Where It Began

“You need to look at them in order,” Huey says.

Why is that? Flipping through them backward and forward, from either direction, they tell the same story.

There I am from behind with Billy and the Andies, weaving our way through the crowd on the front lawn, heading toward the open door.

There we are in the kitchen, going for the bottles arranged helter-skelter on the counter, the only light reflected off the bottles and my earrings and off Billy’s pale hair.

There’s Jordie Berger mixing margaritas.

There’s Andie dancing for Andy in another corner, a dark expanse of silky skin between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her baby tee.

There are the Slutmuffins, all Louis Vuitton bags and attitude, standing by the pool house, lighting up with boys all around them, their personal fan club. Their heads all bent together, it is hard to tell who’s who.

Aliza Benitez on the deck chair with no blouse, breasts and arms and nipples darkened blurs, leaning into someone’s shoulder, on top of, under, and entangled with some boy, the boy with light glinting off his pale gold hair.

I appear to be yelling.

I appear to be crying.

I appear to be drinking straight out of a bottle like some bum under a freeway bridge. It is too dark to tell exactly what I’m doing. There I am drinking some more, only the bottle is a different shape. There I am drinking some more.

There I am, being hauled into the Beemer, half-carried, waving my bag in the air. Dropping my bag. Andy has me under the arms and I seem to be made of splayed rubber limbs and a big gash of a sad, drunk mouth.

There I am, getting into the car with Billy and the Andies, with Aliza Benitez kind of sitting on the trunk with her legs hanging over the back. There I am draped over Andy and Billy, who are maneuvering me into the front seat, the passenger seat, no seat belt, all of us looking exceptionally drunk, Billy trying to toss my purse in after me but missing.

There’s Billy, walking back around the car, sticking his hands wherever Aliza wants them, sticking his tongue down her throat.

There’s Billy opening the driver’s side door, holding up the keys, waving good-bye to Huey maybe.

Waving good-bye to me now, to everything I knew and wanted and believed about him and me and everything. Because I knew it was bad all along. I knew it was really bad. I just didn’t want to believe it. And I sure as hell didn’t know that it could get as bad as this.

And what’s worse is the simple fact of what must have happened next. What must have happened after Billy drove the car into the tree. What must have happened just before the sirens started and the police pulled up and I was lying on the ground with the keys in my hand and Billy was gone. Billy and Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez were gone and I was still there, passed out on the ground.

“Who knows?” I say.

Huey does not look up, flipping forward and backward through the story of my life.

“Pretty much everyone,” he says.

“Everyone meaning the computer nerds and the manga club or everyone us?”

“Who’s us?”

It’s true. There is no us. There is my former us. The us in the pictures, the us I poured an entire bottle of vodka down my throat in front of. “Billy and the Andies and the Slutmuffins . . . you know.”

“Geez,” he says in this sarcastic tone of voice. “I don’t know. . . . Do you think they got hit on the head too?” Huey starts pacing around, completely overheated. “Do you think they came down with amnesia too? Do you think so? Because otherwise, yes, us knows.”

“You knew? Lisa and Anita knew?”

“Everyone knew. I thought you knew. Everyone knows and everyone thinks you know too. Everyone thinks you’re doing this on purpose to save Billy’s ass.”

LIX

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I am hitting Huey and he’s going for my arms and he says that he’s sorry and I don’t even care.

I am pretty sure I’m pounding the steel pin out of my ulna, pain is snaking through my shoulder, and I pound on him and I wonder, if I keep going, if I demolish the bones in my forearm, if I smash them, if fragments of bone splinter off and slice into my nerves, will I feel better?

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Huey says, “Don’t say that.”

I say, “Shut the fuck up.”

Then I throw up in the waste basket. Lunch. Breakfast. The lime chunks from an icy pop. Then nothing and nothing and nothing.

And this is the good part. The part where I’m a girl with an excellent grasp on the nature of life, who is not, in fact, a moron dupe. Because: I get what happened. Although it is also the part where the only way to feel better would involve being dead because that would be the only way to stop feeling anything.

To stop feeling this.

To stop feeling.

He played me.

He framed me for an actual CRIME.

Beyond cheating, beyond lying, beyond not loving me.

I am so stupid.

I start to slam Huey, but my left arm feels as if the bones already exploded.

I slam him anyway and then there’s nothing left, not the old me or the new me or any form of me but stupid stupid nothing me and I can’t even throw a fucking pot because I just wrecked my wrist.

Oh Jesus Christ, I really did.

Yeah, I’m the one.

This is the bad part.

LX

HUEY DRIVES ME HOME WHERE I SO DO NOT WANT to be. There I sit, in front of my house, cradling my arm in my lap.

Huey says, “I’m sorry. Call me if you want to talk.”

Like that’s going to happen.

Like I could think or talk or have a conversation.

Billy Nash has taken over my head, his face is sunlit just behind my eyes, and I am going, How could you? How COULD you? HOW COULD YOU?

And I can’t even call him. I can’t even ask. Because I already know. Because listening to him lie some more would only make it worse. And worse than that, unbearably worse, would be listening to him tell me the truth.

I can’t do anything.

My arm hurts and it hurts to cry. It hurts to lie down and it hurts to sit in a chair. My room is hideous and when I see myself in the mirror on the closet door, my makeup looks like primordial ooze, like what would happen if the La Brea Tar Pits were beige instead of black and offering up random eyes and chins and noses instead of prehistoric bird bones.

Vivian spends two days tag-teaming with Juanita, trying to get me to eat food, upping the ante from egg salad sandwiches to delivery pizza to takeout buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto tartine from Le Pain Quotidien.

“You have to eat!” she yells through the door. “You have to tell me what happened to you!”

“I thought you had that all figured out!” I yell back.

“You have to go see Dr. Berman!”

“No,” I say, because even if I wanted to go, which I don’t, this would involve taking a shower and getting dressed and putting on deodorant and figuring out how to hold my face in an expression that looks like someone who’s not posing for Munch’s Scream. “I don’t have to and I’m not going.”

I hear her caucusing with John in the hall. She thinks he should get out of the den and do something. He doesn’t.

Finally she gives up and goes shopping.

I can’t get off the bed.

I am completely and in every way humiliated.

My arm throbs and throbs and throbs and swells around the wrist and all my fingers curl in protest. You can be u