Where It Began(59)

All right, you have to give her credit for not totally avoiding me given her aversion to drama and the fact that I didn’t return her four hundred phone calls or send thank-you notes for the dozen little presents she’s mailed me in the past month. And the truth is, all I want is to be back on the checkered linen blanket on the grass in the Class of 1920 Garden with her and Andy totally into each other and totally uninterested in me and Billy, sitting there drinking Chardonnay from Andie’s Dixie cups—not standing around feeling awkward and watching her try to talk coherently.

But she looks as if she’s going to cry and the Must Help Andie instinct kicks in and I go, “Hey, Andie,” given that I don’t have any helpful substances to give her if she goes into her catatonic crying state.

“Why didn’t you call me back?” she says, looking completely miserable.

“Uh, I didn’t know what to say, I guess. Sorry.”

Andie blurts, “I feel like it’s my fault. I just wanted to tell you that. Billy says you don’t want to hang out with us like before,” (which, although I instantly understand why he had to say that, is not the funnest topper to what has to be the least fun school day of my life) “and I understand, I really do, but I just wanted to, I don’t know, say hi or something.”

She stands there gazing at me, looking guilty as all hell, which is a new look for inhabitants of Cute World.

“Are you feeling okay?” she says. “Are you still in pain? Do you need anything for it? Maybe I could help you.”

Even the thought of Andie Bennett skipping across campus with an adorably wrapped little bottle of Vicodin does not make this conversation any more bearable. I am in the just-say-something-and-get-this-over-with mode. In the I-don’t-want-this-to-be-reality, I-want-to-slip-into-the-alternate-reality-in-which-I-turn-around-and-drive-the-Beemer-back-to-the-party-and-slip-back-inside-and-go-to-the-beach-house-with-Billy-after-he-tells-his-mother-he’s-spending-the-night-cramming-for-AP European-with-Andy-and-I-tell-my-parents-basically-nothing-and-everything-stays-exactly-the-same mode.

I am nevertheless not entirely un-curious as to where she is going with this.

“So how is it your fault?”

“Gabby!” she says, widening her eyes, as if of course I know, in a sort of “duh” move. “I was supposed to be the designated driver.” She looks down at her hands, which she is kind of wringing in front of herself, as if she could gain comfort from her manicure. “I’m not trying to make an excuse. But Jordie was making those really good margaritas. I mean, who drinks margaritas? But you were drinking them and they looked really good and I guess I kind of started drinking them too.”

This is all just so incredibly stupid and lame, and I am already so completely wigged out, I just don’t know what to say.

I mean, it’s not as if I’m the world’s biggest fan of drunk driving, and if you’d ever sat in the backseat while John careened up the hill from Sunset toward Mulholland, straddling the middle line all the way up Roscomare and scraping the bottom of the Benz over the speed bumps, you’d completely believe me. Because: I don’t have a death wish or the delusional belief that cute drunk boys with car keys who say they can handle it can handle it.

And this, boys and girls, is why God invented taxis and Andy Kaplan’s pool house.

All right, it’s true that occasionally, in a spurt of conscientious zeal, we’d come up with a designated driver, but the only person who ever actually abstained when she was supposed to drive was Andie, which became completely irrelevant when Andy got his Porsche because Andie couldn’t turn it on or shift the gears, which put the possibility of Andie driving the Porsche in the basket with ha-ha-forget-it and impossible.

And, anyway, if you’ve ever wondered why there are no cabs in L.A. late at night, it’s because they’re all ferrying the rich drunk kids from the Three B’s to coed overnights at the houses of whoever’s parents are the most clueless or on location in Cambodia. Or occasionally the sharing caring slobbery kind of parents who think it’s a testament to their grooviness that their kid and her slightly impaired friends are passed out at home and not in some low-class gutter in the Toy District after a rave.

Andy Kaplan’s father is the first kind, which is better; once we ended up in Sasha Aronson’s rec room and her father wanted to rap, leading Billy to conclude that maybe consuming a truck-load of hash in the ’60s really could rot your brain. Andy’s father, on the other hand, leaves us completely alone out in the pool house, presumably so he and the fifth Mrs. Kaplan can play naked freeze tag all over the hacienda without being interrupted by pesky teens padding down the hall in search of a toilet to throw up in. He is so grateful that we are out cold in the pool house, he sends the housekeeper with trays of brunch-like goodies at noon the next day.

The point of which being that Andie screwing up when she was supposed to be the designated driver of a car that Billy would never let her drive in the first place was kind of irrelevant.

“Right.”

I am incredibly tempted to say something really nasty to her.

At that particular moment, it is hard to see a downside to being as nasty as I feel like being, as nasty as I’ve felt like being all day, and even more so after Billy’s hand slipped onto Aliza Benitez’s butt and into her pocket while I was innocently staring at the back of his head from behind a pillar.