Where It Began(17)

Propped up on pillows in the small green room, I want to close my eyes to avoid the close-up of how pathetically choked up I was, fondling that candy kiss, but they are already closed.

Not to mention my current state of choked-uppedness because nothing makes sense: that Andie Bennett has figured out how to phone me in the hospital from Cute World while Candy Kiss Boy might just as well have been sucked into a black hole with no cell phone reception.

Explain that.

“You should call back this little girl when you feel up to it,” Vivian says. “Because she sounds like she’s going to cry if you don’t.”

Everyone in the whole world that I don’t want to talk to is just calling calling calling. And then there’s Billy, who isn’t. Who is, for all I know, out there sitting around with Andy and Andie and some shiny, new piece of firm young flesh that Andy and Andie have nothing to say about because they’re so into each other that they don’t even notice that she isn’t me.

I slip from Paranoid Fantasyland into Homemovieland without even a glitch in the continuity.

See:

It’s the first time I actually meet Andie and Andy after four years of being in school with them and just standing around watching them, that first lunch with Billy that first day of junior year on the lawn in the Class of 1920 Garden, and they don’t actually look up.

Not that I care.

I just keep smiling.

You have to figure that if I could smile through entire weekends of Singin’ in the Rain and a cavalcade of Disney classics with marshmallow-speckled fudge because that is what my actual friends like to do in their free time, there is no reason I can’t deal with this. Even though I know I don’t remotely belong on the perfect checkered blanket and even if I did, I could never be as perfect a girlfriend as Andie because I will never be as cute or as nice or as rich or a congenital idiot.

You go, Gabs, I tell myself in buzzed affirmation. You’re just the second-cutest thing ever and you fit right in. Just let out your inner babe and no one will notice you’re just a sub-regular girl with good hair.

Right.

So then I go, You go, Gabs. Billy Nash has his hand on your thigh, and that’s all anybody will notice.

Which turns out to be more or less true.

Not to mention, if Billy is the Andies’ oldest friend, then he has to be somewhat nice, right? He does start saying hello to my friends purely in honor of me by the end of the first week of eleventh grade, which is not what you’d call a challenge, given that there aren’t all that many of them. But still. He says, “Hey, Anita,” “How’s it going, Lisa?” all the time, not even looking over to see if the Slutmuffins are curling their lips. And he is already nodding his head whenever Huey bounces by, more, it seems, out of friendliness to my semi-buddy than out of recognition that Huey is another mega-rich boy from the same zip code.

All right, he is definitely somewhat nice.





XIV


MEANWHILE, MY PARENTS ARE SPONSORING A Gardiners-Have-Made-It Fest complete with a great many banana daiquiris and pretty much everything except Mexican sparklers.

Watch:

The first night Billy pulls up to my house in the midnight-blue Beemer and Vivian spots him getting out of the car and slinging his little black daypack over his shoulder and flexing his back, she is pretty much ready to fall to her knees and yell “Hallelujah!”

She doesn’t even try to hide how excited she is. For years I’d been this disappointing nonentity, a sorry clothes rack for expensive little wrong-season outfits from Sunset Plaza, but now I have a pretty damned cool approximation of a boyfriend.

Hallelujah, all right.

My dad, who pretty much hasn’t said squat to me on a regular basis since father-daughter Indian Princess at the YMCA broke up in second grade and we retired our stupid leather Indian Princess medallions, says “Nice ride.” While making eye contact.

It’s unnerving.

Somewhere out there, somewhere in the Midwest maybe, with cornfields and silos and sheep, there are parents who are all concerned about the age when their children should go on a date, all worried about whether they’ll kiss with tongue before marriage. These are no doubt the same people who think that having a cute lime-green bra strap sticking out of your tank top puts you one step away from working in a brothel in Hong Kong.

Or maybe these parents are in Hong Kong and in their minds the brothel is here in L.A.

Or maybe these parents are from Utah and their imaginary brothels are littered all over the other forty-nine states.

Wherever they are, they don’t have kids at Winston School.

Unless they’re from some exotic land filled with ethnic diversity, but clueless about pimping your kid for popularity. But still, you can tell that even Anita’s mom is eyeing that cute Derek Dash Sharma when he rolls through the Winston gates in his nice little red tricked-out Audi TT, so who knows? Although you can’t help but notice that Anita’s mom is afraid Derek will ravish Anita at four in the afternoon if his mother isn’t home to stop them, whereas Vivian would drop everything to drive me straight over there if Derek Dash Sharma—whose family is in the richer-than-God category that she and John are so fond of—so much as cocked his head in my direction.

There stand my parents, grinning like grateful idiots when Billy comes through the front door of Casa Gardiner. He is golden, with that pale blond hair reflecting light. He says, “Hey, Vivian. How’s it going, John?” And it is as if they are turned on.