Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  This is the part where I cry for twenty-five minutes straight, which is more or less what Billy said I was supposed to do in the first place, so you have to figure it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.

  Which is pretty bad.

  The only comforting, affirmative thought I can come up with (Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most convincing, not-going-to-wilderness-camp patient who ever sat in this big leather chair? is so not working for me) is that at least it has to seem like I’m being sincere, which, strangely, I am. I mean, who can fake crying for that long?

  And it isn’t as if I can stop, either.

  XL

  MY LESS-THAN-FUN SESSION WITH PONYTAIL MUST have shown all over my tear-rutted, unnaturally beige face because Vivian, who is sitting in the waiting room in her recently overused mauve funeral and teacher conference suit, jumps up and says she is going to take me for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting at Dottie’s Sweeties. Which, given all the calories a trip to Dottie’s Sweeties involves stuffing into your mouth, is an epic offer. Epic and unnerving, given that Vivian never gives me anything resembling a dessert unless someone has died or there’s an earthquake, not to mention it is hard to visualize her traipsing around Beverly Hills with a bruised, smeared makeup, red-eyed, cupcake-chomping kid.

  But, of course, it turns out that Vivian thinks she’s doing me a favor when she leaves me in the parking lot and runs in herself, given that letting me humiliate myself by risking someone seeing me when I look this wrecked is no doubt right up there in her mind with public flogging.

  Sitting alone in the car on the roof of the parking structure, I am completely stumped as to any possible affirmative thing to say to myself.

  Losing control and sniveling was so not what I had in mind. If I was going to cry for twenty-five minutes nonstop, I was supposed to be doing it on purpose, not like some out-of-control crybaby who just whimpers on until reaching the point of dehydration.

  Not in front of someone I don’t even like, in the world’s dowdiest expensive shoes, who nevertheless has the potential to make my life worse than it already is.

  Not when I’ve been planning to tell Billy about what happened and how I pulled it off and how everything is just fine and freakishly dandy. I am so not planning to tell him about this, or at least not what this feels like.

  pologuy: how was ur day at the therapist?

  gabs123: it beats AA. but not by much. and no refreshments.

  pologuy: the better to save u from yourself little girl, with ur brand new eating disorder and cutting problem. she bought it right?

  I’m afraid that if I lie too much, he won’t be able to tell me what to do next, and I’ll be doubly screwed. And if I don’t lie enough, it will just be too humiliating.

  gabs123: i cried copiously. SAT word. vivian got me the flash cards. u said cry—i cried. that’s ok, right?

  pologuy: what did u say?

  gabs123: basically nothing. i cried a lot. very emo.

  pologuy: excellent. what do u have to say to her anyway? boo hoo and u don’t remember anything right?

  gabs123: hence the crying, like you said. no word on when i get to go back to school though.

  pologuy: lucky u. stretch it out

  Even though Billy might have my best interests at heart, you didn’t see him stretching it out in exile at his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito despite all the excellent surfing off Rincon Point. And even though my life might currently suck, the only way I have the slightest chance of getting it back is going back to Winston. The only way of getting him back.

  Which is basically the same thing.

  XLI

  YOU WOULD FIGURE THAT A HIGHLY TRAINED helping professional like Ponytail would have picked up on the part that I wasn’t really at risk for swimming around in the boiling contents of industrial-sized coffeemakers, but apparently she and Mr. Healy had a little chat and now I have to have another deeply meaningful session ASAP so she can clear me to go back to school.

  “That’s what you want, right?” Mr. Healy says, as if he’d missed the part where I said that was what I wanted every time he made another lame phone call to make sure I hadn’t eloped with Billy with me driving.

  This seems like a no-brainer until I start thinking about what it will actually be like to slink back into Winston and have everyone looking at me in my current state of being a juvenile delinquent covered with artfully applied beige foundation in a color not approximating human skin all that closely. Gossiping about me as if I were Buddy Geiss coming back to the Three B’s from celebrity rehab in Malibu, back from military school rehab in South Carolina, back from holistic-getting-down-with-therapeutic-farm-animals rehab in the Napa Valley.

  I, on the other hand, will be back from wrecking Billy’s car and messing up my life on Songbird Lane. You have to figure that this could be worse than either my prior state of invisibility or being Buddy Geiss.

  This time Vivian takes me to Dottie’s for the cupcake beforehand, and when I pull my cupcake out of the little checkered bag, I see that Vivian has paid extra for them to top it with slivers of white chocolate and honey-roasted almonds. In the absence of deaths or earthquakes, it is hard to tell if all the sugary treats are coming my way because she’s feeling that sorry for me, or if she thinks it doesn’t matter anymore if I turn into a pillar of undulating chocolate-and-honey-roasted-almond-filled fat because any hope of me being anything other than a sub-regular girl is smoldering in Hidden Hills with the last fiery, wrecked bits of Billy’s Beemer.

  “It’s going to be hard on you, going back to school like this,” Vivian says when I am halfway through my cupcake and all the way to a sugar rush.

  No shit.

  Although it isn’t clear if “like this” means Billy-less or with a lavender cheekbone and a swollen jawline. Or both.

  “It agreed with you to have a boyfriend,” she says. “But I have a lot of faith that you’ll be back to being the New You again.”

  “What?”

  And I go, Gabriella, give it up. She’s trying to be extra nice. Don’t be a little bitch.

  I say, “I hope you’re right,” but I just want to scream, Stop talking about it. Just. Stop. It’s not that I don’t totally want what she is saying to be true. I do. But hearing her say it out loud makes it sound lame and not remotely possible. Because I’m pretty sure the New Me crashed and burned on Songbird Lane.

  “You will be, Gabby,” Vivian says. “You can be anything you want.”

  Such as the president of the United States, Tinker Bell, and Billy Nash’s girlfriend in public?

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “It’s hard for a girl to lose her looks, but you’ll get back on your game. You’ll see. You can get another boyfriend. The swelling will go down and you’ll be fine.”

  Then she hands me a little container of extra white chocolate slivers that I pour directly onto my tongue, partly because it tastes like the god of chocolate made it and partly to keep myself from talking back to her.

  Even Ponytail has a plate of what look like homemade cookies on her desk, which she pushes toward me as if she thinks I need some edible comfort too.

  This time she’s sitting there in a pale-green cashmere sweater, and you want to tell her that even though it might somewhat match her eyes, it is so so not working. I am wearing the highest cut jeans I own to avoid upsetting her with the sight of my thong and an ugly striped shirt with cufflinks that Vivian forced me to wear because apparently she thinks that shapelessness is a good look for the psychologically impaired.

  This time, it takes me less than a minute to start crying.

  Ponytail hands me a box of tissues, and I notice that this time there is a tiny little leather-covered wastebasket beside the leather chair. The possibility that Ponytail saw this coming, that this is not the result of a slight change in her interior decorating plan, but that she is graciously providing me with someplace to stow my snotty tissues because she knew in advance what was going to happen, c
ompletely freaks me out.

  After about fifteen minutes of this, she asks me if I can talk about it, and not seeing a downside to telling her the actual truth, I say, “I don’t know.” Then I realize that this is the perfect opening to tell her how much I hate myself, but then I start crying again.

  “I’m wondering if you’re feeling reluctant to be frank with me because of your legal situation.”

  Duh.

  I nod my head and try to look as if I want to be there.

  “Weeeeeeellllll,” Ponytail says, filling my silence, “it’s hard for me to imagine anything you could tell me that would harm you in that respect.”

  For me, on the other hand, it isn’t all that hard. To imagine what could happen if I tell her something that makes her hate me, for example. To imagine what could happen if I say the wrong thing and she decides that a few months in the desert serves me right.

  Billy’s voice telling me not to trust the therapist is playing over and over in my head like a tape loop that won’t quit.

  “And all this crying tells me that something’s hurting,” she says.

  I just keep sniffling because, basically, I can’t stop, and she sits there saying all these inane things about growing and changing and being a re-potted plant turning toward the morning sun and trying to talk to me about how I feel about going back to school after being out for so long, which I can’t really tell her because I don’t totally know how I feel about it; I just know that I have to do it because not doing it is just going to make my life worse.

  “I have to go back to school,” I say. “I have to. It’s like everybody else’s life kept on going but my life stopped and I don’t even exist and” (oh yeah, the magic and completely credible and somewhat true moment to throw it in) “I hate myself.”

  Ponytail’s gaze bores through my forehead but is stopped in its tracks by the complete opacity of my completely private mind. She gives me her most sympathetic mmmmmm.

  “Are you feeling ready?”

  No.

  I say, “Yes.”

  So it is finally happening.

  XLII

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I GO BACK TO WINSTON, PEOPLE are wishing me the kind of bon voyage and good luck you’d expect if you were leaving on a spaceship for a sinister galaxy far far away, not tooling halfway down a swanky hill to finish junior year.

  Anita’s and Lisa’s mothers—who are both very big on being the carpool mom because, as far as I can figure out, it gives them control over the sound system, so Lisa’s mom can force us to listen to Jesus radio and Anita’s mom can force us to listen to South Asian elevator music—are competing to carpool me, assuring Vivian that it will be much better for me to arrive with my true friends.

  If I had any other friends, this would be quite the slam, but I don’t, so it isn’t.

  Then Huey’s mother calls to offer us a debilitated rescue cat I could nurse back to health, and when Vivian gleefully assures her that the coyotes in the canyon would eat that cat in one gulp, she offers us an endangered two-foot lizard. This makes Vivian get creative really fast and insist that as much as we’d love to have an endangered two-foot lizard in the process of shedding its mass quantities of scaly skin, our housekeeper has a pathological fear of reptiles.

  Then Andie Bennett texts to say that she hopes I have a really nice day, with a smiley face emoticon. I have the feeling my day isn’t exactly going to reach the level of smiley facedness, on top of which, all that concern makes me wonder if everybody else somehow knows how spectacularly horrible it is going to be and I am grossly underestimating the depth of the shit I’m in.

  And to remind me of the depth and consistency of that shit and how bad an idea everything I thought would be a good idea is, Charlotte Ward actually phones the house.

  She does such a good Queen of the Universe impersonation that Vivian doesn’t even try to screen her out; she just hands me the phone. And even though Lisa and Anita have spent the past three hours calling to be wildly encouraging, it is pretty clear that some people aren’t looking forward to being in the same room with me as much as others.

  Council, for reasons clear only in Charlotte’s twisted mind, does not seem too eager for me to show up. But given that Billy is on Council, I am not exactly eager to give it up.

  The only reason I am even on Charlotte’s damned decorating committee is because I heard Mr. Piersol’s lecture about leaving your mark on Winston School once too often and I must have been temporarily hypnotized.

  And all right, it was unlikely that I was going to leave my mark by leading the charge to adopt a sister school in Botswana. So just after the image of the Slutmuffins tagging the hell out of Winston receded—their mark being giant designer logos and discarded cans of spray paint—I figured that my mark could be the permanent retirement of the vile pink, black, and silver color scheme from all school events involving crepe paper and tinsel.

  And after I miraculously got the decorating committee to go along with this, I would change the name of Spring Fling to something reasonable. Something that didn’t rhyme or make Billy sneer.

  I admit I had visions of walking into this reimagined, nicer dance, resting my head on Billy’s shoulder, and swaying to vintage tunes, mostly “My Blue Heaven,” while he admired the superior color scheme of the renamed event.

  Unfortunately, when I raised the idea of a renamed event, the most popular alternative was Courtney Yamada Phillips’s suggestion of Spring Hop, which was kind of the same, only worse. So I went back to shutting up on Council except to support Billy when he talked, which wasn’t much. He wasn’t even on the decorating committee.

  “How are you feeeeling?” Charlotte drawls into the phone, her lips so close to the receiver that her breath rasps and puffs as if she were spitting into my ear.

  “I’m getting there,” I say.

  “Did you get the flowers? The committee sent you peonies.

  Andie says you like stuff like that, right?”

  “They were nice. Thanks. I was kind of out of it.”

  “I heard. Billy says you don’t want to talk about it, so that’s cool.”

  “Cool,” I say. Why she would want to talk to me unless she wants me to jump out of bed and run down to Kinko’s to pick up giant boxes of dance flyers is a mystery of life.

  “So. I’m calling because the committee has to meet and finalize the plans for Fling and I don’t want to stress you out or anything . . . so I was wondering how you want to play it.”

  How I want to play it is to show up and explain in detail why her design choices suck and her color scheme sucks and get her voted down and then make fun of her to Billy, which is as close to addressing the extreme folly of him being with a Slutmuffin—his previous companions of choice—as I will ever get.

  But abandoning fun fantasies and moving right along, I am more than happy to continue to keep my mouth shut in my role as designated Council slave as long as none of the Muffins tells Billy I suck.

  And I say to myself, Hey, Gabby, look at you! You are right back into high school and your mind is working perfectly. You’ve got your game on. You can totally play this. Because: Life with the Slutmuffins really is a lot like a rank game of somewhat challenging, backstabbing Trivial Pursuit.

  “What do you mean?” I say, pseudo-sweetly, noticing that it is getting harder to breathe.

  “I mean, I know you must have work piling up and SATs are coming up and everything, so I don’t want you to feel like the committee is just one more thing you have to do.”

  “Like an anchor around my neck?”

  “Yeah, like that,” she says somewhat too eagerly.

  Long pause. Long, long pause. I am mostly focused on inhaling and exhaling.

  “Nope,” I say. “It’s fine. Just save me a seat and I’ll be there when I get back.”

  “So, like, when’s that going to be?”

  I know she knows, but I say it anyway, I say, “Tomorrow,” just to see if I can hear that little snort noise she makes. An
d I can. I do.

  When I get off the phone with her, it’s like I’ve gone completely numb and breathing doesn’t help.

  I am so not ready for this.

  XLIII

  WHICH IS WHEN BILLY JUST COMES OUT AND ASKS if I’m sure I can do it.

  When I’m completely not sure.

  And I go, You know you want this. Just be somewhat cheerful and get this over with before he figures out that you’re pathetic. Then I simulate normal as fast as I can.

  pologuy: earth to g. so can u?

  gabs123: can i what, go to school? i’ve been going to school since i was 3½.

  pologuy: don’t get cute g

  gabs123: u never complained about how cute I was before nash.

  pologuy: i’ve been working on this. i can keep the guys and the andies and the muffins off ur back guaranteed but u have to stick to the plan with everybody else

  And I go, Just. Stay. Cheerful.

  gabs123: how hard can it be to say i don’t want to talk about something i don’t want to talk about? what r they going to say? hey gabs i saw u at that party and man were u drunk? way to drive a car into a tree?

  pologuy: U HAVE TO CUT THEM OFF BEFORE IT GETS THERE. close them down. all my people know not to bother u but u have to watch out for the loose cannon dorks

  He sounds seriously seriously worried.

  And I’m thinking, Maybe I should be feeling more seriously worried instead of just numb.