Where It Began

Every couple of weeks, a delegation of earnest artsy girls goes up to Mr. Rosen’s office where he sits with his eyes closed listening to music and looking as if he has a headache while they explain in detail how they really really feel about not getting to paint. According to Sasha Aronson, who is head of the petition brigade, no matter how respectful and convincing they are, Mr. Rosen never even opens his eyes.

So naturally, the minute I get back from my vehicular crime spree, Mr. Rosen, who you would think you could rely on not to make a big production about anything short of pure genius, makes a big production out of giving me back the paints. Not the acrylic paints, either.

Oils.

You’d like to think that mixing oil paint on a palette and painting my little heart out would just magically take my mind off things and make everything, if not A-okay, maybe semi-okay. And that I would create gorgeous, angsty art.

But I don’t.

I spend a week trying to get the light right on this little table with the remnants of a tea party or something (so not my idea, and the pastry is starting to get moldy and change color) and it just keeps getting grayer and darker until I’ve completely scrubbed any possibility of life off the canvas. I feel like my paintbrush is going to jump out of my hand, slide down the leg of the easel, and hop out the door in protest.

At least it gives me something to do that doesn’t involve sca

Finally, Mr. Rosen comes up behind me and stands there for about five minutes.

“I think you’re finished with this,” he says. He bundles up the junk on the little table in the tablecloth and takes the paintbrush. Then he scuttles over to his desk and takes out a little framed sketch. Real, and from the Renaissance, a woman sitting in a chair, draped in diaphanous cloth, just done in pencil, perfect.

“Copy this,” he says, propping it up.

So great, now that I’m a juvenile delinquent who can’t even paint a moldy croissant with rancid butter, Mr. Rosen is preparing me for life as an art forger. Just great. At least it would give me something lucrative to do, something to do other than being at Winston School, where this little sketch is the only real piece of art worth forging.

“Don’t think,” he says. “Just draw. You’ll feel better. You want music?”

He goes back to his desk and sticks a tape into the world’s most primitive tape deck. “Young people like this, yes?”

And this is how, for the first time in history, everybody in advanced permission-only painting has to listen to odd German techno all period. And how I find out I’m a really good art forger. Which at least gives me something to do other than visualizing Billy pawing other girls.

LIII

“EXPLAIN THIS TO ME AGAIN,” ANITA SAYS, EATING her icy pop at break. “How is it that Courtney Phillips going down on him in the parking lot is supposed to make you feel better?”

“Anita! Just because she’s gnawing on his face—”

“Sorry, Lisa.” And then to me, even though they can see that I’m tearing up over my icy pop, “Are you completely demented? He’s not with other girls to be nice to you and prove he’s not with any one of them, he’s with other girls because he’s an incorrigible player.”

“SAT word?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t one. And it doesn’t prove he’s not with Aliza, either, it just proves he’s a jerk.”

All right, so they despise Billy and there isn’t much I can do about it.

“Why don’t you just tell him how it makes you feel,” Lisa says. (Right, that should work.) “Tell him to stop it.” (Even better.) “He says he’s still your boyfriend so it’s not like you don’t have a hold on him.”

But that’s exactly what it’s like—like I am powerless and pathetic. Like I’m powerless and pathetic and ridiculously perky and give really good IM. And even repeating undying love to myself every time I inhale and every time I exhale can’t completely drown out what I’m thinking.

And I say to myself: Gabby, if you keep this up, you’re going to have a whole lot of bad self-esteem to make Ponytail happy. But perhaps you should avoid sharp objects and thinking.

pologuy: whatcha doing?

gabs123: not a lot. spanish homework.

pologuy: same. do not take AP spanish language. slow death by magical realism. even tutor says so

gabs123: is your tutor living there now?

pologuy: now now. we all have our helpful professionals on the payroll. i’m stuck with him for company. ag is turning me into a hermit. boy needs companionship

gabs123: not a complete hermit. i see u with ur little harem. courtney thinks ur awesome

pologuy: r u saying i’m not awesome? well, i saw u with your scary little witches coven. again

gabs123: that is so not fu

pologuy: no seriously. they look like they want to run me down in the parking lot

gabs123: lucky for u they don’t have cars.

pologuy: gabs! when did u get so harsh?

gabs123: when did u get ur harem?

pologuy: this is a joke right?

gabs123: duh. i totally understand. i do. u know i do. i’m just getting punchy with all this online cavorting. i miss actual cavorting.

pologuy: me too. miss u Miss G.

gabs123: i’ve gotta go to sleep. no more irregular verbs. xx

pologuy: u know it

I do know it. But as it turns out, some of the things I know are less true than others.

Because while I am sleeping, drifting through space in solo orbit so far away from actual events on planet Earth that I can’t see what everyone is doing well enough to understand anything at all, while I am dozing off thinking that nothing worse could happen, not even noticing when six thirty a.m. comes and goes, I am undone by a rhyming sock hop with poodle skirts.

part three

LIV

IT IS ALL JUST SO STUPID BUT I AM COMPLETELY unhinged. It’s like having an emotional breakdown over an advertising jingle about aftershave or having your heart ripped out by the Pillsbury Doughboy. And it isn’t even the Spring Fling itself, the actual dance, which, when you think about it, has all sorts of genuine dramatic possibilities:

Maybe Huey would grope Lisa, maybe he would play with the buttons of the horrible sombrero sweater that her mom is so attached to, and she would experience extreme moral conflict over slightly spiked punch.

Maybe Anita would break out of her house, show up with her bra straps hanging off her shoulders, and introduce us to the cute French guy from Marseilles who, having renounced his priestly vocation, was holed up at the Bel Air Hotel feeding torn up croissants to the black swans and waiting for her to run away with him.

Maybe I’d lose my mind and go stag and maybe I’d see Billy across the room and maybe we would slow dance to “My Blue Heaven” and we would both remember who I am, swaying to Elvis, and maybe he would want me.

What does not cross the mind of the orbiting space cadet, my mind, is that he would nominate himself for King of Fling and not even mention it to me, and Aliza would run for Queen of Fling with not one single other Slutmuffin nominating herself, big conspiracy, so you know that the crowned and anointed couple dancing to “My Blue Heaven” is going to be pologuy, live and in person, with Aliza Benitez and not gabs123.