Where It Began (4 page)

I say, “I want a mirror.”

“I know this is hard for you,” she says, “but you’re in a state of flux. A mirror would capture
one
moment in time but your situation is . . . um . . . dy
na
mic.”

Lovely.

Dy
na
mic.

The asshole orthopedist with the stuffed marsupials hanging off his stethoscope carries on at length about his reconstructive genius and how he’ll have me throwing pots, playing some imaginary accordion, and keyboarding fast enough to be some other asshole’s secretary any minute. But when I get to the part about my face, he clutches his koala bears, grimaces at Ponytail, and flees.

“You have to tell me what’s going on,” I say to Ponytail. “Am I coming out of this as Scarface or what? You
have
to tell me.”

“Healing takes time,” Ponytail says, infinitesimally edging back toward her usual state of bizarre cheerfulness while carefully sidestepping the question. Not that she isn’t manaically
thorough: Orbital fracture. Reconstruction. Hairline fracture, broken, chipped.

My face is like the table of contents in a how-to book for surgeons.

“Dr. Rollins already reset your nose; it’s going to be almost perfect. Same tip.” She smiles, but I do not smile back. “And that gash—almost entirely behind the hairline. So assuming you’re not planning to shave your head . . .” She grins at me, but I am so so not amused. “Invisible.”

Almost
perfect.

“What do I look like?”

“You look like a pretty girl who ran into a tree at thirty miles an hour without a seat belt and got pummeled by air bags and the tree. So what you’d expect. Bruises. Lacerations. A lot of swelling and some discoloration.”

“So basically I look grotesque. Is that what you’re saying?”

The ponytail is whipping around in the coiffure version of an anxiety attack. “You look exactly like someone on the way to having the same pretty face she had before,” she says. “Just not yet . . .”

I feel as if I’ve been transformed into a giant scary lizard or some frightening mythological creature that turns people to stone when they so much as glance at her because that’s just how bad she looks. You can’t help but notice that no one is saying when I’m going to attain
almost
perfection either. No one is saying when I’m getting out of here or how messed up I’m going to be.

Ponytail is so not good at this.

“You’re going to look more like yourself in a few weeks, maybe a month. And in a couple of months, my goodness . . . ,” she drones on. “As soon as you feel up to seeing your friends, you know they’re going to come support you through it. Believe me. A lot of patients feel this way, but your friends are friends with
you
, not with your face. People won’t care how you look.”

People. Won’t. Care. How. You. Look.

You could tell that she spent all of high school being home-schooled, studying honors bio on her kitchen table, not looking up long enough to notice the first thing about real life.

Meanwhile,
Gabriella Gardiner’s (slightly mangled) Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s
is just rolling along in my head, jumping back and forth in no particular order from one bit of my real life to another.

There it is, with a
Before
and
After
that make more sense than the actual present, which comes after the
After
, the
after-After
, shooting off in a whole other direction.

I close my eyes, and there it is.

Right there, the embarrassing
Before
, my own personal prequel.

Look:

There I am, getting into Winston School, ripping open the envelope and spilling the good news onto the kitchen counter. There is green and gold confetti in the envelope.

Twelve years old and I’m thinking,
Hey, Gabs, this is pretty damned great.

But not so much as my dad.

Zoom in on my dad, out on the balcony that overhangs the canyon and runs the length of our house, which is shaped like a big cardboard carton built into the downslope of a steep, ritzy hill in Bel Air, from which we get to look down on L.A. He is shuffling up and down the balcony congratulating himself while Vivian chases him around squealing and providing him with an endless supply of Bloody Marys.

“I knew being a Gardiner had to mean something,” he crows, tossing the celery from his Bloody Mary into the canyon so some poor coyote can get plowed too. “I’m so proud of you.”

Proud of me has been a long time coming, given how when I didn’t get into John Thomas Dye, kindergarten of the rich and famous, he went into deep mourning for the next seven years.

Proud my last name is Gardiner, a clan filled with rich and famous members, not including us despite my dad’s efforts to play the Asian stock market at three a.m. Despite his efforts to sell zillion-dollar houses to foreign guys who don’t know any better, taking out really expensive ads in the
Kuala Lumpur Daily Gazette
or wherever, and driving the big Mercedes we can’t actually afford but looks good in carpool.

According to my mom when she’s pissed off, if the
über
-Gardiners didn’t throw my dad a bone once in a while and use him as their real estate agent when they bought ten-zillion-dollar buildings in Las Vegas resulting in the occasional monster commission
checks that keep us afloat, we’d be the only family in Bel Air subsisting on cat food and mac ’n’ cheese. We would have to move to the Valley where, according to her, we’d be like royalty in exile in a vast, smoggy wasteland. Unlike here, where it’s hard to miss the part that we’re the dregs of Upper Bel Air.

But now Winston has opened its gates and I’m
in.

I can finally go to the right school, meet the right people, get into the right college, become incredibly successful, smart, popular, and rich, be star of the school play, captain of the soccer team, president of my class, homecoming queen, and valedictorian. I can be the cheerleading, honor roll, never-a-bad-hair-day girl whose papers get read aloud to classes years later as examples of super-galactic perfection.

As if he actually believes that if only I’d be that girl and if he drove that big car over to Winston School, we would all be magically transformed. As if parents who pay the humongous tuition out of leftover pocket change would leap out of their even bigger cars, bang on the Mercedes’ slightly darkened side window, and beg him to sell them a strip mall in the Philippines.

Because a guy with such a perfect kid must be hot shit.

It is as if he’s never actually met me, an ordinary student with the normal amount of friends, who doesn’t like sports, and is somewhat good at art.

Art?

Did somebody say
art
?

Hell
no.

After Winston, I would be attending the totally impossible
college of my parents’ dreams. Biz school from the sound of it, between Bloody Marys. Because: Do you know what twenty-three-year-olds who graduate from Wharton make even in this economy? Six figures!

Gabby Gardiner, shake hands with your totally impossible, not-going-to-happen future.

IN ACTUAL FACT, THE HIGH POINT OF THAT YEAR AT
Winston is when Miss Cornish, the art teacher who does the crafty part of art—ceramics and pottery and sculpture—puts my ceramic spoon holder on a pedestal outside the teachers’ lounge because it is an outstanding example of really good glaze.

At my old school, I had always been this sort of regular person. At Winston, I figure out quickly that I am
sub
-regular. Basically, everybody else is either gorgeous or super-smart or incredibly good at something important, born with the popular gene or richer than God. And I’m not. So, big surprise, I do not get a whole crowd of popular friends and a round of applause when I walk down the hall.

Look:

There I am, telling myself all these helpful affirmations such as,
Oh Gabby, you really are smart. Oh Gabby, you’re totally normal
and everything is fine. Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most adorable thing that ever got out of bed in the morning?

Only if any of this were true, it is hard to explain why I’m standing around Winston School watching Billy Nash and the Slutmuffins lounging in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden, owning benches and tables and patches of grass that are instantly cool just because they own them, watching the smart kids and the
über-
rich kids and the weird kids in the manga club all hanging out together in big happy clumps, while I am alone with my unimpressive grades and no one to talk to except for Lisa Armstrong and Anita Patel.

“Your little friends called again,” Vivian says from what sounds like far away across the vibrating green room.

Friends?

You would think that after all these enlightening sessions with Ponytail Doc trying to get me to tell her all about myself, it would be easier to connect the dots.

I open my eyes, but everything stays in a lot better focus when they’re closed. “Who?”

“That Lisa and Anita,” Vivian says. “
Those
friends.”

Making her little puke face as if having to be reminded that her daughter is once again reduced to counting these poor excuses for fashionable teens as her only friends makes her physically ill.

As if she can’t stand to remember.

What I remember is the smell of burnt, melted bittersweet chocolate and charred marshmallows. The backs of their heads—Lisa’s strawberry-blond fluff and Anita’s black braid—blurring in the smoke that billows from the wall oven in Lisa’s kitchen. Grabbing for the mitts and the fire extinguisher and waving magazines at the smoke detectors to try to get them to turn off.

How long ago was that?

There I am, thirteen years old and slouching around Winston School in the shortest blue uniform skirt in the history of man over tiny black bicycle shorts. The only cute thing about this skirt is the pocket on the butt. Anita is wearing a similarly truncated skirt over a pair of leggings, which is also, God help us, a Winston School style, except Anita is wearing them because her mother made her. Lisa is the one person still wearing the baggy khaki uniform pants that no other girl has ever worn to school after the first day of seventh grade. Lisa is also the one person at Winston School who admires me for something before I get Billy after four years of total obscurity.

It is October of seventh grade and I have just figured out that art is the
only
thing I don’t suck at, but it turns out to be the only thing Lisa does suck at (apart from her apparent inability to shop for clothes that don’t have some Disney character or strange-looking appliqués on them) and that she really really wants to be good at. This is because her parents are seriously religious cinematographers who value art just a notch below how much they value God Almighty.

It is November and Lisa has started following me to assembly and sitting next to me and Anita, who actually has the potential to be completely regular, except she has to take Hindi language class and Indian dance class and learn to play weird-looking musical instruments and entertain old ladies from her extended family who are visiting her from New Delhi for months at a time. She has to figure out how to modify her uniform in a way that keeps her mother happy but does not involve social suicide.

At least the stuff she has to do to keep her mom happy doesn’t involve getting people to think she’s hot.

There we are in December, about as hot as egg salad sandwiches or, in Anita’s case, completely vegan soy wraps. There we are, sitting three in a row, invisible enough to slouch there in the back of the auditorium eating contraband snack food, while Mr. Piersol, our idiot headmaster, slogs from one alarming story to the next in his mind-numbing weekly ascent up Cliché Mountain. Not to mention, Mr. Piersol would appear to be scrounging all his information on teen life off a shady website for urban legends.

News flash: Boston high school girls caught in pregnancy pact!

Oh no, boys and girls: Children having children! Look before you leap!

“Children having icy pops. Look before you lick,” Anita whispers, gazing up at Mr. Piersol, hunkering down in her auditorium seat to eat the lime icy pop that she smuggled in.

“Anita!” says Lisa. “That could have such double meaning.”

News flash: Catty clique of mean cheerleaders in Texas cause sad, chunky cheerleader to leap from bridge!

Oh no, boys and girls: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it!

“If you can’t say something nice, welcome to Winston School,” Anita says.

“That is
so
mean.” Lisa says. And then she snickers. “Are you by any chance a member of a catty clique?”

“I want to be in the catty clique!” I say. I am not completely joking.