Where It Began

“Are you all right?” Huey says, just kind of staring at me.

Yes, boys and girls, as if things weren’t bad enough, now Jeremy Hewlett III is finding me lunch tables and feeling sorry for me. Ever so briefly, I wonder how I’d look in a Holy Name plaid jumper, and how short they let you wear it.

“My parents are paying hundreds of dollars an hour for professional dimwits to ask me that,” I say. “Could we possibly talk about your athlete’s foot or something?”

“I don’t know,” Huey says. “I noticed that suddenly you’ve become friendly, so I was worried about you.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, taking a sip of the cafeteria lemonade, so sweet and cold the first hit gives you sugar shock so bad it makes your head ache. “I was always friendly. I can’t help it if everybody wants to turn themselves inside out in front of me all of a sudden.”

“Friendly! You’ve only ever spoken to half a dozen people in the past four and a half years. Now you’re gabbing it up with the masses. Gabbing. Gabby. Get it?”

I got it.

“Yeah, well I got mashed on the head. I can’t help it.” Huey is just staring at me and it is spectacularly weirding me out. “Stop it, Huey. I always talked to anyone who talked to me, such as you.”

Only we can’t continue the conversation because Je

Huey doesn’t even look up, but you can see his face getting flushed. And then he snaps a picture of five girls with 2% body fat.

XLV

THE PERSON I LEAST WANT TO SEE IN MY NEW ROLE as well-known juvenile delinquent is Miss Cornish. Art is the only class I ever wanted to go to all the time, no matter how I was feeling or what I was going through.

But not today.

It’s hard to know how my main art teacher since seventh, who managed to survive my metamorphosis from invisibility to whatever, is going to adjust to my new role as penitent thug.

The problem is, Miss Cornish is personally interested.

Deeply deeply interested.

Deeply and sincerely interested. Not faking it, either. She likes to talk to us artistic young people and it is sort of difficult not to sort of like her. Not to mention I’ve taken every class she teaches that fits into my schedule, and it turns out she even saw the dorky portfolio my elementary school principal at St. Thomas Aquinas made for me when I applied to Winston School in the first place since he knew my grades sure as hell weren’t going to do the trick.

Just thinking about having to face Miss Cornish in her art room with the kilns and the potter’s wheels and the blowtorch and the mallets, where everything smells like warm clay and acid that could expunge anything, makes me stop breathing.

Miss Cornish is always going on and on about how she wants me to nourish my rare gifts and apply for the Interscholastic Art Awards, the Ceramic Federation Honor, the Ovation Fine Arts Scholarship, and the Nobel Peace Prize while I’m at it. But by rare gifts I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean my remarkable ability to play beer pong or turn sports cars into scrap metal. She wants me to infuse my art with my life, but the idea of her finding out anything about the part of my life I am now famous for makes me want to throw up.

It is already hard enough to hold it together, but the minute she spots me slinking through the door to the ceramics studio, she comes scampering up to me and gives me this big, sincere hug in front of everybody in double advanced ceramics and, basically, I want to die.

Miss Cornish drags me into her office, which is this little cluttered storage room off the main art room—unlike Mr. Rosen, who gets a real office with a stained glass window and real furniture upstairs—and she propels me into a metal folding chair.

“I am very proud of you,” she says.

I sit there looking moronic and thinking this is probably not the moment for her to be proud of me. Maybe before I got artificially cute and started hanging out with Billy, it might have helped. Maybe before I got drunk and stole a car and crashed it. Maybe when I was some whole other person who was potentially going to turn out to be someone different from who I am now.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she says.

The thing is, I do believe she thinks I’m just some wonderful young specimen of womanhood. I just think that either she’s an idiot to be proud of me or maybe she just doesn’t know who I actually am.

I sit there trying not to cry and not to think about how sad this is.

“I’m proud that you came back to school after spring break,” she says, gazing into my eyes as if she were kind of daring me to look away. “I’m proud that you’re back here taking care of business. I’m proud that you’ve developed into such a wonderful artist, and no matter what was going on in your life, you never stopped doing the work.”

I nod my head but keep my mouth clamped shut. I so don’t want to disappoint her, and I’m pretty sure that if she knew me, she wouldn’t exactly be so thrilled with me.

“Gabby,” she says. “I don’t care what happened. You’re a wonderful young lady and a wonderful artist. Sometimes at this school it’s very easy to lose track of how talented we are and what wonderful people we are. I want you to use this class to express yourself and to use the materials the way you need to use them.”

Right, like maybe if I smush enough clay, I’ll feel better. Maybe if I take a nice blue BMW M3 and turn it into a creative, abstract, tree-hugging piece of found art hanging off a eucalyptus tree on Songbird Lane.

Or maybe not.

So I spend the next fifty minutes sitting between Lisa and Sasha Aronson mixing glaze and pretending that everything is all right. Looking down at what I’m doing and not looking up at the windows that overlook the fountain where the Slutmuffins hang out. Not looking up and trying not to see Billy. Trying to see him and trying not to see him. Knowing that it’s going to be like this every day and not knowing if it’s going to get better or worse.

Seeing him with his arm around Aliza Benitez, seeing his hand slipping just below her waist as they walk toward the lockers. Thinking, I know this isn’t real. You’re the one is what’s real, I know he isn’t actually with her, but how am I going to live through this?

XLVI

IT IS DEFINITELY TURNING INTO ONE OF THOSE DAYS that runs on nightmare time, the kind of nightmare where you start to experience everything in slo-mo, just walking down the sidewalk takes hours, just lifting one foot is like pulling it up against the force of a hundred wads of perfectly chewed gum adhering to the sole of your shoe, and everything is stretched out and takes forever.

So naturally, before I can make it through the parking lot and get onto the bus—which would at least let me be by myself because only kids who live in the hinterlands of Calabasas or Glendale or Hancock Park take the bus, so the local bus is totally empty except for the occasional seventh grader whose na

All right, you have to give her credit for not totally avoiding me given her aversion to drama and the fact that I didn’t return her four hundred phone calls or send thank-you notes for the dozen little presents she’s mailed me in the past month. And the truth is, all I want is to be back on the checkered linen blanket on the grass in the Class of 1920 Garden with her and Andy totally into each other and totally uninterested in me and Billy, sitting there drinking Chardo