Where It Began

Vivian just glares at me. “That’s not what I said. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? What I said is she’s some kind of hotshot who can get you out of this if you’ll just cooperate. Can you do that, Gabby? Can you just cooperate?”

As if she somehow doubts that I want to get out of this, short of going to AA all the time. As if she doesn’t even know who I am, even though my lying like a rug about my fictional cutting and puking to get out of AA is apparently no secret.

Which is beside the point. The point being that I have to go see Ponytail Doc who is apparently a hotshot shrink in the Valley, which kind of makes you wonder. Like Vivian is going to hop into the car and drive me through the Sepulveda Pass to some strip mall in Tarzana with a Popeyes chicken and a Dunkin’ Donuts and a tacky medical building. Fortunately for Vivian, Ponytail, not being completely devoid of taste and discernment, also has an office on the Westside by UCLA, presumably hoping that someone in the B’s will notice what a hotshot she is and rescue her from strip mall hell.

XXXVIII

gabs123: whatcha doing?

pologuy: nothing. SAT words. heavily armed warden with flash cards. what’s up?

gabs123: i have to see the therapist later.

pologuy: no worries. jackman is harmless. tries to teach u deep breathing. very relaxing

gabs123: not ur therapist. big honcho girl therapist. the one from the hospital. supposedly she likes me, which is going to make it so so easy to just spill my guts.

pologuy: as long as u don’t plan to spill ur guts

gabs123: i think i have to. nobody came out and said it but i think if i pass, no residential. if therapy works out is what the lawyer said. how can u tell if therapy is working out?

pologuy: didn’t ur lawyer tell u what to say on this one either?

It occurs to me once again that people who write large checks to the mayor, or whatever it is that Agnes actually does every time Billy screws up, get a lot more help from their lawyers.

gabs123: i’m screwed right?

pologuy: ur lawyer is lame. he needs to tell u these things. court ordered therapist tells EVERYBODY what u say. judge, DA, police. very sneaky. uses everything against you. DO NOT TRUST THERAPIST!

gabs123: what do i say? i have to pass or i’m going to rehab jail in the high desert!!!! what do i say???

pologuy: cry a lot

gabs123: a person can’t just cry forever. physically impossible. and she already knows me. i can’t just pretend to b somebody else.

pologuy: stick to the plan ok? complete denial. followed by maybe u do have the problem. then u pretend to work on it once a week until your record gets expunged ok?

gabs123: how do u pretend to work on it? what words come out of your mouth when u do that?

pologuy: ok like this. oh no dr jackman i have a restless urge to drink, smoke, and have meaningless sex. yet i know all this fun stuff my wicked peers are pressuring me to do is self destructive. oh no dr. jackman what should i do? hey i know, what if u put on the cd with the jungle bugs and bird calls and i relax in this nice zero gravity chair?

gabs123: no way.

pologuy: way. and be sure to tell her how much u hate yourself

gabs123: what if she doesn’t buy any of this? she’s not completely stupid. is there a backup plan?

pologuy: dude u don’t need a backup plan. just tell her how u sit in ur bedroom and hate yourself while drinking up ur dad’s glenlivet

gabs123: y is everybody making such a big deal about that? it was just that one time.

pologuy: don’t tell her that

XXXIX

BACK IN THE HOSPITAL, PONYTAIL WAS JUST AN irritating interruption of Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s. She was a lot less a

An office in a glass and steel building with a bad metal sculpture in the lobby (convex mother with concave child, only it is hard to tell if the mother is nursing the kid or dropping it).

An office that looks like a set decorator’s idea of a professor’s lair: the antique desk, the leather chairs, the books and journals strewn across the desk as if Ponytail is so so busy doing important research on the I

“And so we meet again,” she says, settling into her chair.

What, like I was supposed to have kept up with her on Facebook?

“I guess,” I say. It is hard to put a finger on why I want to smack her so much except that, oh yeah, I don’t want to be here.

She smiles at me and makes the kind of piercing eye contact that feels as if the person can gaze into your mind and see things that you don’t know. And I go, Stop it, Gabriella. She can’t see into your mind, for godsake. She doesn’t even know you that well.

But after Billy’s helpful pep talk, I am in a complete state of paranoid terror.

Ponytail, meanwhile, is sitting there looking me over, aka staring, as apparently normal social skills are irrelevant in psychiatry. I am sitting there looking her over, too. I am wearing a perky yet conservative teen outfit that looks really expensive and boring but at least I got to pick it out. A denim skirt and a butter-yellow cardigan. She is wearing her standard issue white shirt and a gray pencil skirt and stubby heels with grosgrain bows.

All I can think of to do is fidget. I start buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of the yellow cardigan and pulling on the ends of the sleeves.

“I notice you’re wearing long sleeves today,” she says.

I am thinking that she is going to turn up her air conditioning when I remember the cutting and the binging on coffee cake and supposedly wanting to plunge my hands into the scalding hot water in Brentwood Unitarian’s giant coffeemaker that got me out of AA and into this comfy leather chair in the first place.

Ponytail looks extremely concerned.

I am afraid she is going to make me push up my sleeves and be righteously pissed off when she sees my uncut, unscarred, unscalded, normal weight arms. Not to mention, she has seen me half-naked and half-dead in the hospital and you have to figure she would have noticed that I didn’t cut.

“Um, I don’t really do any of that stuff,” I say. “I just think about it all the time.”

“Stuff?” she says, leaning forward. You can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“I know you know,” I say. “Everyone from here to San Diego has read my file by now.”

“I know what your file says,” she says. “I wrote half your file. But I want to know what you say.”

I am pretty eager to get to the part where I deny my Problem so she can help me see the Problem so I can go, Oh yeah, big epiphany, I have a Problem! and then she can cure me and I can get out of there.

“Okay,” I say, in the interest of expediting. “Okay, being at AA and feeling, uh, pressured to talk about myself in front of other people, uh, makes me think about, uh, cutting myself and eating all the refreshments and, you know, the thing with the hot water. But now that I’m not in AA anymore, I’m kind of past it.”

Ponytail says she is glad to hear it. Then she goes back to looking me over. “Was there ever a time when you got past thinking about it, and you cut or binged or hurt yourself with boiling water?”

“Ew. No. Of course not.”

“And you were at AA because—”

“Oh, all right,” I say, in the interest of getting on with it. “If you really want me to say it, I’ll say it. I got drunk at a party and crashed my boyfriend’s car into a tree. And now I don’t remember anything about it. There. Are you happy?”