Where It Began(15)

I am done winning diddly art ribbons, the same tacky red ribbon as one hundred and fourteen other pathetic losers in L.A. County who can also draw a pastel bowl of fruit, while the bouncy, organizing-10K-walks-to-cure-obscure-diseases girls are getting commendations from the mayor, the governor, the Secretary General of the U.N., and the Queen of England, and everybody else is too busy to attend the commendation ceremony because they are all tied up becoming National Merit Finalists, AP Scholars, Presidential Scholars, and Masters of the Universe. And Lolly Wu keeps showing up at assembly to play the sonata that took the audience by storm and won her a gold medallion in Romania.

So unless someone is planning to crown me Worldwide Queen of Glaze: no.

Just no.

But I don’t tell him that, and he spends the period sticking stuff in front of me and making me draw it for five minutes, and moving it slightly and making me draw it again, and putting it in a glass bowl and making me draw it again. It is very hard to concentrate, given that all I can think about is Billy Nash.

“Oooooh! I’d love to draw the feather and those eggs,” Sasha Aronson says, staring at the ratty old objects on my still-life table as if they were pirates’ booty.

Mr. Rosen tells her to keep drawing her hand, which you have to figure is going to get old pretty fast.

“You have slides of all those pots you make for Elspeth, yes?” he says to me.

Well, no.

“Tell Camera Boy, very fine resolution and well lit to show the luster.”

To which Huey, the aforementioned camera boy, is not going to object because he is slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen and because he gets to look all cool and technologically proficient in front of Lisa while she sits there trying to throw bowl after sorry bowl on her potter’s wheel.

Not that I’m not slavishly devoted to Mr. Rosen too, sort of, but it is as if my slavish devotion compass has suddenly been thrown off course by an irresistible magnetic force and all I can think about is whether I’m going to run into Force Field Boy again when class lets out.

Which I do. He is waiting for me after class.

He says, “Hey.”

I say, “Hey.” Thinking: Do not screw this up, Gabriella. Do. Not. Screw. This. Up.

He says, “So, are you coming to Kap’s?”

I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Why would I go to Kap’s?”

Billy puts his hand into the back pocket of my tiny denim skirt. “Because his father scored a copy of Gorgon III.” (Which isn’t out yet. Which is supposed to have the world’s most gruesome special effects. Which up until that point I had no plan to ever see because I don’t care all that much about gruesome special effects.) “And maybe other reasons . . .”

I am leaning in toward him. I know and he knows and anyone in their right mind knows what other reasons.

I say, “What other reasons, Nash? Could you perhaps elaborate on that?”

The elaboration is the pressure of his fingers on my ass.

And even though I am the same person, living in the same place, going to the same school, and driving the same ratty Toyota, I am magically someone else.





XIII


“LOOK AT YOU,” PONYTAIL DOC SAYS, GRINNING AT me like a drunken baby. “Wendy tells me you’re reflecting on your life, and your brain is going a mile a minute.”

Meaning: Not only did I remember to ask Vivian the day of the week when she came with some kind of remedial lip liner in a giant tube with a rubber grip this morning before Ponytail showed up, but I told Wendy to go away because I was thinking due to the fact that I was glued to Gabriella Gardiner Presents and I didn’t want to be interrupted. Then, when given no choice but to open my eyes, I told Ponytail it was Friday—when, ta-da, it was Friday—and she wrote it down.

I am just racking up the bonus points.

Except that all I want to do is keep my eyes closed and lounge in what appears to be my actual past with Billy Nash in it looking a lot like my actual boyfriend, as opposed to sitting here in this strange, hospital present where Billy Nash is nowhere to be found.

But Ponytail’s unbridled enthusiasm for my progress as an ever-so-slightly sentient vegetable is unquenchable. “I saw your sketches,” she says. “And your mood chart is stellar.”

This is the chart on which I circle a number for my mood, from suicidal number 1 to buzzed-on-IV-morphine number 10. When you circle a number between semi-jolly 7 and drugged-out, ecstatic 10, people in white jackets stop coming by your room to cheer you up. But circle a 4 and there they are, trying to force you to explore your lack of cheer and making you take happy pills.

It’s not that I’m opposed to happy pills in principle, it’s just that they make it hard to work your way from one end of a thought to the other. Which makes you feel so sadly brainless, it pretty much defeats the purpose of the pill. You would think. Part of which I evidently say out loud.

But Ponytail, having lost Miss Congeniality to Wendy, is going out for Miss Empathy. “It can be hard to feel smart after an insult to your brain,” she says. “It’s common even for very smart people—”

I feel a precipitous dip below semi-jolly 7 coming on, but I am too completely whacked to keep my mouth shut. “How do you even know I’m smart?” I say.

Ponytail Doc looks stumped.

“Gabby,” Vivian asks in her Florence Nightingale, long-suffering nurse voice. “Do you know any little kids who might be calling you? Do you tutor a small child for community service or something?”