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.

IX

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.

And I think: How is it that I’m going to go from this to normal?

And I think: How did you do this to yourself?

And I think: Even if Billy is sitting around watching porn after a quick run to the Westwood Cannabis Club on Le Conte with Ian Brodie’s dog-eared med club card, even full of Master Kush-laced, semi-legal, double-chocolate pot muffins, it is not an entirely bad thing that he isn’t here to see this.

Which you would think would make me feel somewhat better about his being somewhere else, the silver lining of the disappearing boyfriend.

You would think.

My eyes close and I don’t feel anything.

This is what happens when you are lying on your back in a hospital gown made of coarse retro-print cotton, when your current life ranges from swirling fog to basically unbearable: Your eyes close and you are still you, only somewhere else.

My eyes close and there’s Billy, driving too fast around the curves on Mulholland with open bottles of old scotch on the front seat and a couple of girls from Holy Name riding in his open trunk. Then Agnes shows up, fuming, to drag him home from the police station. Not that there is the slightest possibility that anything bad will ever happen to him, or he’ll get kicked out of Winston. It isn’t as if he stuck actual Winston girls into his trunk.

But as it turns out, when Billy says, “Let’s violate some probation,” every time he lights up, he actually means it.

There we are sitting on Billy’s bed, throwing darts at his conditions of probation. Billy keeps the thirty-two conditions of his probation—Maintain a 3.0 average; Do not exit domicile between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m. without permission of parent or guardian; Do not consume controlled substances or alcoholic beverages of any kind; Do not cavort with known underage users of said substances—on the bulletin board over his desk. We are sitting on the bed trying to hit his favorite ones.

We are sitting on the bed and he is nuzzling the back of my neck.

“Follow the light with your eyes,” Ponytail Doctor says, glancing down at her clipboard, reviewing my daily mental state as ascertained by one of her eager little intern helpers, dropping Wendy’s mirror into her giant pocket and leaning in toward me in the mistaken belief that we have anything, including human-looking heads, in common.

She tilts her head to consider my face.

“The swelling will come down,” she says, staring down at the bandages some white-coated flunky plucked off, depositing them, soaked in bodily fluids and livid orange antiseptic, on a stainless steel tray so I could admire them.

“I saw it,” I say. “You know I’m screwed.”

“This is why I didn’t want you to see it when it’s still like this,” she says. “This is only temporary. Look—”

“I did.”

Wendy is bringing up the rear and I’m pretty damn sure she won’t be getting her mirror back any time soon. “You’re going to be just as smart and beautiful as before!” she says with a cheerleading fervor that leaves Ponytail’s usual baseless enthusiasm in the dust.