Where It Began

Even though I more than notice and I ever so slightly don’t even care.

Because: In the sorry, not-going-to-happen fantasy, I whip off my clothes for Billy just like that.

And I know, even with Huey standing there gazing at me expectantly, waiting for me to wise up and do the right thing, I’m not going to do a damned thing about what happened.

Because: Thank you, Billy, for pointing it out, there is no upside to nailing Billy Nash. Beyond pure vengeance, fun as that might be. But so what? After a bunch of drama, he would sink deeper into probation and maybe he’d have to toss his little water polo ball around a swimming pool in the Big Ten and not the Ivy League and so what? It’s not like four years at Giant Midwest State U is going to kill him, unless maybe he catches fatal cooties from someone with a dad in middle management.

His mom would have to hide out in a spa with a mudpack on her face for four years, but by the time she got him into law school or biz school or whatever kind of school boys like Billy from the B’s are supposed to go to and she undid her seaweed wrap, no one would remember or care what a little teenage shit he’d been. Agnes would hire a consultant in the mid–five figures to rehabilitate his image.

Rock stars and football players get to rape, pillage, and burn and five minutes later the guys are all rehabilitated and fixed and cured and rolling in endorsement contracts. All Billy did was set up a teenage drunk girl from the sketchy branch of her family; he was right back in the Bel Air Country Club for sure.

As for the teenage drunk girl, I’d be more screwed than I already was if I went after him. That’s just how things work. I was about to be the Princess of Turning Your Life Around. I was halfway through my plan to make it all go away, the it being the stuff I didn’t actually do but got arrested for doing, but what the hell? I was skipping down the marathon path to pseudo-rehabilitation.

Why stop now?

The finish line is in sight; what’s the point of blowing it?

To the kids who know I didn’t do the stuff I’m being rehabilitated for doing, and who think I knew all along: I am the reigning Princess of Not Ratting Out Your Boyfriend. Your really bad boyfriend who is sleeping with Aliza Benitez in your face and Courtney Yamada Phillips behind your back.

This makes me even more heroic to the people who thought that I knew what they knew from the minute Billy did what I said I did.

The so-called grown-ups think I’m a former drunk-driver car-thief who is embracing virtue with the assistance of a pack of brain-dead professional helpers. Everybody else thinks I remember what I don’t remember and that I said that I didn’t remember in order to protect the Golden Creep Boy.

Billy is the only one who knew what was actually happening all along, who set it up and sat back and watched it unfold, and he wasn’t telling anyone: especially me.

No wonder I get along with all the brain-dead helpers so well, I am so totally brain-dead myself. But then, how brilliant do you have to be to make a really good love slave?

As far as I can see, the only way things are going to work out is if I keep my mouth shut. If I open it, if I rat out Billy, if I tell the truth and proclaim my actual i

No one wants Billy to go down. That was the point of all this. The only shred of status I still have at Winston School, evidently, comes from the fact that I look like the world’s best former girlfriend. And this being the case, there is not a whole lot to gain from making everybody think that I’m Satan the Billy-Slayer.

All I want is to be out of there, to live through pseudo-rehabilitation, and, in the absence of a functional driver’s license, walk away. All I want is to be somewhere else doing something else that doesn’t have Billy or Winston School in it.

LXVI

“MR. ROSEN,” I SAY, BECAUSE HE HAS A LIFE OUTSIDE and beyond Winston and you’d think that he would somewhat get it, so I’m sitting in his office waiting for him to open his eyes. “Excuse me. I need to make a plan.”

“What kind of plan?” he says, suddenly scarily attentive. “Is this the college talk? Elspeth, she makes the college talk, not me.”

But I don’t want to have the college talk with Miss Cornish. I want to have the anti-college talk with Mr. Rosen.

“Is there someplace I could go right now and do art and not be here?”

Which is, I realize, The New Plan.

“Not after graduation?”

“Right now, Mr. Rosen.”

Mr. Rosen looks straight at me. “Olga Blau is at Santa Monica CC,” he says.

Olga Blau is this ancient, genius potter. What was Olga Blau doing teaching at community college? I start to wonder if she’s gone totally senile or her hands shake or something.

“Very fine art, Santa Monica College,” Mr. Rosen says, staring me down, looking straight through me. Because: Even though Mr. Rosen’s portraits bear only the slightest, most abstract resemblance to actual people, you could tell that the man can read faces.

“This would be a good decision,” he says. And the way he’s looking at me puts to rest for all eternity any lingering question as to whether Mr. Rosen’s obliviousness extends to some of my less good decisions. “You work with Olga one year, maybe two, you transfer, work with Erik Wertheimer at Northridge maybe?”

Eric Wertheimer is a double-genius ceramics god who gave us a demonstration freshman year.

Except that nobody from Winston ever goes to Cal State Northridge, let alone transfers there from CC. It would be like waving a big white flag that says Defeated By Life. Spit in the Face of Opportunity. Failed to Measure Up. Fuckup of Unspeakable Proportion.

And then I go, Screw it, Gabs. Just screw it. Don’t measure up. So what? You are so good at party limbo, slide under the bar. Then straighten up and walk away.

And you can kind of see it: me sitting in a room with Olga Blau and a big lump of clay, even if she is bat-shit crazy and I have a scarlet F for failure stamped across my forehead. So what if what I actually want to do makes everyone else wince? Because, you have to figure, things would be looking up if I wasn’t the one wincing.

“I could maybe do this,” I say. Because: You don’t need a high school diploma to sign up for SMCC. You don’t even need a GED to sign up for SMCC.

“Only Elspeth will be very mad at me,” says Mr. Rosen. “Only she does the college talk so I won’t tell the artists drop out, go to Europe, learn something, no football, no goldfish, no wasting time!” He is lost in a sad fantasy of U.S. college life.

“Europe?” I say.

“Very fine academies, Europe,” he says. “Excellent art academies. The best. But all I’m hearing here is Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.”

“Europe!” I say.

“Very late in the year for application, Europe. You want me to make the email?”

Duh?

“Yes, please.”

But just when I think I’ve limboed under the bar and past it, when the song has changed and I think the whole game is over, I turn around and there’s a lower bar that even my completely flexible and almost spineless back ca

LXVII

THIS IS HOW IT STARTS TO COME APART: STACKS and stacks of the Winston Wildcat yearbook in its sparkly green, fake leather-covered splendor, on tables along the low stone wall that separates the Class of 1920 Garden from the lawn where the ordinary kids like I am now hang out.