Where It Began(14)

Still, it’s hard to miss the part where Lisa, who has signed on for a life as Untouched Godly Girl, has Huey following her around, and Anita has to be forced to turn down invitations to cavort with cute Indian boys, while I, having spent the whole summer being doused with Elixir of Sex Appeal, only ever have physical contact with males who are working on my hair, and my hunky yet gay personal trainer.

“You know,” Anita says. “At the beginning of the year, so many people are at loose ends. You should run with this. Before things get organized.”

I just keep hoping I won’t screw this up before somebody figures out that I’m the same sub-regular girl with nothing going for her as before I showed up looking hot.





XII


AND THEN SCHOOL STARTS.

It’s that perfect SoCal scene with the matching Jaguars lined up in the carpool line, inching through the stone gates with their ivy and red bougainvillea and pink geraniums, sunlight glinting through the palm fronds and the flat blue sky that makes people from Back East want to throw up or move here.

The ironic thing is that we start off the year reading Thoreau in non-AP, non-honors, sub-regular English Lit. The part where he says you should beware of any enterprise you have to get new clothes for? Clearly, this does not apply to Winston School. I have two inches of cleavage, thanks to my slightly orange Wonderbra, and by lunchtime Billy Nash is looking down it.

“So, how do you like it so far?” Freaking Billy Nash is making eye contact with my chest. It’s a freaking miracle.

“Excuse me?”

Billy sticks out his hand like a politician who is pretty damned sure he is going to get my vote. Then he flashes me The Grin. The smoldering, adorable grin. Like he knows that I’m going to race from precinct to precinct and vote for him over and over all day long.

“Billy Nash,” he says.

“Uh, Gabby Gardiner,” I say. Why not?

“Whoa,” Billy says, with the faintest look of recognition. “You’re not new. I know you, don’t I?”

“Not really,” I say. This is basically the weirdest conversation I have ever had, although it does prove for all eternity that I really was invisible as plastic wrap with nothing in it until I streaked my hair and got professional eyelash consultation. Which I already know but do not exactly want to know.

“Weren’t you in my Spanish class?”

“Eighth grade,” I say, feeling the way you feel when you’ve just jumped onto a ski lift and it’s pulling you up quickly over the crowns of pine trees and the air is thin and cold and you’re afraid you might fall off and die but it’s just so amazing you really don’t care. “Who remembers?”

“Who wants to?” Billy says. Billy Nash, who has been bathed in golden light, as far as anybody knows, since birth. “Did you get a nose job or something?”

“No, I did not get a nose job or something.”

And I realize we are walking together, actually walking down the hall toward the cafeteria together, we are actually walking through the door and people keep saying hello to him and nodding to me, and I am actually walking around with Billy freaking Nash.

As it turns out, Billy has just broken up with Aliza Benitez, the queen of the Slutmuffins, and is trawling for firm young flesh. Or so he says. It is one of those jokes that isn’t really a joke.

“Aliza’s great,” he says. “But let’s face it, she’s very high maintenance. And, let’s face it, life with Aliza isn’t exactly a day with the Andies.”

I nod and try not to look as if I am memorizing it all. Slutmuffin: good.

High maintenance: bad.

Day with the Andies: good.

Day with Aliza Benitez: not exactly good.

Benitez gone: The firm young flesh sitting right next to Billy Nash in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden is Me.

My flesh: good.

I keep wishing that lunch would extend for the rest of the day, or possibly the rest of my life.

By the time I get to the art room for back-to-back ceramics and painting, I am in an altered state of consciousness.

Miss Cornish, although she doesn’t come right out and say it, seems slightly taken aback by the New Me. When Lisa comes in late and sits next to me in the chair I was saving for her, Miss Cornish beams and looks relieved that I’m not trailing Slutmuffins in my wake. Then she tells me that I should probably wear a smock, which somewhat defeats the purpose of free dress day, and I’m not sure if it’s the newly unveiled cleavage or the fact that the mega-expensiveness of the new blouse is obvious even to her, a woman who comes to school in large plaid shirts thrown over Lakers T-shirts.

Mr. Rosen, of course, doesn’t notice a thing. If I’d shown up naked, he probably would have figured that Winston had a radical new figure-drawing policy and made everybody sketch my naked body really really fast before some angry parent made sure the policy switched back and we only got to draw heavily draped figure models, who might just as well not have had any nipples for all we got to see of them.

He comes up to me and he says, “So! Gabriella, you’re working on portfolio, yes?”

Well, no.

Even though Winston School goes basically apeshit whenever anyone wins pretty much anything and our portfolios are constantly being pillaged by the prize-whore faculty and submitted to every contest in the galaxy, I am so so done with that.