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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: Youreyes 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.
    Ponytail looks as if she wants to stuff the entire playology supply of mushy modeling clay down Wendy’s throat.
    “It’s hard to see yourself like this,” she says. “Of course it is. But it’s going to be all right. It might not seem that way right now but—”
    But what ? You have to wonder what Ponytail could even come up with that would make this even vaguely all right, now or ever.
    But she doesn’t have to.
    “You go to Winston School!” Wendy says. “You’re on Student Council! The world is