Where It Began

I can tell that I am crying because a tear is blazing an acid trail down the side of my face.

“Don’t touch!” Vivian lunges through the tangle of tubes and wires toward my seriously bandaged hands.

“What?” I say. “What happened to my face? Oh God, do my hands work? What did I do?”

The bed bobs and lurches like a space raft floating in the gray-green sky. I can tell that the nurse is injecting something soothing and potent into the tube that goes directly to my veins. I can tell that Vivian is saying something soothing and insincere. I open my eye and Vivian whirls into the distance in the plastic chair, her hair streaming behind her. The doctors multiply in kaleidoscope formation, at the center of which is the tiny white light that they shine into my eye.

Before sunrise, when the room is vibrating with pale fluorescent light, I can see the space debris that’s been floating in the corner of my eye is a bouquet of ugly Mylar balloons. The watercolor clouds are flowers, mostly half-dead, showy ones, with cheesy stuffed animals stuck in the crooks of branches stiff with curled, dry leaves.

I have been here long enough for flowers to wilt.

I rattle the railing on the side of the bed, wondering what happens when my feet touch the floor. If I can walk away.

As it turns out, I can’t.

Bu

“Gabby,” Vivian whispers, “do you remember what you did? Even the tiniest, teensiest detail?”

Nope.

“Well, the doctor says that with this kind of head trauma and all those, um, substances, you might not remember . . . I guess you might not remember yet.”

Then she tries playing games.

“Okay, Gabby, let’s try this: When I say ‘party,’ what pops into your mind? Just go with it. Don’t even try to think about it.”

As if I could think.

“Okay, what if I say ‘Songbird Lane?’ Okay . . . Songbird Lane . . . Gabby, will you please just try this? The police want to talk to you, and I’m not sure how long I can hold them off.”

Songbird Lane?

I would tell her if anything was in there.

Maybe I would.

Voices drift in through the doorway.

“Even if I let you talk with her, what would be the point?” somebody murmurs. “It’s a closed head injury and she just rambles. Good luck making sense of it.”

My injured head rolls toward the sound, and there is Bu

“Look, I know you’re just doing your job, but this won’t take long,” the lady with the gun says.

“You’re not going in there.”

“I just need to take her statement,” Gun Lady says. “It’ll take three minutes, tops. Can’t she talk?”

“Sure, she can talk,” says Bu

You would think some part of this would have made a lasting impression.

You would think that after Billy didn’t show up and my mother kept hissing about what I did and averting her gaze, it would occur to me that there might be some serious problem here.

You would think.

III

WHEN I COME TO, VIVIAN IS READING THE CARDS that are stuck in the flower arrangements, writing down who sent them in the tiny spiral notebook she carries around.

“Everybody sent you flowers,” she says. You would think this was a good thing, but you can tell it isn’t. “Everybody knows.”

“Did Billy send me something?”

“They sent you a lovely bouquet,” Vivian says, not looking up.

“The Nashes did.” She flicks away a helium-filled balloon dog that is hovering over the foot of the bed and starts foraging for the Nashes’ lovely bouquet.

I start looking around for some sumptuous floral extravaganza, given that the Nashes could basically afford to send me a whole tulip farm and a live-in Dutch florist if they felt like it. But it turns out they’d come up with a particularly weird combination of green and red oversized lilies that look left over from Christmas with a smiley face card that says, “Wishing you all the best for a speedy recovery!!!” signed, “The Nash Family.”

Which is when it happens: when the story of my life starts to show up in mosaic splinter flashes in my head. Which is when Agnes Nash shows up in my head—with horns and a red pointy tail and little cloven hooves and an Armani suit. Which I take to be a drug-induced yet totally insightful vision of her.

You could see her making her assistant’s assistant go order this bouquet and this particular card, the most impersonal, meanest thing she could think of that wouldn’t make people jump to the conclusion that she was the Great Satan of the Three B’s—Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills—where, in my personal opinion, you have to try pretty hard to be the really Great Satan and not just some random devil due to all the competition.

Did I mention Billy’s mother doesn’t like me a whole lot?

Apparently, it takes more than a eucalyptus tree to bang this particular fact out of your head.

Agnes Nash’s face the first time I saw her.

Agnes Nash’s eyes the first time she saw me with Billy.

Billy, who walks three inches off the ground, is the mainstay of the Winston School water polo team, and gets anything he wants out of anyone he wants it from because he is just so charming and gorgeous and basically the first person you notice in a room full of people only you look away really fast because you don’t want him to think that you’re staring at him, which you are.

Every time Agnes sees me with him, she kind of looks me over and makes a little face like once again, she has considered my many fine attributes, and once again, she can’t figure out what Billy is doing with me.

We have these generic little conversations in which she says, “So, Gabriella, are you thinking about college?” and I can tell I’m supposed to haul out some Ivy League fight song or start panting “Oh Stanford, oh Stanford, oh give it to me Stanford, oh Stanford!”

But instead, I just sort of stand there muttering something incoherent about art school. How there is a really good art school just down the road in Pasadena.

Big frown. Agnes is maybe as enthused about art school as my parents.

Well, Rhode Island School of Design is supposed to be good and it’s right next door to (bow head and genuflect) Brown, right?

You can tell she has to exert a lot of effort just to keep her eyes from rolling. You can tell she’d be a whole lot happier with Billy hooking up with the kind of girl who is going to cheerlead her Advanced Placement butt into (angels playing harps) Yale. Not the kind of girl whose reach school is some art school next door to (bow your head) Brown but not actually (well, you know) Brown, and who probably is going to end up in some pokey college in South Dakota with a bad art department because, in the first place, my parents would never pay for me to go to art school, and in the second place, no doubt even art school can figure out who is sub-regular.

The kind of girl who isn’t me.

Still, as long as I don’t interfere with Agnes’s plan for Billy’s life—Do Not get kicked out of Winston School; Do Not, no matter how plowed, do lines in front of Coach; Do Not get caught violating your probation; Get into (drum roll) Princeton—she is happy enough to give Billy the keys to the beach house and look the other way when he takes me there.

Even trapped in this electric hospital bed, dizzy, smelling sour, and with Swiss cheese for brains, I can see where if she didn’t like me all that much back when I was just some ordinary, stupid excuse for a girlfriend, she might be even less happy with me now that I’m Billy’s drunken car-wrecker girlfriend.