Where It Began(6)

“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.