Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “Yeah, but my uncle could really help you. Gabby, this is serious. Don’t you want a lawyer who could help you? You have to take this seriously.”

  “Why would you think I’m not taking this seriously? I could go to some kind of jail in Arizona. I could have killed somebody.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Lisa squeals. An actual squeal, like a piglet having a coronary. “Don’t say that!”

  It is so clear that I shouldn’t say anything. Even my best friend can’t stand to hear the truth about me. I have to shut it down or I’m going to be too freaked out to get out of bed, eat toast, or implement The Plan. Which is not exactly optional unless I want to embrace a new life as Rehab Wilderness Girl. Billy is so so absolutely and completely right.

  You can tell Lisa is getting wound up again, and before she can start, I say, “I’m not going to talk about it. Save your breath.”

  And Lisa says, “I know, I know. And I’m trying to respect that. I am. But this is really hard to watch.”

  XXXVII

  MEANWHILE, MR. HEALY KEEPS CALLING ME ON THE phone. No introduction, he just launches right in.

  “Isabelle Frost says you’d be more comfortable with intensive therapy than AA?”

  “Yup,” I say, “Because—”

  But he doesn’t even want to hear about it.

  I don’t know. Maybe all us girls who threaten to gorge ourselves on the entire refreshment table at Brentwood Unitarian AA, stab ourselves with plastic butter knives that aren’t even serrated, and thrust our hands and forearms into Brentwood Unitarian’s boiling hot forty-eight-cup industrial-size coffeemakers are a lot more comfortable with therapy than AA.

  “All righty,” he says. “I think I should talk to your mom for a quick sec. I think we need a change of plan here to a heavier-duty therapist, all right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Someone objective-looking with big, bad credentials . . . hmmmm . . .”

  After this, the frequency of Mr. Healy’s phone calls increases exponentially.

  He keeps reminding me that I’m not supposed to be driving a car or hanging out with undesirables, by which I assume he means Billy (thank you, Agnes Nash), and to see if anything has changed. . . . Pregnant pause.

  The only upside to the whole situation is that whenever I need to talk to Billy, apparently it’s all right to message him constantly in his new role as legal consultant. He actually seems interested. Even when I don’t message him, he keeps chatting me with questions eerily similar to Mr. Healy’s.

  It is starting to feel as if I exist again, at least a little, in a tiny corner of the outskirts of Billy World. Sort of.

  So this is my life:

  Lisa is texting me to see if it would be okay to go to Fling in her mother’s arguably vintage acrylic cardigan that has sequined sombreros shading little napping men (No, not even close to okay. Tell her that you can’t wear racist outerwear to Winston School social events. Tell her anything) and me chatting online with Billy to get pointers on how I can stay out of jail.

  gabs123: how did u get out of residential? big lawyer says residential is the worst case scenario if therapy doesn’t work out. i will DIE in residential.

  pologuy: went to this outward bound thing in the rockies summer of 9th after pot in locker room at loyola match. did ropes course. listened to crap about personal responsibility. took other people’s ritalin

  gabs123: no way.

  pologuy: way. no booze no weed. what’s boy to do?

  gabs123: i will not do a ropes course. just not happening.

  pologuy: no worries. u need to knock over lots more trees before ropes course. that’s after 4th offense. not now. lawyer’s just scaring u so you’ll go all o mr. lawyer man, my hero when nothing bad happens to u

  gabs123: 4th offense!?!?!?!? u are a very busy boy.

  pologuy: what r u wearing right now?

  gabs123: i’m going to be wearing a day glo jumpsuit if u don’t get me out of this.

  And I say to myself, Gabriella, you have a whole team of highly skilled, high-priced professionals getting you out of this. If you don’t stop bugging Billy Nash, he’s going to pretend he’s offline. You have to stop whining like a big freaking baby and step away from the computer.

  But I don’t.

  Meanwhile, Vivian keeps slamming in and out of my room without knocking. When she sees that I’m chatting online with Billy, she is somewhat happier.

  But Vivian, it turns out, is extremely annoyed about my failure to embrace kiddie Twelve Step.

  “Everything was going fine!” she says, tight-lipped. “But could you get with the program? No you could not.”

  “Mr. Healy says it’s fine if I get heavy-duty therapy instead. Billy even said so. What’s wrong with that? It’s not as if I have a drinking problem.”

  “Of course you don’t!” Vivian snaps. “That’s not the point. But I’m not going to stand here and watch you shoot yourself in the foot.”

  “Yeah, well I’ll be sure to take off your ugly Coach clown shoes before I do the deed, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “I am worried. I want this to work out for you, but you have to get with the program. What were you thinking? And now it looks as if you have to go back to that child psychiatrist you don’t like, and if that makes you want to cut yourself and tear out your hair and eat it, I just don’t want to hear about it.”

  “What child psychiatrist?”

  “That woman at Valley Mercy with the odd hair. The one you said was so annoying.”

  “Wendy!”

  “Not Wendy. Wendy is a playologist. Dr. Berman. With those dowdy Ferragamos.”

  “Ponytail? Ponytail Doc is a neurologist.” But she does have bad shoes. Really expensive bad shoes with bows on them.

  “Nuh-uh, she’s a child psychiatrist and she went to Harvard, and Mr. Healy has read every word she wrote about you in the chart and it’s all good, if you can believe it.”

  “Why can’t you believe it?”

  Vivian just glares at me. “That’s not what I said. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? What I said is she’s some kind of hotshot who can get you out of this if you’ll just cooperate. Can you do that, Gabby? Can you just cooperate?”

  As if she somehow doubts that I want to get out of this, short of going to AA all the time. As if she doesn’t even know who I am, even though my lying like a rug about my fictional cutting and puking to get out of AA is apparently no secret.

  Which is beside the point. The point being that I have to go see Ponytail Doc who is apparently a hotshot shrink in the Valley, which kind of makes you wonder. Like Vivian is going to hop into the car and drive me through the Sepulveda Pass to some strip mall in Tarzana with a Popeyes chicken and a Dunkin’ Donuts and a tacky medical building. Fortunately for Vivian, Ponytail, not being completely devoid of taste and discernment, also has an office on the Westside by UCLA, presumably hoping that someone in the B’s will notice what a hotshot she is and rescue her from strip mall hell.

  XXXVIII

  gabs123: whatcha doing?

  pologuy: nothing. SAT words. heavily armed warden with flash cards. what’s up?

  gabs123: i have to see the therapist later.

  pologuy: no worries. jackman is harmless. tries to teach u deep breathing. very relaxing

  gabs123: not ur therapist. big honcho girl therapist. the one from the hospital. supposedly she likes me, which is going to make it so so easy to just spill my guts.

  pologuy: as long as u don’t plan to spill ur guts

  gabs123: i think i have to. nobody came out and said it but i think if i pass, no residential. if therapy works out is what the lawyer said. how can u tell if therapy is working out?

  pologuy: didn’t ur lawyer tell u what to say on this one either?

  It occurs to me once again that people who write large checks to the mayor, or whatever it is that Agnes actually does every time Billy screws up, get a lot more help from their lawyers.
>
  gabs123: i’m screwed right?

  pologuy: ur lawyer is lame. he needs to tell u these things. court ordered therapist tells EVERYBODY what u say. judge, DA, police. very sneaky. uses everything against you. DO NOT TRUST THERAPIST!

  gabs123: what do i say? i have to pass or i’m going to rehab jail in the high desert!!!! what do i say???

  pologuy: cry a lot

  gabs123: a person can’t just cry forever. physically impossible. and she already knows me. i can’t just pretend to b somebody else.

  pologuy: stick to the plan ok? complete denial. followed by maybe u do have the problem. then u pretend to work on it once a week until your record gets expunged ok?

  gabs123: how do u pretend to work on it? what words come out of your mouth when u do that?

  pologuy: ok like this. oh no dr jackman i have a restless urge to drink, smoke, and have meaningless sex. yet i know all this fun stuff my wicked peers are pressuring me to do is self destructive. oh no dr. jackman what should i do? hey i know, what if u put on the cd with the jungle bugs and bird calls and i relax in this nice zero gravity chair?

  gabs123: no way.

  pologuy: way. and be sure to tell her how much u hate yourself

  gabs123: what if she doesn’t buy any of this? she’s not completely stupid. is there a backup plan?

  pologuy: dude u don’t need a backup plan. just tell her how u sit in ur bedroom and hate yourself while drinking up ur dad’s glenlivet

  gabs123: y is everybody making such a big deal about that? it was just that one time.

  pologuy: don’t tell her that

  XXXIX

  BACK IN THE HOSPITAL, PONYTAIL WAS JUST AN irritating interruption of Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s. She was a lot less annoying than when she is sitting in her office in Westwood.

  An office in a glass and steel building with a bad metal sculpture in the lobby (convex mother with concave child, only it is hard to tell if the mother is nursing the kid or dropping it).

  An office that looks like a set decorator’s idea of a professor’s lair: the antique desk, the leather chairs, the books and journals strewn across the desk as if Ponytail is so so busy doing important research on the Inner Life of Teens that you ought to be grateful when she looks up for long enough to talk to your seriously annoyed self.

  “And so we meet again,” she says, settling into her chair.

  What, like I was supposed to have kept up with her on Facebook?

  “I guess,” I say. It is hard to put a finger on why I want to smack her so much except that, oh yeah, I don’t want to be here.

  She smiles at me and makes the kind of piercing eye contact that feels as if the person can gaze into your mind and see things that you don’t know. And I go, Stop it, Gabriella. She can’t see into your mind, for godsake. She doesn’t even know you that well.

  But after Billy’s helpful pep talk, I am in a complete state of paranoid terror.

  Ponytail, meanwhile, is sitting there looking me over, aka staring, as apparently normal social skills are irrelevant in psychiatry. I am sitting there looking her over, too. I am wearing a perky yet conservative teen outfit that looks really expensive and boring but at least I got to pick it out. A denim skirt and a butter-yellow cardigan. She is wearing her standard issue white shirt and a gray pencil skirt and stubby heels with grosgrain bows.

  All I can think of to do is fidget. I start buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of the yellow cardigan and pulling on the ends of the sleeves.

  “I notice you’re wearing long sleeves today,” she says.

  I am thinking that she is going to turn up her air conditioning when I remember the cutting and the binging on coffee cake and supposedly wanting to plunge my hands into the scalding hot water in Brentwood Unitarian’s giant coffeemaker that got me out of AA and into this comfy leather chair in the first place.

  Ponytail looks extremely concerned.

  I am afraid she is going to make me push up my sleeves and be righteously pissed off when she sees my uncut, unscarred, unscalded, normal weight arms. Not to mention, she has seen me half-naked and half-dead in the hospital and you have to figure she would have noticed that I didn’t cut.

  “Um, I don’t really do any of that stuff,” I say. “I just think about it all the time.”

  “Stuff?” she says, leaning forward. You can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

  “I know you know,” I say. “Everyone from here to San Diego has read my file by now.”

  “I know what your file says,” she says. “I wrote half your file. But I want to know what you say.”

  I am pretty eager to get to the part where I deny my Problem so she can help me see the Problem so I can go, Oh yeah, big epiphany, I have a Problem! and then she can cure me and I can get out of there.

  “Okay,” I say, in the interest of expediting. “Okay, being at AA and feeling, uh, pressured to talk about myself in front of other people, uh, makes me think about, uh, cutting myself and eating all the refreshments and, you know, the thing with the hot water. But now that I’m not in AA anymore, I’m kind of past it.”

  Ponytail says she is glad to hear it. Then she goes back to looking me over. “Was there ever a time when you got past thinking about it, and you cut or binged or hurt yourself with boiling water?”

  “Ew. No. Of course not.”

  “And you were at AA because—”

  “Oh, all right,” I say, in the interest of getting on with it. “If you really want me to say it, I’ll say it. I got drunk at a party and crashed my boyfriend’s car into a tree. And now I don’t remember anything about it. There. Are you happy?”

  “Sometimes it’s more disconcerting once you get out of the hospital and back to your life. Having your memories gone.”

  “Not so much. It’s pretty obvious what happened. I went to a party. I got drunk. I crashed the car. I grabbed the keys and passed out on the ground. What else is there to know? And it’s not like I’m back to my life anyway.”

  “Do you have any feelings or ideas about why you were drinking that much?”

  “Because it was a party . . .” I am trying to come up with the right answers here, but speculating about why you did things you don’t remember doing is just not that illuminating.

  Ponytail nods as if she were actually listening to me. She is perched on the edge of her seat, deeply fascinated by my every word but so not getting it, patiently waiting for me to enlighten her. “I get that you drink at parties,” she says. “Do you often black out?”

  “I never black out! I hit my head against a tree or an air bag or something. That’s not the same as blacking out. If blacking out made me hit the tree, then how did I turn off the car and pull the keys out?”

  She just looks at me. More or less as if I’m crazy, which is maybe not that much of a stretch given that I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office pretending to be crazy.

  “All right,” I say. “All right. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t have a drinking problem.”

  She just sits there.

  Really, am I just supposed to repeat this over and over for the entire rest of the session or what? All the time knowing that saying you don’t have a drinking problem is supposed to prove you do have a drinking problem, which basically makes no sense, but okay, whatever.

  “My dad is the one with the drinking problem,” I say. I have to say something. “You’ve seen him, right? I swear, the guy basically sits in the house all day and doesn’t actually do anything and I know I’m not a drunk because I’m nothing like that.” She just looks at me. “I’m not.”

  “So you’re not like your dad.”

  Oh, kill me now. If she’s planning to repeat everything I say and sit there looking deeply concerned and fascinated, I might as well just start searching her office for some sharp object I can pretend I’m thinking about stabbing myself with in the faint hope that Mr. Healy will decide that I’m an even crazier model
girl than he thought and send me to an even heavier duty therapist who I can stand.

  “I really do not want to sit here and talk about my dad. I just want everything to go back to the way it was before.”

  “And you’d be comfortable with that?”

  “I would be totally happy and whistling a merry tune if things could be like before, but my life is completely wrecked.”

  She nods and looks sympathetic. Really, really sympathetic. Or maybe some shred of Vivian has rubbed off on me through some nasty trick of genetics and I, too, am such a glutton for the smallest scrap of sympathy that a chipmunk would seem sympathetic if it nodded its fuzzy little head at me.

  Still, it is hard to believe that Ponytail is going to send me to some residential hellhole in the desert to live in a tent and do ropes courses with gang girls.

  “Uh, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be talking about,” I say. I am thinking that this would be the magic moment for her to teach me to gently close my eyelids, take a deep cleansing breath, and relax, like Billy does with his therapist. Because just sitting in her office staring out the window at the view of Westwood is making me extremely nervous.

  Then it occurs to me that I’m doing a pretty damned good job of denying the problem so perhaps this is going well.

  “That’s the thing, when the courts get involved in treatment,” she says. “You’re supposed to be talking about whatever you want to talk about in this office. This is supposed to be your time. But when the courts are going to be involved, it’s easy to feel as if, if you say the wrong thing, something terrible is going to happen to you, yes?”