Where It Began(32)

pologuy: i need to c u





Yes yes yes yes yes! I have become a makeup-application fiend waiting exactly for this. I am the reigning queen of camouflage. Yes!



gabs123: me too.



pologuy: i’d climb through ur window if ur house wasn’t on freaking stilts



gabs123: big letterman. u could scale a stilt. romeo would have scaled stilt.



pologuy: romeo ended up dead in crypt, whereas i’m going to play polo at princeton. broken neck scaling gf’s stilt is not in my plan





GF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





gabs123: ok, do u have a non-fatal plan?



pologuy: behind the castle? can u get there?





Like there was any place or time or way I wouldn’t go see Billy.

Like this wasn’t the first time I’d felt like a halfway real person with a halfway real life since my actual life went up in smoke with Billy’s Beemer.

Like maybe if I could just avoid looking desperate and drooling all over him, I could get my life back.





XXIV


IN THE MORNING, IT IS TORTURE WAITING FOR VIVIAN to get ready to roll down the hill to get her hair styled so I can spackle on my makeup and get out of there. The only real question in my mind is if I should go with all the concealer so I’ll look halfway cute or if I should let some of the bruises show through so I’ll look battered yet brave.

I go with the concealer.

And as soon as Vivian pokes her head in to say she is going, looking slightly guilty but pretty much as eager to get out of there as I am, I lower myself gently into the tightest possible sweats and head out through the back of the house, through the laundry room, and down into the canyon toward the castle, trying to walk like a human being.

The castle is what we call this enormous old Spanish house at the end of a cul-de-sac off Via Hermosita. It has been under reconstruction but mostly abandoned, half-finished, for my whole life. The place is gated tight from the street, but if you climb down the bank from the house next door, you can slip through the gate by the pool house. The pool is empty and there’s graffiti in it, but behind the pool, the yard is terraced and wooded, so even if somebody did show up to work on the main house, they wouldn’t see you down there unless they came looking.

I wait on a stone bench out of the sun, not for the coolness of the shade, but because I am afraid my face will look as if it’s covered with putty in full sunlight, and I watch for Billy.

And it really does feel as if I were abducted by aliens, sucked into a time warp, and returned to planet Earth a long time later, looking (almost) the same, but entirely different. Like I can’t quite remember how to breathe, and my heart isn’t sure how to beat in the right rhythm, and I don’t know how to focus my eyes so I can take it all in, and I can’t tell how to feel beyond the rush of seeing him coming toward me finally.

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve seen him, and climbing down the neighbor’s embankment, he looks as if having his car wrecked made him get even more gorgeous. He is wearing a dark, dark green T-shirt and these perfect jeans and ratty old black Converse without socks. I swear, his footsteps have to scorch the path.

“Oh, Babe,” he says before he hugs me, looking at me through those blue eyes, through those dark lashes, the sun in that pale hair. “You look like you’ve been through it.”

So much for the makeup. Carefully holding my head a little bit away from his cheek so he won’t get plastered with a big, greasy splotch of opaque beige glop, the rest of me feels so good, so at home, pressed up against him.

And I think: Don’t cling don’t cling don’t cling.

I say, “Ya think?”

“Are you all right, G? You look so thin.”

Like this is a bad thing.

“I just want this all to be over. . . .”

“I know you do,” he whispers in my ear, so close I can feel his breath, feel it blowing my hair over my ear. “But it’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be over and in the past.”

“Billy, it’s not in the past yet! What happens if I tell the police I don’t remember and they don’t believe me? What if they want to put me in prison for stealing your car?”

“You didn’t steal my car,” Billy says. Snorts, actually, as if the idea that I did what I did is so ridiculous, it’s snort-provoking. “No one in his right mind would believe you stole my car. Come on.”

Except that I did.

“Your mother hates me,” I say.

“Not that much,” Billy says. “Not enough to tell the police you stole my car.”

Billy starts to rub my shoulders, which kind of hurts, but I let him do it anyway. I want it to feel good. I want to believe that Agnes will go along with him and I won’t be up for the part of hot-girl icon in Grand Theft Auto any time soon, but if he has so much power over her, then why are we hiding out behind the castle?

“What if they want to know the story of my life?” Meaning my life since the first day of junior year, given that before then I didn’t have anything that you could call a life. “I can’t just say I don’t remember anything ever.”

Billy keeps rubbing, only faster, so it feels as if the skin is going to peel off my shoulder blades leaving just bones and nerve endings. “Maybe you could,” he says. “You got pretty smashed. Maybe you could just pummel the bitches with your drinking problem.”