Where It Began

I am completely petrified, huddled in the wheelchair, not even wearing my own clothes because Vivian thinks I look more pathetic in a hospital gown and she is going for the all-season pathetic look just in case. I am waiting for someone to arrest me and throw me in a tiny cell with one sixty-watt lightbulb and a window in the door to slide in Spam sandwiches with wedges of sad iceberg lettuce. I am waiting for someone in a uniform to grab the handles of the wheelchair out of Bu

But it doesn’t happen.

Bu

And when I finally get home, which is exactly the same as before, when I finally get into my exactly-the-same room, the only drama left is the drama of me lying in my exactly-the-same bed with my same laptop on my stomach, staring at my same dog-on-surfboard screensaver and waiting for Billy to show up online. Staring at the new cell phone and waiting for Billy to text. Staring at the landline and waiting for Billy to call. Waiting for the miraculous evaporation of Billy’s Have-a-Drunken-Girlfriend-Go-to-Jail Condition of Probation so he can come through my door and into my bedroom and hold my hand and stroke my hair and make things stay the same.

I want to be back in my After and not in some weird after-After Purgatory, waiting to find out if I am Saved or Damned.

Staring at the row of odd little presents that Andie Be

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t work.

I can’t even get my private home movies to work. I am not sure if this is because I no longer have the interesting drugs dripping into my veins or because now that I’m home and right here, right now, in real time, this is my life. This is Gabriella Gardiner’s ACTUAL Teen Life in the Three B’s uncut, happening to me minute by minute, without chemical enhancement. I can’t close my eyes and watch it because I’m stuck in it.

Except that Gabriella’s actual teen life consists of lying in my room waiting for Billy to show up, which might not even count as a life, if you think about it.

To make things even more bizarre while I’m lying here, completely terrified about what’s going to happen with me and Billy, not to mention me and the LAPD, it is as if after all those years of flying too low to be a blip on his radar, I’ve come up with something my dad can relate to: a problem with mixed drinks in it.

I am used to being in the house with my dad and feeling comfortably alone, not having any idea what he’s actually doing closed up in the den other than drinking. But all of a sudden, I’m his New Best Friend. All of a sudden, he starts coming downstairs and eating breakfast with me in my room, not saying much except for jolly, totally off-the-wall things about how much he likes pink grapefruit.

After the third day of this, he gets up from my desk chair and walks over to the side of the bed just as I’m sliding my tray off my lap. He puts his arm around my shoulder and he squinches up his eyes and it hits me that he is silently crying without the sobbing again. And even though all along, since it began, since Songbird Lane, since everything, I had pretty much thought it was the end of the world, I was wrong: The actual end of the world is this.

His arm is just resting there, not moving, like a dead eel. I just want him to say whatever it is he’s pla

And I go, Shit, Gabriella, this is your dad having a nervous breakdown. You’re supposed to feel something and do something and help him or something.

But I don’t. Short of wanting him to magically turn into someone who vaguely resembles an actual parent, all I want is for him to retract the eel and go away.

“Oh, Gabsy,” he says, like the guy hasn’t even noticed what people call me for the past seventeen years. “I can’t help but think that if only I’d wrestled with my own demons sooner, you wouldn’t be going through this.”

Right.

Unless, of course, he’s talking about the demon that makes him a sub-regular, totally incompetent businessman, which, if he could have managed to wrestle it into the corner and slide past its defeated husk and into the richer than richer-than-God category, I could have been popular even if geeky.

“It’s not like it’s genetic, Dad,” I say, just wanting him to take the eel and go back into the den, only the fish-head hand has grabbed onto my arm, hard.

“You are so wise for such a young person,” he says. Then he sighs with what sounds a lot like relief and he slinks away. Marking the end of our father-daughter breakfasts.

For a couple of days, I am so freaked out by the possibility I’ll run into him somewhere other than di

Juanita, who my mother has hired full time for the week supposedly to help with me but really so Vivian can go shopping without feeling too guilty, doesn’t go in for all this pointless affirmation: I don’t even think you go, girl translates as a Salvadorian expression. What she does is make me a lot of hot chocolate with high-cal whole milk she carries up the hill to our house in a little paper bag with contraband ca

This is so not turning into the best extended spring vacation ever.

XXII

THE ONLY PERSON WHO MANAGES TO GET THROUGH to me, despite Vivian’s best efforts to keep everyone away until my skin goes back to being unbruised and lifelike all on its own, is Lisa.

“The hospital said you weren’t there anymore. Thank God! You’re out of your coma. You remember me, right?” She sounds exactly the same.

“Duh. Who said I was in a coma?”

“Your mom. Kind of. And Gabby, people gossip. Everybody knows. Are you all right?”

It is hard to know which aspect of not all right to start with. “My face looks like it belongs in a body bag, but yeah. And no coma. I just don’t remember the crash.”

“Well, people can probably fill you in.”

“Yeah, people in police uniforms. I crashed Billy’s car, so apparently they’re interested.”

“What are you talking about?” Lisa says, clueless as ever. “I’m coming over there, okay?”

“Are you sure your mom will drive you over now that I’m Evil Delinquent Girl?”

“Gabby! You are not an evil, delinquent girl,” Lisa says, delusional but perpetually supportive.

But even if she refuses to believe I am a wayward, felonious teen, evidently I still qualify as a charity project, because her parents are letting her jump into the Saab every day to come see me, which is a little u