Where It Began(51)

pologuy: ok like this. oh no dr jackman i have a restless urge to drink, smoke, and have meaningless sex. yet i know all this fun stuff my wicked peers are pressuring me to do is self destructive. oh no dr. jackman what should i do? hey i know, what if u put on the cd with the jungle bugs and bird calls and i relax in this nice zero gravity chair?



gabs123: no way.



pologuy: way. and be sure to tell her how much u hate yourself



gabs123: what if she doesn’t buy any of this? she’s not completely stupid. is there a backup plan?



pologuy: dude u don’t need a backup plan. just tell her how u sit in ur bedroom and hate yourself while drinking up ur dad’s glenlivet



gabs123: y is everybody making such a big deal about that? it was just that one time.



pologuy: don’t tell her that





XXXIX


BACK IN THE HOSPITAL, PONYTAIL WAS JUST AN irritating interruption of Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s. She was a lot less annoying than when she is sitting in her office in Westwood.

An office in a glass and steel building with a bad metal sculpture in the lobby (convex mother with concave child, only it is hard to tell if the mother is nursing the kid or dropping it).

An office that looks like a set decorator’s idea of a professor’s lair: the antique desk, the leather chairs, the books and journals strewn across the desk as if Ponytail is so so busy doing important research on the Inner Life of Teens that you ought to be grateful when she looks up for long enough to talk to your seriously annoyed self.

“And so we meet again,” she says, settling into her chair.

What, like I was supposed to have kept up with her on Facebook?

“I guess,” I say. It is hard to put a finger on why I want to smack her so much except that, oh yeah, I don’t want to be here.

She smiles at me and makes the kind of piercing eye contact that feels as if the person can gaze into your mind and see things that you don’t know. And I go, Stop it, Gabriella. She can’t see into your mind, for godsake. She doesn’t even know you that well.

But after Billy’s helpful pep talk, I am in a complete state of paranoid terror.

Ponytail, meanwhile, is sitting there looking me over, aka staring, as apparently normal social skills are irrelevant in psychiatry. I am sitting there looking her over, too. I am wearing a perky yet conservative teen outfit that looks really expensive and boring but at least I got to pick it out. A denim skirt and a butter-yellow cardigan. She is wearing her standard issue white shirt and a gray pencil skirt and stubby heels with grosgrain bows.

All I can think of to do is fidget. I start buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of the yellow cardigan and pulling on the ends of the sleeves.

“I notice you’re wearing long sleeves today,” she says.

I am thinking that she is going to turn up her air conditioning when I remember the cutting and the binging on coffee cake and supposedly wanting to plunge my hands into the scalding hot water in Brentwood Unitarian’s giant coffeemaker that got me out of AA and into this comfy leather chair in the first place.

Ponytail looks extremely concerned.

I am afraid she is going to make me push up my sleeves and be righteously pissed off when she sees my uncut, unscarred, unscalded, normal weight arms. Not to mention, she has seen me half-naked and half-dead in the hospital and you have to figure she would have noticed that I didn’t cut.

“Um, I don’t really do any of that stuff,” I say. “I just think about it all the time.”

“Stuff?” she says, leaning forward. You can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“I know you know,” I say. “Everyone from here to San Diego has read my file by now.”

“I know what your file says,” she says. “I wrote half your file. But I want to know what you say.”

I am pretty eager to get to the part where I deny my Problem so she can help me see the Problem so I can go, Oh yeah, big epiphany, I have a Problem! and then she can cure me and I can get out of there.

“Okay,” I say, in the interest of expediting. “Okay, being at AA and feeling, uh, pressured to talk about myself in front of other people, uh, makes me think about, uh, cutting myself and eating all the refreshments and, you know, the thing with the hot water. But now that I’m not in AA anymore, I’m kind of past it.”

Ponytail says she is glad to hear it. Then she goes back to looking me over. “Was there ever a time when you got past thinking about it, and you cut or binged or hurt yourself with boiling water?”

“Ew. No. Of course not.”

“And you were at AA because—”

“Oh, all right,” I say, in the interest of getting on with it. “If you really want me to say it, I’ll say it. I got drunk at a party and crashed my boyfriend’s car into a tree. And now I don’t remember anything about it. There. Are you happy?”

“Sometimes it’s more disconcerting once you get out of the hospital and back to your life. Having your memories gone.”

“Not so much. It’s pretty obvious what happened. I went to a party. I got drunk. I crashed the car. I grabbed the keys and passed out on the ground. What else is there to know? And it’s not like I’m back to my life anyway.”