Where It Began(77)

As far as I can see, the only way things are going to work out is if I keep my mouth shut. If I open it, if I rat out Billy, if I tell the truth and proclaim my actual innocence, I’m screwed. The brain-dead helpers will think I’ve been lying to them all along. The kids who thought I was the Joan of Arc of no-rat girlfriends will think I’m finally embracing the truth, only to them, me telling the truth will not be a good thing.

No one wants Billy to go down. That was the point of all this. The only shred of status I still have at Winston School, evidently, comes from the fact that I look like the world’s best former girlfriend. And this being the case, there is not a whole lot to gain from making everybody think that I’m Satan the Billy-Slayer.

All I want is to be out of there, to live through pseudo-rehabilitation, and, in the absence of a functional driver’s license, walk away. All I want is to be somewhere else doing something else that doesn’t have Billy or Winston School in it.





LXVI


“MR. ROSEN,” I SAY, BECAUSE HE HAS A LIFE OUTSIDE and beyond Winston and you’d think that he would somewhat get it, so I’m sitting in his office waiting for him to open his eyes. “Excuse me. I need to make a plan.”

“What kind of plan?” he says, suddenly scarily attentive. “Is this the college talk? Elspeth, she makes the college talk, not me.”

But I don’t want to have the college talk with Miss Cornish. I want to have the anti-college talk with Mr. Rosen.

“Is there someplace I could go right now and do art and not be here?”

Which is, I realize, The New Plan.

“Not after graduation?”

“Right now, Mr. Rosen.”

Mr. Rosen looks straight at me. “Olga Blau is at Santa Monica CC,” he says.

Olga Blau is this ancient, genius potter. What was Olga Blau doing teaching at community college? I start to wonder if she’s gone totally senile or her hands shake or something.

“Very fine art, Santa Monica College,” Mr. Rosen says, staring me down, looking straight through me. Because: Even though Mr. Rosen’s portraits bear only the slightest, most abstract resemblance to actual people, you could tell that the man can read faces.

“This would be a good decision,” he says. And the way he’s looking at me puts to rest for all eternity any lingering question as to whether Mr. Rosen’s obliviousness extends to some of my less good decisions. “You work with Olga one year, maybe two, you transfer, work with Erik Wertheimer at Northridge maybe?”

Eric Wertheimer is a double-genius ceramics god who gave us a demonstration freshman year.

Except that nobody from Winston ever goes to Cal State Northridge, let alone transfers there from CC. It would be like waving a big white flag that says Defeated By Life. Spit in the Face of Opportunity. Failed to Measure Up. Fuckup of Unspeakable Proportion.

And then I go, Screw it, Gabs. Just screw it. Don’t measure up. So what? You are so good at party limbo, slide under the bar. Then straighten up and walk away.

And you can kind of see it: me sitting in a room with Olga Blau and a big lump of clay, even if she is bat-shit crazy and I have a scarlet F for failure stamped across my forehead. So what if what I actually want to do makes everyone else wince? Because, you have to figure, things would be looking up if I wasn’t the one wincing.

“I could maybe do this,” I say. Because: You don’t need a high school diploma to sign up for SMCC. You don’t even need a GED to sign up for SMCC.

“Only Elspeth will be very mad at me,” says Mr. Rosen. “Only she does the college talk so I won’t tell the artists drop out, go to Europe, learn something, no football, no goldfish, no wasting time!” He is lost in a sad fantasy of U.S. college life.

“Europe?” I say.

“Very fine academies, Europe,” he says. “Excellent art academies. The best. But all I’m hearing here is Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.”

“Europe!” I say.

“Very late in the year for application, Europe. You want me to make the email?”

Duh?

“Yes, please.”

But just when I think I’ve limboed under the bar and past it, when the song has changed and I think the whole game is over, I turn around and there’s a lower bar that even my completely flexible and almost spineless back cannot negotiate.





LXVII


THIS IS HOW IT STARTS TO COME APART: STACKS and stacks of the Winston Wildcat yearbook in its sparkly green, fake leather-covered splendor, on tables along the low stone wall that separates the Class of 1920 Garden from the lawn where the ordinary kids like I am now hang out.

Free dress day. A girl in a slightly orange tank top (homage to her previous, temporarily cute and kicky self) and a pair of ratty jeans sitting with her friends in the ordinary mortal section of the lawn sucking grape icy pops just before, without warning or permission, the naked, unembellished true story of her life appears on the last page before all the blank signature pages.

One full page in black and white, nobody’s face blurred out.

Songbird Lane.

Me: drunk and passed out in the passenger seat.

Billy: drunk and driving.

Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez: drunk and hanging out of the convertible, peeling out toward the crash, toward the amnesiac lie of my dishonest future that was about to end, right here, right now, on the back lawn at Winston School.