Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “I can imagine how shocking this must have been for you,” she says.

  “My friend showed me the picture last week, but yeah.”

  “So you’d known for several days before it hit the press, so to speak. . . .”

  Then I stop scratching the dog and I just look at her, and it hits me that even with the vast amount of stuff I didn’t tell her in the hospital and the even more vast amount of lying I had done in here, starting with why I couldn’t go to AA and moving right along, she believes me.

  She believed me all along.

  The Do Not Trust Therapist tape loop is still going like the annoying, disembodied voice that tells you to please take a ticket when you pull into an automated parking structure, even after you already took a ticket, when you’re already driving through the open gate. Billy’s voice: Do Not Trust Therapist.

  Oh yeah, thanks for that.

  The gate is open. I start to talk. Lame as it is, I pretend the empty chair is Billy and I scream at the empty space where he’s supposed to be sitting for fifty-five minutes.

  LXX

  THE ACTUAL BILLY IS GONE.

  Nobody sees him after morning break and by that night, his Facebook page is down and his email bounces. He doesn’t show at Fling, and Jack Griffith is drafted into being king at the last minute.

  Attempts to contact Billy to find out when he’s planning to show up are in vain. His cell phone says that the number is not in service, please check the number before redialing. By the end of the week, Andy Kaplan says that Billy is in boarding school in Western Massachusetts and he says he’s sorry.

  “How?” I say. “I thought he went dark.”

  “He borrowed some other kid’s cell phone.”

  Andie grabs Andy’s arm. “Why didn’t he use that other kid’s phone to call Gabby himself?”

  This is not a rhetorical question.

  You can tell that even though Andy knows the answer, he doesn’t have the heart to explain it to her. You can tell that the answer makes him sad and uncomfortable, but not sad and uncomfortable enough to hang up when Billy calls him on the other kid’s phone.

  What was I supposed to say, that it was okay? It wasn’t.

  That I forgave him? I didn’t.

  That as good as I was at swearing at empty chairs, the thing I wanted most was to be able to go back to pretending that I was an adorable hot girl and he was my boyfriend who loved me, which made even my therapist look at me as if I were a hopeless case? It wasn’t my drinking problem or my closed head injury problem that was interesting to her all of a sudden—it was my Total Evasion of the Truth Problem. How much I wanted things to go back to the way they were even though I knew, I completely knew, that things were never really ever like that.

  Andie says, “Well, he should have called Gabby. I’m sorry,” she says, looking over at Andy. “I know he was your best friend, but he isn’t very nice.”

  And I think, How is it that Andrea Bennett gets it but somewhere deep, somewhere that seems impossible to change, I don’t?

  LXXI

  “IS THIS WHAT HAPPENED?” MR. PIERSOL ASKS, thumping on the Wildcat. “Or is this one of those photoshopped dealies that’s someone’s idea of a joke?”

  Everyone in the picture is there with a full complement of parents, except for, obviously, Billy.

  Agnes is there, glaring at everyone, white despite excellent makeup.

  “Jim,” she says to Mr. Piersol. “I don’t see how we can determine what happened, until we have forensic experts. Which I would be happy to provide. Why don’t we just collect these Wildcats here and now and hold them in a safe place until we can do that?” You can tell she isn’t going to be happy until she has all the Wildcats in a shed with some lighter fluid and a match.

  Huey says, “It isn’t photoshopped.”

  “Who authorized you to take that picture?” Agnes snaps. “Did a faculty member sign off on this? Did you get a release?”

  Mr. Piersol more or less cringes. “Well, Gabby,” he says, “we seem to have been operating here on some unfounded assumptions. And we know about assumptions—”

  “I really can’t remember,” I say very quickly in what turns out to be a very effective attempt to preempt an onslaught of Piersol clichés.

  “You can stop saying that now,” Vivian sighs. “The cat is out of the bag.”

  There it is. My own mother still doesn’t believe me.

  “Well,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking up from the orphan quadruped stowed in her bag. “I have a question, which is, how long have you had this picture, Hewbo?”

  Huey looks completely miserable. “When the time stamp says. That’s when I took it.”

  “You’re telling me you’ve had this picture since April and you didn’t think to bring it to us or the police because . . .”

  At the sound of the word “police” Agnes starts hyperventilating and Mr. Piersol’s body seems to gain uncharacteristic muscle tone. This is when Mr. Piersol suspends everybody in the room. He looks very proud of himself.

  You can tell that Huey is having to sit on his hands to restrain himself from taking a picture.

  Huey’s mom, who has abandoned all pretense of paying attention, now has a mole sitting in her lap unraveling her loosely knit angora sweater with its tiny paws.

  “I just don’t get it,” John says, not even slurred, from the back of the room. “If Gabby wasn’t suspended when we thought she was driving the car, why is she suspended now that you know it was her boyfriend who was driving?”

  Mr. Piersol looks perplexed, possibly because he’s never heard a complete, unslurred sentence from my dad before, and possibly because the sentence—the sentence with my dad defending me—makes so much sense.

  “What I don’t understand, Hewbo,” Madeleine Hewlett says, “is how you could have let your friend take the blame when you knew she didn’t do it.”

  At which point Huey and everybody else in the room who is under eighteen recites in unison, “I thought she knew.”

  I am already on my way out of the room when Mrs. Hewlett says, “I still don’t understand. Why on Earth would you think that?”

  LXXII

  I RUN INTO THE TEACHERS’ HANDICAP BATHROOM near the college counselor’s office, the only place at Winston School where you can lock the door and actually be alone. I turn on the water and the fan and then I wait to start crying, but I don’t. Weeks of crying like a total slob, and now there’s nothing left.

  I stare at myself in the teachers’ handicap bathroom mirror, and I look so strange and so not like myself in all that opaque makeup. Clearly, it’s time for something new, but the thing is, I have no idea what new thing that will be.

  I put my hands under the cold water and I splash it on my face, not really thinking about it, and the makeup starts to dissolve in sticky clumps. I start to wipe it off, a little at a time, until there are patches of naked skin, mostly beige, some not, some still turning the colors skin turns after it gets pummeled by an imploding car, air bags, and a eucalyptus tree. I look like myself, only slightly bruised. Which is to say: I look like myself.

  Someone is banging on the door and I think that unless it’s a desperate handicapped person (which, if Winston had one, I would know about it) then it’s an extremely rude person who should go away, which I semi-nicely tell them to do.

  “But it’s Lisa!” she shouts over the fan and the running water.

  “Go away!”

  “Let me in!” If she doesn’t stop, she is going to attract attention and pretty soon there will be a platoon of helpful teachers helping her break down the door, which I crack open, and she squeezes in and turns the lock.

  “What happened?” she says. “I was looking for you and I saw you running.” You can tell she’s looking at my face, at the bruises, trying not to. Trying to lock her eyes into eye-contact-only mode, an eye-lock that won’t let them wander along my purple cheekbone and into the hollow of my yellow cheek.

  “Well, I might be suspended
. Or not. Everybody might be suspended. Or not. They were still duking it out when I left.”

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Yeah. Only when you touch it.”

  “How did I not know this was going on under your makeup?” she says.

  I say, “I don’t know,” but I kind of do. Then we just stare at me in the mirror some more.

  “I was just thinking, Billy did this to me. He got drunk and he stuck me in the car and he didn’t put a seat belt on me and he drove me into a tree. I just wanted to look at it. I never think about that part of it but here I am, and I’m such a pathetic loser, I hate him but I still somewhat want him.”

  There is something about saying it out loud that makes it worse but also better.

  Lisa rolls her eyes. “Maybe you’re just in love with the idea of him.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it’s his body.”

  Then we both start to laugh and Lisa flushes the toilet just to raise the noise level in there to drown us out because we can’t stop.

  “I am so lame.”

  “Totally pathetic,” she agrees, pulling out her stick concealer because my purse is in my locker. “You want some of this?”

  “You know, I’m good,” I say.

  “You don’t even know how good,” she says. “That’s why I was looking for you. You have someplace to go.”

  “Even if I’m not suspended, someplace out of Winston, that’s for sure.”

  “Way not to be pathetic. Drop out of school. Perfect.”

  “As long as dropping out doesn’t violate the terms of my impending probation and get me thrown in juvie, I am seriously out of here.”

  “How can you be on probation for something you didn’t do? I thought you said you have a lawyer,” Lisa says.

  “Ask Agnes Nash. She found him for me.”

  “Agnes Nash is going to burn in hell,” Lisa says, with the conviction of a truly religious person with a pretty clear idea of how the afterlife works.

  I find this extremely comforting, but not comforting enough to unlock the door and go deal with anything.

  “We have to go,” Lisa says. “People are waiting for you. Come on. It’s something good. Don’t you want to see Mr. Rosen smiling? It’s kind of frightening. I don’t want to give it away, but you really need to get out of here.”

  LXXIII

  THIS IS HOW IT STARTS OVER: AN ARTSY-LOOKING girl in a ratty smock is lying on her back on an unmade bed in a room she shares with a Polish watercolor painter named Paulina. Paulina is the only person whose Italian the girl can understand because Paulina has a vocabulary of maybe twenty-five Italian words and she says them all extremely slowly. Through the open curtains of their room, there are certain undeniable signs: the tile roof skyline of a Medieval city, the River Arno, and the sound of people laughing and talking in a language that is slowly becoming comprehensible.

  Paulina, who used to be a gymnast in her former life, has a suitcase full of skanky little outfits that involve a lot of leotards and cloth that looks like stretchy tinfoil with fringe. Under the smock, the girl has jeans and a black sweater. The girl and Paulina look pretty weird together in clubs, where Paulina can drink entire bottles of anything you put in front of her and still walk a straight line on her hands in skirts so tight they don’t succumb to gravity and uncover her upside-down butt.

  The girl, having been subjected to the world’s weirdest intervention by her three best friends and Andie Bennett—all of whom insisted that anyone who drinks so much that they black out and lose three and a half hours of a highly significant nature has a drinking problem (which she kind of already knew, but she wasn’t about to stop drinking because of it)—took a double dare to stay stone-sober for six months. This is somewhat easier to do in Italy than in the Three B’s because all you have to do here is point slightly to the left of your belly button and say “fegato,” which means liver in Italian, and everyone leaves you alone. Because (grazie to her genius art teacher who sent off her slides and attested to her high level art forgery and glazing skills that got her into this amazing art school) the girl turns out to be an art restoration fiend. And it would be kind of horrible to be drunk and debilitated and screw up some ancient priceless artifact. Not that they let her anywhere near ancient priceless artifacts.

  Yet.

  Anyway, having also accepted blackmail-ish double dares from Ponytail Doc before the woman would sign off on her Get Out of Probation Free card (actually, it wasn’t a card, it was a seriously thick legal document), and just to prove that she can totally do it, and because loving Billy Nash was seriously pathetic, the girl has three months, one week, and two days left before she can have Chianti with dinner, streak her increasingly sub-regular hair, or have a boyfriend.

  The likeliest candidate for this position is an architecture student named Giovanni who admires her ability to simulate priceless ancient artifact glaze and is almost supernaturally hot for a person who wears turtlenecks and is obsessed with Gothic churches. Although it’s hard to say, and probably it would be a good idea to learn enough Italian to be able to have a quasi-intelligent conversation with him and figure out whether he’s just another specimen of hot pond scum before removing any significant articles of clothing.

  It’s not that she’s a nun. It’s just that she is trying to figure out how to be me.

  Acknowledgments

  Brenda Bowen, because I always wanted an agent who was a goddess, and that would be Brenda. Her intelligence, literary sensibility, tireless attention to text, incisive suggestions for polishing the manuscript (“Incisive” and “polishing” are both understatements), and dead-on savvy made this happen.

  Jen Klonsky is the editor everybody prays they’ll get—smart, enthusiastic, intuitive, open, completely supportive, and able to see the forest and the trees and the leaves and all the tiny little acorns with perfect clarity. And the whole team at Simon Pulse.

  My husband, Rick, Best Husband Ever, who actually read every single version of every single chapter, listened to every draft, and managed to remain kind and constructive and helpful and funny even through the really bad ones.

  My kids, Laura and Michael, a writer and a filmmaker, who were raised in the B’s but turned out pretty damned great, and whose generosity and talents (and notes) I relied on all the time as I was writing this.

  Early readers Suzi Dubin, who gave me hope that I had, in fact, written a novel; Jen Weiss Handler, whose expertise helped me fit seventy-five unruly chapters together; and June Sobel, whose discerning feedback was invaluable.

  Electronic communication consultants: Sharla Steiman, Laura and Michael, Sarah Markoff, and Brian and Erik Becker. Thank you!

  I am hugely grateful to an emergency room doctor, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, two lawyers, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s traffic investigator, and two LAPD officers, whom I thank from the bottom of my heart, but who shall remain nameless.

  And thanks, Mom, for thinking I was a writer even when I wasn’t.

  Finally, this is a work of fiction. It is not a roman à clef. My kids are not in it, nor are their friends, or their acquaintances, or my friends or acquaintances, and the most striking thing I have in common with any of the characters (apart from my geography and the tiny fact that I spent a couple of years channeling Gabby Gardiner) is my affinity for Ponytail’s Italian shoes. Winston School does not exist, and anyone who has ever set foot at my kid’s high school can tell you that that isn’t it. I do wish Madeleine Hewlett existed, though, because I like her and I kind of want the one-eyed rescue cat.

  Leading me to my dog, Evan, who ate part of one of the drafts, but who sat with me during the entire writing process.

 

 

 
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