No, we couldn’t talk to her. No, we didn’t have much time.
Was there someone, a real adult maybe, into whose custody they could release her? Yes, yes! I called Frances, who showed up in PJs and Asics. Bilal called his roommates, Jewish guys doing the scriptwriting thing. Oh, wait, did we mention that only The Explorer’s registered owners can save it from the tow truck? Crap. I was trying to avoid calling Jane and Carl, Gina’s parents, at all costs. There was a time in eleventh grade when Gi told her mom she was with me when in fact she was with a college guy until well after midnight curfew. By the time sixteen-year-old Gina finally got home, the always-appropriate Jane, who’d been waiting on their manicured lawn in a terry-cloth robe, said, “Ass.” I didn’t want to be the jackass at the beginning of that sentence. So using the 3:00 a.m. voice, my opening line for talking to Jane had been passed down over the centuries from fuckup to fuckup: “We’re okay….”
But were we? I knew I was, and Bilal, who all during the wait to be rescued by people obviously more qualified managed to stack all his cards up in a row, had to be too. It was the “we” part that had me all messed up. Without me, Gina would be on the opposite side of the universe right now, in a place called her boyfriend’s arms, oblivious to the fact that she had a selfish bitch for a BFF and a possibly autistic asshole for a boyfriend. Solitaire for a straight hour? Really, guy?
Even if I had the DeLorean, the flux capacitor, and all the gigawatts to get us out of here, Doc only knows when I’d program it for—1996 and Melrose Driving School? To Pilgrim High School in 1994, when the sporty girls needed a fifth and Gi picked me? Two hours ago on the corner of Wilshire, or a day ago when Gina said she wanted me to meet Bilal: “All right, you gotta see this dude and tell me what the deal is.” Helena from today would have tried to convince the Helena from yesterday to say something sincere or white girl–ish like, “If you like him then I like him. I’m sure he’s perfect!” And when the old Helena rolled her neck around to give me the side eye and ask, “Why the hell…?” the time-traveling Helena would cut her off with the YouTube of right now and say, “This is why, bitch!” Then the happy couple in the picture would fade back into existence, minus the annoying friend holding up bunny ears behind them. Then the present day would be even better than before. Or…
Maybe all of this was a good thing. Well, not the whole DUI situation—everyone can agree how much that was going to hurt come tomorrow morning—but perhaps by some convoluted cosmic kismet, my lack of a driver’s license had inadvertently outed Bilal’s lack of common sense. I mean, why didn’t he just drive? Why didn’t the three of us just head to his house, which was like ten minutes from the bar, and sleep off our troubles? But see, someone in possession of a nondriver’s ID cannot ask these types of questions from the backseat. It isn’t done. Also, what kind of sociopath plays solitaire when his girlfriend might be in solitary? It didn’t take long for me to diagnose Bilal with Asperger syndrome. I was rescuing Gina from having “special” children. Screw my promises to Mr. J. H. Christ: not driving was saving more souls than the Forum on Sundays.
In the time it took for me to absolve myself, the cavalry had arrived. Frances came first, walked straight up to Gina at the mobile home moonlighting as the intake center, gave her a wink, and said, “It’s all good.” Then she gave Gina her shoulder, and the two of them stood still for a minute. Then came Bilal’s white boys from Hollywood. And then Carl and Jane, who, just wanting their daughter back, decided to hold the furious for later. I was all set to roll down my window and yell, “It wasn’t me!” but thought better of it. Whichever way the steering wheel turned, it was me. I’d helped rack up negative points on her driving record and added yet another name to the losing column of her love life because, obviously, I’d have to inform her of what a jerk Bilal had been this