Where It Began(28)

I say, “That’s my boyfriend.” Although, I admit, I have made him kind of glowing and unusually golden for a human. And then there’s the issue of the slightly green horse.

Wendy says, “Well, he sounds nice too.”

And I think: You can totally do this, Gabriella. Tell her. Just because he hasn’t been calling you every five minutes and he isn’t lurking by your bedside, doesn’t mean he’s not your boyfriend. Tell her.

I say, “That’s not my boyfriend on the phone.”

Wendy starts lining up the pencils on the tray table.

I say, “I don’t want him to see me when I look like this.” Which you have to give me points for, which is semi-true. “I want to look vaguely like myself and I want to be thinking straight before I even talk to him.”

Wendy says, “Oh,” like she almost believes it.

I almost believe it, too.

Eventually, though, even the perfume-smitten nurses can tell that no amount of communing with Ponytail Doc, who keeps showing up in my room trying to get me to tell her all the four-legged animals I can think of in thirty seconds, is going to get me to remember diddly about what happened; when I have exhausted the limits of playology and Wendy has taped my portraits of every medical resident, intern, janitor, and candy striper at Valley Mercy onto the walls of the staff lounge; when no one can figure out what possible reason there is for me to be sticking around, going up and down in the cool electric bed, having makeup sponged onto my face without being able to remember one single clue regarding how my face got that way, I get snuck out the side door of the hospital by the freight elevator, as if a bunch of paparazzi and the whole LAPD were just hanging around in the hospital lobby on the edge of their seats waiting for me to make an appearance.

I am completely petrified, huddled in the wheelchair, not even wearing my own clothes because Vivian thinks I look more pathetic in a hospital gown and she is going for the all-season pathetic look just in case. I am waiting for someone to arrest me and throw me in a tiny cell with one sixty-watt lightbulb and a window in the door to slide in Spam sandwiches with wedges of sad iceberg lettuce. I am waiting for someone in a uniform to grab the handles of the wheelchair out of Bunny Shirt’s hands and wheel me away.

But it doesn’t happen.

Bunny Shirt helps me into the backseat of the Mercedes when Vivian pulls it up to the valet service curb. Then Vivian guns the motor, and we’re out of there.

And when I finally get home, which is exactly the same as before, when I finally get into my exactly-the-same room, the only drama left is the drama of me lying in my exactly-the-same bed with my same laptop on my stomach, staring at my same dog-on-surfboard screensaver and waiting for Billy to show up online. Staring at the new cell phone and waiting for Billy to text. Staring at the landline and waiting for Billy to call. Waiting for the miraculous evaporation of Billy’s Have-a-Drunken-Girlfriend-Go-to-Jail Condition of Probation so he can come through my door and into my bedroom and hold my hand and stroke my hair and make things stay the same.

I want to be back in my After and not in some weird after-After Purgatory, waiting to find out if I am Saved or Damned.

Staring at the row of odd little presents that Andie Bennett has been sending and Vivian has lined up on my dresser, including a pink blown glass horse, a Peppermint Patty PEZ dispenser, and a mauve Kate Spade pencil case. And you really have to wonder if the Department of Probation would actually drag Billy off in leg irons if he sent me a freaking mauve pencil.

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t work.

I can’t even get my private home movies to work. I am not sure if this is because I no longer have the interesting drugs dripping into my veins or because now that I’m home and right here, right now, in real time, this is my life. This is Gabriella Gardiner’s ACTUAL Teen Life in the Three B’s uncut, happening to me minute by minute, without chemical enhancement. I can’t close my eyes and watch it because I’m stuck in it.

Except that Gabriella’s actual teen life consists of lying in my room waiting for Billy to show up, which might not even count as a life, if you think about it.

To make things even more bizarre while I’m lying here, completely terrified about what’s going to happen with me and Billy, not to mention me and the LAPD, it is as if after all those years of flying too low to be a blip on his radar, I’ve come up with something my dad can relate to: a problem with mixed drinks in it.

I am used to being in the house with my dad and feeling comfortably alone, not having any idea what he’s actually doing closed up in the den other than drinking. But all of a sudden, I’m his New Best Friend. All of a sudden, he starts coming downstairs and eating breakfast with me in my room, not saying much except for jolly, totally off-the-wall things about how much he likes pink grapefruit.

After the third day of this, he gets up from my desk chair and walks over to the side of the bed just as I’m sliding my tray off my lap. He puts his arm around my shoulder and he squinches up his eyes and it hits me that he is silently crying without the sobbing again. And even though all along, since it began, since Songbird Lane, since everything, I had pretty much thought it was the end of the world, I was wrong: The actual end of the world is this.

His arm is just resting there, not moving, like a dead eel. I just want him to say whatever it is he’s planning to say, assuming he’s planning to say something, so this whole freakish father-daughter episode will be over and he’ll reclaim the eel. But no, now there is some weird shaking thing going on too. I can’t tell if this is John’s rendition of Deep Emotion or if he is trying to pat me on the back but he can’t quite bring himself to do it.