Where It Began (14 page)

Authors: Ann Redisch Stampler

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Adolescence, #Drugs; Alcohol; Substance Abuse, #Emotions & Feelings

Juanita, who my mother has hired full time for the week supposedly to help with me but really so Vivian can go shopping without feeling too guilty, doesn’t go in for all this pointless affirmation: I don’t even think
you go, girl
translates as a Salvadorian expression. What she does is make me a lot of hot chocolate with high-cal whole milk she carries up the hill to our house in a little paper bag with contraband canned whipped cream and tiny marshmallows. Which is the highlight of my day.

This is so not turning into the best extended spring vacation ever.

XXII

THE ONLY PERSON WHO MANAGES TO GET THROUGH
to me, despite Vivian’s best efforts to keep everyone away until my skin goes back to being unbruised and lifelike all on its own, is Lisa.

“The hospital said you weren’t there anymore. Thank God! You’re out of your coma. You remember me, right?” She sounds exactly the same.

“Duh. Who said I was in a coma?”

“Your mom. Kind of. And Gabby, people gossip. Everybody
knows
. Are you all right?”

It is hard to know which aspect of not all right to start with. “My face looks like it belongs in a body bag, but yeah. And no coma. I just don’t remember the crash.”

“Well, people can probably fill you in.”

“Yeah, people in police uniforms. I crashed Billy’s car, so apparently they’re interested.”

“What are you talking about?” Lisa says, clueless as ever. “I’m coming over there, okay?”

“Are you sure your mom will drive you over now that I’m Evil Delinquent Girl?”

“Gabby! You are not an evil, delinquent girl,” Lisa says, delusional but perpetually supportive.

But even if she refuses to believe I am a wayward, felonious teen, evidently I still qualify as a charity project, because her parents are letting her jump into the Saab every day to come see me, which is a little unnerving because they only ever let her drive it to community service and youth group at her church. Not only that, she is bringing Anita, who is generally only allowed to sit in cars driven by moms and people over the age of twenty-five who are related to her and have Volvos with front, back, side, rear, floor, and roof air bags.

Lisa seems to find this all extremely amusing. She says she hopes I’m ready for a whole lot of salvation because unless she brings me some on a regular basis, she is probably never going to get to drive a car somewhere other than church again until she graduates from college, gets a job, and buys herself one, a fact that she seems weirdly fine with. Then she starts beating herself up about how she’s a twit to talk about herself when I’m bedridden and mangled, and at the point when I am pretty sure she’s on the verge of hauling out our Lord and Savior, I tell her it’s okay but I’m too tired to talk.

Meanwhile, Anita keeps sending me text messages about how worried about me she is and am I having cognitive problems
and do I want her to show me how to meditate or go back over the SAT flash cards we’ve already done. She doesn’t sound amused at all.

I’m not all that amused either. In fact, Anita’s text messages are making me crazy, not because there is anything inherently annoying about them, but because every time my phone makes its little got-a-text bleep noise, I think it might be Billy but it isn’t.

Meanwhile, Lisa and Anita show up at the front door with one of those Save the Children blankies they make for godless, impoverished children with no electricity or blankies, with my name embroidered on the yellow silk border.

“You don’t have to let them see you,” Vivian whispers, sticking her head into my room when they are pounding on the front door. “It’s not too late. Nobody has to see you like this. Do you want to put on more concealer?”

She is in the Vivian version of maternal frenzy, seriously concerned that my so-called friends will ditch me if they notice I’m not pageant-ready, trying to save me from this sorry fate—completely ignoring the actual looming disaster in which somebody shows up and arrests me for DUI and grand theft auto.

But I am only thinking
Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy
, so much so that all other thoughts, scary thoughts, no-lawyer-and-the-LAPD-is-on-its-way-with-sirens-blaring-and-handcuffs-at-the-ready thoughts, oh-no-I-look-like-crap-and-my-friends-won’t-like-me-anymore-and-I’ll-be-a-Bashed-in-Face-Pariah thoughts—except, whoops, that last one is
Vivian’s
thought, not my thought—have no space to hang out.

Vivian is prepared to barricade the door on my behalf, but eventually, still unconvinced, she gives way for the gift-wrapped goodies, the fuzzy knitted scarf, handmade dangle earrings, and a bunch of pastel aromatherapy candles with names like “Sea of Tranquility” and “Mellow Morning.” And all right, as miserable a cynical bitch as I feel like, boyfriend-less and very likely re-invisible, it still feels kind of good to be with people who actually don’t care how I look or what I did and still like me. Even if Vivian thinks they’re a couple of losers, not unlike the reappearing Old Me with the purple and green bruises that clash with the currently nonexistent New Me’s autumn season earth tones.

And did I mention board games?

“When I’m sick, I love to play board games,” Lisa says. “And you’re really good at board games.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Grumpy, aren’t we?” says Anita, making a face that is supposed to cheer me up and cajole me out of grumpiness but doesn’t. “Sanjiv says closed head injuries can affect your mood.”

“You talked to your
brother
about me?”

Anita shrugs and looks somewhat sheepish.

“Come on, Gabby,” Lisa says. “You got hit on the head. This is your excuse to kick back and be a kid again! Don’t you want to play Boggle?” Well, no. Battleship? No. Connect Four? Parcheesi? Candyland? Chutes and Ladders? Hungry Hungry Hippos? Checkers? Chinese Checkers? Mah-jongg? Chess?

“We should play Husker Du?” Anita says. “After a closed head injury, we should work on your memory.”

And it’s no better when Huey tags along, either.

Because Huey, as it turns out, is such a wreck in the presence of a banged up, debilitated person such as me, he can barely hold it together for long enough to figure out who done it in a game of Clue. Or maybe it’s just the shock of being in a girl’s bedroom.

“I’d leave him out,” Lisa says, “but he really wants to see you. And I might not get to be semi-alone with a boy in a car again for years.”

“You do know that your mother is insane, right?” I say. “No offense.”

Lisa sighs but doesn’t seem all that worked up about it.

“You call that insane,” Anita says. “Hello. Have you met
my
mother? She’s trying to establish a perfect simulation of small-town life in Punjab circa 1958. Only in Beverly Hills. And we all know how sane
that
it.”

We have all been so severely indoctrinated to respect insane cultural differences that Lisa and I don’t know what to say.

“Well, at least you don’t have to cover all your hair like Asha,” Lisa says weakly.

“Admit it’s insane,” Anita says.

We do.

Ironically, Asha, albeit covered head to toe, gets to jump into Huey’s car every time they have to go do yearbook business because Huey drove down to Culver City and had a meaningful dialogue with her dad.

Whereas the mere sight of me has reduced Huey to cringing in my desk chair, barely able to push Colonel Mustard around the board.

“Boys are such babies,” Lisa says.

“You look like you’re in so much pain,” Huey says, as if this or some variant of this is the only conversation starter he can think of. “How do you feel about . . .”—he scrapes Colonel Mustard into the library where he’s been before and doesn’t need to go again—“. . . everything?”

How do you feel about everything?
You have to figure that if Huey had been born into my family, Vivian would have drowned him back when he was still a pup.

“And what’s up with your left arm?” he says.

“Huey!” Lisa says. “She’s going to make a full recovery. She’s lucky it’s not worse.”

“Lucky!” Huey basically howls. “Sorry, Lisa. I admire your outlook. No—I’d say I
love
your outlook. But lucky is not on the list of words that describe what happened to her.”

“Hello, I’m right here. Hello. Bed to Huey . . .”

“She’s a
potter
and look at her left arm!” he bellows.

Just to show him that there’s nothing to discuss, I do the wrecked person’s version of slithering out of bed. All right, so I have to will myself to smile when my feet graze the floor. All right, so I am somewhat limping. But if I suck it up and make myself put weight on my left foot, my walk isn’t noticeably all that weird. And it isn’t as if this is keeping me out of jazz dance ensemble. To keep being who I am, I just need both my hands to work.

I try to button up my robe, but this does not turn out as well as you would hope.

And I go,
Gabriella, you don’t need to run around buttoning things up to show off.
You can always tie the brace on your left wrist
.
Just not in front of anyone.

Huey, who is watching me make my way across my bedroom to the bathroom, for once puts down the camera.

He says, “How could you let this happen to you?”

I say, “I don’t know.”

Also, “Shut up.”

There are days of Clue and Monopoly marathons that I am pretty sure Lisa and Anita are conspiring to let me win. Days that last so long my mother makes Juanita stay late and cook us actual dinner instead of getting the bad Chinese takeout Vivian slaps on the table night after night. Days when I figure that I might actually die if Billy doesn’t call me.

Not to mention, Lisa and Anita want to talk about
ev
erything too.

“About
what you told Lisa
,” Anita says. “We should talk about it.”

“About you
crashing Billy’s car
. . . ,” Lisa says.

“Could we please, pretty please, pretty pretty please not talk about it?” I say. The thought of Anita trying to devise a scientifically perfect way to kick my brain into gear while Lisa prays for me is more than I can take.

“Not that we want to be pushy or intrude on your privacy,” Anita says. As if it didn’t take until tenth grade for her to blurt out that if her mother made her spend another Christmas vacation at a theme park, national park, or slogging through the Getty Museum showing off her Hindi language skills to an entourage
from New Delhi one more time, she was going to run away by Greyhound bus and hide out in her brother Sanjiv’s co-op at UC Berkeley.

“We know that you’re a private person,” Lisa says, even though she, herself, has never uttered one single word about what she and Huey have been up to since seventh grade. Despite the fact that Anita and I are more than slightly curious.

“We want to support you,” Anita says. “But some things don’t make sense—”

“Can’t you just accept that I don’t remember anything and I’m not planning to remember anything any time soon and just leave it there?” It is the embarrassing and horrifying truth.

Lisa and Anita exchange looks and gape at me.

“Gabby, please just think about it—”

“We want to help, but—”

“I mean it,” I say. “So there’s nothing to talk about. And there isn’t going to
be
anything to talk about either.”

So Lisa and Anita just keep letting me be the tiny Monopoly top hat, and we just keep playing.

XXIII

AND THEN, JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, A FEW MINUTES
after Anita gets into Lisa’s mother’s Saab and they tool back up Estrada with their board games rattling around on the backseat, Billy’s screen name shows up on my laptop.

I am drunk on the possibility of bliss.