Текст книги "Where It Began"

Автор книги: Ann Redisch Stampler

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

XXXIII

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DRINKING A GREAT deal of scotch on the rocks when you’re alone in your bedroom is that, in addition to making you feel somewhat less preoccupied with the sorry state of your abysmal, completely wrecked life, it makes you uncoordinated and a sentimental sap and somewhat more stupid than usual.

Which might cause you to drink even more scotch on the rocks in order to take the edge off feeling stupid, et cetera.

So basically I sit on the edge of my bed hugging the ice bucket, drinking twelve-year-old Glenlivet and feeling like a moron. Vivian is getting over her traumatic afternoon in the Valley by getting her nails wrapped in Santa Monica and I, actually being a sentimental sap and also stupid, start rummaging through the Billy Nash memorabilia in the top drawer of my dresser.

There are movie ticket stubs and shells from the beach outside his parents’ place near Point Dume and a ratty wrist corsage that I probably should have pressed instead of shoving it whole into a drawer where the petals are turning into mini-compost.

There are little boxes that used to contain an assortment of Belgian chocolates that Billy bought for me only because he wanted the semi-sweet truffles and if he bought the whole box for me, he didn’t have to feel like a goof standing in line at Godiva Chocolatier buying himself romantic candy.

There is the Rule the Pool water polo booster baseball cap that seems like a good thing to be wearing only because by that point in the bottle, I am seriously judgment-impaired.

It seems like a good idea to ponder all the lined up little presents Andie Bennett has mailed me since the accident, and then it seems like an even better idea to kiss the little plastic Flower the Skunk figurine with the pencil sharpener embedded in its belly that she sent last week, only I don’t even think about how a person could nick her lip on the metal strip where the shavings get sliced off the pencil.

By the time Anita calls to see if I want her to come over so we can quiz each other on SAT words, I am impaired on several other dimensions too, and she says, “Are you all right? You sound awful.”

I say, “I’m fine.”

“I don’t know,” Anita says. “Are you crying? Should I come over?”

“I just cut my lip on a pencil sharpener. Don’t come over.”

You can hear Anita taking a breath. “Gabby,” she says, “if this is wrong, I’ll never bring it up again, but are you drunk?”

This seems like the most hilarious thing I’ve heard all day, which isn’t saying much. The only tiny scrap of self-control I have left staunches the impending giggle and leaves me sort of snorting into the phone.

“I’m not drunk,” I say, in a vain attempt to sound as if I’m not. “Maybe I went to the dentist so my tongue is numb.”

“I thought you were going to see that lawyer.”

“Maybe I went to the lawyer and the dentist. Did you think of that? Maybe I went to the dentist and the lawyer and a police station in freaking Reseda. Maybe I should go to sleep.”

“Because if you’re drinking, if it’s more than that one time, you need to talk to someone.”

“Anita, all I do is talk to people. And it was just that time and this time. And now I really have to lie down.” To demonstrate, I lie down and the Rule the Pool hat falls off onto the pillow.

“Do novocaine and alcohol even go together safely?” Anita says. “I’m going to look this up on the Internet. I’m going to text Sanjiv. Hold on.”

But before I have time to hold on, I am asleep.

XXXIV

IF YOU’RE A FAN OF IRONY, MS. FROST’S FIRST project for me, in the quest to look like I am halfway to being rehabilitated before the Department of Probation gets its hooks into me, is going to AA, and Vivian tells me about it when I am still lying on my bed next to the Rule the Pool hat, sauced.

I am pretty sure that Billy would appreciate the irony, but not only has he forgotten to mention AA in the first place, he has been exiled to his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito, sharing a room with his nosy little cousin and bereft of electronics, because Agnes had to go to New York on business and doesn’t trust Billy at home without heavy-duty adult supervision after it supposedly took him two hours and forty-five minutes to get to Kap’s house for the Spanish book, and given that his dad is about as present and as capable of providing supervision as John, except that his dad is MIA at Murchison Nash Capital rolling in enormous bundles of cash as opposed to passed out in the den.

Fortunately, Billy manages to convince his aunt that he can’t stay there for the whole three-day weekend because if he misses any more practice with the water polo team, he’ll end up benched and attending a giant state college full of riff-raff, and she has to let him go home.

“Just go,” he says, whispering into a prepaid cell phone that he bought at a mini-mart in Oxnard on his way back down the coast while his uncle’s driver pumps the gas and cleans the wind-shield and Billy hides out in the men’s room. “Just go this one time and don’t say anything. Just sit there. Keep your mouth shut and don’t get a sponsor. No sponsor, got that? Gotta go.”

What do you even wear to kid AA?

Vivian drives me down the hill and into Brentwood, and she drops me off in front. She seems perfectly happy to consign me to two hours in a room full of alcoholics. But it only takes me thirty seconds in the church hall before I am 100% sure that AA isn’t happening for me, even if it is in this very plush church with exceptionally nice-looking refreshments. As much fun and games as it might be to fake out all the sharing caring adults who want to help me solve my so-called problem, it doesn’t exactly seem realistic to bank on faking out a whole room full of kids with actual drinking problems.

I mean, it’s not as if their bullshit meters are nonfunctional because of an alcohol-induced stupor.

Not to mention, some of them look vaguely familiar and have pretty much the same Marc Jacobs flats and pseudo-military jacket that I have, and might actually turn up unexpectedly in my real life, and then what? My big night of drinking untold amounts might be filed somewhere in the Amnesiac Archives, but other than that, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not about to start lying about it in front of a large, sincere audience.

Not to mention my personal plan, the Gabs and Billy plan, is to suck up to my highly paid professional helpers but trot rapidly in the opposite direction with my lips locked if anybody else wants to Talk About Everything. This is an entire church filled with people who look like they’re dying to talk their little hearts out.

What am I supposed to do?

For maybe twenty-nine seconds, I think how probably half the other kids there are in the same stupid situation as me, got caught bombed at a party, downed a bottle of scotch in their bedrooms one time, and zap: Go Directly to Twelve Step. Do Not Pass GO. A stop along the way to getting their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Only then they open their mouths and pretty much no, they’re really into it. I feel like a sleazoid Peeping Tom hiding out in the bushes waiting to cop a peek of naked people through his neighbor’s bedroom window.

It is actually kind of sad. People who drink before school every day and spend first period sucking on mentholated cough drops to clean up their breath. And who look twelve years old. And feel like their lives have nothing to offer. And I’m thinking, No, you’re so cute, you could definitely get a boyfriend. You could end up like me, with a totally screwed-up life but, hey, no drinking problem.

This is probably the only problem I don’t have.

But no, here are people who can’t get out of bed or go to sleep without it. People who are incredibly proud they just spent sixty-eight days without it, even though they constantly want it and think about it all the time and show up at meetings where all they do is talk about it, and have to call up other kids to talk them out of using it.

And I really would have helped them stop it if I had any idea of how to get anyone to do anything. I’m sitting there thinking: You go, fourteen-year-old drunk boy, get a grip, go another sixty-eight days, call up your fifteen-year-old sponsor (if kids even get a kid sponsor which, thank you Billy, I don’t plan to stick around long enough to find out) and smoke a lot of cigarettes because if you think this is bad, wait until you grow up and it turns out you’re exactly like my dad.

And then I think, big revelation, giant whoop, silent You Go Girl from the helpful helping professionals who sent me to this godforsaken pastry smorgasbord and confession-fest: John is the alcoholic. Not me, John. Why isn’t he here?

But it doesn’t seem as if it would go over too well to explain that I just drink at parties a couple of times a week, not unlike everybody else at the parties except for the people who just blaze their way into oblivion with weed, and if I belong at this so-called meeting, then we might just as well sink the church into the ground under the sheer weight of the gazillion other kids who all get plowed at the same parties as me and, hello, they aren’t alcoholics either.

So maybe there are a couple of other places where I drink, such as at lunch in the Class of 1920 Garden, such as at meals other than breakfast where, give me a break, you really do have to be a drunk to drink anything other than a mimosa, which is at least appropriate with eggs. So send for more chairs. Enough so, say, the entire population of France (where they do drink wine with breakfast; I have personally witnessed this) will have someplace to sit in the Brentwood Unitarian Church.

But I don’t say this. Not to people who drink Stoli out of their thermoses in study hall at Paul Revere Middle School. I wish them well. All I want in life is to find some nice way to get out of there without anyone noticing.

Except, of course, that everyone is looking me over, waiting for an opportunity to spring out of their chairs and sidle up to me and make me feel all welcome.

I figure that hanging out in the ladies’ room for the next hour and a half would be a bit obvious and somewhat insulting, so I just sit there in my folding chair leaning as far back as possible without tipping over, not making eye contact with anybody, pretending to listen.

Every time another one of them starts talking, I glance up, very fast, and every time they stop, I wonder if this is when they’re going to shout out a big Kid AA howdy to all the new people—or for all I know, just me, for all I know, I am the only new person—and force us or just me or whoever to stand up and say something.

I just slink down further in my chair, sliding my eyes over every corner of the room, checking out the emergency exits just in case.

When it is over, I run out of there, not saying hi to anybody, just jumping into Vivian’s car and closing my eyes, light-headed and completely clammy.

XXXV

gabs123: i cannot go to AA anymore. get me out of AA. i mean it.

pologuy: shit aa. this is not good

gabs123: kill me now. i’m supposed to go all the time. i mean constantly. daily. i am not going to stand around and talk about myself. did u have to go?

pologuy: long time ago. tiny tot fake aa. i think i got kicked out

gabs123: how does a person get kicked out of tiny tot fake AA?

pologuy: i think i hit someone. doofus buddy geiss. hate that kid

gabs123: buddy geiss!!! wait. isn’t this supposed to b alcoholics ANONYMOUS? thus the second a.

pologuy: ok some doofus kid identical to buddy geiss. not hit. knocked over his chair when he was in it

gabs123: y?

pologuy: who the hell remembers back to tiny tot aa? maybe he took my donut

gabs123: i don’t know if i’m up for knocking over a doofus to get out of this. what do i do? i’m not a sharing caring gabfest kind of girl.

pologuy: and that is what we love about u

What we LOVE about you?!?!?!?!

gabs123: ?

pologuy: ok just tell ur social worker u can’t do it

gabs123: right. that’ll make her happy. frost is the one who’s making me go and she reports to my lawyer. it’s supposed to impress the hell out of probation. remember probation?

pologuy: think of something else to impress them. it’s not that hard. like i told u before. boo hoo and dig in ur heels. boo hoo queen frostine I can’t go to aa because . . .

gabs123: because y?

pologuy: it could b anything. b creative. try again. boo hoo queen frostine i can’t go to aa because . . .

gabs123: if anyone sees me there my name will be mud all over candyland? did u know mudd was some guy who supposedly helped john wilkes booth shoot abraham lincoln?

pologuy: thnx for the fun fact. will it b on SAT 2’s? i’m being forced to memorize all words in english language. and an all purpose essay

gabs123: u wrote an all purpose SAT essay?

Even though it isn’t too hard to figure out that life is going on without me in it, the idea that Billy was sitting around writing an all-purpose SAT essay while I was out in the Valley getting mug shots taken is somehow mind-boggling. The idea that he could just sit there and concentrate and write essays about his most emotional moment and his most inspirational hero and his most compelling hope, dream, or extracurricular activity, and soon I am going to have to write about how getting past my Problem made me a Better Person to try to get everyone in some sub-regular college admissions office to love me. The idea that I’ve wandered into this horrible, alternate world and have to do all this weird stuff to get back, but everybody else is still sitting there in the real world writing their SAT essays and memorizing the Latin roots of SAT words.

pologuy: tutor wrote it. i memorize it and adapt it to 200 stupid prompts. it’s inspirational. how i’m on student council and martin luther king and gandhi

gabs123: can u adapt it to getting me out of AA?

pologuy: y not? u need 5 compelling paragraphs. need reason from literature or ancient history, current events, and deep personal crap that u get to make up. u can make up the whole thing. u can say ghandi was the first indian guy on the atlanta braves, and that’s where he met MLK. u can say that you’re on council even if ur not. tutor says. what a scam.

gabs123: the deep personal part is i’ll die if i have to go again.

pologuy: very compelling. did u make that up?

gabs123: i am not making this up! do something!

pologuy: calm down. tell frosty NO AA. you’d rather have therapy

gabs123: she’s already supposedly giving me therapy.

pologuy: ok tell her u need to get super intensive therapy because ur super intensively deranged

gabs123: just kill me now.

pologuy: listen. ur paying the bitch to do what u want and make the court like it. just be smart about it. i can’t go to AA because . . .

gabs123: sorry if I’m repeating myself here nash but BECAUSE WHY?

pologuy: ok because being there makes u want to cut yourself. that sounds nice and girlie

gabs123: i want to CUT myself? right, with the plastic knife from the coffee cake on the dessert buffet in the back of the church.

pologuy: makes u want to eat up all the coffee cake, stick your finger down ur throat, barf, and then cut yourself

gabs123: ew. like she’s going to buy this.

pologuy: u r paying her to buy this. her job is to buy anything u tell her to buy. trust me on this

So I call her up and cry. And he’s right again.

XXXVI

LISA SAYS, “WHERE WERE YOU? I CAME OVER WITH Anita and your mom was very squirrelly about where you were.”

“AA.” It just slips out.

“Wow,” Lisa says.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anymore.”

“No,” Lisa says. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, it could be good for you. You give your worries over to a higher power.”

“No offense, Lisa, but I’m not giving anything over to a higher power.”

“Well, no offense, but it might be better than giving things over to Billy Nash.”

“Did you just say that?”

“Yeah, well, sorry, all I’m saying is that if you’re having a problem with drinking, AA wouldn’t be the worst place for you to go.”

“You can talk when you’ve been there. I’m going to go to constant psychotherapy instead, are you happy? Could we please talk about something else? Could we talk about you instead? Pretty, pretty please with a rum ball on top?”

“Pretty please with a keg on top is more like it,” Lisa says.

But as it turns out, she is dying to talk about something else. She is, in fact, dying to talk about Junior Spring Fling, which sounds about as weird and alien to my current life as a potato sack race on Mars but beats hearing one more person weigh in on my so-called drinking problem.

Although it is somewhat odd that now that—instead of festooning the old gym with rolls of crepe paper and watching the Muffins pitch a fit about how much they like pink, silver, and black—I am expanding my range of my fun high school experiences by becoming a lowlife, arrested north of Ventura Boulevard followed by hours in a church full of drunk kids, now Lisa wants to expand her range of fun high school experiences by shopping for a new dress and going to Fling.

You have to wonder what we even have to talk about anymore.

“Huey wants to go,” she says. “So I just said I would without thinking and now I’m feeling like maybe this is a mistake.”

“Huey wants to go to Fling?”

“I know. You wouldn’t think he’d want to do anything that conventional. It kind of took me by surprise.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t just want to use you as cover so he can take pictures that make everybody look like decadent slobs for yearbook?” Huey is a big fan of smoky, black-and-white, decadent slob pictures. Only, nobody can tell he’s making fun of them. They think they look gorgeous and artistic.

“Come on,” Lisa says. She sounds horrified.

“Sorry. I was joking.”

“No you weren’t.”

“Okay, it’s not that I don’t think Huey would want to take you to a dance. It’s just that you’d think he’d be repelled by a rhyming-name dance at Winston.”

Lisa sighed. “Well, it’s the only dance that’s available. Except for his cousin’s debutante ball in Paris.”

“He invited you to a deb ball in Paris?”

“Like my mother’s going to let me go to Paris, France, with Huey? I don’t even know if she’s going to let me go to Spring Fling.”

“You should one hundred percent go. Tell her it’s a sock hop, for godsake, with poodle skirts and socks, and all the really old teachers are chaperoning because they like Elvis and all that old stuff. They’re going to be dancing the twist. It’s going to be completely harmless.”

“My mom is pretty sure someone will slip me a rufie.”

“She’s completely unhinged. It’s the Junior Spring Fling, not a frat party.”

“I know. I just don’t want to stick out in a bad way.”

“All you need is a tight sweater.” Although not, perhaps, a Little Mermaid sweater. “I’ll go shopping with you.”

“Thanks. Are you going?”

My first thought is, of course. Of course I’m going. Because I’ve gone to every Winston School social event large and small since September. Because I’m on the committee that has planned and decorated every event large and small since September. Because Billy likes going to parties with a girl who looks damned good and so, of course, I go to parties and I look pretty damned good.

But, of course, I’m not going anymore.

“Doubtful,” I say. “I just have to focus on staying out of any form of juvie jail.”

“How could you go to jail?”

This makes me remember why I’m not talking about any of this stuff with anyone but Billy and people who are paid to listen and keep quiet about it.

“Not going to happen. Don’t worry about it.”

“Won’t you please, please, please, please let me call my uncle for you? He’s a really good lawyer. Listen to me Gabby, don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to have your own lawyer and not Billy’s lawyer. My uncle says. You really need to look out for yourself here.”

“Lisa, I’ve got my own lawyer. I was just filling out a bunch of forms for him.”

“Yeah, but my uncle could really help you. Gabby, this is serious. Don’t you want a lawyer who could help you? You have to take this seriously.”

“Why would you think I’m not taking this seriously? I could go to some kind of jail in Arizona. I could have killed somebody.”

“Are you kidding me?” Lisa squeals. An actual squeal, like a piglet having a coronary. “Don’t say that!”

It is so clear that I shouldn’t say anything. Even my best friend can’t stand to hear the truth about me. I have to shut it down or I’m going to be too freaked out to get out of bed, eat toast, or implement The Plan. Which is not exactly optional unless I want to embrace a new life as Rehab Wilderness Girl. Billy is so so absolutely and completely right.

You can tell Lisa is getting wound up again, and before she can start, I say, “I’m not going to talk about it. Save your breath.”

And Lisa says, “I know, I know. And I’m trying to respect that. I am. But this is really hard to watch.”