Where It Began

Right now, before you screw it up with Billy Nash, is what I hear. Which is so not happening. Because pretty much my whole way of life involves thinking about how much I adore Billy Nash, and adoring him, and doing all this cute domestic stuff to keep him happy and not screwing it up.

XV

I AM MAYBE THE WORLD’S BEST ASPIRING GIRLFRIEND.

Billy likes blue Pilot pens; I always have one handy. Billy wants to cut out of school and get coffee at Starbucks or some boysenberry/wheatgrass thing at Jamba Juice; I am out of there in a flash. Billy likes fat oatmeal cookies with currants and not raisins; I am a fat-oatmeal-cookie-with-currants-and-no-raisins baking machine.

Vivian even helps me. We have mother-daughter pimp-your-kid bonding over cookie sheets and baking powder.

“Don’t think you don’t deserve this,” she says, spraying sticky nonstick grease onto the cookie sheets.

I say, “Huh?”

“You look darling,” she says. “And you’re a very sweet girl. People like that.”

And for like thirty seconds, kneading the dough for sugar balls, standing next to Vivian in a cloud of powdered sugar, I am in a state reserved for actual darling-looking, sweet girls whose mothers really like them. I am beaming and inhaling sugar and Vivian is sort of looking at me strangely.

And then I go, Shit, Gabriella. Really? Are you freaking delusional?

Because: It is more than slightly difficult to forget the part where I was the slightly less darling-looking, sweet girl she didn’t like all that much before she got me slightly reupholstered and I got such a hot boyfriend.

“People like what?” I say.

“Oh crap, Gabby,” she says. “Don’t do this. Let me support you, all right? I just don’t want you to squander your opportunities.”

“What opportunities?”

Like we both don’t know what my one and only opportunity is, and what kind of car he drives. I just want to make her say it out loud.

“What opportunities?” I whine.

“Just to be with people who might be more, uh, fun for you,” she says, not looking up, lying as fast as she can while measuring the flour. “Just to have the chance to be a little more, uh, out there. You know, The New You. So more people can get to know how wonderful you are.”

I don’t think she even said anything like that to me when I was a tiny kid at the young age when everybody really is wonderful. Or maybe I’m just not wonderful enough, or my head is too bashed in, to remember. Maybe I would remember better now if I hadn’t smashed my head against a tree, greatly reducing my wonderfulness as well as my crowd of fun people.

Not that I exactly make a bunch of fun new girlfriends once being with Billy turns me into who I was before I ran his car into a tree.

The obvious people to be my new girlfriends are Aliza Benitez and Charlotte Ward and their little pack of Slutmuffin hos and maybe the whole taste-impaired Student Council decorating committee once it turns out that Anita is right, and I get elected even though the only thing anybody knows about me is that Billy has his hand down my back pocket.

But Billy had dumped Aliza Benitez, popular ho royalty, just before he hooked up with me. So: The princess posse is even less likely to throw a Welcome to Our World party for some outside, unpopular, clueless girl they’ve never heard of, no matter how good I look and how good I am at slinging crepe paper after they relegate me to the status of newbie slave on the Council decorating committee.

Actually, one of the good things about moving into Billy Nash World from total obscurity is that I don’t have to worry about getting tight with a whole lot of new friends I could screw it up with.

The Andies are so busy with every detail of each other that they just sort of accept I’m there and go back to gazing into one another’s eyes. And the Slutmuffins aren’t exactly begging me to make time for little shopping trips down Montana Avenue with them.

I actually think that the fact I’m not brown-nosing around makes me somewhat less abhorrent to them than if I’d been a more obvious wa

They sit right in front of me, three of them sprawled on the corner of the Andies’ checkered blanket in the Class of 1920 Garden and have what passes as a conversation while looking straight at me but acting as if I’m not there. Not so much an invisible person like before, but more like the Serbo-Croatian-speaking crazy lady who can’t be expected to follow even the simple English dialogue of brain-dead hos.

I could just reach out and knock them over, but I don’t.

“Are you coming to shop at Ron Herman or not?”

“Not. I have my French tutor.”

“So blow him off.”

“What does Ron Herman have anyway? Those dresses are heinous.”

“Crimes against humanity.”

“I thought you were coming.”

“I’ll wait for you at CPK. I’m too gross to try on right now anyway.”

“So you’re going to binge on CPK barbeque chicken pizza, skank? Come try on.”

“No, they don’t even like me in there. That big redheaded salesgirl—”

“The one with the split ends?”

“She just keeps following me around like I shoplifted a T-shirt or something.”

“No way! Why?”

“Because she shoplifted a T-shirt or something.”

“I spend so much money in there, they ought to be giving me T-shirts.”

This is not as hard to take as you would think, given all the Chardo

When I actually have to show up and try to get the decorating committee not to make things look any uglier than they have to given the large quantity of gaudy balloons and tinsel they have stockpiled, when all they will say to me is basically, “Please pass the glue gun,” I just go, Gabriella, you do not have to hang with these bitches, you have actual friends. You have Billy and they don’t. Everything is Perfect. Back away from the glue gun and go make a crepe paper flower and shut up.

They go back into their little huddle, as if they think they’re magically inaudible. Or maybe they just don’t care.

“Kaps says Nash wants us to let her do the posters.”

“But we’re already tracing the Elvis poster.”

“Just because he’s hooking up with her, she doesn’t get to take over.”

“It’s just a poster, Char. And she’s got plenty of time for it. It’s not like she’s in AP Physics.”

“Yeah, and do you want to tell Nash no? Because I don’t.”

I just keep telling myself that as long as I keep Billy happy, I can ignore them back. I can just wander around glowing faintly with light from his star.

Which makes me more noticeable.

All of a sudden, I am cuter and smarter. Dr. Berg says that I’m “building up steam” in non-AP, non-honors, sub-regular track chemistry (although I have to say not as sub-regular as Andie, who is taking Topics in the Environment for which she gets extra credit for figuring out how to send away for a poster of a humpback whale from Greenpeace) when I am doing exactly the same as always.

Sure I’m building up steam; I am smoking from hotness by association. Sure I have a whole lot more going for me, the entire whole lot consisting of Billy and my new wardrobe. If Billy likes me, suddenly everybody but a few stray Muffins like me. Not that they actually like me like me, they just act like they like me. And it isn’t as if I mind all that much.