Where It Began(48)

pologuy: tutor wrote it. i memorize it and adapt it to 200 stupid prompts. it’s inspirational. how i’m on student council and martin luther king and gandhi



gabs123: can u adapt it to getting me out of AA?



pologuy: y not? u need 5 compelling paragraphs. need reason from literature or ancient history, current events, and deep personal crap that u get to make up. u can make up the whole thing. u can say ghandi was the first indian guy on the atlanta braves, and that’s where he met MLK. u can say that you’re on council even if ur not. tutor says. what a scam.



gabs123: the deep personal part is i’ll die if i have to go again.



pologuy: very compelling. did u make that up?



gabs123: i am not making this up! do something!



pologuy: calm down. tell frosty NO AA. you’d rather have therapy



gabs123: she’s already supposedly giving me therapy.



pologuy: ok tell her u need to get super intensive therapy because ur super intensively deranged



gabs123: just kill me now.



pologuy: listen. ur paying the bitch to do what u want and make the court like it. just be smart about it. i can’t go to AA because . . .



gabs123: sorry if I’m repeating myself here nash but BECAUSE WHY?



pologuy: ok because being there makes u want to cut yourself. that sounds nice and girlie



gabs123: i want to CUT myself? right, with the plastic knife from the coffee cake on the dessert buffet in the back of the church.



pologuy: makes u want to eat up all the coffee cake, stick your finger down ur throat, barf, and then cut yourself



gabs123: ew. like she’s going to buy this.



pologuy: u r paying her to buy this. her job is to buy anything u tell her to buy. trust me on this





So I call her up and cry. And he’s right again.





XXXVI


LISA SAYS, “WHERE WERE YOU? I CAME OVER WITH Anita and your mom was very squirrelly about where you were.”

“AA.” It just slips out.

“Wow,” Lisa says.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anymore.”

“No,” Lisa says. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, it could be good for you. You give your worries over to a higher power.”

“No offense, Lisa, but I’m not giving anything over to a higher power.”

“Well, no offense, but it might be better than giving things over to Billy Nash.”

“Did you just say that?”

“Yeah, well, sorry, all I’m saying is that if you’re having a problem with drinking, AA wouldn’t be the worst place for you to go.”

“You can talk when you’ve been there. I’m going to go to constant psychotherapy instead, are you happy? Could we please talk about something else? Could we talk about you instead? Pretty, pretty please with a rum ball on top?”

“Pretty please with a keg on top is more like it,” Lisa says.

But as it turns out, she is dying to talk about something else. She is, in fact, dying to talk about Junior Spring Fling, which sounds about as weird and alien to my current life as a potato sack race on Mars but beats hearing one more person weigh in on my so-called drinking problem.

Although it is somewhat odd that now that—instead of festooning the old gym with rolls of crepe paper and watching the Muffins pitch a fit about how much they like pink, silver, and black—I am expanding my range of my fun high school experiences by becoming a lowlife, arrested north of Ventura Boulevard followed by hours in a church full of drunk kids, now Lisa wants to expand her range of fun high school experiences by shopping for a new dress and going to Fling.

You have to wonder what we even have to talk about anymore.

“Huey wants to go,” she says. “So I just said I would without thinking and now I’m feeling like maybe this is a mistake.”

“Huey wants to go to Fling?”

“I know. You wouldn’t think he’d want to do anything that conventional. It kind of took me by surprise.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t just want to use you as cover so he can take pictures that make everybody look like decadent slobs for yearbook?” Huey is a big fan of smoky, black-and-white, decadent slob pictures. Only, nobody can tell he’s making fun of them. They think they look gorgeous and artistic.

“Come on,” Lisa says. She sounds horrified.

“Sorry. I was joking.”

“No you weren’t.”

“Okay, it’s not that I don’t think Huey would want to take you to a dance. It’s just that you’d think he’d be repelled by a rhyming-name dance at Winston.”

Lisa sighed. “Well, it’s the only dance that’s available. Except for his cousin’s debutante ball in Paris.”

“He invited you to a deb ball in Paris?”

“Like my mother’s going to let me go to Paris, France, with Huey? I don’t even know if she’s going to let me go to Spring Fling.”

“You should one hundred percent go. Tell her it’s a sock hop, for godsake, with poodle skirts and socks, and all the really old teachers are chaperoning because they like Elvis and all that old stuff. They’re going to be dancing the twist. It’s going to be completely harmless.”