Where It Began

I say, “Ya think?”

“Are you all right, G? You look so thin.”

Like this is a bad thing.

“I just want this all to be over. . . .”

“I know you do,” he whispers in my ear, so close I can feel his breath, feel it blowing my hair over my ear. “But it’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be over and in the past.”

“Billy, it’s not in the past yet! What happens if I tell the police I don’t remember and they don’t believe me? What if they want to put me in prison for stealing your car?”

“You didn’t steal my car,” Billy says. Snorts, actually, as if the idea that I did what I did is so ridiculous, it’s snort-provoking. “No one in his right mind would believe you stole my car. Come on.”

Except that I did.

“Your mother hates me,” I say.

“Not that much,” Billy says. “Not enough to tell the police you stole my car.”

Billy starts to rub my shoulders, which kind of hurts, but I let him do it anyway. I want it to feel good. I want to believe that Agnes will go along with him and I won’t be up for the part of hot-girl icon in Grand Theft Auto any time soon, but if he has so much power over her, then why are we hiding out behind the castle?

“What if they want to know the story of my life?” Meaning my life since the first day of junior year, given that before then I didn’t have anything that you could call a life. “I can’t just say I don’t remember anything ever.”

Billy keeps rubbing, only faster, so it feels as if the skin is going to peel off my shoulder blades leaving just bones and nerve endings. “Maybe you could,” he says. “You got pretty smashed. Maybe you could just pummel the bitches with your drinking problem.”

“What drinking problem?” This is so not what I need to hear from him. “You want me to say I have a drinking problem and I’m like permanently blacked out?”

“Whoa,” he says. “Don’t get defensive. You were pretty smashed is all I meant.”

“Jesus freaking Christ, Billy!” I can tell that yelling is not a good thing, but I can’t exactly help myself. “Everyone gets pretty smashed! It was a party. Everyone gets smashed at parties. The stoners blaze and we get smashed.”

“You were kind of unusually smashed,” he says. “You could hardly walk.”

“Well, obviously I could walk well enough to get into your car and drive it into a tree,” I say. Billy just looks at me. It is impossible to tell what he is thinking. “It would help if I could remember anything.”

“Whoa,” Billy says, eyeing me as if he were one of the detectives Vivian won’t let me talk to. “You really don’t remember anything? Not anything.”

“Duh.”

He stands there staring at me. “But it’ll come back to you sometime, right?”

“Gone forever,” I say. “That’s what my dimwit doctor said. Some combination of my so-called binge drinking and the head injury.”

Billy says, “Whoa. So you’ll never remember what happened? It’s gone forever? They can’t even hypnotize you?”

“Gone forever,” I say.

Billy just stands there looking kind of dazed but like he finally gets it.

All I know is that if I don’t do something right away, if I don’t make him want me right away, it is pretty much over. I know it before he even starts to elaborate on how being with me is a probation violation, which I already know and so do not want to hear about. How he’s beyond grateful that I didn’t finger him for being at the party, but unless his PO is a bigger moron than he thinks, he has to keep the guy from figuring it out and nailing him, and he can’t have a girlfriend with a drinking problem who parties blahblah because he’s on probation for his so-called drinking problem and his many DUI’s that his mom got him out of, and it’s different for me because this was my first offense blabitty-blah but if he screws up again, he’s screwed and he can kiss (drum roll) Princeton good-bye because he’s going to be incarcerated somewhere with bars and Eight-Trey Gangster Crips.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says. “It has to at least look like I’ve cleaned up, or I have to kiss everything good-bye.”

It is so obvious that he’d rather kiss me good-bye.

It is so so obvious that I have to find a way to keep that from happening.

I keep trying to tell myself what a wonderful person I am and how any reasonable boyfriend would just have to see that and just want me, want me, want me, but this is such a complete crock that it only makes me cry more.

“Don’t, Gardiner,” Billy said. “Shhhh. It’ll be all right. Like I said, we just have to act like we’re over until things settle down.”

I don’t even know what that means. Am I supposed to be hanging around Winston School pretending it’s over when it really isn’t over? If Billy can’t see me or talk to me or be with me, how is it not over?

Billy takes my hand and gazes at me as if he is actually sad. “Look,” he says. “Are you sure you even want to come back?”

“What?”

“You look so fragile and everything. And with me not being able to take care of you in public and everybody at Winston looking at you and trying to talk to you about it and everything . . . Would you be better off at Holy Name?”

My face is suddenly hot and I feel like I am going to pass out, and not in some adorable southern belle, gee-golly, Rhett-Butler-run-and-fetch-me-a-mint-julep-straight-up kind of way either.

“You don’t want me to go to Winston?”

“Christ, Gabs, it’s not about what I want,” he says. “I’m thinking about what’s best for you with everybody talking about it and bothering you and me not being able to help you. This is not going to be easy to pull off.”

Like the nuns at Holy Name are going to fall all over themselves taking in a teenage felon after Easter of junior year. Like they aren’t already busy enough explaining to their little coke whores how they shouldn’t drive around the curves on Mulholland in the open trunk of Billy’s car. A problem, come to think of it, that I have solved for them being as how now Billy doesn’t have a car.

Like I am going to leave Winston and, from the sound of it, never see Billy again, but hey, it’ll be good for his probation.

Like I am going to hang around in a Holy Name plaid pleated jumper for a year and a half and never see him at all, not even have the slightest chance of ru

Like I am ever going to let that happen.

“I can deal,” I say. “I’ll just say I don’t want to talk about it. Because actually, I don’t.”

And I say to myself, Gabby, what a rare genius you are, you are already saying you don’t want to talk about it before anyone else thought of it. You can so totally do this.

“I’ll just be very Greta Garbo: I vant to be alone, dahlink,” I say to him. “You so don’t have to take care of me.”

Billy reaches over and puts his arm around me tight. It hurts like a bitch. He looks really concerned.

“Just think about it,” he says “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“What could be worse than what’s already happened?”

Billy runs his fingertips up and down between my shoulder blades. “Listen, would you break something if we, you know—?”

And I think, Whoa! and I don’t even care what breaks.

XXV

BILLY DRIVES ME HOME IN ONE OF HIS DAD’S OLD classic Ferraris which you would think would undermine a person’s ability to sneak around effectively, only around here it doesn’t. He drops me off a few houses up the street, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one but a couple of gardeners out blowing leaves down the hill with their illegal leaf-blowers spots him, and he kisses me again before I stumble back home.

It’s the middle of the day but I am too tired to even undress. I fall asleep weirdly happy, and when I wake up, it’s completely dark and my mother is trying to haul me into the living room as if I have to hurry or I’ll miss the Second Coming of Christ.