Where It Began(38)

“It probably doesn’t matter anyway,” I say. “It’s just that I don’t remember anything to level with you about.”

“Really?” he says. Only it’s more like REALLLLLLY!?!?!?!?!?!?

“Yeah, like if I said I remembered what I did, I’d be making it up.”

“Oh, I see.” Mr. Healy leans back in his big leather chair, which creaks pathetically, as if it were hoping that someone would put it out of its misery. “Then you really will be comfortable telling the police and probation that you don’t, in fact, remember?”

Like I’m going to be comfortable telling anyone anything.

“I guess,” I say. “I mean, I’m definitely not going to be comfortable having a big courtroom scene where I have to take an oath and have to . . . you know . . .”

By now, the guy is grinning from huge ear to huge ear. “I don’t think we have to worry about what would happen if you were testifying in the kind of trial you see on TV,” he says. “I think we can work this out without that. As for what happened on, er, Songbird Lane, your mom was kind enough to fill me in, and, unfortunately, the facts do seem to speak for themselves.”

Drunk blabitty-blah car wrapped around a tree blah-blah car keys in my hand blah-blah-blah.

This is the part where Mr. Healy tips all the way back in his immense leather chair and explains in detail how if not for the vehicular pyrotechnics, maybe I could get away with being a penitent-yet-dopey teen led astray by peer pressure and a low, low tolerance for canned, chilled daiquiris. But now, in the eyes of the State of California, if I don’t deal with the Problem that led to all these hijinks fast, next thing you know, I’ll be off on a drunken vehicular rampage. If someone doesn’t rehabilitate me immediately, a life of crime, mixed drinks, battered sports cars, and carnage spreads before me where some mediocre college and a sub-regular career used to be.

As a result of the State of California’s unfortunate opinion of me, the helpful helping professionals Agnes Nash has picked out for me have to love and adore my perfect self. Because: If I’m not really really convincing, I’ll be singing my sad, alcoholic ballad of teenage depravity in a locked juvenile rehab jail in Arizona.

He has the brochure.

I’ll be taking wilderness walks in a one-hundred-and-ten-degree desert wonderland. And I’ll be doing it sober. Which would pretty much work for me since I only drink at parties north of Sunset and gated ones in the Valley on streets like Songbird Lane, and all right, also at picnic lunches in the Class of 1920 Garden, which involves white wine in tiny Dixie cups and shouldn’t even count, or just something relaxing with Billy and company after school, which seems a lot more like a bonding activity the Brady Bunch would go for after turning off the cameras than a hard-core criminal activity. But even so, I sort of doubt they have anything like that in locked rehab facilities no matter how many zillions of dollars your parents have to pay to get you in there and, more importantly, to keep you out of California Youth Authority where they have actual gang members and where Mr. Healy seems pretty convinced that someone like me could actually get killed.





XXVIII


“SO,” MR. HEALY SAYS, “ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE?”

Given that the only other page involves me going to juvie jail and being a car-thief drunk-driver with a criminal record for about ten minutes until a gang girl stabs me to death with a stiletto-sharp, rat-tailed comb, you bet we’re on the same page.

But now that I can barely breathe because it feels as if my throat is closing up, there’s The Bright Side. It’s my first offense; nobody got all that hurt; and probation is a real good option.

This is so so not totally reassuring.

“So,” he says, making a brave but unsuccessful attempt to push his sleeves half an inch up his arms. “When you were arrested, do you recall what you said to the police?”

“I was arrested?”

“You don’t recall being arrested?” Mr. Healy starts thumbing through the files with increased interest.

“Uh-uh.”

“This is interesting,” he says, plucking papers from the file. “Let’s see what we have here. . . . Wait a minute, is this the LAPD or the sheriff or what?”

I am trying to look as calm as possible while waiting for this to make sense.

Mr. Healy looks perturbed. “I don’t see an unbooked DUI, I don’t see a citation. . . . Wait . . . okay, this paperwork is not in your name.”

“What isn’t?”

Mr. Healy heaves a giant sigh. “Tell me you didn’t give them a false name. Heidi?”

“No way! It must have been the nurse or someone, seriously. I was delirious. I was in some kind of coma.” It is hard to tell if he believes me.

“We’re going to have to fix this,” he says, frowning at my file. “I’m going to have to take you in there.”

I’m too scared to ask what the this we have to fix is, and where we have to go to do the fixing.

“And you weren’t handcuffed to the hospital bed?”

“What? No!”

Mr. Healy shakes his head. He looks somewhat disgusted with the wrong-name paperwork, or me, or both. “Okay, do you remember talking to a sheriff at the hospital?”

What I remember is the gun lady and the vigilant nurse. I remember telling people who, when you think about it, had no reason to be there if they weren’t police, things like “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” and “I really don’t remember” and shutting my eyes and pretending they weren’t there and falling asleep. I remember drip bags full of clear liquids that greatly enhanced the possibility of falling fast asleep in the middle of a sentence.