Добавить в цитаты Настройки чтения

Страница 38 из 57

Which is basically the same thing.

XLI

YOU WOULD FIGURE THAT A HIGHLY TRAINED helping professional like Ponytail would have picked up on the part that I wasn’t really at risk for swimming around in the boiling contents of industrial-sized coffeemakers, but apparently she and Mr. Healy had a little chat and now I have to have another deeply meaningful session ASAP so she can clear me to go back to school.

“That’s what you want, right?” Mr. Healy says, as if he’d missed the part where I said that was what I wanted every time he made another lame phone call to make sure I hadn’t eloped with Billy with me driving.

This seems like a no-brainer until I start thinking about what it will actually be like to slink back into Winston and have everyone looking at me in my current state of being a juvenile delinquent covered with artfully applied beige foundation in a color not approximating human skin all that closely. Gossiping about me as if I were Buddy Geiss coming back to the Three B’s from celebrity rehab in Malibu, back from military school rehab in South Carolina, back from holistic-getting-down-with-therapeutic-farm-animals rehab in the Napa Valley.

I, on the other hand, will be back from wrecking Billy’s car and messing up my life on Songbird Lane. You have to figure that this could be worse than either my prior state of invisibility or being Buddy Geiss.

This time Vivian takes me to Dottie’s for the cupcake beforehand, and when I pull my cupcake out of the little checkered bag, I see that Vivian has paid extra for them to top it with slivers of white chocolate and honey-roasted almonds. In the absence of deaths or earthquakes, it is hard to tell if all the sugary treats are coming my way because she’s feeling that sorry for me, or if she thinks it doesn’t matter anymore if I turn into a pillar of undulating chocolate-and-honey-roasted-almond-filled fat because any hope of me being anything other than a sub-regular girl is smoldering in Hidden Hills with the last fiery, wrecked bits of Billy’s Beemer.

“It’s going to be hard on you, going back to school like this,” Vivian says when I am halfway through my cupcake and all the way to a sugar rush.

No shit.

Although it isn’t clear if “like this” means Billy-less or with a lavender cheekbone and a swollen jawline. Or both.

“It agreed with you to have a boyfriend,” she says. “But I have a lot of faith that you’ll be back to being the New You again.”

“What?”

And I go, Gabriella, give it up. She’s trying to be extra nice. Don’t be a little bitch.

I say, “I hope you’re right,” but I just want to scream, Stop talking about it. Just. Stop. It’s not that I don’t totally want what she is saying to be true. I do. But hearing her say it out loud makes it sound lame and not remotely possible. Because I’m pretty sure the New Me crashed and burned on Songbird Lane.

“You will be, Gabby,” Vivian says. “You can be anything you want.”

Such as the president of the United States, Tinker Bell, and Billy Nash’s girlfriend in public?

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “It’s hard for a girl to lose her looks, but you’ll get back on your game. You’ll see. You can get another boyfriend. The swelling will go down and you’ll be fine.”

Then she hands me a little container of extra white chocolate slivers that I pour directly onto my tongue, partly because it tastes like the god of chocolate made it and partly to keep myself from talking back to her.

Even Ponytail has a plate of what look like homemade cookies on her desk, which she pushes toward me as if she thinks I need some edible comfort too.

This time she’s sitting there in a pale-green cashmere sweater, and you want to tell her that even though it might somewhat match her eyes, it is so so not working. I am wearing the highest cut jeans I own to avoid upsetting her with the sight of my thong and an ugly striped shirt with cufflinks that Vivian forced me to wear because apparently she thinks that shapelessness is a good look for the psychologically impaired.

This time, it takes me less than a minute to start crying.

Ponytail hands me a box of tissues, and I notice that this time there is a tiny little leather-covered wastebasket beside the leather chair. The possibility that Ponytail saw this coming, that this is not the result of a slight change in her interior decorating plan, but that she is graciously providing me with someplace to stow my snotty tissues because she knew in advance what was going to happen, completely freaks me out.





After about fifteen minutes of this, she asks me if I can talk about it, and not seeing a downside to telling her the actual truth, I say, “I don’t know.” Then I realize that this is the perfect opening to tell her how much I hate myself, but then I start crying again.

“I’m wondering if you’re feeling reluctant to be frank with me because of your legal situation.”

Duh.

I nod my head and try to look as if I want to be there.

“Weeeeeeellllll,” Ponytail says, filling my silence, “it’s hard for me to imagine anything you could tell me that would harm you in that respect.”

For me, on the other hand, it isn’t all that hard. To imagine what could happen if I tell her something that makes her hate me, for example. To imagine what could happen if I say the wrong thing and she decides that a few months in the desert serves me right.

Billy’s voice telling me not to trust the therapist is playing over and over in my head like a tape loop that won’t quit.

“And all this crying tells me that something’s hurting,” she says.

I just keep sniffling because, basically, I can’t stop, and she sits there saying all these inane things about growing and changing and being a re-potted plant turning toward the morning sun and trying to talk to me about how I feel about going back to school after being out for so long, which I can’t really tell her because I don’t totally know how I feel about it; I just know that I have to do it because not doing it is just going to make my life worse.

“I have to go back to school,” I say. “I have to. It’s like everybody else’s life kept on going but my life stopped and I don’t even exist and” (oh yeah, the magic and completely credible and somewhat true moment to throw it in) “I hate myself.”

Ponytail’s gaze bores through my forehead but is stopped in its tracks by the complete opacity of my completely private mind. She gives me her most sympathetic mmmmmm.

“Are you feeling ready?”

No.

I say, “Yes.”

So it is finally happening.

XLII

THE NIGHT BEFORE I GO BACK TO WINSTON, PEOPLE are wishing me the kind of bon voyage and good luck you’d expect if you were leaving on a spaceship for a sinister galaxy far far away, not tooling halfway down a swanky hill to finish junior year.

Anita’s and Lisa’s mothers—who are both very big on being the carpool mom because, as far as I can figure out, it gives them control over the sound system, so Lisa’s mom can force us to listen to Jesus radio and Anita’s mom can force us to listen to South Asian elevator music—are competing to carpool me, assuring Vivian that it will be much better for me to arrive with my true friends.

If I had any other friends, this would be quite the slam, but I don’t, so it isn’t.

Then Huey’s mother calls to offer us a debilitated rescue cat I could nurse back to health, and when Vivian gleefully assures her that the coyotes in the canyon would eat that cat in one gulp, she offers us an endangered two-foot lizard. This makes Vivian get creative really fast and insist that as much as we’d love to have an endangered two-foot lizard in the process of shedding its mass quantities of scaly skin, our housekeeper has a pathological fear of reptiles.