Where It Began(44)

“Absolutely,” Vivian keeps repeating. “Of course we can get Gabby treatment! Of course she’s not out of control! Of course Gabby can take responsibility for her Problem, can’t you, Gabby?”

She is blissfully unaware of what I have to say to fake out everybody, how I have to deny my so-called Problem.

“Sure,” I say, really hoping that Billy knows what he’s talking about because I am about to launch. Frosty looks up to see where the voice is coming from, given that I haven’t said anything, not one single word including hello, for the past forty-five minutes. “Only I’m not sure I have a Problem. Are you sure I have a Problem?”

Billy is completely right.

Ms. Frost is so overjoyed that I am sitting there semi-denying the Problem while remaining open to learning all about said Problem, you can almost discern the faint suggestion of a smile at the corners of her Botox-frozen, twitching mouth. Billy is a complete Get Out of Jail Free meister.

Of course I don’t appreciate the Problem and that is why all these helpful professionals are going to help me appreciate and come to grips with it! Preferably before the Department of Probation helps me appreciate and come to grips with it in desert rehab in Arizona.

All I am thinking is: How do I get out of this and get back to Winston and get back with Billy? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Tell me what to say and I’ll say it.

All Vivian is thinking is: Winston School! Tell me what to do to keep her from getting booted out of Winston School and destroying her chance of attending the sub-regular college of her choice and I’ll do it!

It is hard to tell what my dad is thinking since, even without the Botox, he is almost as poker-faced as Ms. Frost. “Of course we have a stable home life,” he’s murmuring, his eyes still partly closed. “Of course we know where she is at all times. Of course we don’t sanction underage drinking.”

Probably he’s thinking: Does this place have a bar?

Or maybe: How soon can I get back to Bel Air where we have a bar and several well-stocked mini-fridges?

The sooner he can get back to a pitcher of margaritas, the sooner he can forget how Winston might hold it against me that I’m a drunken felon car thief, thereby stripping him of any slim claim to status that I had ever offered. Except for my increasingly tenuous connection to Billy Nash.

All I can think about is Billy. How I need to see him and not just to make out to the point of frustration on top of a washing machine and hiding out behind abandoned houses. How I need to see him all the time and I need to make him want me again. How I need to be at Winston even though Ms. Frost says to avoid him and all other cute bad boys—if I am at Winston and he is at Winston, what are they going to do, put us in handcuffs if we make eye contact?

Winston School!

For once Vivian and John and I are in perfect agreement.

Only I have to survive the black hole of the legal system first.





XXXII


THE THING ABOUT FALLING INTO THE LEGAL SYSTEM is that even if you aren’t ready for it; even if you don’t want to deal with it; even if you need to crawl back onto your space-raft bed and float in a gray-green sky; even if you wish you could get your behind-the-eyes documentary going again instead of being stuck with your actual, real life; even if you reach the absolute limits of positive thinking and there’s not a single nice thing you can think of to say to yourself that you actually believe, you still can’t make it stop.

Vivian and I are parked under a scrubby tree in a parking lot in the Valley. John has bailed, with the completely bogus claim that he has work to do, so it’s just me and her waiting in complete silence, which, under the circumstances, probably beats talking.

We are sitting there in the old SUV and not the Mercedes because Vivian is afraid that the police will hold a Mercedes that big against us if they notice it. Because we are so deep deep in the San Fernando Valley, so far north of Ventura Boulevard and civilization, that we don’t even recognize where we are, and she suspects that there’s an irrational hatred of rich people—presumably extending to the pseudo-rich—out here.

We are parked by a sheriff’s station, waiting for me to go in.

The station is a tan, cinder-block building with windows too high to look out of or see into. All I can think about is how you could go into a building like that and not come out except to ride from one locked room to another on one of those sheriff’s buses you stare into on the freeway, wondering what those men scowling sideways at you did to be riding in there. And how I could end up in a bus like that with rows of terrifying girls in Day-Glo jumpsuits.

We are not planning to get out of the SUV until Mr. Healy shows up and gets out of his Maybach first, meanwhile avoiding eye contact with any of the tired-looking deputies walking by, or the people going in and out of the station who, from the look of it, have no reason to fear they are going to inspire prejudice by virtue of uppity displays of Westside wealth.

It’s the Valley; it is eighty-eight degrees in April; and all I want to do is swim out of there in a conveniently deep river of sweat. Why couldn’t I just paddle over to some Westside courthouse where the big question would be what the hell a girl like me was doing in the Valley in the first place, even if it was Songbird Lane in Hidden Hills, which is gated and where all the houses have acres of grassy lawns, black-bottom swimming pools, koi ponds, and a horse?