Where It Began

There is something about saying it out loud that makes it worse but also better.

Lisa rolls her eyes. “Maybe you’re just in love with the idea of him.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s his body.”

Then we both start to laugh and Lisa flushes the toilet just to raise the noise level in there to drown us out because we can’t stop.

“I am so lame.”

“Totally pathetic,” she agrees, pulling out her stick concealer because my purse is in my locker. “You want some of this?”

“You know, I’m good,” I say.

“You don’t even know how good,” she says. “That’s why I was looking for you. You have someplace to go.”

“Even if I’m not suspended, someplace out of Winston, that’s for sure.”

“Way not to be pathetic. Drop out of school. Perfect.”

“As long as dropping out doesn’t violate the terms of my impending probation and get me thrown in juvie, I am seriously out of here.”

“How can you be on probation for something you didn’t do? I thought you said you have a lawyer,” Lisa says.

“Ask Agnes Nash. She found him for me.”

“Agnes Nash is going to burn in hell,” Lisa says, with the conviction of a truly religious person with a pretty clear idea of how the afterlife works.

I find this extremely comforting, but not comforting enough to unlock the door and go deal with anything.

“We have to go,” Lisa says. “People are waiting for you. Come on. It’s something good. Don’t you want to see Mr. Rosen smiling? It’s kind of frightening. I don’t want to give it away, but you really need to get out of here.”

LXXIII

THIS IS HOW IT STARTS OVER: AN ARTSY-LOOKING girl in a ratty smock is lying on her back on an unmade bed in a room she shares with a Polish watercolor painter named Paulina. Paulina is the only person whose Italian the girl can understand because Paulina has a vocabulary of maybe twenty-five Italian words and she says them all extremely slowly. Through the open curtains of their room, there are certain undeniable signs: the tile roof skyline of a Medieval city, the River Arno, and the sound of people laughing and talking in a language that is slowly becoming comprehensible.

Paulina, who used to be a gymnast in her former life, has a suitcase full of skanky little outfits that involve a lot of leotards and cloth that looks like stretchy tinfoil with fringe. Under the smock, the girl has jeans and a black sweater. The girl and Paulina look pretty weird together in clubs, where Paulina can drink entire bottles of anything you put in front of her and still walk a straight line on her hands in skirts so tight they don’t succumb to gravity and uncover her upside-down butt.

The girl, having been subjected to the world’s weirdest intervention by her three best friends and Andie Be

Yet.

Anyway, having also accepted blackmail-ish double dares from Ponytail Doc before the woman would sign off on her Get Out of Probation Free card (actually, it wasn’t a card, it was a seriously thick legal document), and just to prove that she can totally do it, and because loving Billy Nash was seriously pathetic, the girl has three months, one week, and two days left before she can have Chianti with di

The likeliest candidate for this position is an architecture student named Giova

It’s not that she’s a nun. It’s just that she is trying to figure out how to be me.

Acknowledgments

Brenda Bowen, because I always wanted an agent who was a goddess, and that would be Brenda. Her intelligence, literary sensibility, tireless attention to text, incisive suggestions for polishing the manuscript (“Incisive” and “polishing” are both understatements), and dead-on savvy made this happen.

Jen Klonsky is the editor everybody prays they’ll get—smart, enthusiastic, intuitive, open, completely supportive, and able to see the forest and the trees and the leaves and all the tiny little acorns with perfect clarity. And the whole team at Simon Pulse.

My husband, Rick, Best Husband Ever, who actually read every single version of every single chapter, listened to every draft, and managed to remain kind and constructive and helpful and fu

My kids, Laura and Michael, a writer and a filmmaker, who were raised in the B’s but turned out pretty damned great, and whose generosity and talents (and notes) I relied on all the time as I was writing this.

Early readers Suzi Dubin, who gave me hope that I had, in fact, written a novel; Jen Weiss Handler, whose expertise helped me fit seventy-five unruly chapters together; and June Sobel, whose discerning feedback was invaluable.

Electronic communication consultants: Sharla Steiman, Laura and Michael, Sarah Markoff, and Brian and Erik Becker. Thank you!

I am hugely grateful to an emergency room doctor, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, two lawyers, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s traffic investigator, and two LAPD officers, whom I thank from the bottom of my heart, but who shall remain nameless.

And thanks, Mom, for thinking I was a writer even when I wasn’t.

Finally, this is a work of fiction. It is not a roman à clef. My kids are not in it, nor are their friends, or their acquaintances, or my friends or acquaintances, and the most striking thing I have in common with any of the characters (apart from my geography and the tiny fact that I spent a couple of years cha

Leading me to my dog, Evan, who ate part of one of the drafts, but who sat with me during the entire writing process.