Where It Began

Billy pulling his car onto the front lawn of the house on Songbird Lane under a security light. Girls in jeans and camisoles and high heels loping past toward the big front door that opens and then shuts out three and a half hours of my life.

My life, which, by the time I wake up wasted, lying dead drunk on the ground clutching the car keys with my head bashed in and heading for the hospital, is pretty much over.

Only I don’t know that right away.

Billy is gone and no one will let me look in a mirror, but I still can’t figure it out.

VI

WHAT IF?

This is quite the scary game under the circumstances.

Given that Billy is not exactly famous for being with girls who Don’t Look Good: What if?

Vivian isn’t saying anything, but it doesn’t exactly strain the intellect to figure out what she’s thinking. It’s not as if she has that many Rules to Live By, and as far as I can tell, whenever I drift off, which is most of the time, she is out foraging for remedial beauty supplies that she stashes discreetly behind all the dying flowers in giant striped Sephora shopping bags.

I say to Ponytail Doc, “So, what’s the deal with my face?”

You can tell that she is clenching her teeth so as not to say, Oh shit.

I say, “It’s not like I’m going to get upset and yank out the IV and die. Let me see.”

I watch her ru

I am clenching my teeth, but oh shit is the least of it.

She takes a breath. She taps her toe. She stares down at her pager as if she is trying to get it to beep through sheer force of will.

I say, “I want a mirror.”

“I know this is hard for you,” she says, “but you’re in a state of flux. A mirror would capture one moment in time but your situation is . . . um . . . dynamic.”

Lovely.

Dynamic.

The asshole orthopedist with the stuffed marsupials hanging off his stethoscope carries on at length about his reconstructive genius and how he’ll have me throwing pots, playing some imaginary accordion, and keyboarding fast enough to be some other asshole’s secretary any minute. But when I get to the part about my face, he clutches his koala bears, grimaces at Ponytail, and flees.

“You have to tell me what’s going on,” I say to Ponytail. “Am I coming out of this as Scarface or what? You have to tell me.”

“Healing takes time,” Ponytail says, infinitesimally edging back toward her usual state of bizarre cheerfulness while carefully sidestepping the question. Not that she isn’t manaically thorough: Orbital fracture. Reconstruction. Hairline fracture, broken, chipped.

My face is like the table of contents in a how-to book for surgeons.

“Dr. Rollins already reset your nose; it’s going to be almost perfect. Same tip.” She smiles, but I do not smile back. “And that gash—almost entirely behind the hairline. So assuming you’re not pla

Almost perfect.

“What do I look like?”

“You look like a pretty girl who ran into a tree at thirty miles an hour without a seat belt and got pummeled by air bags and the tree. So what you’d expect. Bruises. Lacerations. A lot of swelling and some discoloration.”

“So basically I look grotesque. Is that what you’re saying?”

The ponytail is whipping around in the coiffure version of an anxiety attack. “You look exactly like someone on the way to having the same pretty face she had before,” she says. “Just not yet . . .”

I feel as if I’ve been transformed into a giant scary lizard or some frightening mythological creature that turns people to stone when they so much as glance at her because that’s just how bad she looks. You can’t help but notice that no one is saying when I’m going to attain almost perfection either. No one is saying when I’m getting out of here or how messed up I’m going to be.

Ponytail is so not good at this.

“You’re going to look more like yourself in a few weeks, maybe a month. And in a couple of months, my goodness . . . ,” she drones on. “As soon as you feel up to seeing your friends, you know they’re going to come support you through it. Believe me. A lot of patients feel this way, but your friends are friends with you, not with your face. People won’t care how you look.”

People. Won’t. Care. How. You. Look.

You could tell that she spent all of high school being home-schooled, studying honors bio on her kitchen table, not looking up long enough to notice the first thing about real life.

Meanwhile, Gabriella Gardiner’s (slightly mangled) Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s is just rolling along in my head, jumping back and forth in no particular order from one bit of my real life to another.

There it is, with a Before and After that make more sense than the actual present, which comes after the After, the after-After, shooting off in a whole other direction.

I close my eyes, and there it is.

Right there, the embarrassing Before, my own personal prequel.

Look:

There I am, getting into Winston School, ripping open the envelope and spilling the good news onto the kitchen counter. There is green and gold confetti in the envelope.

Twelve years old and I’m thinking, Hey, Gabs, this is pretty damned great.

But not so much as my dad.

Zoom in on my dad, out on the balcony that overhangs the canyon and runs the length of our house, which is shaped like a big cardboard carton built into the downslope of a steep, ritzy hill in Bel Air, from which we get to look down on L.A. He is shuffling up and down the balcony congratulating himself while Vivian chases him around squealing and providing him with an endless supply of Bloody Marys.

“I knew being a Gardiner had to mean something,” he crows, tossing the celery from his Bloody Mary into the canyon so some poor coyote can get plowed too. “I’m so proud of you.”

Proud of me has been a long time coming, given how when I didn’t get into John Thomas Dye, kindergarten of the rich and famous, he went into deep mourning for the next seven years.

Proud my last name is Gardiner, a clan filled with rich and famous members, not including us despite my dad’s efforts to play the Asian stock market at three a.m. Despite his efforts to sell zillion-dollar houses to foreign guys who don’t know any better, taking out really expensive ads in the Kuala Lumpur Daily Gazette or wherever, and driving the big Mercedes we can’t actually afford but looks good in carpool.

According to my mom when she’s pissed off, if the über-Gardiners didn’t throw my dad a bone once in a while and use him as their real estate agent when they bought ten-zillion-dollar buildings in Las Vegas resulting in the occasional monster commission checks that keep us afloat, we’d be the only family in Bel Air subsisting on cat food and mac ’n’ cheese. We would have to move to the Valley where, according to her, we’d be like royalty in exile in a vast, smoggy wasteland. Unlike here, where it’s hard to miss the part that we’re the dregs of Upper Bel Air.

But now Winston has opened its gates and I’m in.

I can finally go to the right school, meet the right people, get into the right college, become incredibly successful, smart, popular, and rich, be star of the school play, captain of the soccer team, president of my class, homecoming queen, and valedictorian. I can be the cheerleading, honor roll, never-a-bad-hair-day girl whose papers get read aloud to classes years later as examples of super-galactic perfection.