Where It Began

“Vivian, I want to sleep. Just let me sleep, okay?”

She is spluttering and hissing, but I am too tired and too buried under plaster of paris makeup and too weirded out to get that Agnes Nash has turned up without warning and is standing on the front porch staring right into our house.

My parents are embarrassingly awkward—like they can’t figure out that they’re supposed to invite her in. It’s u

Actually, Agnes seems inexplicably smiley given that I just burned up, what, $75,000 of Nash family sports car and got her baby boy into deep shit with his probation officer.

My dad takes her coat and then sort of forgets about it and drops it behind the ratty chaise. My mother can’t even look her in the face.

“Can I get you something?” Vivian asks, leading Agnes nervously across the living room, scooping up stray pieces of clothes and sections of old newspapers that are strewn all over the place because Juanita is back to coming two days a week, and the other five days, stuff just piles up.

“Nice view,” Mrs. Nash says, looking outside since it’s pretty clear that her looking around at the inside of the house makes my mother cringe with shame over the state of our dilapidated box on stilts.

My mother pours gin and tonic into a purple tumbler and shoves it into her hand. Agnes Nash looks down at it as if it might be contaminated. Then her whole body gives a little shake, as if she has to pull herself together, and she looks up with an even more beatific smile.

“You know,” she says, “Vivian, John, you have to believe that I know how godawful this is. Because, believe me, we’ve been there.” She takes a slug of the contaminated drink, still holding it away from her body, and makes a little face.

My mother snatches the glass. “Can I get you a refill, Agnes?”

Mrs. Nash shakes her head no, but my mother refills the glass anyway, stirring frenetically with a purple glass straw. Agnes is mesmerized.

I am thinking, Where did we get all this ugly stuff? and wondering why I never noticed how tacky it is before.

Mrs. Nash takes the drink in its nasty purple tumbler and makes a face at it, so just in case it didn’t know how nasty it was before, it knows now.

“I can’t even count how many times we’ve been there.” She looks at me, slouched in my extremely tight sweat suit that probably still has Billy’s fingerprints in the nap of the velour, folding myself into the smallest possible size on the ottoman, trying to pretend I am somewhere else. “Gabby probably knows. Gabby, how many times would you say we’ve been there? How many, exactly?”

I have no idea, not the faintest hint, of what I am supposed to say to her or why she is here. I have no idea how many times Billy screwed up.

“Um, I guess we’re all in this together,” is what I finally say when it’s clear that no one is going to stop looking at me until I say something. It is one of Mr. Piersol’s favorite all-purpose clichés. Who says I’m not taking advantage of all the life-changing educational opportunities at Winston School?

“So,” Agnes says, downing drink number two, “you’re telling the police you don’t remember?”

The idea that Billy is actually having conversations with his mother in which he talks about me and tells her how I’m somewhat saving his ass by not telling the cops he attended what must have been quite the fun party is not totally unpleasant. I kind of wonder what else he’s told her about me. I wonder what other meaningless clichés I can come up with so she’ll stop looking at me like that.

A stitch in time saves nine?

United we stand, divided we fall?

The early bird gets whatever?

What I say is, “I haven’t talked to them since before I remembered what my name was. But what else am I going to say?”

Agnes squints and peers at me, thrusting her empty purple glass in the direction of Vivian. Then she looks over drink number three and beams at me. All right, it is definitely a more-than-slightly-strained beam, but it is an undeniable beam. Given that Agnes has never even so much as slightly smiled at me before, I am completely discombobulated.

Unless there is some diabolical plot afoot and she is secretly here to take me down and I’m just too wrecked to figure it out, this has to be a good thing.

“All right, then,” she says. “Let’s roll up our sleeves and make this whole thing go away. I’m going to say the same thing to you I said to Billy when he started down this trail. You have a problem: Deal with it.” She starts ticking things off on her fingers until it becomes clear that if she makes any more points, she’ll use up so many of those fingers she’ll have to put down drink number three.

“There is a tried and true way to make this go away,” she says, staring at me. “You have to take this seriously or it could seriously derail . . . well . . . whatever path it is you’re on. You need a lawyer who knows what he’s doing. Oh, and you’d better find her some really good psych treatment pronto or she could end up in a group home in South Central. Or out of state, God forbid.”

It’s surreal.

“I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Agnes says, noticing that I am about to die. “Thank God we were able to keep Billy out of rehab and get him some nice psychotherapy with Dan Jackman out in Malibu this time.”

My parents are just standing there nodding their heads like bobble-headed dashboard dolls.

“We’re so sorry about the car,” my mother says, cringing some more.

“The car is the least of our problems,” Mrs. Nash says. “That’s what insurance is for, that damned blue car. Had to be midnight-blue. We’re certainly not going to make a fuss about it. You just keep doing what you’re doing and as far as I’m concerned, he gave her the keys and that’s that.”

That’s that? That’s that! You have to give the boy credit. He is a parental manipulation god. And I am semi-officially the not-a-car-thief drunken girlfriend.

Sort of.

More squinting and peering from Agnes. “All right? Are we on the same page?”

But college, my mother moans. College college college. How will Little Thug Girl ever get into college?

Mrs. Nash sighs some more. “Oh puh-lease,” she says. “Let me help you with this one. College loves a good sob story. Just make sure her grades improve a little afterward and then make sure she counsels others. Not now. Not yet. As soon as she deals with it, though, pronto. With her Problem, I mean.”

“Are you sure, Agnes?” I swear, anyone with nice accessories offers Vivian a crumb of hope and she’s all over them, kissing the hem of their garment and sniffing around for more crumbs.

“I paid through the nose to be sure,” Agnes says. “We hired a consultant. Damage control for college. Mid-five figures. No reason for you to reinvent the wheel here. I’ll get you his info; just run the essay past him.”

“But Billy doesn’t have to counsel others,” I say. It just slips out of my dry, sleepy mouth.

Mrs. Nash gives me the same look she gave the nasty gin and tonic. “Hel-lo. At the Youth League shelter. He most certainly does.”

Well, not exactly.

Student Council decorates the Santa Monica Youth League shelter for holiday parties. Billy, who is not exactly into crepe paper and plastic turkeys, doesn’t even show up.

You can picture him standing around on the boardwalk under the pier in Santa Monica getting high while me and the rest of the Student Council are laying on the masking tape and festive poster-board snowflakes. I mean, the only helpful counseling he could possibly be doing would have to be arriving by astral projection via the psychic cat that’s always out there on the Third Street Promenade in a wizard hat making money for his half-zonked owner.

Still, it is always reassuring to be reminded that you aren’t the only person in the Three B’s whose parents aren’t exactly familiar with you or what you do in your spare time.