Where It Began(52)

“Do you have any feelings or ideas about why you were drinking that much?”

“Because it was a party . . .” I am trying to come up with the right answers here, but speculating about why you did things you don’t remember doing is just not that illuminating.

Ponytail nods as if she were actually listening to me. She is perched on the edge of her seat, deeply fascinated by my every word but so not getting it, patiently waiting for me to enlighten her. “I get that you drink at parties,” she says. “Do you often black out?”

“I never black out! I hit my head against a tree or an air bag or something. That’s not the same as blacking out. If blacking out made me hit the tree, then how did I turn off the car and pull the keys out?”

She just looks at me. More or less as if I’m crazy, which is maybe not that much of a stretch given that I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office pretending to be crazy.

“All right,” I say. “All right. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t have a drinking problem.”

She just sits there.

Really, am I just supposed to repeat this over and over for the entire rest of the session or what? All the time knowing that saying you don’t have a drinking problem is supposed to prove you do have a drinking problem, which basically makes no sense, but okay, whatever.

“My dad is the one with the drinking problem,” I say. I have to say something. “You’ve seen him, right? I swear, the guy basically sits in the house all day and doesn’t actually do anything and I know I’m not a drunk because I’m nothing like that.” She just looks at me. “I’m not.”

“So you’re not like your dad.”

Oh, kill me now. If she’s planning to repeat everything I say and sit there looking deeply concerned and fascinated, I might as well just start searching her office for some sharp object I can pretend I’m thinking about stabbing myself with in the faint hope that Mr. Healy will decide that I’m an even crazier model girl than he thought and send me to an even heavier duty therapist who I can stand.

“I really do not want to sit here and talk about my dad. I just want everything to go back to the way it was before.”

“And you’d be comfortable with that?”

“I would be totally happy and whistling a merry tune if things could be like before, but my life is completely wrecked.”

She nods and looks sympathetic. Really, really sympathetic. Or maybe some shred of Vivian has rubbed off on me through some nasty trick of genetics and I, too, am such a glutton for the smallest scrap of sympathy that a chipmunk would seem sympathetic if it nodded its fuzzy little head at me.

Still, it is hard to believe that Ponytail is going to send me to some residential hellhole in the desert to live in a tent and do ropes courses with gang girls.

“Uh, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be talking about,” I say. I am thinking that this would be the magic moment for her to teach me to gently close my eyelids, take a deep cleansing breath, and relax, like Billy does with his therapist. Because just sitting in her office staring out the window at the view of Westwood is making me extremely nervous.

Then it occurs to me that I’m doing a pretty damned good job of denying the problem so perhaps this is going well.

“That’s the thing, when the courts get involved in treatment,” she says. “You’re supposed to be talking about whatever you want to talk about in this office. This is supposed to be your time. But when the courts are going to be involved, it’s easy to feel as if, if you say the wrong thing, something terrible is going to happen to you, yes?”

This is the part where I cry for twenty-five minutes straight, which is more or less what Billy said I was supposed to do in the first place, so you have to figure it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.

Which is pretty bad.

The only comforting, affirmative thought I can come up with (Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most convincing, not-going-to-wilderness-camp patient who ever sat in this big leather chair? is so not working for me) is that at least it has to seem like I’m being sincere, which, strangely, I am. I mean, who can fake crying for that long?

And it isn’t as if I can stop, either.





XL


MY LESS-THAN-FUN SESSION WITH PONYTAIL MUST have shown all over my tear-rutted, unnaturally beige face because Vivian, who is sitting in the waiting room in her recently overused mauve funeral and teacher conference suit, jumps up and says she is going to take me for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting at Dottie’s Sweeties. Which, given all the calories a trip to Dottie’s Sweeties involves stuffing into your mouth, is an epic offer. Epic and unnerving, given that Vivian never gives me anything resembling a dessert unless someone has died or there’s an earthquake, not to mention it is hard to visualize her traipsing around Beverly Hills with a bruised, smeared makeup, red-eyed, cupcake-chomping kid.

But, of course, it turns out that Vivian thinks she’s doing me a favor when she leaves me in the parking lot and runs in herself, given that letting me humiliate myself by risking someone seeing me when I look this wrecked is no doubt right up there in her mind with public flogging.

Sitting alone in the car on the roof of the parking structure, I am completely stumped as to any possible affirmative thing to say to myself.

Losing control and sniveling was so not what I had in mind. If I was going to cry for twenty-five minutes nonstop, I was supposed to be doing it on purpose, not like some out-of-control crybaby who just whimpers on until reaching the point of dehydration.