Where It Began

“Not that we want to be pushy or intrude on your privacy,” Anita says. As if it didn’t take until tenth grade for her to blurt out that if her mother made her spend another Christmas vacation at a theme park, national park, or slogging through the Getty Museum showing off her Hindi language skills to an entourage from New Delhi one more time, she was going to run away by Greyhound bus and hide out in her brother Sanjiv’s co-op at UC Berkeley.

“We know that you’re a private person,” Lisa says, even though she, herself, has never uttered one single word about what she and Huey have been up to since seventh grade. Despite the fact that Anita and I are more than slightly curious.

“We want to support you,” Anita says. “But some things don’t make sense—”

“Can’t you just accept that I don’t remember anything and I’m not pla

Lisa and Anita exchange looks and gape at me.

“Gabby, please just think about it—”

“We want to help, but—”

“I mean it,” I say. “So there’s nothing to talk about. And there isn’t going to be anything to talk about either.”

So Lisa and Anita just keep letting me be the tiny Monopoly top hat, and we just keep playing.

XXIII

AND THEN, JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, A FEW MINUTES after Anita gets into Lisa’s mother’s Saab and they tool back up Estrada with their board games rattling around on the backseat, Billy’s screen name shows up on my laptop.

I am drunk on the possibility of bliss.

pologuy: hey baby. how r u?

And I go, Stay cool stay cool stay cool. Just try to be somewhat amusing.

gabs123: life sucks. lying around getting turned into a geisha with a makeup mask.

pologuy: geisha? verrrrrrry interesting. what r u wearing geisha?

And I go, Stop whining. Stop it. Do you want him back or not?

gabs123: makeup. lots of makeup. don’t even have to get out of bed for it. vivian delivers.

pologuy: wish i could c

gabs123: so come see.

Why not? I know he won’t.

And then I think, OMG what are you doing, Gabriella? Do. Not. Cling. Do not ask him where he’s been or what he’s been doing or why he didn’t call sooner.

I am just so far back there in that awful place of not quite knowing, it’s as if I just met him. It is as if I am back where I don’t even know him again.

pologuy: did u have ur fun talk with the cops yet?

gabs123: FUN?!?!?!?!?!?!

pologuy: i’ve had several fun talks. i have my own personal policeman

gabs123: what did u say to ur probation guy? r u ok?

pologuy: u first

gabs123: what can i say to them anyway? i don’t remember.

pologuy: r u serious? r u still go

gabs123: seems like a plan.

pologuy: yowza! they’re go

gabs123: y?

pologuy: r u kidding me?

gabs123: what am i supposed to do about it? all i can do is say sorry 500 times and cry. what can they even do about it? if someone could make me remember, they already would have.

pologuy: hold up. u actually said u don’t remember to the cops? they really hate that. does ur lawyer know about this?

gabs123: i don’t have a lawyer remember?

pologuy: and they bought it?

gabs123: nash, i don’t even remember when i told them that i don’t remember. but that’s what i’m going to say. y wouldn’t they buy it?

pologuy: u r freaking amazing

gabs123: duh

pologuy: and this is the plan?

gabs123: it’s my plan and i’m sticking to it. do u have some alternate plan?

pologuy: i need to c u

Yes yes yes yesyes! I have become a makeup-application fiend waiting exactly for this. I am the reigning queen of camouflage. Yes!

gabs123: me too.

pologuy: i’d climb through ur window if ur house wasn’t on freaking stilts

gabs123: big letterman. u could scale a stilt. romeo would have scaled stilt.

pologuy: romeo ended up dead in crypt, whereas i’m going to play polo at princeton. broken neck scaling gf’s stilt is not in my plan

GF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

gabs123: ok, do u have a non-fatal plan?

pologuy: behind the castle? can u get there?

Like there was any place or time or way I wouldn’t go see Billy.

Like this wasn’t the first time I’d felt like a halfway real person with a halfway real life since my actual life went up in smoke with Billy’s Beemer.

Like maybe if I could just avoid looking desperate and drooling all over him, I could get my life back.

XXIV

IN THE MORNING, IT IS TORTURE WAITING FOR VIVIAN to get ready to roll down the hill to get her hair styled so I can spackle on my makeup and get out of there. The only real question in my mind is if I should go with all the concealer so I’ll look halfway cute or if I should let some of the bruises show through so I’ll look battered yet brave.

I go with the concealer.

And as soon as Vivian pokes her head in to say she is going, looking slightly guilty but pretty much as eager to get out of there as I am, I lower myself gently into the tightest possible sweats and head out through the back of the house, through the laundry room, and down into the canyon toward the castle, trying to walk like a human being.

The castle is what we call this enormous old Spanish house at the end of a cul-de-sac off Via Hermosita. It has been under reconstruction but mostly abandoned, half-finished, for my whole life. The place is gated tight from the street, but if you climb down the bank from the house next door, you can slip through the gate by the pool house. The pool is empty and there’s graffiti in it, but behind the pool, the yard is terraced and wooded, so even if somebody did show up to work on the main house, they wouldn’t see you down there unless they came looking.

I wait on a stone bench out of the sun, not for the coolness of the shade, but because I am afraid my face will look as if it’s covered with putty in full sunlight, and I watch for Billy.

And it really does feel as if I were abducted by aliens, sucked into a time warp, and returned to planet Earth a long time later, looking (almost) the same, but entirely different. Like I can’t quite remember how to breathe, and my heart isn’t sure how to beat in the right rhythm, and I don’t know how to focus my eyes so I can take it all in, and I can’t tell how to feel beyond the rush of seeing him coming toward me finally.

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve seen him, and climbing down the neighbor’s embankment, he looks as if having his car wrecked made him get even more gorgeous. He is wearing a dark, dark green T-shirt and these perfect jeans and ratty old black Converse without socks. I swear, his footsteps have to scorch the path.

“Oh, Babe,” he says before he hugs me, looking at me through those blue eyes, through those dark lashes, the sun in that pale hair. “You look like you’ve been through it.”

So much for the makeup. Carefully holding my head a little bit away from his cheek so he won’t get plastered with a big, greasy splotch of opaque beige glop, the rest of me feels so good, so at home, pressed up against him.

And I think: Don’t cling don’t cling don’t cling.