Текст книги "Where It Began"

Автор книги: Ann Redisch Stampler

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

XI

THEN, AT THE END OF AUGUST, LISA AND ANITA GET home from their uplifting summers of fun that will look great on a college application, and Lisa starts phoning me.

I kind of avoid her phone calls until I can figure out how I feel about looking like someone else, but eventually I answer my cell phone when she calls from a blocked number, and I am trapped into girlie coffee in Westwood.

And here’s the thing: When I walk into Starbucks, Lisa and Anita look up—and then they look down again.

I’m not completely sure if my friends not recognizing me is a good thing or a bad thing, but I am sort of fixated on the bad thing aspect of it, thinking about turning around and leaving fast if I can just come up with a not too obvious way to do it, when Lisa yells.

Everybody looks up from their laptops and their lattes and the people they’re flirting with to stare at me. People no doubt come out of the bathroom to stare at me.

“Gabby, you look so different!” Lisa hurls her arms around me in some kind of a frenzy. All I want to do is to sit down and be inconspicuous.

“You look really, really good,” Anita says.

“You do,” says Lisa. “Not that you didn’t look good before.”

“You know what I mean,” says Anita. “How did you get your hair to even do that?”

They both sit there googly-eyed, staring at the New Me and I basically want to go into the bathroom and rip my face off, or more accurately, peel it off.

But I change the subject instead. “How was camp?”

Lisa had been on a religious Outward Bound where she learned how to survive if she ever gets stranded in Wisconsin with only dehydrated stew, a toothbrush, and a pocket Bible. She met a lot of boys with great tans and six-packs but, given that she was somewhat streaked with dirt and smelled sort of funky the whole time, she was not exactly ripe for romance.

“And then there’s Huey, of course,” she says, looking down.

All right. She has been hanging out with Huey, making the discreet, religious version of goo-goo eyes and getting her picture taken maybe two dozen times a day ever since seventh grade, the pictures lined up chronologically and perfectly cropped in little plastic albums that Huey, besotted and creepily well organized, buys by the truckload at Rite Aid and hauls to school to show her every time he fills a new one. But given that she would appear to be completely and unnaturally fine with the fact that she isn’t allowed to wear clothes that show any cleavage or go on car dates or think thoughts with body parts in them, and given that she is not exactly open about how she feels or what they’ve been doing together for the past four years, it’s hard to tell what, if anything, is going on.

Anita had volunteered to help out orphan children in New Delhi all summer where she lived with her grandma and learned once again that (1) she is Indian, and (2) things are a lot better back in L.A.

“But,” she says, sipping her mocha Frappuccino, “I met someone.”

Tragically, he is an extremely cute French guy from Marseilles who was in India emulating Mother Theresa because he is thinking about becoming a priest, which makes the chance of his taking up with an underaged Hindu girl somewhat remote. Which is especially annoying since the chance Anita’s parents will let her go out with some cute older guy they didn’t more or less pick out back home in Beverly Hills is even more remote.

“They wouldn’t even let me go to a kickback at Derek Dash Sharma’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon yesterday. Because his mother wasn’t home, if you please. But look at you,” Anita says. “You look like a completely different person! Also more confident. With very good hair.”

Lisa and Anita have both had these supposedly transformative summers doing all this deeply meaningful stuff that is going to change their lives and get them into college, but we can all tell that after three months of beauty salons, color consultation, and Pilates, I am the one who is transformed.

“I’ll bet your mom is happy,” Lisa says.

“Orgasmic. I look just like a Slutmuffin.”

Lisa and Anita shake their heads and deny what we all know is true. The whole Winston School Slutmuffin crew would have nodded to me in the street if they didn’t figure out who I was first. That is how hot and totally debauched I look.

Still, it’s hard to miss the part where Lisa, who has signed on for a life as Untouched Godly Girl, has Huey following her around, and Anita has to be forced to turn down invitations to cavort with cute Indian boys, while I, having spent the whole summer being doused with Elixir of Sex Appeal, only ever have physical contact with males who are working on my hair, and my hunky yet gay personal trainer.

“You know,” Anita says. “At the beginning of the year, so many people are at loose ends. You should run with this. Before things get organized.”

I just keep hoping I won’t screw this up before somebody figures out that I’m the same sub-regular girl with nothing going for her as before I showed up looking hot.

XII

AND THEN SCHOOL STARTS.

It’s that perfect SoCal scene with the matching Jaguars lined up in the carpool line, inching through the stone gates with their ivy and red bougainvillea and pink geraniums, sunlight glinting through the palm fronds and the flat blue sky that makes people from Back East want to throw up or move here.

The ironic thing is that we start off the year reading Thoreau in non-AP, non-honors, sub-regular English Lit. The part where he says you should beware of any enterprise you have to get new clothes for? Clearly, this does not apply to Winston School. I have two inches of cleavage, thanks to my slightly orange Wonderbra, and by lunchtime Billy Nash is looking down it.

“So, how do you like it so far?” Freaking Billy Nash is making eye contact with my chest. It’s a freaking miracle.

“Excuse me?”

Billy sticks out his hand like a politician who is pretty damned sure he is going to get my vote. Then he flashes me The Grin. The smoldering, adorable grin. Like he knows that I’m going to race from precinct to precinct and vote for him over and over all day long.

“Billy Nash,” he says.

“Uh, Gabby Gardiner,” I say. Why not?

“Whoa,” Billy says, with the faintest look of recognition. “You’re not new. I know you, don’t I?”

“Not really,” I say. This is basically the weirdest conversation I have ever had, although it does prove for all eternity that I really was invisible as plastic wrap with nothing in it until I streaked my hair and got professional eyelash consultation. Which I already know but do not exactly want to know.

“Weren’t you in my Spanish class?”

“Eighth grade,” I say, feeling the way you feel when you’ve just jumped onto a ski lift and it’s pulling you up quickly over the crowns of pine trees and the air is thin and cold and you’re afraid you might fall off and die but it’s just so amazing you really don’t care. “Who remembers?”

“Who wants to?” Billy says. Billy Nash, who has been bathed in golden light, as far as anybody knows, since birth. “Did you get a nose job or something?”

“No, I did not get a nose job or something.”

And I realize we are walking together, actually walking down the hall toward the cafeteria together, we are actually walking through the door and people keep saying hello to him and nodding to me, and I am actually walking around with Billy freaking Nash.

As it turns out, Billy has just broken up with Aliza Benitez, the queen of the Slutmuffins, and is trawling for firm young flesh. Or so he says. It is one of those jokes that isn’t really a joke.

“Aliza’s great,” he says. “But let’s face it, she’s very high maintenance. And, let’s face it, life with Aliza isn’t exactly a day with the Andies.”

I nod and try not to look as if I am memorizing it all. Slutmuffin: good.

High maintenance: bad.

Day with the Andies: good.

Day with Aliza Benitez: not exactly good.

Benitez gone: The firm young flesh sitting right next to Billy Nash in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden is Me.

My flesh: good.

I keep wishing that lunch would extend for the rest of the day, or possibly the rest of my life.

By the time I get to the art room for back-to-back ceramics and painting, I am in an altered state of consciousness.

Miss Cornish, although she doesn’t come right out and say it, seems slightly taken aback by the New Me. When Lisa comes in late and sits next to me in the chair I was saving for her, Miss Cornish beams and looks relieved that I’m not trailing Slutmuffins in my wake. Then she tells me that I should probably wear a smock, which somewhat defeats the purpose of free dress day, and I’m not sure if it’s the newly unveiled cleavage or the fact that the mega-expensiveness of the new blouse is obvious even to her, a woman who comes to school in large plaid shirts thrown over Lakers T-shirts.

Mr. Rosen, of course, doesn’t notice a thing. If I’d shown up naked, he probably would have figured that Winston had a radical new figure-drawing policy and made everybody sketch my naked body really really fast before some angry parent made sure the policy switched back and we only got to draw heavily draped figure models, who might just as well not have had any nipples for all we got to see of them.

He comes up to me and he says, “So! Gabriella, you’re working on portfolio, yes?”

Well, no.

Even though Winston School goes basically apeshit whenever anyone wins pretty much anything and our portfolios are constantly being pillaged by the prize-whore faculty and submitted to every contest in the galaxy, I am so so done with that.

I am done winning diddly art ribbons, the same tacky red ribbon as one hundred and fourteen other pathetic losers in L.A. County who can also draw a pastel bowl of fruit, while the bouncy, organizing-10K-walks-to-cure-obscure-diseases girls are getting commendations from the mayor, the governor, the Secretary General of the U.N., and the Queen of England, and everybody else is too busy to attend the commendation ceremony because they are all tied up becoming National Merit Finalists, AP Scholars, Presidential Scholars, and Masters of the Universe. And Lolly Wu keeps showing up at assembly to play the sonata that took the audience by storm and won her a gold medallion in Romania.

So unless someone is planning to crown me Worldwide Queen of Glaze: no.

Just no.

But I don’t tell him that, and he spends the period sticking stuff in front of me and making me draw it for five minutes, and moving it slightly and making me draw it again, and putting it in a glass bowl and making me draw it again. It is very hard to concentrate, given that all I can think about is Billy Nash.

“Oooooh! I’d love to draw the feather and those eggs,” Sasha Aronson says, staring at the ratty old objects on my still-life table as if they were pirates’ booty.

Mr. Rosen tells her to keep drawing her hand, which you have to figure is going to get old pretty fast.

“You have slides of all those pots you make for Elspeth, yes?” he says to me.

Well, no.

“Tell Camera Boy, very fine resolution and well lit to show the luster.”

To which Huey, the aforementioned camera boy, is not going to object because he is slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen and because he gets to look all cool and technologically proficient in front of Lisa while she sits there trying to throw bowl after sorry bowl on her potter’s wheel.

Not that I’m not slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen too, sort of, but it is as if my slavish devotion compass has suddenly been thrown off course by an irresistible magnetic force and all I can think about is whether I’m going to run into Force Field Boy again when class lets out.

Which I do. He is waiting for me after class.

He says, “Hey.”

I say, “Hey.” Thinking: Do not screw this up, Gabriella. Do. Not. Screw. This. Up.

He says, “So, are you coming to Kap’s?”

I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Why would I go to Kap’s?”

Billy puts his hand into the back pocket of my tiny denim skirt. “Because his father scored a copy of Gorgon III.” (Which isn’t out yet. Which is supposed to have the world’s most gruesome special effects. Which up until that point I had no plan to ever see because I don’t care all that much about gruesome special effects.) “And maybe other reasons . . .”

I am leaning in toward him. I know and he knows and anyone in their right mind knows what other reasons.

I say, “What other reasons, Nash? Could you perhaps elaborate on that?”

The elaboration is the pressure of his fingers on my ass.

And even though I am the same person, living in the same place, going to the same school, and driving the same ratty Toyota, I am magically someone else.

XIII

“LOOK AT YOU,” PONYTAIL DOC SAYS, GRINNING AT me like a drunken baby. “Wendy tells me you’re reflecting on your life, and your brain is going a mile a minute.”

Meaning: Not only did I remember to ask Vivian the day of the week when she came with some kind of remedial lip liner in a giant tube with a rubber grip this morning before Ponytail showed up, but I told Wendy to go away because I was thinking due to the fact that I was glued to Gabriella Gardiner Presents and I didn’t want to be interrupted. Then, when given no choice but to open my eyes, I told Ponytail it was Friday—when, ta-da, it was Friday—and she wrote it down.

I am just racking up the bonus points.

Except that all I want to do is keep my eyes closed and lounge in what appears to be my actual past with Billy Nash in it looking a lot like my actual boyfriend, as opposed to sitting here in this strange, hospital present where Billy Nash is nowhere to be found.

But Ponytail’s unbridled enthusiasm for my progress as an ever-so-slightly sentient vegetable is unquenchable. “I saw your sketches,” she says. “And your mood chart is stellar.”

This is the chart on which I circle a number for my mood, from suicidal number 1 to buzzed-on-IV-morphine number 10. When you circle a number between semi-jolly 7 and drugged-out, ecstatic 10, people in white jackets stop coming by your room to cheer you up. But circle a 4 and there they are, trying to force you to explore your lack of cheer and making you take happy pills.

It’s not that I’m opposed to happy pills in principle, it’s just that they make it hard to work your way from one end of a thought to the other. Which makes you feel so sadly brainless, it pretty much defeats the purpose of the pill. You would think. Part of which I evidently say out loud.

But Ponytail, having lost Miss Congeniality to Wendy, is going out for Miss Empathy. “It can be hard to feel smart after an insult to your brain,” she says. “It’s common even for very smart people—”

I feel a precipitous dip below semi-jolly 7 coming on, but I am too completely whacked to keep my mouth shut. “How do you even know I’m smart?” I say.

Ponytail Doc looks stumped.

“Gabby,” Vivian asks in her Florence Nightingale, long-suffering nurse voice. “Do you know any little kids who might be calling you? Do you tutor a small child for community service or something?”

I don’t remember anything vaguely like that, but who knows? Maybe I used to be a paragon of tutoring homeless kids with sad, incurable diseases. Maybe I’m the poster girl for Why Bad Things Happen to Good Teenagers. Maybe I just haven’t gotten that far in Gabriella Gardiner Presents.

Still, it seems pretty unlikely.

“Well, do you?” Vivian wants to know. “Because some little girl named Andrea keeps calling you.”

“Andie Bennett is calling me?”

“Is that Heather Bennett’s girl? The pretty one with the shoes?” Vivian is impressed. “Maybe you should call her back.”

Because if you’re pretty enough and you have enough different-colored pairs of quilted Chanel ballet flats, you are right up there on Vivian’s automatic speed dial.

“Did she say what she wanted?”

Vivian looks perplexed. “She sounds a lot younger,” she says. “And it was hard to understand her.”

My eyes close themselves and I am right back in my After—after I get made over into an adorable, hot girl; after I get Billy; after I become designated decorating slave on the Student Council decorating committee; after I start spending my leisure time in Kap’s pool house (which is more of a pool villa) with the future Ivy League water polo and lacrosse gang and trying to figure out what the hell Andie Bennett is even talking about.

The After that comes before the hospitalized Present.

The After I’m not even sure I’m still in.

I am right back to watching the Andies float across my brain in Technicolor splendor, lit up the same way they used to be when I stared at them at Winston from afar for all the years when I didn’t actually know them, back in my Before.

But the problem with the Andie and Andy reel of Gabriella Gardiner’s Smashed Brain Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s is that it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be some weird parody of Teen Luv or a creepy Lifetime drama about sick sick codependency or what.

Look:

There they are floating down the hall, their hands all over each other, so into each other that the only reason they don’t bump into people is that people get out of their way.

There they are in a tight little threesome with Billy, walking around with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, and whatever Muffin Billy is with right then is running along slightly behind them to keep up, no room on the walkway to be four abreast.

Back then, you had to wonder if the rumors were true.

Turns out, they were. Andy and Andie have been into each other since Sunny Hills Preschool where they spent their leisure time slipping snacks to Billy in time-out.

Turns out, Andie doesn’t actually have to dial or do anything else by herself because Andy does it for her.

Turns out, Andy is very smart and gets Andie through all of her not-what-you’d-call-difficult classes (not even sub-regular normal American Lit, but super-unbelievably easy Topics in Literature, in which Mr. Mallory stands on a chair and applauds if anyone finishes a book. Any book, including graphic novels and Classic Comics) by teaching her everything in really simple sentences and making color-coded index cards.

Andie is very well dressed, mostly in pink, and it has nothing to do with whether pink is the new black. Also, she likes getting little pink presents. This works because Andy likes giving her presents. A lot. What they don’t like is drama.

“Allergic to drama!” they say.

It’s like they’re the only good marriage any of us has ever seen. Even though all four of their parents have been married about nineteen times each, including once in the fifth grade when Andie and Andy narrowly escaped a future fraught with incest because Andie’s mom was married to Andy’s dad for about twenty minutes. This was not even long enough for Andie to pack up her little pink bedroom and move into the new joint house that never happened.

There she is, opening a set of Hello Kitty pencils in their own matching pink pencil case, only you can’t tell if this is a campy little joke or what she wants for real.

“They’re so nice! Thank you, Kaps!”

Then she looks over at Billy who is sitting with his legs draped across my lap on the low wall behind the Class of 1920 Garden loading up on Cabernet before AP Spanish Language.

“You should get Gabs a present,” she says. “How come I get all this stuff and she doesn’t?” She puts her hands on her hips and makes a monkey face at him and the possibility that I am going to come out of this looking like present-free Pathetic Girl seems to be rising off the checkered blanket like the bouquet from the wine in the thermos and the Dixie cups.

“I don’t know, Bens,” Billy says. “We could get you pink shoelaces and you’d be happy, but she’s a hard one to figure.”

Andie rolls her eyes. “Well, you could always ask her what she wants, you know.” She looks over at me, dying on the blanket, pouring Dixie cups of Cabernet down my throat. “Well, he could, couldn’t he?”

And I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Could you?”

The thing is, by Christmas, he can ask, and by Valentine’s Day, he knows without asking, and when Andie gets another in a series of velvet, heart-shaped, lace-trimmed cushions that you figure her bed must be buried underneath by now, I get my little silver heart-shaped box with my initials on the lid and one slightly melted candy kiss inside.

Propped up on pillows in the small green room, I want to close my eyes to avoid the close-up of how pathetically choked up I was, fondling that candy kiss, but they are already closed.

Not to mention my current state of choked-uppedness because nothing makes sense: that Andie Bennett has figured out how to phone me in the hospital from Cute World while Candy Kiss Boy might just as well have been sucked into a black hole with no cell phone reception.

Explain that.

“You should call back this little girl when you feel up to it,” Vivian says. “Because she sounds like she’s going to cry if you don’t.”

Everyone in the whole world that I don’t want to talk to is just calling calling calling. And then there’s Billy, who isn’t. Who is, for all I know, out there sitting around with Andy and Andie and some shiny, new piece of firm young flesh that Andy and Andie have nothing to say about because they’re so into each other that they don’t even notice that she isn’t me.

I slip from Paranoid Fantasyland into Homemovieland without even a glitch in the continuity.

See:

It’s the first time I actually meet Andie and Andy after four years of being in school with them and just standing around watching them, that first lunch with Billy that first day of junior year on the lawn in the Class of 1920 Garden, and they don’t actually look up.

Not that I care.

I just keep smiling.

You have to figure that if I could smile through entire weekends of Singin’ in the Rain and a cavalcade of Disney classics with marshmallow-speckled fudge because that is what my actual friends like to do in their free time, there is no reason I can’t deal with this. Even though I know I don’t remotely belong on the perfect checkered blanket and even if I did, I could never be as perfect a girlfriend as Andie because I will never be as cute or as nice or as rich or a congenital idiot.

You go, Gabs, I tell myself in buzzed affirmation. You’re just the second-cutest thing ever and you fit right in. Just let out your inner babe and no one will notice you’re just a sub-regular girl with good hair.

Right.

So then I go, You go, Gabs. Billy Nash has his hand on your thigh, and that’s all anybody will notice.

Which turns out to be more or less true.

Not to mention, if Billy is the Andies’ oldest friend, then he has to be somewhat nice, right? He does start saying hello to my friends purely in honor of me by the end of the first week of eleventh grade, which is not what you’d call a challenge, given that there aren’t all that many of them. But still. He says, “Hey, Anita,” “How’s it going, Lisa?” all the time, not even looking over to see if the Slutmuffins are curling their lips. And he is already nodding his head whenever Huey bounces by, more, it seems, out of friendliness to my semi-buddy than out of recognition that Huey is another mega-rich boy from the same zip code.

All right, he is definitely somewhat nice.