Where It Began(34)

Billy reaches over and puts his arm around me tight. It hurts like a bitch. He looks really concerned.

“Just think about it,” he says “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“What could be worse than what’s already happened?”

Billy runs his fingertips up and down between my shoulder blades. “Listen, would you break something if we, you know—?”

And I think, Whoa! and I don’t even care what breaks.





XXV


BILLY DRIVES ME HOME IN ONE OF HIS DAD’S OLD classic Ferraris which you would think would undermine a person’s ability to sneak around effectively, only around here it doesn’t. He drops me off a few houses up the street, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one but a couple of gardeners out blowing leaves down the hill with their illegal leaf-blowers spots him, and he kisses me again before I stumble back home.

It’s the middle of the day but I am too tired to even undress. I fall asleep weirdly happy, and when I wake up, it’s completely dark and my mother is trying to haul me into the living room as if I have to hurry or I’ll miss the Second Coming of Christ.

“Vivian, I want to sleep. Just let me sleep, okay?”

She is spluttering and hissing, but I am too tired and too buried under plaster of paris makeup and too weirded out to get that Agnes Nash has turned up without warning and is standing on the front porch staring right into our house.

My parents are embarrassingly awkward—like they can’t figure out that they’re supposed to invite her in. It’s unnerving.

Actually, Agnes seems inexplicably smiley given that I just burned up, what, $75,000 of Nash family sports car and got her baby boy into deep shit with his probation officer.

My dad takes her coat and then sort of forgets about it and drops it behind the ratty chaise. My mother can’t even look her in the face.

“Can I get you something?” Vivian asks, leading Agnes nervously across the living room, scooping up stray pieces of clothes and sections of old newspapers that are strewn all over the place because Juanita is back to coming two days a week, and the other five days, stuff just piles up.

“Nice view,” Mrs. Nash says, looking outside since it’s pretty clear that her looking around at the inside of the house makes my mother cringe with shame over the state of our dilapidated box on stilts.

My mother pours gin and tonic into a purple tumbler and shoves it into her hand. Agnes Nash looks down at it as if it might be contaminated. Then her whole body gives a little shake, as if she has to pull herself together, and she looks up with an even more beatific smile.

“You know,” she says, “Vivian, John, you have to believe that I know how godawful this is. Because, believe me, we’ve been there.” She takes a slug of the contaminated drink, still holding it away from her body, and makes a little face.

My mother snatches the glass. “Can I get you a refill, Agnes?”

Mrs. Nash shakes her head no, but my mother refills the glass anyway, stirring frenetically with a purple glass straw. Agnes is mesmerized.

I am thinking, Where did we get all this ugly stuff? and wondering why I never noticed how tacky it is before.

Mrs. Nash takes the drink in its nasty purple tumbler and makes a face at it, so just in case it didn’t know how nasty it was before, it knows now.

“I can’t even count how many times we’ve been there.” She looks at me, slouched in my extremely tight sweat suit that probably still has Billy’s fingerprints in the nap of the velour, folding myself into the smallest possible size on the ottoman, trying to pretend I am somewhere else. “Gabby probably knows. Gabby, how many times would you say we’ve been there? How many, exactly?”

I have no idea, not the faintest hint, of what I am supposed to say to her or why she is here. I have no idea how many times Billy screwed up.

“Um, I guess we’re all in this together,” is what I finally say when it’s clear that no one is going to stop looking at me until I say something. It is one of Mr. Piersol’s favorite all-purpose clichés. Who says I’m not taking advantage of all the life-changing educational opportunities at Winston School?

“So,” Agnes says, downing drink number two, “you’re telling the police you don’t remember?”

The idea that Billy is actually having conversations with his mother in which he talks about me and tells her how I’m somewhat saving his ass by not telling the cops he attended what must have been quite the fun party is not totally unpleasant. I kind of wonder what else he’s told her about me. I wonder what other meaningless clichés I can come up with so she’ll stop looking at me like that.

A stitch in time saves nine?

United we stand, divided we fall?

The early bird gets whatever?

What I say is, “I haven’t talked to them since before I remembered what my name was. But what else am I going to say?”

Agnes squints and peers at me, thrusting her empty purple glass in the direction of Vivian. Then she looks over drink number three and beams at me. All right, it is definitely a more-than-slightly-strained beam, but it is an undeniable beam. Given that Agnes has never even so much as slightly smiled at me before, I am completely discombobulated.

Unless there is some diabolical plot afoot and she is secretly here to take me down and I’m just too wrecked to figure it out, this has to be a good thing.