Where It Began(33)

“What drinking problem?” This is so not what I need to hear from him. “You want me to say I have a drinking problem and I’m like permanently blacked out?”

“Whoa,” he says. “Don’t get defensive. You were pretty smashed is all I meant.”

“Jesus freaking Christ, Billy!” I can tell that yelling is not a good thing, but I can’t exactly help myself. “Everyone gets pretty smashed! It was a party. Everyone gets smashed at parties. The stoners blaze and we get smashed.”

“You were kind of unusually smashed,” he says. “You could hardly walk.”

“Well, obviously I could walk well enough to get into your car and drive it into a tree,” I say. Billy just looks at me. It is impossible to tell what he is thinking. “It would help if I could remember anything.”

“Whoa,” Billy says, eyeing me as if he were one of the detectives Vivian won’t let me talk to. “You really don’t remember anything? Not anything.”

“Duh.”

He stands there staring at me. “But it’ll come back to you sometime, right?”

“Gone forever,” I say. “That’s what my dimwit doctor said. Some combination of my so-called binge drinking and the head injury.”

Billy says, “Whoa. So you’ll never remember what happened? It’s gone forever? They can’t even hypnotize you?”

“Gone forever,” I say.

Billy just stands there looking kind of dazed but like he finally gets it.

All I know is that if I don’t do something right away, if I don’t make him want me right away, it is pretty much over. I know it before he even starts to elaborate on how being with me is a probation violation, which I already know and so do not want to hear about. How he’s beyond grateful that I didn’t finger him for being at the party, but unless his PO is a bigger moron than he thinks, he has to keep the guy from figuring it out and nailing him, and he can’t have a girlfriend with a drinking problem who parties blahblah because he’s on probation for his so-called drinking problem and his many DUI’s that his mom got him out of, and it’s different for me because this was my first offense blabitty-blah but if he screws up again, he’s screwed and he can kiss (drum roll) Princeton good-bye because he’s going to be incarcerated somewhere with bars and Eight-Trey Gangster Crips.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says. “It has to at least look like I’ve cleaned up, or I have to kiss everything good-bye.”

It is so obvious that he’d rather kiss me good-bye.

It is so so obvious that I have to find a way to keep that from happening.

I keep trying to tell myself what a wonderful person I am and how any reasonable boyfriend would just have to see that and just want me, want me, want me, but this is such a complete crock that it only makes me cry more.

“Don’t, Gardiner,” Billy said. “Shhhh. It’ll be all right. Like I said, we just have to act like we’re over until things settle down.”

I don’t even know what that means. Am I supposed to be hanging around Winston School pretending it’s over when it really isn’t over? If Billy can’t see me or talk to me or be with me, how is it not over?

Billy takes my hand and gazes at me as if he is actually sad. “Look,” he says. “Are you sure you even want to come back?”

“What?”

“You look so fragile and everything. And with me not being able to take care of you in public and everybody at Winston looking at you and trying to talk to you about it and everything . . . Would you be better off at Holy Name?”

My face is suddenly hot and I feel like I am going to pass out, and not in some adorable southern belle, gee-golly, Rhett-Butler-run-and-fetch-me-a-mint-julep-straight-up kind of way either.

“You don’t want me to go to Winston?”

“Christ, Gabs, it’s not about what I want,” he says. “I’m thinking about what’s best for you with everybody talking about it and bothering you and me not being able to help you. This is not going to be easy to pull off.”

Like the nuns at Holy Name are going to fall all over themselves taking in a teenage felon after Easter of junior year. Like they aren’t already busy enough explaining to their little coke whores how they shouldn’t drive around the curves on Mulholland in the open trunk of Billy’s car. A problem, come to think of it, that I have solved for them being as how now Billy doesn’t have a car.

Like I am going to leave Winston and, from the sound of it, never see Billy again, but hey, it’ll be good for his probation.

Like I am going to hang around in a Holy Name plaid pleated jumper for a year and a half and never see him at all, not even have the slightest chance of running into him, of catching a glimpse of him turning the corner in the hall.

Like I am ever going to let that happen.

“I can deal,” I say. “I’ll just say I don’t want to talk about it. Because actually, I don’t.”

And I say to myself, Gabby, what a rare genius you are, you are already saying you don’t want to talk about it before anyone else thought of it. You can so totally do this.

“I’ll just be very Greta Garbo: I vant to be alone, dahlink,” I say to him. “You so don’t have to take care of me.”