The sooner he can get back to a pitcher of margaritas, the sooner he can forget how Winston might hold it against me that I’m a drunken felon car thief, thereby stripping him of any slim claim to status that I had ever offered. Except for my increasingly tenuous connection to Billy Nash.
All I can think about is Billy. How I need to see him and not just to make out to the point of frustration on top of a washing machine and hiding out behind abandoned houses. How I need to see him all the time and I need to make him want me again. How I need to be at Winston even though Ms. Frost says to avoid him and all other cute bad boys—if I am at Winston and he is at Winston, what are they going to do, put us in handcuffs if we make eye contact?
Winston School!
For once Vivian and John and I are in perfect agreement.
Only I have to survive the black hole of the legal system first.
XXXII
THE THING ABOUT FALLING INTO THE LEGAL SYSTEM is that even if you aren’t ready for it; even if you don’t want to deal with it; even if you need to crawl back onto your space-raft bed and float in a gray-green sky; even if you wish you could get your behind-the-eyes documentary going again instead of being stuck with your actual, real life; even if you reach the absolute limits of positive thinking and there’s not a single nice thing you can think of to say to yourself that you actually believe, you still can’t make it stop.
Vivian and I are parked under a scrubby tree in a parking lot in the Valley. John has bailed, with the completely bogus claim that he has work to do, so it’s just me and her waiting in complete silence, which, under the circumstances, probably beats talking.
We are sitting there in the old SUV and not the Mercedes because Vivian is afraid that the police will hold a Mercedes that big against us if they notice it. Because we are so deep deep in the San Fernando Valley, so far north of Ventura Boulevard and civilization, that we don’t even recognize where we are, and she suspects that there’s an irrational hatred of rich people—presumably extending to the pseudo-rich—out here.
We are parked by a sheriff’s station, waiting for me to go in.
The station is a tan, cinder-block building with windows too high to look out of or see into. All I can think about is how you could go into a building like that and not come out except to ride from one locked room to another on one of those sheriff’s buses you stare into on the freeway, wondering what those men scowling sideways at you did to be riding in there. And how I could end up in a bus like that with rows of terrifying girls in Day-Glo jumpsuits.
We are not planning to get out of the SUV until Mr. Healy shows up and gets out of his Maybach first, meanwhile avoiding eye contact with any of the tired-looking deputies walking by, or the people going in and out of the station who, from the look of it, have no reason to fear they are going to inspire prejudice by virtue of uppity displays of Westside wealth.
It’s the Valley; it is eighty-eight degrees in April; and all I want to do is swim out of there in a conveniently deep river of sweat. Why couldn’t I just paddle over to some Westside courthouse where the big question would be what the hell a girl like me was doing in the Valley in the first place, even if it was Songbird Lane in Hidden Hills, which is gated and where all the houses have acres of grassy lawns, black-bottom swimming pools, koi ponds, and a horse?
Leaving aside those pesky questions that are sure to come up in maybe five minutes (if Mr. Healy ever shows) about (1) the drunk driving, (2) the Beemer, and (3) why someone who did what I did should get out of trouble just by having her enormous lawyer bludgeon people.
What I don’t want to be doing is the thing I came here to do: get arrested. Or maybe re-arrested, this time adding the element of consciousness.
It turns out that there are quite a few other things I don’t want to do, such as getting fingerprinted.
Such as having mug shots taken with numbers on the bottom. Such as surrendering my driver’s license—graciously returned to us by the mom of the kid who threw the party on Songbird Lane by FedEx, my wallet still nestled inside my bag and nothing missing—into a big mustard-colored envelope with my number on the front.
Such as getting a date and an actual time on a real day in June to show up in juvenile court.
So I hold my breath and get logged in to the system, with Mr. Healy standing around drumming his fingers as if he’s bored and all of this is no big deal. And I say, “I don’t remember,” in response to every question other than the one about my name and address.
No, I have no firsthand knowledge of where the party was or who threw it or if there even was a party or how I got the liquor or if I drank it of my own free will or if there even was liquor, which I don’t remember and therefore I can’t admit I drank. Artfully avoiding words like “stole” and “Billy.”
The detective looks annoyed as hell but he has the doctor’s report about the tree and its effect on my head right in front of him on the table so he can’t exactly come out and say liar, liar, pants on fire to try to get me to tell him what he wants to know. He keeps cozying up to words that have a great deal of SAT potential such as “stonewall” and “intransigent,” but Mr. Healy keeps murmuring “closed head injury,” and I just sit there, amazed by the depth and breadth of what I really don’t know, and hoping I look dazed and brain-dead enough for them to leave me alone.
What I want to know is why Billy didn’t tell me this part of it, the part where you’re sitting in a metal chair in a windowless room and it feels like you’re an inch away from being sucked up into a whole other life—not in a distant universe, but in a squat, shabby building, with cells and linoleum floors and pissed-off detectives, that you never even knew was there before.
Explain that.
And when I am finally home, alone in my room, all I can think is, Man, if I did have a drinking problem, this would be the magic moment.
And then I think: What the hell?
And I go into the bar in the living room and get out some vile-tasting twelve-year-old scotch and some ice.
XXXIII
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DRINKING A GREAT deal of scotch on the rocks when you’re alone in your bedroom is that, in addition to making you feel somewhat less preoccupied with the sorry state of your abysmal, completely wrecked life, it makes you uncoordinated and a sentimental sap and somewhat more stupid than usual.
Which might cause you to drink even more scotch on the rocks in order to take the edge off feeling stupid, et cetera.
So basically I sit on the edge of my bed hugging the ice bucket, drinking twelve-year-old Glenlivet and feeling like a moron. Vivian is getting over her traumatic afternoon in the Valley by getting her nails wrapped in Santa Monica and I, actually being a sentimental sap and also stupid, start rummaging through the Billy Nash memorabilia in the top drawer of my dresser.
There are movie ticket stubs and shells from the beach outside his parents’ place near Point Dume and a ratty wrist corsage that I probably should have pressed instead of shoving it whole into a drawer where the petals are turning into mini-compost.
There are little boxes that used to contain an assortment of Belgian chocolates that Billy bought for me only because he wanted the semi-sweet truffles and if he bought the whole box for me, he didn’t have to feel like a goof standing in line at Godiva Chocolatier buying himself romantic candy.
There is the Rule the Pool water polo booster baseball cap that seems like a good thing to be wearing only because by that point in the bottle, I am seriously judgment-impaired.
It seems like a good idea to ponder all the lined up little presents Andie Bennett has mailed me since the accident, and then it seems like an even better idea to kiss the little plastic Flower the Skunk figurine with the pencil sharpener embedded in its belly that she sent last week, only I don’t even think about how a person could nick her lip on the metal strip where the shavings get sliced off the pencil.