Where It Began

The landline keeps ringing, and John keeps pounding on the door, standing in the doorway, the receiver in his hand. “These are your friends,” he says.

I just wait for him to close the door.

“I know,” he says. “Sometimes things just creep up on you and then wham.”

He is wan and pathetically sober with his eyes blinking too much in a state of utter cluelessness. At least he got the wham part right.

What I say is, “Could you drive me to the hospital?”

We tool down to the UCLA ER where I look like such shit that I get prioritized ahead of the crystal meth guy with the stab wound and police escort.

The doctor prods my arm and shuttles me off to x-ray on a gurney.

“So what happened to you?” gurney guy wants to know.

“Car crash and then I fell.”

“You fell?” the doctor says, when she is signing off on the discharge sheet, when she is giving me prescriptions for three kinds of anti-inflammatory drugs and a sling. When she is telling John exactly how much this is going to hurt and how I can’t have any more narcotic pain pills and how I’m not a credible historian. When there is no b.s. about accordion playing, or throwing pots, or my secretarial future, and no stuffed marsupials to blunt the blow. The doctor rolls her eyes, “Well, whatever you did, don’t do it again.”

And I go, Listen, Gabriella, if by some miracle Huey was too soft to permanently trash your hand against, things can only look up. Think about it. Really.

Only then I have to go back to school.

LXI

GETTING OUT OF THE CAR JUST LIKE ALWAYS AND walking across the lawn, climbing the stairs just like always and walking through the domed entryway, all the familiar stateliness of Winston’s fake-Gothic architecture and the walk through the familiar buildings does nothing to neutralize the Carnival of Weirdness, tilted floors and fun-house mirrors feel of going to school on Monday.

Knowing what everybody else knew all along and thought that I knew all along makes everything look different, all of the faces more cynical and the buildings as formal and unfriendly as they really are but I’d been pretending they weren’t.

I had been back for two weeks, and in two weeks I had been so I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it-blah-blabitty-blah that I’d managed to avoid finding out the main thing, the simple fact that would make everything different and worse. I had missed the Big Kahuna of simple truths. The salient point, as Mr. Monahan would say in history. When you analyze the passage, ladies and gentlemen, be sure to identify that salient point. Underline that salient point. It will be on the test.

I, on the other hand, seemed to have failed that particular test and unwittingly stumbled on the perfect method to evade all those pesky yet salient points. It was a simple three-part plan in which:

1. you run your head into a tree when you’re not wearing a seat belt, erasing all relevant memory

2. you share this unfortunate fact with your boyfriend, after which

3. your boyfriend sets you up with the assistance of his helpful posse of adorable Andies, a marauding Slutmuffin, and the entire student body of Winston School.

And Winston School, no-snitch Paradise, was the perfect spot for this simple plan. Everybody knew and everybody believed I would throw myself under the bus for Billy.

Nobody believed I didn’t remember, so nobody told me the truth; they all thought I knew the truth already.

No wonder Billy didn’t want me to have a meaningful dialogue with anyone.

All of this admiration and bizarre respect I was getting was because of the unfounded Saint Girlfriend aspect of it and, here comes the salient point, Billy knew it all, knew every bit of it, and now he was spending his time “protecting” me by telling people I didn’t want to talk about it while sticking his hands in some other girl’s Wonderbra. Not because he loved me and liked me and wanted to protect me, but because he didn’t.

Because I was completely expendable as long as it kept him out of trouble.

This is my salient, impossible fact.

LXII

I SIT THERE AT ONE OF THE WHITE METAL TABLES on the back patio looking out toward the Class of 1920 Garden and there they are, dripping in salience and conspiratorial friendship. Andie, seeing me, smiles her big smile and gets up and comes prancing up toward me, waving something orange at me. You could see Billy trying to keep her there and frowning, turning his head away.

“Hey, Gabby,” she says.

She looks so adorable and harmless and completely evil. And she is giving me PEZ. Not just a candy, a whole Pebbles Flint-stone PEZ dispenser. It’s like giving me presents is the adorable, harmless-looking, evil girl’s new hobby.

“It’s for you,” she says. Duh. There is no one else here. “Don’t you like it?”

“Just stop it, Andie,” I say. “Go back to your garden.”

Andie says, “I don’t understand. You were Pebbles for seventh grade Halloween. I thought you’d like it.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Yearbook,” says Andie, just beaming away. “I love yearbook. Huey takes very good pictures of us, don’t you think? I love Halloween. Don’t you love dressing up?”

“Andie,” I say. “You have to go away.”

“Billy keeps reminding me you don’t want to talk to me, but I just wanted to give you—”

“What, a criminal record? Being cute doesn’t give you a free pass, Andrea! You might be cuter than Mrs. God but I know what you did and I don’t like you.”

“What?” I can see the catatonic cry face coming on. Andie scampers off to get Andy, and I watch as Andy gets up and comes toward her with a Dixie cup of vin du jour directly from his dad’s wine cellar while Billy collects his things and just leaves.

He sees me coming and he leaves basically for the rest of the day.

Because I am following Andie back into the garden with a look on my face that Billy Nash has never seen before. Yes, in pursuit of the salient point, I get up and I walk across the ordinary people’s lawn and into the Class of 1920 Garden, which is almost empty because it’s so early, and I stand there as Andie slurps down the contents of her Dixie cup.

“Do you want some?” Andy says, offering breakfast wine.

“Haven’t you heard? I have a drinking problem.”

“Right. Sorry,” Andy says. He rolls his head around as if his neck and shoulders were sore. “Sorry about everything.”

“Gabby doesn’t like me anymore,” Andie says, by way of explanation.

Andy looks horrified, maybe because Andie is sniffling and squinting and her face is getting splotchy, and maybe because the idea that a human being is walking the face of the Earth who doesn’t adore Andie is too much for him to take.

“What every thing would it be that you’re sorry about?” I say. “The one where you set me up and then you gave me PEZ?”

I so don’t want to be doing this.

I so want to just live through to the end of semester.

“What is she talking about?” Andie says, looking doe-eyed up at Andy as he stands there pouring himself wine out of his thermos.

They look completely baffled, although guilty as hell.

“I’m not saying I expected you to be my actual friends—”

“I am too your actual friend,” Andie says. “Tell her.”

And Andy runs his fingers through her hair and says, “What’s this about? It’s cool what you’re doing for Billy, but why are you mad at Andie all of a sudden?”

“Were you just going to let this keep on going and never tell me and just hope I never found out?”

“Okay, Gabby,” Andy says. “I feel really bad you’re the one who got caught, but what is this about?”

So I tell them.

“We thought you knew,” they chant over and over, like it is now the lyric of their special song.