Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “You aren’t very observant, are you?” Huey says. “It’s lucky for you that your artistic interest is still lifes and ceramic bowls and not people.”

  “I observe people,” I protest. “I notice things.”

  Huey makes a face. “No offense,” he says, walking me into the outer photography room full of computers for digital pictures and the yearbook layout, all bright with buzzing light, “but if you noticed things, you’d be leading a completely different life.”

  Then he snaps a picture of me with my mouth hanging open.

  And it hits me: It isn’t that I don’t notice things. It’s that I don’t pay enough attention to the things I notice, as if the things I notice aren’t actually true or worth noticing. As if Billy was my boyfriend who cared about me. As if the people who actually do care about me don’t matter all that much, and the people who don’t like me, like me. As if drinking so much I couldn’t see or remember or feel anything isn’t a problem.

  But mostly as if I didn’t know I was Billy’s pathetic love slave.

  As if I didn’t know what everybody else had noticed all along and it makes perfect sense to the Andies and the Slutmuffins and even Huey and Lisa and Anita and everybody in the Western world that I’d toss my life out the window just so Billy could be on the water polo team at Princeton.

  Because I don’t even have a life to toss out the window. I was just Billy’s well-trained dog, his tail-wagging bitch.

  No wonder Billy went back to Aliza Benitez. At least she’s a human being. All right, a disgusting human being, but at least nobody ever accused her of not paying enough attention to all the things she had to know to be able to look out for herself.

  Or drinking so much that she careened beyond the point of just being plowed and swerved into the oblivious place of not noticing or seeing or caring or remembering or being the least bit able to take care of herself.

  Not like me.

  And it occurs to me that maybe I wasn’t 100% entirely lying when I copped to the teenage felon drinking problem. It just so wasn’t the problem the helpful helping professionals thought it was, so so not about peer pressure or an irresistible compulsion or an impulsive binge. It was pure, cold liquid escape from everything I so noticed but so didn’t want to notice. And I just so hadn’t paid any attention to it.

  “I should have stopped you,” Huey says. “Lisa says if I had any balls, I would have stopped you. She thinks I’m like a morals-impaired news photographer watching people in flames jumping out of burning buildings and not trying to catch them because it would mess up his photo op. I should have stopped you. I wish I had.”

  “So do I,” I say. “Duh.”

  “Are you going to do anything to him?”

  It isn’t as if I haven’t thought about this maybe constantly since hanging up on him, pictured the conversation, pictured myself screaming at him, screaming: You were supposed to be my boyfriend! You were supposed to care about me just a little! Pictured slapping his shining face . . . pictured myself crying and him holding me and him apologizing over and over and having make-up sex.

  The lameness of my fantasy life is truly horrifying.

  And I can’t even decide what the most twisted part is, the part where I can actually picture him being sorry for what he did to me, or the part where I can picture myself believing he’s sorry and just ripping off my clothes all glad to have him back.

  Even though I know who he is.

  Even though I more than notice and I ever so slightly don’t even care.

  Because: In the sorry, not-going-to-happen fantasy, I whip off my clothes for Billy just like that.

  And I know, even with Huey standing there gazing at me expectantly, waiting for me to wise up and do the right thing, I’m not going to do a damned thing about what happened.

  Because: Thank you, Billy, for pointing it out, there is no upside to nailing Billy Nash. Beyond pure vengeance, fun as that might be. But so what? After a bunch of drama, he would sink deeper into probation and maybe he’d have to toss his little water polo ball around a swimming pool in the Big Ten and not the Ivy League and so what? It’s not like four years at Giant Midwest State U is going to kill him, unless maybe he catches fatal cooties from someone with a dad in middle management.

  His mom would have to hide out in a spa with a mudpack on her face for four years, but by the time she got him into law school or biz school or whatever kind of school boys like Billy from the B’s are supposed to go to and she undid her seaweed wrap, no one would remember or care what a little teenage shit he’d been. Agnes would hire a consultant in the mid–five figures to rehabilitate his image.

  Rock stars and football players get to rape, pillage, and burn and five minutes later the guys are all rehabilitated and fixed and cured and rolling in endorsement contracts. All Billy did was set up a teenage drunk girl from the sketchy branch of her family; he was right back in the Bel Air Country Club for sure.

  As for the teenage drunk girl, I’d be more screwed than I already was if I went after him. That’s just how things work. I was about to be the Princess of Turning Your Life Around. I was halfway through my plan to make it all go away, the it being the stuff I didn’t actually do but got arrested for doing, but what the hell? I was skipping down the marathon path to pseudo-rehabilitation.

  Why stop now?

  The finish line is in sight; what’s the point of blowing it?

  To the kids who know I didn’t do the stuff I’m being rehabilitated for doing, and who think I knew all along: I am the reigning Princess of Not Ratting Out Your Boyfriend. Your really bad boyfriend who is sleeping with Aliza Benitez in your face and Courtney Yamada Phillips behind your back.

  This makes me even more heroic to the people who thought that I knew what they knew from the minute Billy did what I said I did.

  The so-called grown-ups think I’m a former drunk-driver car-thief who is embracing virtue with the assistance of a pack of brain-dead professional helpers. Everybody else thinks I remember what I don’t remember and that I said that I didn’t remember in order to protect the Golden Creep Boy.

  Billy is the only one who knew what was actually happening all along, who set it up and sat back and watched it unfold, and he wasn’t telling anyone: especially me.

  No wonder I get along with all the brain-dead helpers so well, I am so totally brain-dead myself. But then, how brilliant do you have to be to make a really good love slave?

  As far as I can see, the only way things are going to work out is if I keep my mouth shut. If I open it, if I rat out Billy, if I tell the truth and proclaim my actual innocence, I’m screwed. The brain-dead helpers will think I’ve been lying to them all along. The kids who thought I was the Joan of Arc of no-rat girlfriends will think I’m finally embracing the truth, only to them, me telling the truth will not be a good thing.

  No one wants Billy to go down. That was the point of all this. The only shred of status I still have at Winston School, evidently, comes from the fact that I look like the world’s best former girlfriend. And this being the case, there is not a whole lot to gain from making everybody think that I’m Satan the Billy-Slayer.

  All I want is to be out of there, to live through pseudo-rehabilitation, and, in the absence of a functional driver’s license, walk away. All I want is to be somewhere else doing something else that doesn’t have Billy or Winston School in it.

  LXVI

  “MR. ROSEN,” I SAY, BECAUSE HE HAS A LIFE OUTSIDE and beyond Winston and you’d think that he would somewhat get it, so I’m sitting in his office waiting for him to open his eyes. “Excuse me. I need to make a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?” he says, suddenly scarily attentive. “Is this the college talk? Elspeth, she makes the college talk, not me.”

  But I don’t want to have the college talk with Miss Cornish. I want to have the anti-college talk with Mr. Rosen.

  “Is there someplace I could go right now and do art and not be here?”

  Which is,
I realize, The New Plan.

  “Not after graduation?”

  “Right now, Mr. Rosen.”

  Mr. Rosen looks straight at me. “Olga Blau is at Santa Monica CC,” he says.

  Olga Blau is this ancient, genius potter. What was Olga Blau doing teaching at community college? I start to wonder if she’s gone totally senile or her hands shake or something.

  “Very fine art, Santa Monica College,” Mr. Rosen says, staring me down, looking straight through me. Because: Even though Mr. Rosen’s portraits bear only the slightest, most abstract resemblance to actual people, you could tell that the man can read faces.

  “This would be a good decision,” he says. And the way he’s looking at me puts to rest for all eternity any lingering question as to whether Mr. Rosen’s obliviousness extends to some of my less good decisions. “You work with Olga one year, maybe two, you transfer, work with Erik Wertheimer at Northridge maybe?”

  Eric Wertheimer is a double-genius ceramics god who gave us a demonstration freshman year.

  Except that nobody from Winston ever goes to Cal State Northridge, let alone transfers there from CC. It would be like waving a big white flag that says Defeated By Life. Spit in the Face of Opportunity. Failed to Measure Up. Fuckup of Unspeakable Proportion.

  And then I go, Screw it, Gabs. Just screw it. Don’t measure up. So what? You are so good at party limbo, slide under the bar. Then straighten up and walk away.

  And you can kind of see it: me sitting in a room with Olga Blau and a big lump of clay, even if she is bat-shit crazy and I have a scarlet F for failure stamped across my forehead. So what if what I actually want to do makes everyone else wince? Because, you have to figure, things would be looking up if I wasn’t the one wincing.

  “I could maybe do this,” I say. Because: You don’t need a high school diploma to sign up for SMCC. You don’t even need a GED to sign up for SMCC.

  “Only Elspeth will be very mad at me,” says Mr. Rosen. “Only she does the college talk so I won’t tell the artists drop out, go to Europe, learn something, no football, no goldfish, no wasting time!” He is lost in a sad fantasy of U.S. college life.

  “Europe?” I say.

  “Very fine academies, Europe,” he says. “Excellent art academies. The best. But all I’m hearing here is Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.”

  “Europe!” I say.

  “Very late in the year for application, Europe. You want me to make the email?”

  Duh?

  “Yes, please.”

  But just when I think I’ve limboed under the bar and past it, when the song has changed and I think the whole game is over, I turn around and there’s a lower bar that even my completely flexible and almost spineless back cannot negotiate.

  LXVII

  THIS IS HOW IT STARTS TO COME APART: STACKS and stacks of the Winston Wildcat yearbook in its sparkly green, fake leather-covered splendor, on tables along the low stone wall that separates the Class of 1920 Garden from the lawn where the ordinary kids like I am now hang out.

  Free dress day. A girl in a slightly orange tank top (homage to her previous, temporarily cute and kicky self) and a pair of ratty jeans sitting with her friends in the ordinary mortal section of the lawn sucking grape icy pops just before, without warning or permission, the naked, unembellished true story of her life appears on the last page before all the blank signature pages.

  One full page in black and white, nobody’s face blurred out.

  Songbird Lane.

  Me: drunk and passed out in the passenger seat.

  Billy: drunk and driving.

  Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez: drunk and hanging out of the convertible, peeling out toward the crash, toward the amnesiac lie of my dishonest future that was about to end, right here, right now, on the back lawn at Winston School.

  The lies I was telling everybody and the lies Billy told me and the lies I was telling myself all burned to ash in the crash I don’t remember, in flames I don’t remember, but toward which that black-and-white, midnight-blue Beemer is inexorably aimed.

  Huey’s picture with the date and time printed on the lower right corner in digital indictment.

  Who knew the Winston Wildcat was mined? Right now, only Huey and the yearbook advisor, Mr. Bell, who has already had his farewell party and is leaving for graduate school in journalism in the fall, who probably has no idea who Agnes Nash even is. And in about five minutes: everybody and their Uncle Rodney.

  Everyone is lined up and getting their names checked off the master list to get their yearbooks, cracking their yearbooks open and pulling out their sharpies and leaning in toward each other and signing each other’s books and leafing through looking for pictures of themselves and all their friends.

  Until they get past the How We Studied Together, Worked Together, Played Together, Healed the Bay and Cleaned Up the Beach Together sections and make it to the How We Had Secrets and Told Lies Together section at the very end.

  “Mother of God!” Lisa says, slamming the yearbook shut as if that would make it go away. “Huey is going to have to go into witness protection.”

  Huey plops himself down on the grass next to us, looking nervous but extremely proud of himself. Lisa leans over and kisses him on the mouth.

  “How could you do this?” I say. Very quietly, since by now three hundred people are turning to stare at me.

  “I pasted it in. It wasn’t that hard.”

  “No: How could you do this?”

  “I did it to bridge the generations,” Huey says. “Everybody under eighteen already knew, and now everybody over eighteen knows too.” I want to smack him, but Lisa kisses him some more, presumably no longer pissed off over his lack of balls. “Besides, everybody under eighteen already thought you were Saint Girlfriend. You said so yourself. This picture only shows what happened, it doesn’t say whether you knew or not.”

  “Except that now everybody over eighteen is going to believe that I did know and I’ve been letting them think the wrong thing all along,” I say, while Lisa and Huey smooch shamelessly and Huey pretends to be the badass king of PDA. “Everybody over eighteen is going to think that I’ve been lying to them all along. I’m screwed. Did you think of that?”

  “Mostly I thought of that tool Billy Nash leaving you there by the side of the road.”

  Oh. My. God.

  What’s going to happen to Billy now that he can no longer . . . no longer what? Lie to me? Lie to everybody? Set me up? Leave me dead drunk and unconscious, passed out with his car keys neatly tucked into my hand, in the grass by the side of Songbird Lane?

  LXVIII

  AT LUNCHTIME, VIVIAN SHOWS UP ON CAMPUS, standing outside the door of trig when class lets out. I just follow her out to the car, and there’s John riding shotgun with the Wildcat in his lap.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Phone tree,” Vivian says. “You should have told us. This is not the way we should have found out. You should have told us the truth.”

  “Why would I even tell you any thing? All you care about is how good I look and if I have a classy boyfriend and whether I get into some college I’m not getting into!”

  “How can you say that to me? Everything I did I did for you, I did it so you would be happy.”

  “Do I look happy?”

  “Don’t try to tell me you weren’t happy,” she says. “You had a very nice boyfriend who happens to be a Nash and you felt very good about yourself.”

  “Uh, Viv?” John says, not merely conscious but coherent. “The point is, he wasn’t a very nice boyfriend.”

  Vivian and John, apparently, do not feel qualified to discuss any of this, and the car is headed not home, where I thought the idea was for me to hole up and hide my head in shame, but is aimed toward Westwood where a highly paid professional is going to help me process it all.

  “I don’t want to freaking process anything,” I yell, “I don’t even know what that is! I just want to go home.”

  “You don’t have a choi
ce!” Vivian yells back. “You have to comply with the reasonable commands of your parent or guardian at all times.”

  “I do not! I’m not even on probation until the Probation Department finishes the freaking report.”

  “Well, you will be soon enough!”

  Only, John says, “No. I don’t think she will be on probation. She didn’t do anything.”

  And I go, “Thanks, Dad,” which is kind of new and different, and he slightly nods his head and you can tell he likes it.

  LXIX

  NATURALLY, PONYTAIL HAS THE YEARBOOK TOO. It is lying open on her desk in all its shiny green fake leather-covered glory. And given that there is an extremely fat old black French bulldog snoring in an open crate under her desk and a dog rescue brochure next to the yearbook, it’s not too hard to come up with a really good hypothesis about how that yearbook got there.

  Apparently Ponytail is so nonplussed by the Winston Wildcat that she isn’t playing shrinkish mystery games today.

  “Madeleine Hewlett brought this in this morning,” she says. “She barged right in and said she knew I couldn’t divulge whom I was treating but her son said I was seeing you so I might be interested in looking at the last page. And then she left.”

  “Right,” I say.

  Ponytail fidgets with her ponytail.

  “The dog,” I say. “I’m thinking that she probably said more than one sentence if she gave you the dog.”

  Ponytail says, “Oh! He’s a retired therapy dog.” She gives the dog a sideways, hello-doggie kind of sappy look before she pulls herself back together. “The woman is very persuasive. But we did not discuss you.”

  “Then you’re the only person in the B’s who didn’t. What’s his name?”

  “Barney.”

  I get out of my chair and start scratching the dog’s warm little head behind his oversized ears, but you can see he’s pretty serious about his retirement because he just opens his eyes, gives me a once-over, goes back to snoring, and ignores me.