Where It Began(75)

“Billy—”

“I mean it, Gabs. No one is going to believe you. They’ll think you’re just out to get me because I’m back with Benitez.”

“Billy—”

“Give it up. Like you didn’t notice? Maybe we should talk or something. Castle?”

Because: Knowing me, you’d think I’d go. Because I want to go. Because I almost go. And I say to myself, Gabby, do not open your hand and take back that potato. Do not. Just ask yourself what fairy tale this is, and who this guy is, now that he’s not the prince.

Now that I’m not the princess.

Now that we aren’t going to live happily ever after until graduation.

And I hang up the phone.





LXIV


THEN I PICK UP THE PHONE AND CANCEL THE ENTIRE week of Ponytail, unlike the last session that I just didn’t show up for, because what am I going to say to her? She can leave all the cryptic, where-the-hell-are-you messages she wants. I don’t want to talk to Billy and I don’t want to talk to her. I want to talk to my real and actual friends.

“Thank God,” Lisa says as she plops on my bed. “I thought you were never going to speak to me again. I am so sorry. We called your house like fifty thousand times.”

At which point, Anita shows up with emergency fudge.

“You talked to Huey,” I say.

Lisa says, “We thought you knew. I swear to God, we never would have let this happen if—” She kind of peters out, tearing the fudge into little, tiny pieces.

“If what?” I say. “If goddamned what? You’re supposed to be my best friends. What, did you think I was lying to you?”

Anita says, “We thought you were protecting Billy. You kept saying you didn’t want to talk about it. It kind of made sense.”

“It would have made more sense if you believed me.”

But I knew, I absolutely knew, it did make sense.

“Billy thinks I would have done it anyway if I’d remembered. He thinks I would have lied my way right into juvie for him.”

“What a self-serving *,” Anita says.

“Yeah,” I say. “But isn’t that what you thought I was doing, pretty much?”

That one just sits there.

“It’s not that we thought you were lying lying,” Lisa says finally. “It’s more like you never tell us anything. And you were so into Billy.”

“As if you ever tell me anything!” I say. As if I were some unnaturally silent sphinx and they’re two all-star blabber mouths. “It’s not just me. Like, are you doing it with Huey?”

“I’m not even talking to Huey,” Lisa says.

“How come?”

Lisa starts rolling the torn up fudge into balls. “He was right there,” she says. “He could have stopped you anytime for hours. He was taking close-ups of you. What kind of friend does that?”

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw fudge,” Anita says, stacking the fudge balls in a pyramid. “We could have stopped, you know, what happened next.”

“We should crush Billy Nash,” Lisa says.

“It’s this stupid school!” Anita says. “We should burn it down for community service.” Four and a half years of watching Slut-muffins having a wonderful time, while not being allowed to date or go to kickbacks, dances, or unchaperoned parties, or hang out with evil American boys, has finally gotten to her. “I’d leave tomorrow if I wasn’t two days away from a five in AP Bio, which I need for Cal, and it would screw up my plan.”

Given that I’m not two days away from AP exams in anything, it’s hard to think of why I’m not taking off tomorrow. Except that being a disorganized person whose life is unraveling in a festival of messy loose ends, I don’t have any plans at all and no place to escape to.





LXV


“LISA SAYS YOU WANT TO LEAVE,” HUEY SAYS. HE IS messing with chemicals in the darkroom where I am hiding out avoiding Billy, which is totally unnecessary since Billy is doing such an excellent job of avoiding me. “She says you don’t want to do senior year.”

It is true that my idea of a bearable future does not involve being a Winston senior, having a big old bittersweet year of pre-nostalgia just before embarking on our big Three B true-life college adventure.

“You still talk to Lisa?” I say because, even now, I’m still the mistress of deflection. “I thought you had The Big Fight.”

“You aren’t very observant, are you?” Huey says. “It’s lucky for you that your artistic interest is still lifes and ceramic bowls and not people.”

“I observe people,” I protest. “I notice things.”

Huey makes a face. “No offense,” he says, walking me into the outer photography room full of computers for digital pictures and the yearbook layout, all bright with buzzing light, “but if you noticed things, you’d be leading a completely different life.”

Then he snaps a picture of me with my mouth hanging open.

And it hits me: It isn’t that I don’t notice things. It’s that I don’t pay enough attention to the things I notice, as if the things I notice aren’t actually true or worth noticing. As if Billy was my boyfriend who cared about me. As if the people who actually do care about me don’t matter all that much, and the people who don’t like me, like me. As if drinking so much I couldn’t see or remember or feel anything isn’t a problem.