Where It Began

And I think, Okay, maybe I can do this.

I’m the one.

XLIV

THINKING THIS IS MAYBE NOT THE BEST TIME TO offend Lisa or Anita by picking one and not the other to carpool with, I say my parents are going to take me to school, even though my parents are not what you’d call thrilled to get out of bed when it’s still dark out. Amazingly, John shows up in the kitchen looking like he’s dressed for high school circa 1962, in the navy blue blazer and khaki pants, to drive me to Winston.

He keeps saying “Gabs,” so at least he has my name right, but I am already so wigged out, the thought of having to live through another bizarro conversation that involves tears ru

He is using his GPS, which gives you some idea of how often he has driven to Winston since seventh grade, when carpool turned out not to be a business op. Navigating the carpool line is completely beyond him, so he pulls into the student parking lot where the clay-waxed German cars get to hang with their own kind. Where I get to watch everybody else get out of their car-pools still drinking their coffee and eating their Starbucks pastries.

And I go, Gabriella, you’re the one. You can totally do this.

But even though Vivian’s hairdresser came to the house and re-streaked my hair and I have three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick makeup from my hairline to my collarbone, I still look like a mutant being.

“You’re going to do fine,” John says, reaching into the backseat to get me my backpack, patting me on the shoulder. Which still hurts. Which makes me wonder, as I climb out of the car and into the open where everyone can see the beige cover-up ooze down my cheeks in the direct sunlight, where they can stare at me as I try to find an unbruised spot where I can put the shoulder strap of the backpack, exactly how horrible this is going to be.

As it turns out, returning to Winston School as a famous screwup is more than slightly horrible in weird ways I never even anticipated. In the first place, there isn’t enough oxygen and I keep having to gulp air to the point that reminding myself to breathe is completely irrelevant, and in the second place, walking around makes my legs shiver as if they were cold, only they aren’t, and I just want to go sit down somewhere far far away, such as the rings of Saturn.

But I can’t sit down because, in the third place, kids I don’t know and don’t want to know keep coming up to me and expecting me to talk to them between gulping deep breaths.

Not only am I no longer Billy’s public girlfriend, which is bad enough, but I’m suddenly approachable.

Back before I was Billy’s girlfriend, unwanted attention wasn’t exactly my big problem. Now, even though “I don’t want to talk about it” is my new mantra, I can’t keep people away from me. Kids I barely know the names of have a strange compulsion to share what screwups they are so we can feel bad together between classes.

Like Je

Like Roy Warner, who smokes pot in the chapel before school on a daily basis, who reeks of it, and is still in Winston School only because he is possibly the richest semi-smart person in the history of the world despite the fact that he’s stoned maybe 100% of the time and because his dad keeps giving Winston large checks. Extremely large checks. So Roy Warner tells me that he understands completely where I’m at, yeah, hey man, he does, oh yeah, he really does, and I just stand there in a state of stupefaction, going, “Thank you, but I just don’t want to talk about it.”

The only people who actually seem to want to get away from me as fast as they can without bumping into something and embarrassing themselves are the decorating committee girls, who grimace ever so slightly and go scuttling off in the other direction. The less civic-minded Muffins just kind of look me over and walk away.

I want to tell Billy, just to see him cock his head and raise one eyebrow and be amused by this bizarre turn of events, but it quickly becomes obvious that that isn’t going to happen. I might be the one, but not so anybody else would notice.

I keep looking for him, sensing his presence across rooms when he isn’t there, glimpsing someone else’s shoulder sliding around a corner and thinking it’s his shoulder, getting a scent of warm salt and Cuban tobacco and turning, but no one is there.

The first time I actually spot him is when I see the back of his head walking down the hall toward the language lab between classes. When I am sure he has to feel my presence and somehow know that I’m there, and he will have to stop.

But he doesn’t.

I feel like the cheesy heroine trying to find her boyfriend in a crowded railroad station in an old-timey World War II movie, only when Cheesy Heroine sees Dashing Boyfriend, he’s already on the train and it’s rolling away down the track and out of the station and he doesn’t even know that she’s there. The Cheesy Heroine who racks up offers of monogrammed cloth hankies and faints into the arms of total strangers because she’s such a pathetic loser cow whose boyfriend can’t even get it together to look out the train window and find her for Pete’s sake.

And I say to myself: Oh Gabby, you are such a spiffy, not-pathetic loser cow, you can totally do this. You can so totally avoid him and not have to deal with this until you stop being such a cringe-worthy whack job. Only perhaps you should stop lurking behind pillars and staring at the back of his head. Like now.

And it isn’t as if I have to skulk around to avoid surprise encounters with him either. He and the Andies and the Slut-muffins still hang by the fountain in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden; I don’t.

They go to their lockers during the long breaks; I haul so many books around, it feels as if my right shoulder is going to fall off.

In stupid track chemistry, which is the only class we have together, Dr. Berg had already made us stop being lab partners back at the begi

All she wants to know is whether I studied for SAT IIs over vacation, and it’s embarrassing to admit that Vivian just got me a prep book like a week ago, as if there isn’t a lot of point to me prepping for SATs. When I tell Lily I didn’t, she kind of mutters that it figures, and loses all interest in anything other than whether I’m pouring the right amount of solution into the beakers she has all lined up.

And Billy is just busy busy busy with his Bunsen burner, too busy to look over and see me sneaking looks at him. Which is good because that level of being a pathetic stalker cow has to show and I don’t want him to notice.

“Aren’t you making a lot of new friends?” Huey says at lunch, when Lisa and Anita are nowhere to be found and I’m not about to text them and make them eat with me, and I’m standing in the cafeteria trying to figure out where in God’s name I’m going to sit. Huey walks me to an empty picnic table on the deck above the ordinary people’s lawn and snaps what turns out to be a photo of Roy Warner looming over me adjusting his crotch while I sit there looking like I just swallowed a live mouse.

Huey says, “Hey, Roy. Did you do the Latin yet?”

Roy mutters something about Virgil and shuffles away.