Where It Began (24 page)

An office that looks like a set decorator’s idea of a professor’s lair: the antique desk, the leather chairs, the books and journals strewn across the desk as if Ponytail is so so busy doing important research on the Inner Life of Teens that you ought to be grateful when she looks up for long enough to talk to your seriously annoyed self.

“And so we meet again,” she says, settling into her chair.

What, like I was supposed to have kept up with her on Facebook?

“I guess,” I say. It is hard to put a finger on why I want to smack her so much except that, oh yeah, I don’t want to be here.

She smiles at me and makes the kind of piercing eye contact that feels as if the person can gaze into your mind and see things that you don’t know. And I go,
Stop it, Gabriella. She can’t see into your mind, for godsake. She doesn’t even know you that well.

But after Billy’s helpful pep talk, I am in a complete state of paranoid terror.

Ponytail, meanwhile, is sitting there looking me over, aka staring, as apparently normal social skills are irrelevant in psychiatry. I am sitting there looking her over, too. I am wearing a perky yet conservative teen outfit that looks really expensive and boring but at least I got to pick it out. A denim skirt and a butter-yellow cardigan. She is wearing her standard issue white shirt and a gray pencil skirt and stubby heels with grosgrain bows.

All I can think of to do is fidget. I start buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of the yellow cardigan and pulling on the ends of the sleeves.

“I notice you’re wearing long sleeves today,” she says.

I am thinking that she is going to turn up her air conditioning when I remember the cutting and the binging on coffee cake and supposedly wanting to plunge my hands into the scalding hot water in Brentwood Unitarian’s giant coffeemaker that got me out of AA and into this comfy leather chair in the first place.

Ponytail looks extremely concerned.

I am afraid she is going to make me push up my sleeves and be righteously pissed off when she sees my uncut, unscarred,
unscalded, normal weight arms. Not to mention, she has seen me half-naked and half-dead in the hospital and you have to figure she would have noticed that I didn’t cut.

“Um, I don’t really do any of that stuff,” I say. “I just think about it all the time.”

“Stuff?” she says, leaning forward. You can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“I know you know,” I say. “Everyone from here to San Diego has read my file by now.”

“I know what your file says,” she says. “I wrote half your file. But I want to know what
you
say.”

I am pretty eager to get to the part where I deny my Problem so she can help me see the Problem so I can go,
Oh yeah, big epiphany, I have a Problem!
and then she can cure me and I can get out of there.

“Okay,” I say, in the interest of expediting. “Okay, being at AA and feeling, uh, pressured to talk about myself in front of other people, uh, makes me think about, uh, cutting myself and eating all the refreshments and, you know, the thing with the hot water. But now that I’m not in AA anymore, I’m kind of past it.”

Ponytail says she is glad to hear it. Then she goes back to looking me over. “Was there ever a time when you got past thinking about it, and you cut or binged or hurt yourself with boiling water?”

“Ew. No. Of course not.”

“And you were at AA because—”

“Oh, all right,” I say, in the interest of getting on with it. “If you really want me to say it, I’ll say it. I got drunk at a party and
crashed my boyfriend’s car into a tree. And now I don’t remember anything about it. There. Are you happy?”

“Sometimes it’s more disconcerting once you get out of the hospital and back to your life. Having your memories gone.”

“Not so much. It’s pretty obvious what happened. I went to a party. I got drunk. I crashed the car. I grabbed the keys and passed out on the ground. What else is there to know? And it’s not like I’m back to my life anyway.”

“Do you have any feelings or ideas about why you were drinking that much?”

“Because it was a party . . .” I am trying to come up with the right answers here, but speculating about why you did things you don’t remember doing is just not that illuminating.

Ponytail nods as if she were actually listening to me. She is perched on the edge of her seat, deeply fascinated by my every word but so not getting it, patiently waiting for me to enlighten her. “I get that you drink at parties,” she says. “Do you often black out?”

“I
never
black out! I hit my head against a tree or an air bag or something. That’s not the same as blacking out. If blacking out made me hit the tree, then how did I turn off the car and pull the keys out?”

She just looks at me. More or less as if I’m crazy, which is maybe not that much of a stretch given that I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office pretending to
be
crazy.

“All right,” I say. “All right. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t have a drinking problem.”

She just sits there.

Really, am I just supposed to repeat this over and over for the entire rest of the session or what? All the time knowing that saying you don’t have a drinking problem is supposed to prove you do have a drinking problem, which basically makes no sense, but okay, whatever.

“My dad is the one with the drinking problem,” I say. I have to say
some
thing. “You’ve seen him, right? I swear, the guy basically sits in the house all day and doesn’t actually
do
anything and I know I’m not a drunk because I’m nothing like that.” She just looks at me. “I’m not.”

“So you’re not like your dad.”

Oh, kill me now. If she’s planning to repeat everything I say and sit there looking deeply concerned and fascinated, I might as well just start searching her office for some sharp object I can pretend I’m thinking about stabbing myself with in the faint hope that Mr. Healy will decide that I’m an even crazier model girl than he thought and send me to an even heavier duty therapist who I can stand.

“I really do not want to sit here and talk about my dad. I just want everything to go back to the way it was before.”

“And you’d be comfortable with that?”

“I would be totally happy and whistling a merry tune if things could be like before, but my life is completely wrecked.”

She nods and looks sympathetic. Really, really sympathetic. Or maybe some shred of Vivian has rubbed off on me through some nasty trick of genetics and I, too, am such a glutton for the smallest scrap of sympathy that a chipmunk would seem
sympathetic if it nodded its fuzzy little head at me.

Still, it is hard to believe that Ponytail is going to send me to some residential hellhole in the desert to live in a tent and do ropes courses with gang girls.

“Uh, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be talking about,” I say. I am thinking that this would be the magic moment for her to teach me to gently close my eyelids, take a deep cleansing breath, and relax, like Billy does with his therapist. Because just sitting in her office staring out the window at the view of Westwood is making me extremely nervous.

Then it occurs to me that I’m doing a pretty damned good job of denying the problem so perhaps this is going well.

“That’s the thing, when the courts get involved in treatment,” she says. “You’re supposed to be talking about whatever
you
want to talk about in this office. This is supposed to be
your
time. But when the courts are going to be involved, it’s easy to feel as if, if you say the wrong thing, something terrible is going to happen to you, yes?”

This is the part where I cry for twenty-five minutes straight, which is more or less what Billy said I was supposed to do in the first place, so you have to figure it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.

Which is pretty bad.

The only comforting, affirmative thought I can come up with (
Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most convincing, not-going-to-wilderness-camp patient who ever sat in this big leather chair?
is so not working for me) is that at least it has to seem like I’m being sincere, which, strangely, I am. I mean, who can fake crying for that long?

And it isn’t as if I can stop, either.

MY LESS-THAN-FUN SESSION WITH PONYTAIL MUST
have shown all over my tear-rutted, unnaturally beige face because Vivian, who is sitting in the waiting room in her recently overused mauve funeral and teacher conference suit, jumps up and says she is going to take me for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting at Dottie’s Sweeties. Which, given all the calories a trip to Dottie’s Sweeties involves stuffing into your mouth, is an epic offer. Epic and unnerving, given that Vivian never gives me anything resembling a dessert unless someone has died or there’s an earthquake, not to mention it is hard to visualize her traipsing around Beverly Hills with a bruised, smeared makeup, red-eyed, cupcake-chomping kid.

But, of course, it turns out that Vivian thinks she’s doing me a favor when she leaves me in the parking lot and runs in herself, given that letting me humiliate myself by risking someone seeing
me when I look this wrecked is no doubt right up there in her mind with public flogging.

Sitting alone in the car on the roof of the parking structure, I am completely stumped as to any possible affirmative thing to say to myself.

Losing control and sniveling was so not what I had in mind. If I was going to cry for twenty-five minutes nonstop, I was supposed to be doing it on purpose, not like some out-of-control crybaby who just whimpers on until reaching the point of dehydration.

Not in front of someone I don’t even like, in the world’s dowdiest expensive shoes, who nevertheless has the potential to make my life worse than it already is.

Not when I’ve been planning to tell Billy about what happened and how I pulled it off and how everything is just fine and freakishly dandy. I am so not planning to tell him about this, or at least not what this feels like.

pologuy:
how was ur day at the therapist?

gabs123:
it beats AA. but not by much. and no refreshments.

pologuy:
the better to save u from yourself little girl, with ur brand new eating disorder and cutting problem. she bought it right?

I’m afraid that if I lie too much, he won’t be able to tell me what to do next, and I’ll be doubly screwed. And if I don’t lie enough, it will just be too humiliating.

gabs123:
i cried copiously. SAT word. vivian got me the flash cards. u said cry—i cried. that’s ok, right?

pologuy:
what did u say?

gabs123:
basically nothing. i cried a lot. very emo.

pologuy:
excellent. what do u have to say to her anyway? boo hoo and u don’t remember anything right?

gabs123:
hence the crying, like you said. no word on when i get to go back to school though.

pologuy:
lucky u. stretch it out

Even though Billy might have my best interests at heart, you didn’t see him stretching it out in exile at his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito despite all the excellent surfing off Rincon Point. And even though my life might currently suck, the only way I have the slightest chance of getting it back is going back to Winston. The only way of getting
him
back.

Which is basically the same thing.

YOU WOULD FIGURE THAT A HIGHLY TRAINED
helping professional like Ponytail would have picked up on the part that I wasn’t really at risk for swimming around in the boiling contents of industrial-sized coffeemakers, but apparently she and Mr. Healy had a little chat and now I have to have another deeply meaningful session ASAP so she can clear me to go back to school.

“That’s what you want, right?” Mr. Healy says, as if he’d missed the part where I said that was what I wanted every time he made another lame phone call to make sure I hadn’t eloped with Billy with me driving.

This seems like a no-brainer until I start thinking about what it will actually be like to slink back into Winston and have everyone looking at me in my current state of being a juvenile delinquent covered with artfully applied beige foundation in a color not
approximating human skin all that closely. Gossiping about me as if I were Buddy Geiss coming back to the Three B’s from celebrity rehab in Malibu, back from military school rehab in South Carolina, back from holistic-getting-down-with-therapeutic-farm-animals rehab in the Napa Valley.