Where It Began(39)

“Well, I know they wanted to talk to me. But the nurses kept telling them I was comatose and they couldn’t come in. And that they had my blood alcohol level so what else did they need.”

“I see,” Mr. Healy says, apparently pleased with this turn of events. “Blood draw. Blood draw? I see the blood draw. What I don’t see is a warrant. And I don’t see a consent form. And I don’t see that a certified nurse or a phlebotomist did the draw either. You don’t recall signing a consent form, do you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Healy says. “This might give us something to work with. No bottles in the car or at the scene. And maybe no usable blood work. Just maybe they’re going to have to break more of a sweat than they like breaking to find someone who saw you putting it away.”

“Good luck with that one,” I say. “No one will say they saw me. Are you kidding me?”

“Pardon?”

“No one will ever say anything like that.”

Mr. Healy looks up from the file. “How can you know that?”

How could he not know that? That no one would ever tell. That Winston and every place else like it is a sacrosanct no-snitch zone, the Citadels of Silence of the Western World. Even in seventh grade, when Buddy Geiss and his eighth-grade a-hole pals were sticking little kids’ heads in the toilet and flushing for no apparent reason and everybody hated his guts and was afraid they’d be the next upside down, little seventh-grade kid with pee in their hair, nobody said a single word.

And because I’m Billy Nash’s girlfriend, sort of, if anyone does say a single word, they’ll come out of this looking worse than me, which is, all things considered, someplace pretty damn far south of happy.

Not to mention, it seems somewhat beside the point given what you would think any reasonable lawyer would have to see as the main event of the Gabby Gardiner Crime Spree and Amnesia Fest: the car.

“What about the car?” I say.

“Well, insurance should take care of that,” Mr. Healy says, not even looking up. “And you won’t be driving for a while, of course.”

Excuse me?

“Because I took the car?”

“Because you drove it drunk into a tree,” he sighs. “Okay, let me explain this to you again.”

“Wait! My boyfriend . . . my former boyfriend is like Mr. DUI and he’s still driving,” I say. The thought of being stranded in that house on Estrada with Vivian and John and no possible means of escape is somewhat horrifying. “When can I drive?”

Mr. Healy hems and haws and makes a lawyer joke about how my former boyfriend’s lawyer must have something on the DA hardy har har. “And even if the blood alcohol is out as evidence,” he says, “then we’ve still got some pretty reckless driving on our hands.”

He seems determined to completely avoid the thing with me stealing the car, which seems like it could be a serious crime.

“The car?” I say again.

He just sits there in the squeaky chair looking concerned but clueless.

“Uh . . . stealing the car . . .”

“You stole a car!” Mr. Healy says, trying to sound calm as his chair squeaks back to its full upright position.

“There’s no way Billy would have given me the keys to that car. That car is his baby. I mean, it was his baby. Before I wrecked it. So it seems like I must have just, I don’t know, sort of taken it. Won’t the police figure that out?”

Mr. Healy is suddenly taking a lot of notes. “And, uh, what does Billy say?”

“Pretty much nothing. He pretty much says not to worry about it, and his mom pretty much says the same thing.”

“This would be Agnes Nash who says not to worry about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

At which point, Mr. Healy puts down his yellow legal pad and smiles at me.

“Okay, then,” he says, settling back down into the chair which squeaks an even more hideous protest. “You just might not have anything to worry about on that aspect of it. The police and the prosecutor haven’t brought it up, and I don’t think we’ll be bringing it up either, eh?” Hardy har har.

So if nobody says anything about the car, we can all join hands and have group amnesia together?

Like if no one says it happened, then it didn’t happen?

As if Billy had said: Here, drunken girl, take my stunning and incredibly expensive car and wrap it around a tree. Or maybe he was so drunk he just tossed me the keys, but who is going to go there? I’d still be the drunk girl who drove into the tree, and he’d be in a worse ring of Probation hell.

“Right,” says Mr. Healy. “I think our focus here needs to be helping you get past the Drinking Problem so everyone can see that you Take Responsibility and it isn’t going to happen again. I need you to be a model girl. I need you doing everything you’re supposed to do, everything all the mental health and rehab people you’re about to meet tell you to do, on time, and with a smile on your face. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do anything.”

“Anything legal,” he says. “Anything legal, moral, and looks good in a probation report. What about school? Do you have a disciplinary record at school I need to know about?”

“No, nothing,” I say, trying to figure out quickly how to let him know what a paragon of perfection I could look like on paper if desperate enough. “I’m on Student Council!” I blurt.