Where It Began(16)

I don’t remember anything vaguely like that, but who knows? Maybe I used to be a paragon of tutoring homeless kids with sad, incurable diseases. Maybe I’m the poster girl for Why Bad Things Happen to Good Teenagers. Maybe I just haven’t gotten that far in Gabriella Gardiner Presents.

Still, it seems pretty unlikely.

“Well, do you?” Vivian wants to know. “Because some little girl named Andrea keeps calling you.”

“Andie Bennett is calling me?”

“Is that Heather Bennett’s girl? The pretty one with the shoes?” Vivian is impressed. “Maybe you should call her back.”

Because if you’re pretty enough and you have enough different-colored pairs of quilted Chanel ballet flats, you are right up there on Vivian’s automatic speed dial.

“Did she say what she wanted?”

Vivian looks perplexed. “She sounds a lot younger,” she says. “And it was hard to understand her.”

My eyes close themselves and I am right back in my After—after I get made over into an adorable, hot girl; after I get Billy; after I become designated decorating slave on the Student Council decorating committee; after I start spending my leisure time in Kap’s pool house (which is more of a pool villa) with the future Ivy League water polo and lacrosse gang and trying to figure out what the hell Andie Bennett is even talking about.

The After that comes before the hospitalized Present.

The After I’m not even sure I’m still in.

I am right back to watching the Andies float across my brain in Technicolor splendor, lit up the same way they used to be when I stared at them at Winston from afar for all the years when I didn’t actually know them, back in my Before.

But the problem with the Andie and Andy reel of Gabriella Gardiner’s Smashed Brain Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s is that it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be some weird parody of Teen Luv or a creepy Lifetime drama about sick sick codependency or what.

Look:

There they are floating down the hall, their hands all over each other, so into each other that the only reason they don’t bump into people is that people get out of their way.

There they are in a tight little threesome with Billy, walking around with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, and whatever Muffin Billy is with right then is running along slightly behind them to keep up, no room on the walkway to be four abreast.

Back then, you had to wonder if the rumors were true.

Turns out, they were. Andy and Andie have been into each other since Sunny Hills Preschool where they spent their leisure time slipping snacks to Billy in time-out.

Turns out, Andie doesn’t actually have to dial or do anything else by herself because Andy does it for her.

Turns out, Andy is very smart and gets Andie through all of her not-what-you’d-call-difficult classes (not even sub-regular normal American Lit, but super-unbelievably easy Topics in Literature, in which Mr. Mallory stands on a chair and applauds if anyone finishes a book. Any book, including graphic novels and Classic Comics) by teaching her everything in really simple sentences and making color-coded index cards.

Andie is very well dressed, mostly in pink, and it has nothing to do with whether pink is the new black. Also, she likes getting little pink presents. This works because Andy likes giving her presents. A lot. What they don’t like is drama.

“Allergic to drama!” they say.

It’s like they’re the only good marriage any of us has ever seen. Even though all four of their parents have been married about nineteen times each, including once in the fifth grade when Andie and Andy narrowly escaped a future fraught with incest because Andie’s mom was married to Andy’s dad for about twenty minutes. This was not even long enough for Andie to pack up her little pink bedroom and move into the new joint house that never happened.

There she is, opening a set of Hello Kitty pencils in their own matching pink pencil case, only you can’t tell if this is a campy little joke or what she wants for real.

“They’re so nice! Thank you, Kaps!”

Then she looks over at Billy who is sitting with his legs draped across my lap on the low wall behind the Class of 1920 Garden loading up on Cabernet before AP Spanish Language.

“You should get Gabs a present,” she says. “How come I get all this stuff and she doesn’t?” She puts her hands on her hips and makes a monkey face at him and the possibility that I am going to come out of this looking like present-free Pathetic Girl seems to be rising off the checkered blanket like the bouquet from the wine in the thermos and the Dixie cups.

“I don’t know, Bens,” Billy says. “We could get you pink shoelaces and you’d be happy, but she’s a hard one to figure.”

Andie rolls her eyes. “Well, you could always ask her what she wants, you know.” She looks over at me, dying on the blanket, pouring Dixie cups of Cabernet down my throat. “Well, he could, couldn’t he?”

And I say, “I don’t know, Nash. Could you?”

The thing is, by Christmas, he can ask, and by Valentine’s Day, he knows without asking, and when Andie gets another in a series of velvet, heart-shaped, lace-trimmed cushions that you figure her bed must be buried underneath by now, I get my little silver heart-shaped box with my initials on the lid and one slightly melted candy kiss inside.