Where It Began(22)

“Yo, you gotta come here,” Sam Deveraux says, more than slightly drunk but dead serious. “Fight on! We’re number one!” His also more-than-slightly-drunk college water polo buddies stick up their index fingers in agreement. “We need you, man. Don’t you want to be number one?”

“Dude. Nothing would make me happier than staying in town,” Billy says. “But, man, I’ve gotta go to . . .” (drumroll drowning out even the permanent, twenty-four-hour party music) “Princeton. You know how it is.”

“Damn Agnes.” Sam drapes his arm around Billy as if Billy could somehow steady him, which, I can tell you from my vast experience with my dad lurching through the house beyond help, is by that point in the evening totally useless. Then he turns to me, which is slightly frightening since he is extremely large and I figure he could crush me if he fell on me, which seems like a strong possibility.

“Whadda bout you?” Sam says. “Don’t you wanna come here and be a Theta and Billy can be king?”

And you know, even though the thought of spending four years at Crazed School Spirit U and being a Theta (if I could have gotten in, which I couldn’t) kind of makes me want to go throw myself into a ditch, if Billy was going to be king of college at SC instead of Princeton, all hunkered down and happy in his dad’s old eating club, I totally would have signed right up.

Billy sticks his shoulder between me and Sam, which could have saved my life if so much as a slight breeze had hit Sam from behind, causing him to pitch forward. “She doesn’t do sorority chick crap,” Billy says. “She does art.”

Sam runs his hand up the wall as if he is looking for a handle. “Theta could do art,” he says. “She could. ’Member Becca French? Theta does product design. Tolja.”

“She doesn’t do that kind of art,” Billy says. “She does real art.”

Okay, so you would have to conclude that he does know something about me, right? And even though I am pretty sure it’s all about the incredibly expensive hair extensions and the perfect makeup and the gravity defying Wonderbra, something like this would give a reasonable person cause to think he actually did kind of like something about me that my mother didn’t spend the summer buying for me. Right?

Which is what makes it so hard to tell if the eucalyptus tree on Songbird Lane has done some actual damage to my chest, or if I am just some metaphorically heartsick, delusional bimbo in a hospital gown with no sense and, coincidentally, no boyfriend.

Explain that.

He has completely vanished. I am lying in a mechanical bed with the sides up while he is no doubt out at Johnny Rockets eating a medium-rare burger with curly fries with his water polo boys and girl school prostitots from Holy Name.

Only, it is hard to reconcile any of this with what I actually do remember, which I am pretty sure is true.





XVII


THIS IS HOW A PERSON FALLS IN LOVE WITH BILLY NASH.

The part of the Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s where a person wants to slow it down to keep it from lurching precipitously toward the mysterious and annoying Now, to hold it on pause and watch it slowly, frame by frame, in an imaginary present in which we, Billy and I, are both in the same room.

Unlike the actual present, in which we aren’t.

By October of junior year, I know that it is right in front of me. He holds my hand by the lockers more often than he doesn’t. He plays with my hair on the Andies’ blanket every day at lunch time, casually, as if it were a natural and easy thing to do, and I just have to keep breathing, or at least not stop breathing so much that anyone would notice.

I tell him, “Stop it,” but I don’t really mean it and he looks at me and I smile at him and he knows I don’t mean it and he says “Really?” and I say “Not really,” and he doesn’t stop playing with my hair and behind my ears and the back of my neck out in the open where anyone can see that he is claiming me.

After school, up in his room, we lie there on the floor doing homework, and on the bed, not doing homework, throwing darts at his conditions of probation, just rolling around and kissing and kissing and kissing. Sometimes he takes off his shirt, and he is muscular and pale and perfect, with a smooth swimmer’s torso and muscles that ripple when he raises his arms as if he were cutting through the water. And when I press my head against his chest, when he cradles my head there, his skin tastes like salt.

The issue of my shirt is more complicated. He likes to slide his hands underneath it, his fingertips feeling their way along the edge of my bra, and then over the edge, and then under it. I imagine us there, perfect and naked on his bed all the time, except that, of course, I’m not Perfect. I really am Not Perfect, and I don’t want him to see that I’m Not and go find someone else who Is. The thing is, as long as he can actually touch underneath anything he wants to move aside, he is happy. I wear extremely stretchy underwear on purpose. I am happy as hell.

And he says, “Hey, you want to go to the beach?”

I say, “Like the beach beach? Like now? You want to surf?”

“Like the beach house,” Billy says. “You want to go right now?”

And I say, “Yeah, Nash. I do.” And I do. I do. I so so do.

Billy drives us to the end of Sunset, speeding around the curves, and onto the Pacific Coast Highway. It is sunset and the sky is pink and orange, orange flames reflected in the water just off the edge of the highway. The beach is just a little strip of sand with the tide pounding over the traffic noise, pounding in my ears.