“And people buy this?”
“Babe, you sell it and they buy it. That’s what they do for a living.”
“Even the lawyer? What am I supposed to say to him?”
“Whatever he wants to hear. Just answer his questions succinctly and look cute.”
“Succinctly, Nash?”
“SAT word.”
“How cute?”
“So cute he can parade you in front of punk-ass chump cops and probation and they’ll be able to tell just by looking at you that it would be a big mistake to try and mess with you.”
You can tell that he knows all this from personal experience, which is both reassuring and somewhat less than reassuring.
The reassuring part is: I can more or less do this.
I just can’t talk about any of it with anyone else, ever, because the Three B’s are a tiny little gossip-riddled world and it could come back to bite me in an anything-you-say-to-friends-or-random-strangers-can-be-used-against-you-in-a-court-of-law kind of way. The whole plan will involve some serious sneakiness, but after seven months of running around Winston School semi-successfully pretending to be hot and, if not popular, not unpopular, I figure I’ve developed one or two useful strategic skills I could use in a pinch.
Billy, with his vast bad boy experience, has given me this whole routine, and now it’s my turn to dance in well-choreographed circles around the truth.
And then his phone starts to vibrate. “Shit,” he says. “Agnes.”
“Just turn it off. Tell her you were in a canyon. Sorry, no reception.”
He just stares at it. It stops vibrating and then it starts again. I reach for it and he pulls it back out of my reach, not even looking up at me. The phone flashes “Agnes B. Nash.”
“You’re sure you can do this?” he says, setting the phone on his lap. “You get it, right? You stick to the plan and you don’t talk to anyone but me?”
“Completely.” I am looking at the stairs that lead to the middle floor where my bedroom is. I am thinking about how close my room is and how John might as well be in Greenland and Vivian isn’t going to leave the sale at Neiman Marcus until she’s escorted to the door by security because they want to clock out for the night. I am thinking about how I want to feel and who can make me feel those particular feelings.
But Billy is looking at his vibrating phone and then at his Swiss precision underwater watch. He kisses me all along my collarbone, gentle where it is still bruised, holding the vibrating phone against my back. “I want you,” he says, as I tilt my head toward the staircase. “You know I do. But I can’t do this anymore. I have to bounce.”
And he bounces.
Leaving me with the new, improved Billy Nash plan to lie my way out of the whole mess, a hickey that means I am going to have to extend the opaque makeup all the way down the left side of my neck, and no boyfriend.
XXXI
AS SOON AS BILLY LEAVES, VIVIAN, WHO WAS apparently only at Neiman’s in her new role as Highly Organized Mother, shows up, her shoes clunking around the kitchen floor overhead and then down the stairs, waving her BlackBerry in a new, snazzy Prada case.
“You’re not doing laundry, are you?” she says.
Unlikely, given that teaching me things like how to work a washing machine and cook food beyond microwaving California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizzas is not on the list. If there is ever a national emergency so severe there’s no takeout or housekeepers, I am going to starve to death in smelly clothes.
“I’m looking for my good jeans,” I say, pretending to rub my neck at the relevant spot.
“No jeans,” she says. “We’re going to Isabelle Frost. She’s the social worker. I put your clothes on the bed.”
“I can dress myself, you know. As God is my witness, I can put a skirt and blouse together.”
Vivian does not look convinced. “I was thinking French schoolgirl, not Scarlett O’Hara,” she says. Which should at least preclude the matted Amish sweater and the six-inch pleated skirt. Which, for reasons clear only to Vivian and some unscrupulous salesgirl dying to unload the Neiman buyer’s more heinous mistakes, involves black linen pants with a waist so high it threatens to meet the underwire of my bra and a tan silk shirt with cuff links.
Think a funny-looking French schoolgirl with no taste.
“I am so not tucking this blouse into these pants. I’ll look ridiculous.”
Oh yes I am.
I am wearing the outfit with a pair of Vivian’s ugly Coach flats, and I am getting into the car with Vivian and John, who has somehow been suckered into wearing a navy blazer with the family crest subtly embroidered on the pocket. We look like a complete joke.
But not as big a joke as Isabelle Frost, social worker to the rich and infamous.
Billy wants me to read my helpful professionals and figure out what they want and give it to them, but it is hard to tell if Isabelle Frost is Botoxed to the point that it limits all forms of facial expression or if she is just trying to look extra stern.
After about five seconds, it’s obvious she thinks that I’m some poor depressed alcoholic girl with bad self-esteem craving liquor to drown her alcoholic sorrows.
And she wants me to know that she totally and completely understands poor depressed alcoholic girls such as myself because she had exactly the same Problem when she was addicted to prescription pain pills following an unfortunate series of surgical procedures that you have to assume involved sucking all the fat out of her body and inserting Teflon in places it is embarrassing to look at unless the thought of armor-piercing breasts appeals to you. John would appear to be examining his fingernails, but Vivian is gazing up at her as if she knows the secret of eternal youth.
I still haven’t said anything, but after another five minutes, it is also obvious that the only way to get out of this with half a life left is to pretend to be some poor depressed girl with bad self-esteem craving liquor to drown her depressed, alcoholic sorrows.
Just like Billy said.
Isabelle Frost has a great many ideas for how I am going to—in a handy two-fer—get my Problem cured and impress the shit out of the Probation Department, with which she is going to personally interface. (Interface? Lobby? Bribe? Blackmail? Threaten? Wave a tiny photo of Agnes Nash in the form of a cross? It’s difficult to visualize exactly how this is supposed to work.)
“What Mr. Healy wants me to make sure of,” Ms. Frost says in between fits of pretending to understand me so so well, her speech slightly slurred because her lips have a limited range of motion and seem to pucker spasmodically all on their own, “is that we have you all set up before the Probation Department even knows your name. They’ll see how you’ve taken responsibility for your Problem and cleaned up your act and you’ve self-procured treatment and your family is straight out of Leave It to Beaver and bingo!”
Bingo?
My mother, by this point, is pacing around Ms. Frost’s office picking up and putting down knick-knacks and shredding the tissues. My dad is sitting there stone-still, his eyes half-closed, so you can’t tell whether he’s super-upset or asleep.
“Absolutely,” Vivian keeps repeating. “Of course we can get Gabby treatment! Of course she’s not out of control! Of course Gabby can take responsibility for her Problem, can’t you, Gabby?”
She is blissfully unaware of what I have to say to fake out everybody, how I have to deny my so-called Problem.
“Sure,” I say, really hoping that Billy knows what he’s talking about because I am about to launch. Frosty looks up to see where the voice is coming from, given that I haven’t said anything, not one single word including hello, for the past forty-five minutes. “Only I’m not sure I have a Problem. Are you sure I have a Problem?”
Billy is completely right.
Ms. Frost is so overjoyed that I am sitting there semi-denying the Problem while remaining open to learning all about said Problem, you can almost discern the faint suggestion of a smile at the corners of her Botox-frozen, twitching mouth.
Billy is a complete Get Out of Jail Free meister.
Of course I don’t appreciate the Problem and that is why all these helpful professionals are going to help me appreciate and come to grips with it! Preferably before the Department of Probation helps me appreciate and come to grips with it in desert rehab in Arizona.
All I am thinking is: How do I get out of this and get back to Winston and get back with Billy? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Tell me what to say and I’ll say it.
All Vivian is thinking is: Winston School! Tell me what to do to keep her from getting booted out of Winston School and destroying her chance of attending the sub-regular college of her choice and I’ll do it!
It is hard to tell what my dad is thinking since, even without the Botox, he is almost as poker-faced as Ms. Frost. “Of course we have a stable home life,” he’s murmuring, his eyes still partly closed. “Of course we know where she is at all times. Of course we don’t sanction underage drinking.”
Probably he’s thinking: Does this place have a bar?
Or maybe: How soon can I get back to Bel Air where we have a bar and several well-stocked mini-fridges?
The sooner he can get back to a pitcher of margaritas, the sooner he can forget how Winston might hold it against me that I’m a drunken felon car thief, thereby stripping him of any slim claim to status that I had ever offered. Except for my increasingly tenuous connection to Billy Nash.
All I can think about is Billy. How I need to see him and not just to make out to the point of frustration on top of a washing machine and hiding out behind abandoned houses. How I need to see him all the time and I need to make him want me again. How I need to be at Winston even though Ms. Frost says to avoid him and all other cute bad boys—if I am at Winston and he is at Winston, what are they going to do, put us in handcuffs if we make eye contact?
Winston School!
For once Vivian and John and I are in perfect agreement.
Only I have to survive the black hole of the legal system first.
XXXII
THE THING ABOUT FALLING INTO THE LEGAL SYSTEM is that even if you aren’t ready for it; even if you don’t want to deal with it; even if you need to crawl back onto your space-raft bed and float in a gray-green sky; even if you wish you could get your behind-the-eyes documentary going again instead of being stuck with your actual, real life; even if you reach the absolute limits of positive thinking and there’s not a single nice thing you can think of to say to yourself that you actually believe, you still can’t make it stop.
Vivian and I are parked under a scrubby tree in a parking lot in the Valley. John has bailed, with the completely bogus claim that he has work to do, so it’s just me and her waiting in complete silence, which, under the circumstances, probably beats talking.
We are sitting there in the old SUV and not the Mercedes because Vivian is afraid that the police will hold a Mercedes that big against us if they notice it. Because we are so deep deep in the San Fernando Valley, so far north of Ventura Boulevard and civilization, that we don’t even recognize where we are, and she suspects that there’s an irrational hatred of rich people—presumably extending to the pseudo-rich—out here.
We are parked by a sheriff’s station, waiting for me to go in.
The station is a tan, cinder-block building with windows too high to look out of or see into. All I can think about is how you could go into a building like that and not come out except to ride from one locked room to another on one of those sheriff’s buses you stare into on the freeway, wondering what those men scowling sideways at you did to be riding in there. And how I could end up in a bus like that with rows of terrifying girls in Day-Glo jumpsuits.
We are not planning to get out of the SUV until Mr. Healy shows up and gets out of his Maybach first, meanwhile avoiding eye contact with any of the tired-looking deputies walking by, or the people going in and out of the station who, from the look of it, have no reason to fear they are going to inspire prejudice by virtue of uppity displays of Westside wealth.
It’s the Valley; it is eighty-eight degrees in April; and all I want to do is swim out of there in a conveniently deep river of sweat. Why couldn’t I just paddle over to some Westside courthouse where the big question would be what the hell a girl like me was doing in the Valley in the first place, even if it was Songbird Lane in Hidden Hills, which is gated and where all the houses have acres of grassy lawns, black-bottom swimming pools, koi ponds, and a horse?
Leaving aside those pesky questions that are sure to come up in maybe five minutes (if Mr. Healy ever shows) about (1) the drunk driving, (2) the Beemer, and (3) why someone who did what I did should get out of trouble just by having her enormous lawyer bludgeon people.
What I don’t want to be doing is the thing I came here to do: get arrested. Or maybe re-arrested, this time adding the element of consciousness.
It turns out that there are quite a few other things I don’t want to do, such as getting fingerprinted.
Such as having mug shots taken with numbers on the bottom. Such as surrendering my driver’s license—graciously returned to us by the mom of the kid who threw the party on Songbird Lane by FedEx, my wallet still nestled inside my bag and nothing missing—into a big mustard-colored envelope with my number on the front.
Such as getting a date and an actual time on a real day in June to show up in juvenile court.
So I hold my breath and get logged in to the system, with Mr. Healy standing around drumming his fingers as if he’s bored and all of this is no big deal. And I say, “I don’t remember,” in response to every question other than the one about my name and address.
No, I have no firsthand knowledge of where the party was or who threw it or if there even was a party or how I got the liquor or if I drank it of my own free will or if there even was liquor, which I don’t remember and therefore I can’t admit I drank. Artfully avoiding words like “stole” and “Billy.”
The detective looks annoyed as hell but he has the doctor’s report about the tree and its effect on my head right in front of him on the table so he can’t exactly come out and say liar, liar, pants on fire to try to get me to tell him what he wants to know. He keeps cozying up to words that have a great deal of SAT potential such as “stonewall” and “intransigent,” but Mr. Healy keeps murmuring “closed head injury,” and I just sit there, amazed by the depth and breadth of what I really don’t know, and hoping I look dazed and brain-dead enough for them to leave me alone.
What I want to know is why Billy didn’t tell me this part of it, the part where you’re sitting in a metal chair in a windowless room and it feels like you’re an inch away from being sucked up into a whole other life—not in a distant universe, but in a squat, shabby building, with cells and linoleum floors and pissed-off detectives, that you never even knew was there before.
Explain that.
And when I am finally home, alone in my room, all I can think is, Man, if I did have a drinking problem, this would be the magic moment.
And then I think: What the hell?
And I go into the bar in the living room and get out some vile-tasting twelve-year-old scotch and some ice.
XXXIII
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DRINKING A GREAT deal of scotch on the rocks when you’re alone in your bedroom is that, in addition to making you feel somewhat less preoccupied with the sorry state of your abysmal, completely wrecked life, it makes you uncoordinated and a sentimental sap and somewhat more stupid than usual.
Which might cause you to drink even more scotch on the rocks in order to take the edge off feeling stupid, et cetera.
So basically I sit on the edge of my bed hugging the ice bucket, drinking twelve-year-old Glenlivet and feeling like a moron. Vivian is getting over her traumatic afternoon in the Valley by getting her nails wrapped in Santa Monica and I, actually being a sentimental sap and also stupid, start rummaging through the Billy Nash memorabilia in the top drawer of my dresser.
There are movie ti
cket stubs and shells from the beach outside his parents’ place near Point Dume and a ratty wrist corsage that I probably should have pressed instead of shoving it whole into a drawer where the petals are turning into mini-compost.
There are little boxes that used to contain an assortment of Belgian chocolates that Billy bought for me only because he wanted the semi-sweet truffles and if he bought the whole box for me, he didn’t have to feel like a goof standing in line at Godiva Chocolatier buying himself romantic candy.
There is the Rule the Pool water polo booster baseball cap that seems like a good thing to be wearing only because by that point in the bottle, I am seriously judgment-impaired.
It seems like a good idea to ponder all the lined up little presents Andie Bennett has mailed me since the accident, and then it seems like an even better idea to kiss the little plastic Flower the Skunk figurine with the pencil sharpener embedded in its belly that she sent last week, only I don’t even think about how a person could nick her lip on the metal strip where the shavings get sliced off the pencil.
By the time Anita calls to see if I want her to come over so we can quiz each other on SAT words, I am impaired on several other dimensions too, and she says, “Are you all right? You sound awful.”
I say, “I’m fine.”
“I don’t know,” Anita says. “Are you crying? Should I come over?”
“I just cut my lip on a pencil sharpener. Don’t come over.”
You can hear Anita taking a breath. “Gabby,” she says, “if this is wrong, I’ll never bring it up again, but are you drunk?”
This seems like the most hilarious thing I’ve heard all day, which isn’t saying much. The only tiny scrap of self-control I have left staunches the impending giggle and leaves me sort of snorting into the phone.
“I’m not drunk,” I say, in a vain attempt to sound as if I’m not. “Maybe I went to the dentist so my tongue is numb.”
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