Where It Began

“Because if you’re drinking, if it’s more than that one time, you need to talk to someone.”

“Anita, all I do is talk to people. And it was just that time and this time. And now I really have to lie down.” To demonstrate, I lie down and the Rule the Pool hat falls off onto the pillow.

“Do novocaine and alcohol even go together safely?” Anita says. “I’m going to look this up on the Internet. I’m going to text Sanjiv. Hold on.”

But before I have time to hold on, I am asleep.

XXXIV

IF YOU’RE A FAN OF IRONY, MS. FROST’S FIRST project for me, in the quest to look like I am halfway to being rehabilitated before the Department of Probation gets its hooks into me, is going to AA, and Vivian tells me about it when I am still lying on my bed next to the Rule the Pool hat, sauced.

I am pretty sure that Billy would appreciate the irony, but not only has he forgotten to mention AA in the first place, he has been exiled to his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito, sharing a room with his nosy little cousin and bereft of electronics, because Agnes had to go to New York on business and doesn’t trust Billy at home without heavy-duty adult supervision after it supposedly took him two hours and forty-five minutes to get to Kap’s house for the Spanish book, and given that his dad is about as present and as capable of providing supervision as John, except that his dad is MIA at Murchison Nash Capital rolling in enormous bundles of cash as opposed to passed out in the den.

Fortunately, Billy manages to convince his aunt that he can’t stay there for the whole three-day weekend because if he misses any more practice with the water polo team, he’ll end up benched and attending a giant state college full of riff-raff, and she has to let him go home.

“Just go,” he says, whispering into a prepaid cell phone that he bought at a mini-mart in Oxnard on his way back down the coast while his uncle’s driver pumps the gas and cleans the wind-shield and Billy hides out in the men’s room. “Just go this one time and don’t say anything. Just sit there. Keep your mouth shut and don’t get a sponsor. No sponsor, got that? Gotta go.”

What do you even wear to kid AA?

Vivian drives me down the hill and into Brentwood, and she drops me off in front. She seems perfectly happy to consign me to two hours in a room full of alcoholics. But it only takes me thirty seconds in the church hall before I am 100% sure that AA isn’t happening for me, even if it is in this very plush church with exceptionally nice-looking refreshments. As much fun and games as it might be to fake out all the sharing caring adults who want to help me solve my so-called problem, it doesn’t exactly seem realistic to bank on faking out a whole room full of kids with actual drinking problems.

I mean, it’s not as if their bullshit meters are nonfunctional because of an alcohol-induced stupor.

Not to mention, some of them look vaguely familiar and have pretty much the same Marc Jacobs flats and pseudo-military jacket that I have, and might actually turn up unexpectedly in my real life, and then what? My big night of drinking untold amounts might be filed somewhere in the Amnesiac Archives, but other than that, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not about to start lying about it in front of a large, sincere audience.

Not to mention my personal plan, the Gabs and Billy plan, is to suck up to my highly paid professional helpers but trot rapidly in the opposite direction with my lips locked if anybody else wants to Talk About Everything. This is an entire church filled with people who look like they’re dying to talk their little hearts out.

What am I supposed to do?

For maybe twenty-nine seconds, I think how probably half the other kids there are in the same stupid situation as me, got caught bombed at a party, downed a bottle of scotch in their bedrooms one time, and zap: Go Directly to Twelve Step. Do Not Pass GO. A stop along the way to getting their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

Only then they open their mouths and pretty much no, they’re really into it. I feel like a sleazoid Peeping Tom hiding out in the bushes waiting to cop a peek of naked people through his neighbor’s bedroom window.

It is actually kind of sad. People who drink before school every day and spend first period sucking on mentholated cough drops to clean up their breath. And who look twelve years old. And feel like their lives have nothing to offer. And I’m thinking, No, you’re so cute, you could definitely get a boyfriend. You could end up like me, with a totally screwed-up life but, hey, no drinking problem.

This is probably the only problem I don’t have.

But no, here are people who can’t get out of bed or go to sleep without it. People who are incredibly proud they just spent sixty-eight days without it, even though they constantly want it and think about it all the time and show up at meetings where all they do is talk about it, and have to call up other kids to talk them out of using it.

And I really would have helped them stop it if I had any idea of how to get anyone to do anything. I’m sitting there thinking: You go, fourteen-year-old drunk boy, get a grip, go another sixty-eight days, call up your fifteen-year-old sponsor (if kids even get a kid sponsor which, thank you Billy, I don’t plan to stick around long enough to find out) and smoke a lot of cigarettes because if you think this is bad, wait until you grow up and it turns out you’re exactly like my dad.

And then I think, big revelation, giant whoop, silent You Go Girl from the helpful helping professionals who sent me to this godforsaken pastry smorgasbord and confession-fest: John is the alcoholic. Not me, John. Why isn’t he here?

But it doesn’t seem as if it would go over too well to explain that I just drink at parties a couple of times a week, not unlike everybody else at the parties except for the people who just blaze their way into oblivion with weed, and if I belong at this so-called meeting, then we might just as well sink the church into the ground under the sheer weight of the gazillion other kids who all get plowed at the same parties as me and, hello, they aren’t alcoholics either.

So maybe there are a couple of other places where I drink, such as at lunch in the Class of 1920 Garden, such as at meals other than breakfast where, give me a break, you really do have to be a drunk to drink anything other than a mimosa, which is at least appropriate with eggs. So send for more chairs. Enough so, say, the entire population of France (where they do drink wine with breakfast; I have personally witnessed this) will have someplace to sit in the Brentwood Unitarian Church.

But I don’t say this. Not to people who drink Stoli out of their thermoses in study hall at Paul Revere Middle School. I wish them well. All I want in life is to find some nice way to get out of there without anyone noticing.

Except, of course, that everyone is looking me over, waiting for an opportunity to spring out of their chairs and sidle up to me and make me feel all welcome.

I figure that hanging out in the ladies’ room for the next hour and a half would be a bit obvious and somewhat insulting, so I just sit there in my folding chair leaning as far back as possible without tipping over, not making eye contact with anybody, pretending to listen.

Every time another one of them starts talking, I glance up, very fast, and every time they stop, I wonder if this is when they’re going to shout out a big Kid AA howdy to all the new people—or for all I know, just me, for all I know, I am the only new person—and force us or just me or whoever to stand up and say something.

I just slink down further in my chair, sliding my eyes over every corner of the room, checking out the emergency exits just in case.