Where It Began (18 page)

As a result of the State of California’s unfortunate opinion of me, the helpful helping professionals Agnes Nash has picked out for me have to love and adore my perfect self. Because: If I’m not really really convincing, I’ll be singing my sad, alcoholic ballad of teenage depravity in a locked juvenile rehab jail in Arizona.

He has the brochure.

I’ll be taking wilderness walks in a one-hundred-and-ten-degree desert wonderland. And I’ll be doing it sober. Which would pretty much work for me since I only drink at parties north of Sunset and gated ones in the Valley on streets like Songbird Lane, and all right, also at picnic lunches in the Class of 1920 Garden, which involves white wine in tiny Dixie cups and shouldn’t even count, or just something relaxing with Billy and company after school, which seems a lot more like a bonding activity the Brady Bunch would go for after turning off the cameras than a hard-core criminal activity. But even so, I sort of doubt they have anything like that in locked rehab facilities
no matter how many zillions of dollars your parents have to pay to get you in there and, more importantly, to keep you out of California Youth Authority where they have actual gang members and where Mr. Healy seems pretty convinced that someone like me could actually get killed.

“SO,” MR. HEALY SAYS, “ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE?”

Given that the only other page involves me going to juvie jail and being a car-thief drunk-driver with a criminal record for about ten minutes until a gang girl stabs me to death with a stiletto-sharp, rat-tailed comb, you bet we’re on the same page.

But now that I can barely breathe because it feels as if my throat is closing up, there’s The Bright Side. It’s my first offense; nobody got all that hurt; and probation is a real good option.

This is so so not totally reassuring.

“So,” he says, making a brave but unsuccessful attempt to push his sleeves half an inch up his arms. “When you were arrested, do you recall what you said to the police?”

“I was
arrested
?”

“You don’t recall being arrested?” Mr. Healy starts thumbing through the files with increased interest.

“Uh-uh.”

“This is in
ter
esting,” he says, plucking papers from the file. “Let’s see what we have here. . . . Wait a minute, is this the LAPD or the sheriff or what?”

I am trying to look as calm as possible while waiting for this to make sense.

Mr. Healy looks perturbed. “I don’t see an unbooked DUI, I don’t see a citation. . . . Wait . . . okay, this paperwork is not in your name.”

“What isn’t?”

Mr. Healy heaves a giant sigh. “Tell me you didn’t give them a false name. Heidi?”

“No way! It must have been the nurse or someone, seriously. I was delirious. I was in some kind of coma.” It is hard to tell if he believes me.

“We’re going to have to fix this,” he says, frowning at my file. “I’m going to have to take you in there.”

I’m too scared to ask what the
this
we have to fix is, and where we have to go to do the fixing.

“And you weren’t handcuffed to the hospital bed?”

“
What?
No!”

Mr. Healy shakes his head. He looks somewhat disgusted with the wrong-name paperwork, or me, or both. “Okay, do you remember talking to a sheriff at the hospital?”

What I remember is the gun lady and the vigilant nurse. I remember telling people who, when you think about it, had no reason to be there if they weren’t police, things like “I don’t know”
and “I don’t remember” and “I
really
don’t remember” and shutting my eyes and pretending they weren’t there and falling asleep. I remember drip bags full of clear liquids that greatly enhanced the possibility of falling fast asleep in the middle of a sentence.

“Well, I know they wanted to talk to me. But the nurses kept telling them I was comatose and they couldn’t come in. And that they had my blood alcohol level so what else did they need.”

“I see,” Mr. Healy says, apparently pleased with this turn of events. “Blood draw. Blood draw? I see the blood draw. What I don’t see is a warrant. And I don’t see a consent form. And I don’t see that a certified nurse or a phlebotomist did the draw either. You don’t recall signing a consent form, do you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Healy says. “This might give us something to work with. No bottles in the car or at the scene. And maybe no usable blood work. Just maybe they’re going to have to break more of a sweat than they like breaking to find someone who saw you putting it away.”

“Good luck with that one,” I say. “No one will say they saw me. Are you kidding me?”

“Pardon?”

“No one will
ever
say anything like that.”

Mr. Healy looks up from the file. “How can you know that?”

How could he not know that? That no one would ever tell. That Winston and every place else like it is a sacrosanct no-snitch zone, the Citadels of Silence of the Western World. Even in seventh grade, when Buddy Geiss and his eighth-grade a-hole pals
were sticking little kids’ heads in the toilet and flushing for no apparent reason and everybody hated his guts and was afraid they’d be the next upside down, little seventh-grade kid with pee in their hair, nobody said a single word.

And because I’m Billy Nash’s girlfriend, sort of, if anyone does say a single word, they’ll come out of this looking worse than me, which is, all things considered, someplace pretty damn far south of happy.

Not to mention, it seems somewhat beside the point given what you would think any reasonable lawyer would have to see as the main event of the Gabby Gardiner Crime Spree and Amnesia Fest: the car.

“What about the car?” I say.

“Well, insurance should take care of that,” Mr. Healy says, not even looking up. “And you won’t be driving for a while, of course.”

Excuse me?

“Because I took the car?”

“Because you drove it drunk into a tree,” he sighs. “Okay, let me explain this to you again.”

“Wait! My boyfriend . . . my former boyfriend is like Mr. DUI and he’s still driving,” I say. The thought of being stranded in that house on Estrada with Vivian and John and no possible means of escape is somewhat horrifying. “When can I drive?”

Mr. Healy hems and haws and makes a lawyer joke about how my former boyfriend’s lawyer must have something on the DA hardy har har. “And even if the blood alcohol is out as
evidence,” he says, “then we’ve still got some pretty reckless driving on our hands.”

He seems determined to completely avoid the thing with me stealing the car, which seems like it
could
be a serious crime.

“The car?” I say again.

He just sits there in the squeaky chair looking concerned but clueless.

“Uh . . . stealing the car . . .”

“You stole a car!” Mr. Healy says, trying to sound calm as his chair squeaks back to its full upright position.

“There’s no way Billy would have given me the keys to that car. That car is his baby. I mean, it
was
his baby. Before I wrecked it. So it seems like I must have just, I don’t know, sort of
taken
it. Won’t the police figure that out?”

Mr. Healy is suddenly taking a lot of notes. “And, uh, what does Billy say?”

“Pretty much nothing. He pretty much says not to worry about it, and his mom pretty much says the same thing.”

“This would be
Agnes Nash
who says not to worry about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

At which point, Mr. Healy puts down his yellow legal pad and smiles at me.

“Okay, then,” he says, settling back down into the chair which squeaks an even more hideous protest. “You just might not have anything to worry about on that aspect of it. The police and the prosecutor haven’t brought it up, and I don’t think we’ll be bringing it up either, eh?” Hardy har har.

So if nobody says anything about the car, we can all join hands and have group amnesia together?

Like if no one says it happened, then it didn’t happen?

As if Billy had said:
Here, drunken girl, take my stunning and incredibly expensive car and wrap it around a tree.
Or maybe he was so drunk he just tossed me the keys, but who is going to go there? I’d still be the drunk girl who drove into the tree, and he’d be in a worse ring of Probation hell.

“Right,” says Mr. Healy. “I think our focus here needs to be helping you get past the Drinking Problem so everyone can see that you Take Responsibility and it isn’t going to happen again. I need you to be a model girl. I need you doing everything you’re supposed to do, everything all the mental health and rehab people you’re about to meet tell you to do, on time, and with a smile on your face. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do anything.”

“Anything
le
gal,” he says. “Anything legal, moral, and looks good in a probation report. What about school? Do you have a disciplinary record at school I need to know about?”

“No, nothing,” I say, trying to figure out quickly how to let him know what a paragon of perfection I could look like on paper if desperate enough. “I’m on Student Council!” I blurt.

Mr. Healy does not look all that impressed. “They never caught you so much as smoking a cigarette behind the gym?” he says. “You’re not one of the usual suspects, notorious bad girl, sketchy friends, the works?”

“No!”

“Because if we need to send you to another school, I’ve got one up my sleeve, and we can slip you right in. Fresh start and all that.”

“I don’t want a fresh start!” I say. “The only thing I could be notorious for is this, and it’s not something I do a lot of.”

“No drunk and disorderlies are going to pop up in Orange County with some Jane Doe-linsky ID? And by the way, if you have a Jane Doe-linsky ID, I need you to melt it down. Today.”

“I don’t. But if I did, I would. I get it. I can be completely perfect for as long as you want, but I really have to go back to Winston.”

Mr. Healy looks suspicious. You could tell that he’d heard protestations of teenage perfection before.

“All righty,” he says, sounding completely unconvinced. “Best-case scenario, you’ll get some favorable probation recommendations, the DA buys it, you’ll live at home, you’ll get some treatment, you will not so much as sit behind the wheel of a car until your license is restored, you’ll act like your conditions of probation are the Ten Commandments, and twelve, eighteen months from today, you won’t have a record.”

“No record?”

I feel as if I’ve stumbled into the Magic Kingdom of making things go away. I want to kiss Billy Nash. I mean, I always want to kiss Billy Nash, but now I
really
want to kiss Billy Nash just after ripping off this awful suit. Except that how I can get myself physically close enough to Billy Nash to plant my kiss is a Mystery of Life because even in the Disneyland of best-case scenarios, I still can’t
drive.

Mr. Healy looks very pleased with himself. “Expunged,” he says. “You’ll need to follow the rules of probation punctiliously. Because worst-case scenario, you’re spending some time in that residential facility.”

Okay, out of the Magic Kingdom and into a black-and-white girls’ prison movie with catfights and sadistic butch matrons with cattle prods.

“Well, young lady, this is what’s going to happen,” he says in a jovial tone that seems spectacularly inappropriate under the circumstances but I really don’t want to piss off the guy standing between me and total doom by pointing this out. “We’re going to get you arraigned. You won’t have to say anything except to verify your name and address. And we’re going to make sure this citation isn’t screwed up in a way that could bite you. And from what you’re telling me, you can honestly say you don’t remember a thing no matter what they ask, so no sweat there. By the time they get around to finishing up your probation report, we’ll have you squared away.”

I don’t even want to know what it means to be squared away in Mr. Healy’s world. All it brings to mind is a perfectly square cell or maybe a cube-shaped cage with bars all the way around.

“All righty, then,” he says. “Let’s get your mother back in here. Let’s get you into Twelve Step and coordinate the psycho-babble. Let’s talk to the police. Let’s get the show on the road.”

YOU WOULD THINK THAT AFTER WEEKS OF LYING
around petrified and chanting
I want a lawyer
over and over, I would have been a happy little camper now that my show
was
on the road.

You would think that now that I didn’t have to man up to put weight on both feet without flinching, and my left hand—although it would have been pretty much a straight-up catastrophe if it had been my right hand, but it wasn’t—was semi-functional and filled with prickly sensations that were actually quite the relief compared to feeling pain or nothing, I would have been striding toward the potentially swell future.