Where It Began(76)

But mostly as if I didn’t know I was Billy’s pathetic love slave.

As if I didn’t know what everybody else had noticed all along and it makes perfect sense to the Andies and the Slutmuffins and even Huey and Lisa and Anita and everybody in the Western world that I’d toss my life out the window just so Billy could be on the water polo team at Princeton.

Because I don’t even have a life to toss out the window. I was just Billy’s well-trained dog, his tail-wagging bitch.

No wonder Billy went back to Aliza Benitez. At least she’s a human being. All right, a disgusting human being, but at least nobody ever accused her of not paying enough attention to all the things she had to know to be able to look out for herself.

Or drinking so much that she careened beyond the point of just being plowed and swerved into the oblivious place of not noticing or seeing or caring or remembering or being the least bit able to take care of herself.

Not like me.

And it occurs to me that maybe I wasn’t 100% entirely lying when I copped to the teenage felon drinking problem. It just so wasn’t the problem the helpful helping professionals thought it was, so so not about peer pressure or an irresistible compulsion or an impulsive binge. It was pure, cold liquid escape from everything I so noticed but so didn’t want to notice. And I just so hadn’t paid any attention to it.

“I should have stopped you,” Huey says. “Lisa says if I had any balls, I would have stopped you. She thinks I’m like a morals-impaired news photographer watching people in flames jumping out of burning buildings and not trying to catch them because it would mess up his photo op. I should have stopped you. I wish I had.”

“So do I,” I say. “Duh.”

“Are you going to do anything to him?”

It isn’t as if I haven’t thought about this maybe constantly since hanging up on him, pictured the conversation, pictured myself screaming at him, screaming: You were supposed to be my boyfriend! You were supposed to care about me just a little! Pictured slapping his shining face . . . pictured myself crying and him holding me and him apologizing over and over and having make-up sex.

The lameness of my fantasy life is truly horrifying.

And I can’t even decide what the most twisted part is, the part where I can actually picture him being sorry for what he did to me, or the part where I can picture myself believing he’s sorry and just ripping off my clothes all glad to have him back.

Even though I know who he is.

Even though I more than notice and I ever so slightly don’t even care.

Because: In the sorry, not-going-to-happen fantasy, I whip off my clothes for Billy just like that.

And I know, even with Huey standing there gazing at me expectantly, waiting for me to wise up and do the right thing, I’m not going to do a damned thing about what happened.

Because: Thank you, Billy, for pointing it out, there is no upside to nailing Billy Nash. Beyond pure vengeance, fun as that might be. But so what? After a bunch of drama, he would sink deeper into probation and maybe he’d have to toss his little water polo ball around a swimming pool in the Big Ten and not the Ivy League and so what? It’s not like four years at Giant Midwest State U is going to kill him, unless maybe he catches fatal cooties from someone with a dad in middle management.

His mom would have to hide out in a spa with a mudpack on her face for four years, but by the time she got him into law school or biz school or whatever kind of school boys like Billy from the B’s are supposed to go to and she undid her seaweed wrap, no one would remember or care what a little teenage shit he’d been. Agnes would hire a consultant in the mid–five figures to rehabilitate his image.

Rock stars and football players get to rape, pillage, and burn and five minutes later the guys are all rehabilitated and fixed and cured and rolling in endorsement contracts. All Billy did was set up a teenage drunk girl from the sketchy branch of her family; he was right back in the Bel Air Country Club for sure.

As for the teenage drunk girl, I’d be more screwed than I already was if I went after him. That’s just how things work. I was about to be the Princess of Turning Your Life Around. I was halfway through my plan to make it all go away, the it being the stuff I didn’t actually do but got arrested for doing, but what the hell? I was skipping down the marathon path to pseudo-rehabilitation.

Why stop now?

The finish line is in sight; what’s the point of blowing it?

To the kids who know I didn’t do the stuff I’m being rehabilitated for doing, and who think I knew all along: I am the reigning Princess of Not Ratting Out Your Boyfriend. Your really bad boyfriend who is sleeping with Aliza Benitez in your face and Courtney Yamada Phillips behind your back.

This makes me even more heroic to the people who thought that I knew what they knew from the minute Billy did what I said I did.

The so-called grown-ups think I’m a former drunk-driver car-thief who is embracing virtue with the assistance of a pack of brain-dead professional helpers. Everybody else thinks I remember what I don’t remember and that I said that I didn’t remember in order to protect the Golden Creep Boy.

Billy is the only one who knew what was actually happening all along, who set it up and sat back and watched it unfold, and he wasn’t telling anyone: especially me.

No wonder I get along with all the brain-dead helpers so well, I am so totally brain-dead myself. But then, how brilliant do you have to be to make a really good love slave?