Where It Began(81)
“How can you be on probation for something you didn’t do? I thought you said you have a lawyer,” Lisa says.
“Ask Agnes Nash. She found him for me.”
“Agnes Nash is going to burn in hell,” Lisa says, with the conviction of a truly religious person with a pretty clear idea of how the afterlife works.
I find this extremely comforting, but not comforting enough to unlock the door and go deal with anything.
“We have to go,” Lisa says. “People are waiting for you. Come on. It’s something good. Don’t you want to see Mr. Rosen smiling? It’s kind of frightening. I don’t want to give it away, but you really need to get out of here.”
LXXIII
THIS IS HOW IT STARTS OVER: AN ARTSY-LOOKING girl in a ratty smock is lying on her back on an unmade bed in a room she shares with a Polish watercolor painter named Paulina. Paulina is the only person whose Italian the girl can understand because Paulina has a vocabulary of maybe twenty-five Italian words and she says them all extremely slowly. Through the open curtains of their room, there are certain undeniable signs: the tile roof skyline of a Medieval city, the River Arno, and the sound of people laughing and talking in a language that is slowly becoming comprehensible.
Paulina, who used to be a gymnast in her former life, has a suitcase full of skanky little outfits that involve a lot of leotards and cloth that looks like stretchy tinfoil with fringe. Under the smock, the girl has jeans and a black sweater. The girl and Paulina look pretty weird together in clubs, where Paulina can drink entire bottles of anything you put in front of her and still walk a straight line on her hands in skirts so tight they don’t succumb to gravity and uncover her upside-down butt.
The girl, having been subjected to the world’s weirdest intervention by her three best friends and Andie Bennett—all of whom insisted that anyone who drinks so much that they black out and lose three and a half hours of a highly significant nature has a drinking problem (which she kind of already knew, but she wasn’t about to stop drinking because of it)—took a double dare to stay stone-sober for six months. This is somewhat easier to do in Italy than in the Three B’s because all you have to do here is point slightly to the left of your belly button and say “fegato,” which means liver in Italian, and everyone leaves you alone. Because (grazie to her genius art teacher who sent off her slides and attested to her high level art forgery and glazing skills that got her into this amazing art school) the girl turns out to be an art restoration fiend. And it would be kind of horrible to be drunk and debilitated and screw up some ancient priceless artifact. Not that they let her anywhere near ancient priceless artifacts.
Yet.
Anyway, having also accepted blackmail-ish double dares from Ponytail Doc before the woman would sign off on her Get Out of Probation Free card (actually, it wasn’t a card, it was a seriously thick legal document), and just to prove that she can totally do it, and because loving Billy Nash was seriously pathetic, the girl has three months, one week, and two days left before she can have Chianti with dinner, streak her increasingly sub-regular hair, or have a boyfriend.
The likeliest candidate for this position is an architecture student named Giovanni who admires her ability to simulate priceless ancient artifact glaze and is almost supernaturally hot for a person who wears turtlenecks and is obsessed with Gothic churches. Although it’s hard to say, and probably it would be a good idea to learn enough Italian to be able to have a quasi-intelligent conversation with him and figure out whether he’s just another specimen of hot pond scum before removing any significant articles of clothing.
It’s not that she’s a nun. It’s just that she is trying to figure out how to be me.
Acknowledgments
Brenda Bowen, because I always wanted an agent who was a goddess, and that would be Brenda. Her intelligence, literary sensibility, tireless attention to text, incisive suggestions for polishing the manuscript (“Incisive” and “polishing” are both understatements), and dead-on savvy made this happen.
Jen Klonsky is the editor everybody prays they’ll get—smart, enthusiastic, intuitive, open, completely supportive, and able to see the forest and the trees and the leaves and all the tiny little acorns with perfect clarity. And the whole team at Simon Pulse.
My husband, Rick, Best Husband Ever, who actually read every single version of every single chapter, listened to every draft, and managed to remain kind and constructive and helpful and funny even through the really bad ones.
My kids, Laura and Michael, a writer and a filmmaker, who were raised in the B’s but turned out pretty damned great, and whose generosity and talents (and notes) I relied on all the time as I was writing this.
Early readers Suzi Dubin, who gave me hope that I had, in fact, written a novel; Jen Weiss Handler, whose expertise helped me fit seventy-five unruly chapters together; and June Sobel, whose discerning feedback was invaluable.
Electronic communication consultants: Sharla Steiman, Laura and Michael, Sarah Markoff, and Brian and Erik Becker. Thank you!
I am hugely grateful to an emergency room doctor, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, two lawyers, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s traffic investigator, and two LAPD officers, whom I thank from the bottom of my heart, but who shall remain nameless.
And thanks, Mom, for thinking I was a writer even when I wasn’t.