Where It Began(70)

The room is filled with folding tables and metal shelves and cardboard bankers’ boxes labeled by year with the names of events and holidays, like he has records of every Christmas, Easter, and Fourth of July for his whole life. His equipment is strewn over a big, old fluffy couch covered with a faded yellow quilt and sat on by a couple of cats named Pinky and Cocoa Puff. Actually, it’s all sort of perfect.

And it’s not that I’m jealous thinking of Lisa sitting in this room with Huey doing whatever it is that Lisa and Huey do, which probably entails playing Boggle and Parcheesi and Monopoly and feeding ferrets for all I know. It’s just that it’s so nice in there.

Huey says, “Wait here.”

I walk to the bay window in the corner, which curves in a semicircle and lets you look down to the coast, out to the slate-blue water, and it just strikes me how happy Vivian would be to see me there. I might be a well-dressed slut of a drunken car thief with an unimpressive GPA and no Ivy League prospects whatsoever, but hell, if I didn’t mind suffocating Lisa, I could be queen of the castle. So then I stand there thinking about what a bad friend and really bad overall person I am to even be having this particular fantasy, but at least I know I wouldn’t actually do anything like that.

And then Huey comes back with the album and that particular chapter, the chapter where I knew what I knew and felt what I felt, ends.





LVIII


IT’S ONE OF THOSE CHEAP ALBUMS FROM RITE AID, the little plastic kind with cellophane sleeves that holds the pictures back-to-back. Labeled “April 11, Songbird Lane.” Neatly organized. You can tell that Huey is the prince of good organization, and he probably has hundreds of these little albums all lined up in order, and he could just pop open the Cataclysmic Disaster box and there this one would be.

So many of the pictures are shot from behind, you can tell the whole thing involves Huey skulking around and sneaking up on people, blowing his breath down toward his camera so they won’t feel him breathing on the backs of their necks. It’s creepy, but the pictures are creepier.

First, there is the house. A big, fake Tudor with maybe thirty kids on the front lawn with red plastic cups and bottles. The front door is hanging wide open and you can make out the shapes of more bodies in there, in the white light that seems to have engulfed them and blurred their edges.

“Is it coming back to you at all?” Huey asks.

“This isn’t some freaking Alfred Hitchcock movie, Huey! It isn’t coming back, all right? Ever. Do you want me to look at these or not?”

“You want to look at these,” he says.

Huey likes photographs with bodies crammed together in the frame, or maybe that’s all the party had to offer. Bodies curved and leaning into one another, arms dangling over rounded shoulders and around necks, hands and wrists and forearms disappearing into the dark folds of each other’s clothing. Bodies curved toward each other in doorways, leaning toward one another like arches, shapes with faces melting into darkness.

But you can always pick yourself out. Even years later, photographed from a distance in a group photo at summer camp, you can still tell that that’s the left side of your little-kid-self’s back in the Camp Tumbleweed T-shirt. Even two months later, you can tell it’s your profile, drinking in a corner in a chair and it looks as if you’re crying, sobbing actually, at a party you can’t remember.

“You need to look at them in order,” Huey says.

Why is that? Flipping through them backward and forward, from either direction, they tell the same story.

There I am from behind with Billy and the Andies, weaving our way through the crowd on the front lawn, heading toward the open door.

There we are in the kitchen, going for the bottles arranged helter-skelter on the counter, the only light reflected off the bottles and my earrings and off Billy’s pale hair.

There’s Jordie Berger mixing margaritas.

There’s Andie dancing for Andy in another corner, a dark expanse of silky skin between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her baby tee.

There are the Slutmuffins, all Louis Vuitton bags and attitude, standing by the pool house, lighting up with boys all around them, their personal fan club. Their heads all bent together, it is hard to tell who’s who.

Aliza Benitez on the deck chair with no blouse, breasts and arms and nipples darkened blurs, leaning into someone’s shoulder, on top of, under, and entangled with some boy, the boy with light glinting off his pale gold hair.

I appear to be yelling.

I appear to be crying.

I appear to be drinking straight out of a bottle like some bum under a freeway bridge. It is too dark to tell exactly what I’m doing. There I am drinking some more, only the bottle is a different shape. There I am drinking some more.

There I am, being hauled into the Beemer, half-carried, waving my bag in the air. Dropping my bag. Andy has me under the arms and I seem to be made of splayed rubber limbs and a big gash of a sad, drunk mouth.

There I am, getting into the car with Billy and the Andies, with Aliza Benitez kind of sitting on the trunk with her legs hanging over the back. There I am draped over Andy and Billy, who are maneuvering me into the front seat, the passenger seat, no seat belt, all of us looking exceptionally drunk, Billy trying to toss my purse in after me but missing.

There’s Billy, walking back around the car, sticking his hands wherever Aliza wants them, sticking his tongue down her throat.