Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  I had been back for two weeks, and in two weeks I had been so I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it-blah-blabitty-blah that I’d managed to avoid finding out the main thing, the simple fact that would make everything different and worse. I had missed the Big Kahuna of simple truths. The salient point, as Mr. Monahan would say in history. When you analyze the passage, ladies and gentlemen, be sure to identify that salient point. Underline that salient point. It will be on the test.

  I, on the other hand, seemed to have failed that particular test and unwittingly stumbled on the perfect method to evade all those pesky yet salient points. It was a simple three-part plan in which:

  1. you run your head into a tree when you’re not wearing a seat belt, erasing all relevant memory

  2. you share this unfortunate fact with your boyfriend, after which

  3. your boyfriend sets you up with the assistance of his helpful posse of adorable Andies, a marauding Slutmuffin, and the entire student body of Winston School.

  And Winston School, no-snitch Paradise, was the perfect spot for this simple plan. Everybody knew and everybody believed I would throw myself under the bus for Billy.

  Nobody believed I didn’t remember, so nobody told me the truth; they all thought I knew the truth already.

  No wonder Billy didn’t want me to have a meaningful dialogue with anyone.

  All of this admiration and bizarre respect I was getting was because of the unfounded Saint Girlfriend aspect of it and, here comes the salient point, Billy knew it all, knew every bit of it, and now he was spending his time “protecting” me by telling people I didn’t want to talk about it while sticking his hands in some other girl’s Wonderbra. Not because he loved me and liked me and wanted to protect me, but because he didn’t.

  Because I was completely expendable as long as it kept him out of trouble.

  This is my salient, impossible fact.

  LXII

  I SIT THERE AT ONE OF THE WHITE METAL TABLES on the back patio looking out toward the Class of 1920 Garden and there they are, dripping in salience and conspiratorial friendship. Andie, seeing me, smiles her big smile and gets up and comes prancing up toward me, waving something orange at me. You could see Billy trying to keep her there and frowning, turning his head away.

  “Hey, Gabby,” she says.

  She looks so adorable and harmless and completely evil. And she is giving me PEZ. Not just a candy, a whole Pebbles Flint-stone PEZ dispenser. It’s like giving me presents is the adorable, harmless-looking, evil girl’s new hobby.

  “It’s for you,” she says. Duh. There is no one else here. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Just stop it, Andie,” I say. “Go back to your garden.”

  Andie says, “I don’t understand. You were Pebbles for seventh grade Halloween. I thought you’d like it.”

  “How do you even know that?”

  “Yearbook,” says Andie, just beaming away. “I love yearbook. Huey takes very good pictures of us, don’t you think? I love Halloween. Don’t you love dressing up?”

  “Andie,” I say. “You have to go away.”

  “Billy keeps reminding me you don’t want to talk to me, but I just wanted to give you—”

  “What, a criminal record? Being cute doesn’t give you a free pass, Andrea! You might be cuter than Mrs. God but I know what you did and I don’t like you.”

  “What?” I can see the catatonic cry face coming on. Andie scampers off to get Andy, and I watch as Andy gets up and comes toward her with a Dixie cup of vin du jour directly from his dad’s wine cellar while Billy collects his things and just leaves.

  He sees me coming and he leaves basically for the rest of the day.

  Because I am following Andie back into the garden with a look on my face that Billy Nash has never seen before. Yes, in pursuit of the salient point, I get up and I walk across the ordinary people’s lawn and into the Class of 1920 Garden, which is almost empty because it’s so early, and I stand there as Andie slurps down the contents of her Dixie cup.

  “Do you want some?” Andy says, offering breakfast wine.

  “Haven’t you heard? I have a drinking problem.”

  “Right. Sorry,” Andy says. He rolls his head around as if his neck and shoulders were sore. “Sorry about everything.”

  “Gabby doesn’t like me anymore,” Andie says, by way of explanation.

  Andy looks horrified, maybe because Andie is sniffling and squinting and her face is getting splotchy, and maybe because the idea that a human being is walking the face of the Earth who doesn’t adore Andie is too much for him to take.

  “What every thing would it be that you’re sorry about?” I say. “The one where you set me up and then you gave me PEZ?”

  I so don’t want to be doing this.

  I so want to just live through to the end of semester.

  “What is she talking about?” Andie says, looking doe-eyed up at Andy as he stands there pouring himself wine out of his thermos.

  They look completely baffled, although guilty as hell.

  “I’m not saying I expected you to be my actual friends—”

  “I am too your actual friend,” Andie says. “Tell her.”

  And Andy runs his fingers through her hair and says, “What’s this about? It’s cool what you’re doing for Billy, but why are you mad at Andie all of a sudden?”

  “Were you just going to let this keep on going and never tell me and just hope I never found out?”

  “Okay, Gabby,” Andy says. “I feel really bad you’re the one who got caught, but what is this about?”

  So I tell them.

  “We thought you knew,” they chant over and over, like it is now the lyric of their special song.

  Andy, seeing the look on my face, in a vain effort to prevent further drama, says, “Truthfully, at first we thought it was a misunderstanding, and then we thought you knew.”

  “We thought you were like the coolest person on Earth throwing yourself on a land-mine-thingy to save Billy,” Andie says.

  “And your sorry little butt,” I say.

  Andie, dumb as Bambi, says. “What do you mean? Billy was driving.”

  “We were in the car,” Andy says quietly.

  “Do you mean we could get in trouble?” Andie asks, all googly-eyed.

  “Let’s see,” I say. “You dragged me out of the car I wasn’t driving and stuck the keys I didn’t steal into my unconscious hand and you totally set me up. Maybe you could get in trouble. No wonder you kept your mouths shut.”

  “What keys?” Andie says, looking up at Andy, who is staring at the ground. “What’s she talking about?”

  Andy says, “I swear it wasn’t like that. We pulled you out of the car because you were passed out and we were afraid it would catch fire. You were passed out before he skidded and you got really banged up. We didn’t want the car to blow with you in it, but you started to heave so we put you down. That’s all it was.”

  “Gross,” says Andie. Like she never heaved into a cardboard box in the back of the limo on the way back from semiformal.

  “Don’t forget the part where you ran away and left me there,” I say.

  “We just went to call Billy’s mom on his cell,” Andy says. “Because she’s a lawyer. And then we heard the sirens and we stayed out of sight. That’s all it was. It wasn’t personal. And I don’t know how the keys got into your hand because I didn’t put them there.”

  He thinks for a minute until his face takes on this amazed and horrified frown, and this time I can tell it’s not about whether I like Andie. “That sucks,” he says almost to himself, twining his fingers in her curls.

  They are so dumb and earnest and into themselves and slimy. Still, it is hard to picture the Andies exchanging looks and prying open my fingers and slipping the keys into the palm of my unconscious hand.

  It is hard to see them sitting down over a nice joint and going, “Hey, I know, let’s tell Gabby she stole Billy’s car. That’ll keep her quiet while we go to D
artmouth.” (Or in their case, while he packs up his lacrosse gear and goes to Dartmouth and she goes to Hanover, New Hampshire College of Fun and Games or wherever girls like that go.)

  It is hard to see Andie even understanding the whole complicated plot and it is hard to see Andy making color-coded note cards to explain it to her. How to set up Gabby: Memorize this.

  Probably he had figured it out by now, could have figured it out all along if he had given any thought to it. But why would he? He’s smart, but why would he even want to know?

  I didn’t even want to know.

  Because as bad as it is to be a drunken teenage felon, it’s worse to be a drunken heaving dupe.

  Billy’s drunken heaving dupe.

  LXIII

  I GO HOME ON THE BUS, I MARCH INTO MY EMPTY living room, I pour myself a glass of John’s Glenlivet, and I drink it straight up. Then I pour myself another one and in a seriously cheesy move, I throw the glass into the fireplace where it breaks into purple splinters, spraying a plume of scotch that smells a lot like a petroleum product across the room. And right on cue, before I can throw up or cry or pass out on the wet chaise, the phone rings.

  “So. Kaplan says that you remember part of it,” he says instead of hello. “That’s good, right?”

  And I think of what we’re studying in psychology, how when you’re shocked beyond what you can take, when your body is flooded with adrenaline, you feel like there’s a ten-foot, hulking grizzly bear blocking your path.

  That’s how I feel.

  And you have to wonder if there’s some chance that Billy developed a Problem, such as terminal idiocy, when I wasn’t watching. Or if the fumes from the scotch are making me hear voices through my cell phone.

  You have to wonder if we’re handing off fists full of terminal idiocy like a hot potato, first I had it and now that I am irrevocably smartened and wised-up, he has it instead.

  Now he has it and he wants to pass it back to me only my hands are already burned and not exactly open and extended in his direction.

  “How come you’re phoning me?”

  “Gabs, this is important.”

  “Important to who? Important that you don’t admit anything in writing?”

  It isn’t even a question, that’s how obvious it is. I want to strangle him. But still, I want him to be all sweet and sorry, all Imaginary Boyfriend Billy so I can keep on being Delusional Girlfriend Gabby. And even though I can tell this is a sure sign of the proximity of the idiocy potato that I have my fists clenched against taking back, I can also tell that if he gives the slightest hint of wanting to be with me, they will open like pupils dilating in the dark.

  “What are you talking about?” he says in his low voice, so quiet you could almost take it for sincere. “I’ve been messaging you online continuously since you got out of your coma.”

  There, that sounded almost boyfriend-like, except for the part where you’d expect his lawyer to write a better script for him. That and the pesky, not-true aspect of it.

  “I was never in a coma,” I say, exerting all possible self-control to make my teeth not chatter, that’s how hard I’m shaking.

  “Well, that’s not what your mother was telling people.”

  “Jesus, you’ve got it all figured out. Every angle on this. You’re freaking amazing.”

  “Not, I assume, a compliment?”

  “Sorry. No. Not.” And then: How could you? How COULD you? HOW COULD YOU? Screaming in my head, in my throat, and just behind my mouth. And I know with absolute and complete clarity, if I let it out, that’s the end of it, of some powerful, unnamed scary it, the end of something, and I have no idea what could possibly replace it, or if my body would just implode, cave in on the vacuum left in there at the former location of my lame, ripped-out heart.

  “Listen,” he says. “I care what happens to you. I risked my probation to get you out of trouble. I walked you through every step. I snuck out to see you. Don’t you see that?”

  “Well,” it is as if my lack of anger-management skills is eclipsing my lack of discernment-in-boyfriend-selection skills without me having to exert any good judgment whatsoever. “Let me be the first to point out that you wouldn’t have had to sneak around to see me because it wouldn’t have violated your probation to see me if you hadn’t made up your bullshit story about what I did.”

  “Only, I would have been seeing you when you visited me in jail. Don’t you get it? Nothing bad was going to happen to you, first offense, cute girl from the B’s. And I knew you wouldn’t have let anything bad happen to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you would have remembered, I knew that you’d take care of it.”

  And even if you’d been pelted by idiocy potatoes, even if you couldn’t think your way out of a bag full of a hundred pounds of moron spuds, you could tell this was probably the truest thing he’d said to me probably ever.

  “So you just lied to me and you got everyone else to go along with it? That was the plan?” I say.

  “Because you object to lying?”

  “Where are you even going with this, Billy? I’m the one who got duped into thinking a lie was the truth. What am I supposed to do with that, anyway?”

  There is a long pause and then he says, “You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut.”

  “What, are you threatening me?”

  “Jesus, Gabs. I don’t know where you got that. All I’m saying is you’ve got a whole lineup of legal people who think you’ve been telling them the truth all along. If you change your story now, they’re going to think you’ve been lying to them all along.”

  “Billy—”

  “I mean it, Gabs. No one is going to believe you. They’ll think you’re just out to get me because I’m back with Benitez.”

  “Billy—”

  “Give it up. Like you didn’t notice? Maybe we should talk or something. Castle?”

  Because: Knowing me, you’d think I’d go. Because I want to go. Because I almost go. And I say to myself, Gabby, do not open your hand and take back that potato. Do not. Just ask yourself what fairy tale this is, and who this guy is, now that he’s not the prince.

  Now that I’m not the princess.

  Now that we aren’t going to live happily ever after until graduation.

  And I hang up the phone.

  LXIV

  THEN I PICK UP THE PHONE AND CANCEL THE ENTIRE week of Ponytail, unlike the last session that I just didn’t show up for, because what am I going to say to her? She can leave all the cryptic, where-the-hell-are-you messages she wants. I don’t want to talk to Billy and I don’t want to talk to her. I want to talk to my real and actual friends.

  “Thank God,” Lisa says as she plops on my bed. “I thought you were never going to speak to me again. I am so sorry. We called your house like fifty thousand times.”

  At which point, Anita shows up with emergency fudge.

  “You talked to Huey,” I say.

  Lisa says, “We thought you knew. I swear to God, we never would have let this happen if—” She kind of peters out, tearing the fudge into little, tiny pieces.

  “If what?” I say. “If goddamned what? You’re supposed to be my best friends. What, did you think I was lying to you?”

  Anita says, “We thought you were protecting Billy. You kept saying you didn’t want to talk about it. It kind of made sense.”

  “It would have made more sense if you believed me.”

  But I knew, I absolutely knew, it did make sense.

  “Billy thinks I would have done it anyway if I’d remembered. He thinks I would have lied my way right into juvie for him.”

  “What a self-serving asshole,” Anita says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But isn’t that what you thought I was doing, pretty much?”

  That one just sits there.

  “It’s not that we thought you were lying lying,” Lisa says finally. “It’s more like you never tell us anything. And you were so into Billy.”r />
  “As if you ever tell me anything!” I say. As if I were some unnaturally silent sphinx and they’re two all-star blabber mouths. “It’s not just me. Like, are you doing it with Huey?”

  “I’m not even talking to Huey,” Lisa says.

  “How come?”

  Lisa starts rolling the torn up fudge into balls. “He was right there,” she says. “He could have stopped you anytime for hours. He was taking close-ups of you. What kind of friend does that?”

  “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw fudge,” Anita says, stacking the fudge balls in a pyramid. “We could have stopped, you know, what happened next.”

  “We should crush Billy Nash,” Lisa says.

  “It’s this stupid school!” Anita says. “We should burn it down for community service.” Four and a half years of watching Slut-muffins having a wonderful time, while not being allowed to date or go to kickbacks, dances, or unchaperoned parties, or hang out with evil American boys, has finally gotten to her. “I’d leave tomorrow if I wasn’t two days away from a five in AP Bio, which I need for Cal, and it would screw up my plan.”

  Given that I’m not two days away from AP exams in anything, it’s hard to think of why I’m not taking off tomorrow. Except that being a disorganized person whose life is unraveling in a festival of messy loose ends, I don’t have any plans at all and no place to escape to.

  LXV

  “LISA SAYS YOU WANT TO LEAVE,” HUEY SAYS. HE IS messing with chemicals in the darkroom where I am hiding out avoiding Billy, which is totally unnecessary since Billy is doing such an excellent job of avoiding me. “She says you don’t want to do senior year.”

  It is true that my idea of a bearable future does not involve being a Winston senior, having a big old bittersweet year of pre-nostalgia just before embarking on our big Three B true-life college adventure.

  “You still talk to Lisa?” I say because, even now, I’m still the mistress of deflection. “I thought you had The Big Fight.”