail . . . well . . . whatever path it is you’re on. You need a lawyer who knows what he’s doing. Oh, and you’d better find her some really good psych treatment pronto or she could end up in a group home in South Central. Or out of state, God forbid.”
It’s surreal.
“I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Agnes says, noticing that I am about to die. “Thank God we were able to keep Billy out of rehab and get him some nice psychotherapy with Dan Jackman out in Malibu this time.”
My parents are just standing there nodding their heads like bobble-headed dashboard dolls.
“We’re so sorry about the car,” my mother says, cringing some more.
“The car is the least of our problems,” Mrs. Nash says. “That’s what insurance is for, that damned blue car. Had to be midnight-blue. We’re certainly not going to make a fuss about it. You just keep doing what you’re doing and as far as I’m concerned, he gave her the keys and that’s that.”
That’s that? That’s that! You have to give the boy credit. He is a parental manipulation god. And I am semi-officially the not-a-car-thief drunken girlfriend.
Sort of.
More squinting and peering from Agnes. “All right? Are we on the same page?”
But college, my mother moans. College college college. How will Little Thug Girl ever get into college?
Mrs. Nash sighs some more. “Oh puh-lease,” she says. “Let me help you with this one. College loves a good sob story. Just make sure her grades improve a little afterward and then make sure she counsels others. Not now. Not yet. As soon as she deals with it, though, pronto. With her Problem, I mean.”
“Are you sure, Agnes?” I swear, anyone with nice accessories offers Vivian a crumb of hope and she’s all over them, kissing the hem of their garment and sniffing around for more crumbs.
“I paid through the nose to be sure,” Agnes says. “We hired a consultant. Damage control for college. Mid-five figures. No reason for you to reinvent the wheel here. I’ll get you his info; just run the essay past him.”
“But Billy doesn’t have to counsel others,” I say. It just slips out of my dry, sleepy mouth.
Mrs. Nash gives me the same look she gave the nasty gin and tonic. “Hel-lo. At the Youth League shelter. He most certainly does.”
Well, not exactly.
Student Council decorates the Santa Monica Youth League shelter for holiday parties. Billy, who is not exactly into crepe paper and plastic turkeys, doesn’t even show up.
You can picture him standing around on the boardwalk under the pier in Santa Monica getting high while me and the rest of the Student Council are laying on the masking tape and festive poster-board snowflakes. I mean, the only helpful counseling he could possibly be doing would have to be arriving by astral projection via the psychic cat that’s always out there on the Third Street Promenade in a wizard hat making money for his half-zonked owner.
Still, it is always reassuring to be reminded that you aren’t the only person in the Three B’s whose parents aren’t exactly familiar with you or what you do in your spare time.
Agnes whips out her BlackBerry and a little pad of paper and starts writing
in a terrifying frenzy. Lawyers, doctors, people for the lawyers and doctors to contact at the LAPD and the DA’s office, the college consultant, an army of people who are going to help me, by which she means people who can be pushed around to cooperate in the secret plan to get me out of the consequences for everything I can’t remember.
And I keep thinking, she can’t actually hate me that much if she’s doing all this stuff for me, or why would she be doing it, right?
But then I see her looking up from the BlackBerry and glancing over at me and I see the expression on her face and I think, Yeah, well, she actually can.
Agnes leaves and my parents have another drink and sit there, hunkered down in the living room, staring out at the view, faint lights and the night-black ocean, streetlights and stars, completely awestruck and wiped out with drunken relief.
I sit there stirring cranberry juice and just the smallest drop of vodka with a suddenly tacky purple glass straw in a suddenly tacky purple glass tumbler, and Vivian says, “Gabby, don’t clink,” so she and John can take in what just happened in stewed silence.
“Are you going to get me a lawyer like she said?” I ask.
“You are going to do exactly what she said,” Vivian says, as if this is what she’s wanted all along and I’ve been holding out on her for no apparent reason.
I don’t say anything.
What do I care if she’s drunk and delusional, as long as she’s going along with the Agnes Nash plan to save my ass?
It is as if every small suspicion I’ve ever had that the mega-rich of the Three B’s know the Secrets of the Universe and can therefore get anything they want is confirmed, now that Agnes has swept down from the gated manse on Mulholland trailing the very secrets I need to get out of this situation, get back to Winston School, and (sorry, Agnes) get back with Billy Nash.
And you have to figure, Billy must have more than a little something to do with this given that even though Agnes is saving my life, you can tell she hates my guts, my parents, my house, and all our purple highball glasses, matching straws, and ugly furniture.
Where It Began Page 11