gabs123: exactly. i’m not going to their lame meeting. too early anyway.
pologuy: smart move. shit. gotta bounce. AP tutor barking at the gate. FML. miss u
LII
WHEN I AM SITTING IN FRONT OF MY COMPUTER screen, I can somewhat get myself to feel that pologuy is missing gabs123. But seeing Real Live Billy grinning his way across the ordinary people’s lawn to get to the Class of 1920 Garden, his back to me, looking over his shoulder, his eyes skimming the top of my head, which prickles as if I could feel the very tips of his fingers along my part, is not getting any easier.
The Aliza and Billy sightings—which he says, in his backhanded way, mean nothing because I’m the one, that it just makes the world at large and his mother in particular believe that he’s down with his probation and not with me so maybe someday she’ll loosen her Satanic grip and we can sneak around—are still miserable. And the Courtney Yamada Phillips and Billy sightings, even though I guess they prove he isn’t really with Aliza Benitez, which is supposed to make me feel fine when he pats Aliza between the knees for godsake, are not much better.
Courtney, even though she’s a sophomore in the very firm, very young flesh category, is in my Honors Spanish class and I have to watch her heated up and panting about him with Rose Lyons when she comes racing in from the semi-hidden nook behind the teachers’ lounge.
“He is so hot,” Rose says.
“Awesome,” Courtney says.
Awesome. Great. He’s publicly nibbling lips that say “awesome” constantly.
And I go, Suck it up, Gabriella. Wake up and smell the chocolates. You’re the one.
But it is actually a relief to go into painting with Mr. Rosen, who at least doesn’t want to have a meaningful dialogue about anything, and whose studio windows face the soccer field so there is no risk of a Billy sighting. Even though I never feel like I’ll ever paint anything good enough for Mr. Rosen, at least I’m better than everyone else in there, and he seems to be fine with that.
Mr. Rosen, you have to figure, is just going to keep sitting there in by-permission-only advanced painting, not noticing who I am, having no idea whatsoever about what’s going on with me apart from my portfolio.
Not that we’re actually painting in Mr. Rosen’s eleventh grade painting class. Since last semester, we aren’t. Just before Christmas break, Mr. Rosen told us that we sucked and we had to start drawing again before we were ready to paint because we had no sense of form. Therefore, we’ve spent this whole semester drawing a succession of objects Mr. Rosen throws on the little tables in front of us, and there are no paints in sight.
Every couple of weeks, a delegation of earnest artsy girls goes up to Mr. Rosen’s office where he sits with his eyes closed listening to music and looking as if he has a headache while they explain in detail how they really really feel about not getting to paint. According to Sasha Aronson, who is head of the petition brigade, no matter how respectful and convincing they are, Mr. Rosen never even opens his eyes.
So naturally, the minute I get back from my vehicular crime spree, Mr. Rosen, who you would think you could rely on not to make a big production about anything short of pure genius, makes a big production out of giving me back the paints. Not the acrylic paints, either.
Oils.
You’d like to think that mixing oil paint on a palette and painting my little heart out would just magically take my mind off things and make everything, if not A-okay, maybe semi-okay. And that I would create gorgeous, angsty art.
But I don’t.
I spend a week trying to get the light right on this little table with the remnants of a tea party or something (so not my idea, and the pastry is starting to get moldy and change color) and it just keeps getting grayer and darker until I’ve completely scrubbed any possibility of life off the canvas. I feel like my paintbrush is going to jump out of my hand, slide down the leg of the easel, and hop out the door in protest.
At least it gives me something to do that doesn’t involve scanning the horizon for Billy Nash, both wanting and not wanting to spot him.
Finally, Mr. Rosen comes up behind me and stands there for about five minutes.
“I think you’re finished with this,” he says. He bundles up the junk on the little table in the tablecloth and takes the paintbrush. Then he scuttles over to his desk and takes out a little framed sketch. Real, and from the Renaissance, a woman sitting in a chair, draped in diaphanous cloth, just done in pencil, perfect.
“Copy this,” he says, propping it up.
So great, now that I’m a juvenile delinquent who can’t even paint a moldy croissant with rancid butter, Mr. Rosen is preparing me for life as an art forger. Just great. At least it would give me something lucrative to do, something to do other than being at Winston School, where this little sketch is the only real piece of art worth forging.
“Don’t think,” he says. “Just draw. You’ll feel better. You want music?”
He goes back to his desk and sticks a tape into the world’s most primitive tape deck. “Young people like this, yes?”
And this is how, for the first time in history, everybody in advanced permission-only painting has to listen to odd German techno all period. And how I find out I’m a really good art forger. Which at least gives me something to do other than visualizing Billy pawing other girls.
LIII
“EXPLAIN THIS TO ME AGAIN,” ANITA SAYS, EATING her icy pop at break. “How is it that Courtney Phillips going down on him in the parking lot is supposed to make you feel better?”
“Anita! Just because she’s gnawing on his face—”
“Sorry, Lisa.” And then to me, even though they can see that I’m tearing up over my icy pop, “Are you completely demented? He’s not with other girls to be nice to you and prove he’s not with any one of them, he’s with other girls because he’s an incorrigible player.”
“SAT word?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t one. And it doesn’t prove he’s not with Aliza, either, it just proves he’s a jerk.”
All right, so they despise Billy and there isn’t much I can do about it.
“Why don’t you just tell him how it makes you feel,” Lisa says. (Right, that should work.) “Tell him to stop it.” (Even better.) “He says he’s still your boyfriend so it’s not like you don’t have a hold on him.”
But that’s exactly what it’s like—like I am powerless and pathetic. Like I’m powerless and pathetic and ridiculously perky and give really good IM. And even repeating undying love to myself every time I inhale and every time I exhale can’t completely drown out what I’m thinking.
And I say to myself: Gabby, if you keep this up, you’re going to have a whole lot of bad self-esteem to make Ponytail happy. But perhaps you should avoid sharp objects and thinking.
pologuy: whatcha doing?
gabs123: not a lot. spanish homework.
pologuy: same. do not take AP spanish language. slow death by magical realism. even tutor says so
gabs123: is your tutor living there now?
pologuy: now now. we all have our helpful professionals on the payroll. i’m stuck with him for company. ag is turning me into a hermit. boy needs companionship
gabs123: not a complete hermit. i see u with ur little harem. courtney thinks ur awesome
pologuy: r u saying i’m not awesome? well, i saw u with your scary little witches coven. again
gabs123: that is so not funny again. not witches, bff’s. u know this.
pologuy: no seriously. they look like they want to run me down in the parking lot
gabs123: lucky for u they don’t have cars.
pologuy: gabs! when did u get so harsh?
gabs123: when did u get ur harem?
pologuy: this is a joke right?
gabs123: duh. i totally understand. i do. u know i do. i’m just getting punchy with all this online cavorting. i miss actual cavorting.
pologuy: me too. miss u Miss G.
ga
bs123: i’ve gotta go to sleep. no more irregular verbs. xx
pologuy: u know it
I do know it. But as it turns out, some of the things I know are less true than others.
Because while I am sleeping, drifting through space in solo orbit so far away from actual events on planet Earth that I can’t see what everyone is doing well enough to understand anything at all, while I am dozing off thinking that nothing worse could happen, not even noticing when six thirty a.m. comes and goes, I am undone by a rhyming sock hop with poodle skirts.
part three
LIV
IT IS ALL JUST SO STUPID BUT I AM COMPLETELY unhinged. It’s like having an emotional breakdown over an advertising jingle about aftershave or having your heart ripped out by the Pillsbury Doughboy. And it isn’t even the Spring Fling itself, the actual dance, which, when you think about it, has all sorts of genuine dramatic possibilities:
Maybe Huey would grope Lisa, maybe he would play with the buttons of the horrible sombrero sweater that her mom is so attached to, and she would experience extreme moral conflict over slightly spiked punch.
Maybe Anita would break out of her house, show up with her bra straps hanging off her shoulders, and introduce us to the cute French guy from Marseilles who, having renounced his priestly vocation, was holed up at the Bel Air Hotel feeding torn up croissants to the black swans and waiting for her to run away with him.
Maybe I’d lose my mind and go stag and maybe I’d see Billy across the room and maybe we would slow dance to “My Blue Heaven” and we would both remember who I am, swaying to Elvis, and maybe he would want me.
What does not cross the mind of the orbiting space cadet, my mind, is that he would nominate himself for King of Fling and not even mention it to me, and Aliza would run for Queen of Fling with not one single other Slutmuffin nominating herself, big conspiracy, so you know that the crowned and anointed couple dancing to “My Blue Heaven” is going to be pologuy, live and in person, with Aliza Benitez and not gabs123.
Thank you, Brynn McElroy, for your highly organized and complete Fling committee minutes, distributed to all committee members, present or innocently sleeping through Charlotte Ward’s planning extravaganza.
“This sucks,” Anita says. “This is a bit much even for him.”
We are sitting in the Winston School darkroom, Huey’s private domain, where we all go sit in the dark so we can eat inside somewhere other than the cafeteria on rainy days, with the glowing red lights and timer buzzers going off and Huey bouncing around hanging up wet, newborn photos by little clothespinthingies while Lisa gazes up at him and Anita and I try not to look at each other.
Only it’s sunny, and we’re hiding out in there because I know if I have to see Billy with anybody else, I’m not going to survive the day.
“Wait a minute,” Huey says, dipping photographic paper into a tub of chemicals. “Are you saying you still want this guy to be your boyfriend?”
“Leave her alone,” Lisa says. “She’s having a hard enough time.”
“I’m just saying, I think you’d have a lot easier time if you’d take care of yourself. Like if you’d take care of all the legal things . . .”
“Huey,” Lisa says. “She doesn’t want to talk about the legal stuff. Leave her alone.”
“I am taking care of the legal stuff!” I say. “I’m doing everything my lawyer says I’m supposed to be doing. Punctiliously! I’m staying away from Billy and I’m going to therapy and I’m having a meeting with the Probation Department and I’m pretending to get over my so-called drinking problem and soon I’ll have my record expunged, okay?”
“Not okay!” Huey shouts.
Lisa says, “Don’t raise your voice, Jeremy.”
Huey says, “I’m talking to Gabby.”
Lisa and Anita sit planted in their folding chairs.
Huey crosses his arms. “I need to talk to Gabby. Do you mind?”
This is a new, improved and updated, Ferocious Huey that I’ve never seen before. I have the feeling this is the most conflict he and Lisa have ever had in their entire relationship, such as it is—that she refuses to get up out of her chair. So I say it’s all right with me and watch Lisa and Anita march out of the darkroom, glaring back at him.
LV
HUEY SAYS, “I THINK YOU NEED TO SEE ANOTHER lawyer.”
“I already have a lawyer,” I say. “What’s your point?”
“I mean a lawyer who isn’t related to Billy Nash,” he says. “Also, I think you should see a lawyer who isn’t brainless.”
“I don’t see how having Albert Einstein for a lawyer could help,” I say. “The facts kind of speak for themselves.”
“Well, they don’t have much choice, do they?” Huey shouts at me. “Given that you don’t seem interested in speaking for yourself!”
“What am I supposed to say, Huey? Give it a rest. I don’t remember anything.”
“Right,” says Huey, hitting himself on the forehead with an exaggerated, dopey look on his face, his tongue hanging out. “You don’t remember anything! How could I forget?”
“Duh. And I don’t see how anyone could fix it at this point even if I did remember. I just have to pretend I have a drinking problem and then I have to pretend to get cured and then I have to pretend to grow and change and then my record gets expunged and it all goes away. Even a brain-dead lawyer could figure out this one.”
Huey looks amazed. “Is that what your lawyer told you?” he says. “Did someone actually tell you that that’s what you’re supposed to do? This is almost as mind-blowing as the part where you don’t have a drinking problem. Did he tell you that too? What is wrong with you?”
“Stop it, Huey. Just stop it! The lawyer thinks I’m fixing my so-called drinking problem and then he can feel all warm and fuzzy about himself when he gets my record expunged. It’s not rocket science.”
“Did your lawyer even ask if someone checked the steering wheel for fingerprints? Or did Agnes Nash pay him off before he got to that question?”
“Why would they want to do that? There’s no big mystery. It’s not like I was wearing gloves.”
Something in the darkroom buzzes and Huey starts swooping around sloshing things in big pans of liquid. The only light is this eerie red color and it looks as if he is a red angry burning spirit.
Huey hangs up two sheets of paper with clothespins and he sits down again and he says, “All right. How much do you really remember?”
I say, “Nothing. Nada, niente, zero, zilch, zip, zippity doo dah. This isn’t news. Everybody already knows this. Did you miss something when you were locked up in here playing with chemicals?”
“What everybody knows is that you’re saving Billy’s ass while he’s back with Aliza Benitez.”
“Are you insane? And he’s not really with her. He’s the one who’s saving my ass. In case you didn’t figure it out, it turns out that technically I stole his car. Just before I totaled it. For which the Nashes are not pressing charges. Colleges would love that one.”
Huey shoves his face so close to my face, my breath could have steamed up his glasses. “Don’t you remember anything?”
“No! Don’t you get it? No! I got hit on the freaking head when I wrecked Billy’s Beemer, just after I stole it! Why is this so hard for you to comprehend? I went spinning out drunk in the Valley, all right? There’s nothing to remember.”
Huey shakes his head. Then he takes me by the wrist and he pulls me out of the darkroom. He is such an exceptionally odd person, it’s hard to know what he has in mind.
Huey walks me through school and out to the parking lot and into his dopey-looking, ecologically good little car. People are staring at me the whole way. I’m not sure if this is because Huey is dragging me around by the wrist or because I’ve been crying so much that my eye makeup has run and I look like a raccoon.
A raccoon that’s about to cut sixth, seventh, and eighth periods.
LVI
WE DRIVE UP INTO THE HILLS TO
HUEY’S HOUSE, which is a giant tan stone château that some captain of industry brought to Bel Air stone by stone from France. It is the size of the Beverly Hills Public Library, and it has matching dogs, three tan mastiffs that come racing and panting up to the car to jump all over Huey and drool on the ecologically good paint.
“This certainly takes my mind off things,” I say, trying to open the car door while a large dog pushes on it from the outside.
“Down, Daisy!” Huey says, causing the dog to wag her giant tail and hyperventilate, but not to get off my door. “Yeah,” he says, “I live in a parallel universe.”
Over by the side of the house, I swear I see a lamb. Two lambs, just walking around eating the grass.
“Is there a shepherd?” I say, only partly a joke, since I figure that if there is a shepherd, he could maybe pull the dog off my side of the car.
“My mother does animal rescue,” Huey says. As if this isn’t already a well-known fact. Then he climbs out of the car and grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck.
We crunch up the gravel path toward the house with the three dogs and a really pushy lamb. The front door is so tall, it seems as if you would need the eighteen-inch keys from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to unlock it.
The inside of Huey’s castle involves a lot of sweeping, curved staircases and tapestries you could always use to tent normalsized houses when you spray for bugs and vermin. We climb up a bunch of these staircases while a uniformed lady follows at our heels, offering snack food. Through an open door on the way up, we see Huey’s mother in a room with a big table and cages and baskets, feeding what looks to be a tiny ferret with a baby bottle.
Where It Began Page 21