Where It Began(54)

This time she’s sitting there in a pale-green cashmere sweater, and you want to tell her that even though it might somewhat match her eyes, it is so so not working. I am wearing the highest cut jeans I own to avoid upsetting her with the sight of my thong and an ugly striped shirt with cufflinks that Vivian forced me to wear because apparently she thinks that shapelessness is a good look for the psychologically impaired.

This time, it takes me less than a minute to start crying.

Ponytail hands me a box of tissues, and I notice that this time there is a tiny little leather-covered wastebasket beside the leather chair. The possibility that Ponytail saw this coming, that this is not the result of a slight change in her interior decorating plan, but that she is graciously providing me with someplace to stow my snotty tissues because she knew in advance what was going to happen, completely freaks me out.

After about fifteen minutes of this, she asks me if I can talk about it, and not seeing a downside to telling her the actual truth, I say, “I don’t know.” Then I realize that this is the perfect opening to tell her how much I hate myself, but then I start crying again.

“I’m wondering if you’re feeling reluctant to be frank with me because of your legal situation.”

Duh.

I nod my head and try to look as if I want to be there.

“Weeeeeeellllll,” Ponytail says, filling my silence, “it’s hard for me to imagine anything you could tell me that would harm you in that respect.”

For me, on the other hand, it isn’t all that hard. To imagine what could happen if I tell her something that makes her hate me, for example. To imagine what could happen if I say the wrong thing and she decides that a few months in the desert serves me right.

Billy’s voice telling me not to trust the therapist is playing over and over in my head like a tape loop that won’t quit.

“And all this crying tells me that something’s hurting,” she says.

I just keep sniffling because, basically, I can’t stop, and she sits there saying all these inane things about growing and changing and being a re-potted plant turning toward the morning sun and trying to talk to me about how I feel about going back to school after being out for so long, which I can’t really tell her because I don’t totally know how I feel about it; I just know that I have to do it because not doing it is just going to make my life worse.

“I have to go back to school,” I say. “I have to. It’s like everybody else’s life kept on going but my life stopped and I don’t even exist and” (oh yeah, the magic and completely credible and somewhat true moment to throw it in) “I hate myself.”

Ponytail’s gaze bores through my forehead but is stopped in its tracks by the complete opacity of my completely private mind. She gives me her most sympathetic mmmmmm.

“Are you feeling ready?”

No.

I say, “Yes.”

So it is finally happening.





XLII


THE NIGHT BEFORE I GO BACK TO WINSTON, PEOPLE are wishing me the kind of bon voyage and good luck you’d expect if you were leaving on a spaceship for a sinister galaxy far far away, not tooling halfway down a swanky hill to finish junior year.

Anita’s and Lisa’s mothers—who are both very big on being the carpool mom because, as far as I can figure out, it gives them control over the sound system, so Lisa’s mom can force us to listen to Jesus radio and Anita’s mom can force us to listen to South Asian elevator music—are competing to carpool me, assuring Vivian that it will be much better for me to arrive with my true friends.

If I had any other friends, this would be quite the slam, but I don’t, so it isn’t.

Then Huey’s mother calls to offer us a debilitated rescue cat I could nurse back to health, and when Vivian gleefully assures her that the coyotes in the canyon would eat that cat in one gulp, she offers us an endangered two-foot lizard. This makes Vivian get creative really fast and insist that as much as we’d love to have an endangered two-foot lizard in the process of shedding its mass quantities of scaly skin, our housekeeper has a pathological fear of reptiles.

Then Andie Bennett texts to say that she hopes I have a really nice day, with a smiley face emoticon. I have the feeling my day isn’t exactly going to reach the level of smiley facedness, on top of which, all that concern makes me wonder if everybody else somehow knows how spectacularly horrible it is going to be and I am grossly underestimating the depth of the shit I’m in.

And to remind me of the depth and consistency of that shit and how bad an idea everything I thought would be a good idea is, Charlotte Ward actually phones the house.

She does such a good Queen of the Universe impersonation that Vivian doesn’t even try to screen her out; she just hands me the phone. And even though Lisa and Anita have spent the past three hours calling to be wildly encouraging, it is pretty clear that some people aren’t looking forward to being in the same room with me as much as others.

Council, for reasons clear only in Charlotte’s twisted mind, does not seem too eager for me to show up. But given that Billy is on Council, I am not exactly eager to give it up.

The only reason I am even on Charlotte’s damned decorating committee is because I heard Mr. Piersol’s lecture about leaving your mark on Winston School once too often and I must have been temporarily hypnotized.