Where It Began (5 page)

“Sorry,” says Anita. “I think you might have to be pregnant first. And you have to look like a Slutmuffin.”

We don’t look as if we’re members of the same species as the Slutmuffins, as if we are fit to inhabit the same planet, as if our skin is made of the same dewy membrane, or that our hairs were ever genetically programmed to spring out of our scalps and line up in perfect order like theirs.

Cut to a montage of sleepovers at Lisa’s house with everybody sitting in their sleeping bags watching old Technicolor movies with Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds and making large sheets of semi-inedible marshmallow fudge, shooting at each other with Silly String.

I don’t know. Maybe all over the country, this is what deliriously happy teenage girls are doing Friday nights, but it seems as if all of the people worth being at Winston are engaging in
somewhat less boring activities involving sex and drugs and rock and roll.

What I want is to be one of those people.

But I am stuck in my
Before
and I have no idea, not a clue or an inkling, that I am even going to get an
After
.

I AM SO DEEP INTO
GABRIELLA GARDINER PRESENTS
Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s,
trawling through it looking for some faint clue as to how I ended up like this, that it is seriously annoying when people show up to take my pulse and check my blood and squirt mildly hallucinogenic drugs into my IV bag.

Ponytail Doc, possibly because she can’t stand the pressure of trying to keep me from getting a look at myself in the crystal of her watch or the lenses of her big retro Italian glasses, has sent in reinforcements. An occupational therapist named Wendy shows up in my room pushing a green metal cabinet on wheels through the door, grinning as if she hasn’t heard that (1) I am not in a good mood, and (2) I do not have an occupation.

“This is a mistake,” I say. “I don’t need an occupational therapist. I go to high school.”

But Wendy, it turns out, is a pediatric occupational therapist
whose goal in life is to help little damaged, hospitalized children play. This is so sad that I can hardly stand to think about it.

“I’m a playologist!” she says.

There is some possibility that I am the oldest person Wendy has ever dealt with. To prove it, she hauls out coloring books, glitter markers, peg boards, and stickers with Elmo in a wheelchair. She has faded clay that is squishier than Play-Doh. She is so chirpy and perky that you have to figure even someone a lot nicer than I am would want to poke a glitter marker in her eye.

Wendy tries to find some space to unload her stuff on the counter between the botanical splendor and the shopping bags of beauty supplies, but I end up with tacky kindergarten art supplies piled on my stomach.

“You’ve got Barbie and Midge paper dolls,” I say.

Wendy is over the moon that I can name Barbie and Midge. When I ask her if she’s got Ken and Skipper, she is one orgasmic playologist.

It is so weirdly easy to please these people.

She hands me a pair of blunt scissors and admires the way I cut things out. I cannot believe that I am lying here cutting out paper-doll clothes.

“Do you have any actual art supplies?” I say after what seems like hours of this, when it seems like my right hand at least is somewhat functional and I could actually draw something. “Like real paper and good pencils or charcoal or anything?”

Wendy admires how precisely I have cut out Barbie’s tiny
high-heeled shoes, which I am kind of seeing quadruple but are nevertheless perfect.

“I mean it,” I say. “I’m an actual artist.”

“Of course you are, dear,” Wendy says.

“Seriously,” I say. “I really am! Werner Rosen is my art teacher!”

Wendy looks deeply impressed, but when I think about it, I remember how deeply impressed she was about the Barbie shoes, and I can’t even tell if she knows who Werner Rosen is. But she does go scuttling off to get more stuff.

So I can sit there by myself with my auto-closing eyes and miss the art rooms at school. I miss Miss Cornish’s and Mr. Rosen’s art rooms, all right?

Look:

Me and Lisa and Lisa’s semi-boyfriend, Huey, hanging out in Miss Cornish’s art studio at Winston. Back when I think Huey is the artist and not me. Because photography counts but I am mostly good at throwing pots and glazing ceramics, which I kind of think doesn’t count much.

Close-up of Huey running around with a giant classic camera from the 1940s strapped around his neck over his father’s ancient Grateful Dead T-shirt, which hangs on him like an old, raggedy dress.

If Huey had given off the slightest hint that he cared what other people thought, the jocks would have ripped him to pieces before he had a chance to finish middle school. But what Huey wants is to take spectacularly weird pictures that fill the spectacularly
uncool Winston School Wildcat yearbook and that hang in the Winston School gallery (aka the hall outside of the gymnasium) and that win prizes.

We are all in the art room because Huey is briefly interested in making big papier-mâché animals out of computer-enhanced photographs. Lisa finally has a buddy who can’t paint either to hang around the easels with. Then they both start standing around watching me paint and throw pots, which is somewhat creepy. I am perfectly fine with Lisa hanging on my every brushstroke. I understand the part about not wanting to disappoint your parents so much it makes perfect sense to watch somebody else drag their paintbrush up and down a canvas for hours at a time. But Huey is taking pictures.

“Jeremy Hewlett,” I say. This is Huey’s actual name. “This is creeping me out. You have to stop it.”

“I’m recording the creative process,” he says.

“Well, go record somebody else’s creative process.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice,” Huey says, “but this is Winston School. Nobody else has a creative process. Except Lolly Wu, and the shutter clicking messes with her concentration.”

Lolly Wu plays the cello. Why she isn’t going to school at Crossroads, where they have an entire orchestra of kids who know how to hold their instruments right side up, is just another mystery of life.

“Yeah, well, when I become an art goddess, you can compare me to Wu.”

But I let him keep taking pictures. Leading Vivian to tell me
that I can’t be a complete social leper if I have so many pictures of myself in the yearbook.

“Right,” Huey says. “I’ll just sit here and finish up my swan until you change your mind.”

This is the first time I see Mr. Rosen up close and personal, when he shows up in Miss Cornish’s art room in search of turpentine and a rag at that exact moment. He is like a hundred years old and a real artist, paintings in museums, the whole famous artist thing, who lives down the street from Winston, and somehow they convinced him to show up three times a week to Mentor the Next Generation. It is hard to imagine how a famous guy who deserves all his glory like Mr. Rosen—who, the headmaster keeps telling us, is some kind of official German national treasure—could fall for that, but he did.

When Mr. Rosen spots Huey turning his hundreds of black-and-white photos of women into that papier-mâché swan, the camera swinging perilously close to the bowl of liquid paste, he marches up behind him and sucks in his breath.

Huey just sits there frozen, holding a paste-soaked photo, gazing over at Mr. Rosen, with his googly green eyes open wide, as if he is waiting for spiritual enlightenment to come his way in a German accent.

“Did you take these photos?” Mr. Rosen asks, thumbing through the stack.

Huey says, “Yessir.”

“Well, they’re very good.” Mr. Rosen waves at Miss Cornish. “Look, Elspeth, see what nice composition?” he says, blurring his
w
sounds toward
v
’s, pointing at the black-and-white grainy picture of a freakishly large woman getting on a bus.

“You should take more photos,” he says to Huey. “Forget this duck.”

“It’s a
swan
,” Lisa says.

“Werner,” Miss Cornish says, visibly steamed, her skin getting whiter and her freckles standing out. “Jeremy has important things to express about beauty and metamorphosis in three dimensions.”

“Huey,” Huey says. “For Hewlett. Jeremy Hewlett the Third.”

“Cheremy Hewlett!” Mr. Rosen says. “Your mother took the raccoons out from my attic.”

Huey nods as if this were normal. He doesn’t even seem to be embarrassed about his spectacularly embarrassing mother, Bel Air’s bizarro answer to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is constantly coming to pick up Huey in the carpool line with an animal-rescue goat or a couple of ratty chickens and a three-legged pit bull in the backseat of the Bentley.

“You take maybe five hundred shots. Maybe six hundred. Then you bring me ten. Only the best.” Then he marches out with his turpentine and Miss Cornish’s blue rag.

Then he comes back.

I thought it was to give Miss Cornish back her rag, but it isn’t. It’s to look at my bowl that just came out of the kiln. “Beautiful glaze,” he says.

Lame as it is, this is my best day of school ever until Billy.

ANYWAY, ACCORDING TO VIVIAN, IT ISN’T JUST LISA
and Anita who are bugging the hell out of her. Huey is phoning every day too, calling the nursing station and demanding to know how I am. He is leaving messages from Huey, Jeremy, and Mr. Hewlett on the off chance that he’ll come up with a name so appealing that somebody will talk to him.

But Vivian is having none of it. She is spending her days hanging over the side of my bed trying to jog my unjoggable memory and then running off to go shopping to cheer herself up. She is buying me vats of goopy makeup that she waves in front of me, as if it’s going to make me happy. (Except that when you open up the jars, they smell like toxic waste.) She is much too busy stirring the unappetizing mess into a lumpy paste to spend a whole lot of time chatting with Huey.

But Wendy takes time out from cajoling me to get up and
sit at a table and draw and not fall over to tell me about Huey’s many calls. My head feels roughly like a bowling ball in a vise and sitting up just makes it worse; I do not want to discuss how upset and concerned Huey is.

Except that Wendy thinks he’s my boyfriend.

“You’re one lucky girl,” she says, trying to get me to squeeze these stupid, squishy rubber balls as hard as I can with both hands, only I can’t. “You have very persistent friends and they all seem to care about you a lot. Especially your nice young man. And your boyfriend’s mother wants to know if she can bring a visiting therapy dog to see you!”

Huey’s
mother and the gimpy pit bull! Which, combined with the failure of my
ac
tual boyfriend to call, write, text, or show up, makes me cry for what feels like days on end, except with everything including time and the days of the week blurred together so much, it might have been more like forty-five minutes.

So where is he?

Where is Billy?

“That’s it,” Vivian says to the roomful of medical residents who want to hear me try to count backward from a hundred by sevens some more for a laugh, shooing them all away. “Look at her face! She’s completely unhinged. How can it possibly be good for her to talk with the police looking like that?”

Even flat on my back, hooked up to a bottle of liquid narcotics, and amusing myself by making the electric bed go up and down, I can tell that talking with the police would not be good.

Until I forget all about it.

Although the way I look has not left my consciousness once in, basically, forever.

“You know what, Wendy?” I say. “I think I want to sculpt my head.”

Wendy is such a paragon of guilelessness and I am such a shameless liar, I’m pretty sure that this is going to work. There is no way you could make an ashtray with sides that stand up out of this mushy clay, let alone sculpt a face. Not to mention, if you actually want to sculpt a face, it’s helpful if your left hand doesn’t have to lie useless in your lap because the steel pin in your ulna seems to send out shock waves when you so much as try to curve your fingers around a dinner roll you’re trying to butter. But I’m pretty sure Wendy can’t tell.

“That sounds wonderful!” she says.

I almost feel guilty.

Almost.

“Yeah,” I say. “Only, I don’t think I’m supposed to touch my face. I might have to look at it and extrapolate to 3-D. Do you think?”

“You’re the artist!” she says, just beaming away. “If you think you can do it, then I’m sure you can.”

“Only, I don’t have a mirror . . . Do you have a mirror?”

She does.

This is how I look: like a scary thirty-second community service ad for seat belts that can only run on late-night between infomercials and porn because it is unsuitable for children and adults
with weak stomachs. Oh, and the color-blind. Because it’s hard to justify exposing anyone to all that gore and medical handiwork—the stitches, staples, bandages, and butterfly Band-Aids arrayed across my face—without giving them the psychedelic thrill of the color palette. Purple and black and violet around the eyes, the left eye sinking into greens, banana-yellow down the cheekbone, interrupted by a splash of white bandage with a crusty brown trim of blood and unidentified gray ooze. Bluish eyelids rimmed with perfectly dyed eyelashes, my eyelashes, the only recognizable, remaining portion of what used to be my face.