Where It Began

Free dress day. A girl in a slightly orange tank top (homage to her previous, temporarily cute and kicky self) and a pair of ratty jeans sitting with her friends in the ordinary mortal section of the lawn sucking grape icy pops just before, without warning or permission, the naked, unembellished true story of her life appears on the last page before all the blank signature pages.

One full page in black and white, nobody’s face blurred out.

Songbird Lane.

Me: drunk and passed out in the passenger seat.

Billy: drunk and driving.

Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez: drunk and hanging out of the convertible, peeling out toward the crash, toward the amnesiac lie of my dishonest future that was about to end, right here, right now, on the back lawn at Winston School.

The lies I was telling everybody and the lies Billy told me and the lies I was telling myself all burned to ash in the crash I don’t remember, in flames I don’t remember, but toward which that black-and-white, midnight-blue Beemer is inexorably aimed.

Huey’s picture with the date and time printed on the lower right corner in digital indictment.

Who knew the Winston Wildcat was mined? Right now, only Huey and the yearbook advisor, Mr. Bell, who has already had his farewell party and is leaving for graduate school in journalism in the fall, who probably has no idea who Agnes Nash even is. And in about five minutes: everybody and their Uncle Rodney.

Everyone is lined up and getting their names checked off the master list to get their yearbooks, cracking their yearbooks open and pulling out their sharpies and leaning in toward each other and signing each other’s books and leafing through looking for pictures of themselves and all their friends.

Until they get past the How We Studied Together, Worked Together, Played Together, Healed the Bay and Cleaned Up the Beach Together sections and make it to the How We Had Secrets and Told Lies Together section at the very end.

“Mother of God!” Lisa says, slamming the yearbook shut as if that would make it go away. “Huey is going to have to go into witness protection.”

Huey plops himself down on the grass next to us, looking nervous but extremely proud of himself. Lisa leans over and kisses him on the mouth.

“How could you do this?” I say. Very quietly, since by now three hundred people are turning to stare at me.

“I pasted it in. It wasn’t that hard.”

“No: How could you do this?”

“I did it to bridge the generations,” Huey says. “Everybody under eighteen already knew, and now everybody over eighteen knows too.” I want to smack him, but Lisa kisses him some more, presumably no longer pissed off over his lack of balls. “Besides, everybody under eighteen already thought you were Saint Girlfriend. You said so yourself. This picture only shows what happened, it doesn’t say whether you knew or not.”

“Except that now everybody over eighteen is going to believe that I did know and I’ve been letting them think the wrong thing all along,” I say, while Lisa and Huey smooch shamelessly and Huey pretends to be the badass king of PDA. “Everybody over eighteen is going to think that I’ve been lying to them all along. I’m screwed. Did you think of that?”

“Mostly I thought of that tool Billy Nash leaving you there by the side of the road.”

Oh. My. God.

What’s going to happen to Billy now that he can no longer . . . no longer what? Lie to me? Lie to everybody? Set me up? Leave me dead drunk and unconscious, passed out with his car keys neatly tucked into my hand, in the grass by the side of Songbird Lane?

LXVIII

AT LUNCHTIME, VIVIAN SHOWS UP ON CAMPUS, standing outside the door of trig when class lets out. I just follow her out to the car, and there’s John riding shotgun with the Wildcat in his lap.

“Where did you get that?”

“Phone tree,” Vivian says. “You should have told us. This is not the way we should have found out. You should have told us the truth.”

“Why would I even tell you any thing? All you care about is how good I look and if I have a classy boyfriend and whether I get into some college I’m not getting into!”

“How can you say that to me? Everything I did I did for you, I did it so you would be happy.”

“Do I look happy?”

“Don’t try to tell me you weren’t happy,” she says. “You had a very nice boyfriend who happens to be a Nash and you felt very good about yourself.”

“Uh, Viv?” John says, not merely conscious but coherent. “The point is, he wasn’t a very nice boyfriend.”

Vivian and John, apparently, do not feel qualified to discuss any of this, and the car is headed not home, where I thought the idea was for me to hole up and hide my head in shame, but is aimed toward Westwood where a highly paid professional is going to help me process it all.

“I don’t want to freaking process anything,” I yell, “I don’t even know what that is! I just want to go home.”

“You don’t have a choice!” Vivian yells back. “You have to comply with the reasonable commands of your parent or guardian at all times.”

“I do not! I’m not even on probation until the Probation Department finishes the freaking report.”

“Well, you will be soon enough!”

Only, John says, “No. I don’t think she will be on probation. She didn’t do anything.”

And I go, “Thanks, Dad,” which is kind of new and different, and he slightly nods his head and you can tell he likes it.

LXIX

NATURALLY, PONYTAIL HAS THE YEARBOOK TOO. It is lying open on her desk in all its shiny green fake leather-covered glory. And given that there is an extremely fat old black French bulldog snoring in an open crate under her desk and a dog rescue brochure next to the yearbook, it’s not too hard to come up with a really good hypothesis about how that yearbook got there.

Apparently Ponytail is so nonplussed by the Winston Wildcat that she isn’t playing shrinkish mystery games today.

“Madeleine Hewlett brought this in this morning,” she says. “She barged right in and said she knew I couldn’t divulge whom I was treating but her son said I was seeing you so I might be interested in looking at the last page. And then she left.”

“Right,” I say.

Ponytail fidgets with her ponytail.

“The dog,” I say. “I’m thinking that she probably said more than one sentence if she gave you the dog.”

Ponytail says, “Oh! He’s a retired therapy dog.” She gives the dog a sideways, hello-doggie kind of sappy look before she pulls herself back together. “The woman is very persuasive. But we did not discuss you.”

“Then you’re the only person in the B’s who didn’t. What’s his name?”

“Barney.”

I get out of my chair and start scratching the dog’s warm little head behind his oversized ears, but you can see he’s pretty serious about his retirement because he just opens his eyes, gives me a once-over, goes back to snoring, and ignores me.

“I can imagine how shocking this must have been for you,” she says.

“My friend showed me the picture last week, but yeah.”

“So you’d known for several days before it hit the press, so to speak. . . .”

Then I stop scratching the dog and I just look at her, and it hits me that even with the vast amount of stuff I didn’t tell her in the hospital and the even more vast amount of lying I had done in here, starting with why I couldn’t go to AA and moving right along, she believes me.

She believed me all along.

The Do Not Trust Therapist tape loop is still going like the a