Where It Began(53)

Not in front of someone I don’t even like, in the world’s dowdiest expensive shoes, who nevertheless has the potential to make my life worse than it already is.

Not when I’ve been planning to tell Billy about what happened and how I pulled it off and how everything is just fine and freakishly dandy. I am so not planning to tell him about this, or at least not what this feels like.





pologuy: how was ur day at the therapist?



gabs123: it beats AA. but not by much. and no refreshments.



pologuy: the better to save u from yourself little girl, with ur brand new eating disorder and cutting problem. she bought it right?





I’m afraid that if I lie too much, he won’t be able to tell me what to do next, and I’ll be doubly screwed. And if I don’t lie enough, it will just be too humiliating.





gabs123: i cried copiously. SAT word. vivian got me the flash cards. u said cry—i cried. that’s ok, right?



pologuy: what did u say?



gabs123: basically nothing. i cried a lot. very emo.



pologuy: excellent. what do u have to say to her anyway? boo hoo and u don’t remember anything right?



gabs123: hence the crying, like you said. no word on when i get to go back to school though.



pologuy: lucky u. stretch it out





Even though Billy might have my best interests at heart, you didn’t see him stretching it out in exile at his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito despite all the excellent surfing off Rincon Point. And even though my life might currently suck, the only way I have the slightest chance of getting it back is going back to Winston. The only way of getting him back.

Which is basically the same thing.





XLI


YOU WOULD FIGURE THAT A HIGHLY TRAINED helping professional like Ponytail would have picked up on the part that I wasn’t really at risk for swimming around in the boiling contents of industrial-sized coffeemakers, but apparently she and Mr. Healy had a little chat and now I have to have another deeply meaningful session ASAP so she can clear me to go back to school.

“That’s what you want, right?” Mr. Healy says, as if he’d missed the part where I said that was what I wanted every time he made another lame phone call to make sure I hadn’t eloped with Billy with me driving.

This seems like a no-brainer until I start thinking about what it will actually be like to slink back into Winston and have everyone looking at me in my current state of being a juvenile delinquent covered with artfully applied beige foundation in a color not approximating human skin all that closely. Gossiping about me as if I were Buddy Geiss coming back to the Three B’s from celebrity rehab in Malibu, back from military school rehab in South Carolina, back from holistic-getting-down-with-therapeutic-farm-animals rehab in the Napa Valley.

I, on the other hand, will be back from wrecking Billy’s car and messing up my life on Songbird Lane. You have to figure that this could be worse than either my prior state of invisibility or being Buddy Geiss.

This time Vivian takes me to Dottie’s for the cupcake beforehand, and when I pull my cupcake out of the little checkered bag, I see that Vivian has paid extra for them to top it with slivers of white chocolate and honey-roasted almonds. In the absence of deaths or earthquakes, it is hard to tell if all the sugary treats are coming my way because she’s feeling that sorry for me, or if she thinks it doesn’t matter anymore if I turn into a pillar of undulating chocolate-and-honey-roasted-almond-filled fat because any hope of me being anything other than a sub-regular girl is smoldering in Hidden Hills with the last fiery, wrecked bits of Billy’s Beemer.

“It’s going to be hard on you, going back to school like this,” Vivian says when I am halfway through my cupcake and all the way to a sugar rush.

No shit.

Although it isn’t clear if “like this” means Billy-less or with a lavender cheekbone and a swollen jawline. Or both.

“It agreed with you to have a boyfriend,” she says. “But I have a lot of faith that you’ll be back to being the New You again.”

“What?”

And I go, Gabriella, give it up. She’s trying to be extra nice. Don’t be a little bitch.

I say, “I hope you’re right,” but I just want to scream, Stop talking about it. Just. Stop. It’s not that I don’t totally want what she is saying to be true. I do. But hearing her say it out loud makes it sound lame and not remotely possible. Because I’m pretty sure the New Me crashed and burned on Songbird Lane.

“You will be, Gabby,” Vivian says. “You can be anything you want.”

Such as the president of the United States, Tinker Bell, and Billy Nash’s girlfriend in public?

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “It’s hard for a girl to lose her looks, but you’ll get back on your game. You’ll see. You can get another boyfriend. The swelling will go down and you’ll be fine.”

Then she hands me a little container of extra white chocolate slivers that I pour directly onto my tongue, partly because it tastes like the god of chocolate made it and partly to keep myself from talking back to her.

Even Ponytail has a plate of what look like homemade cookies on her desk, which she pushes toward me as if she thinks I need some edible comfort too.