Pretty Amy Read online

  Pretty

  Amy

  a novel by

  Lisa Burstein

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Burstein. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Edited by Stacy Abrams

  Cover design by Liz Pelletier

  Print ISBN 978-1-62061-119-7

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-62061-120-3

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition May 2012

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: Band-Aid, Barbie, Big Bird, Birkenstock, Boy Scouts, Cheetos, Chester Cheetah, Chuck Taylors, Civic, Comet, Denny’s, Diet Pepsi, Doritos, Dress Barn, Dumpster, Facebook, Folgers, Gatorade, Gobstopper, Goodwill, Google, Guinness World Record, Hacky Sack, Hi-C, Humane Society, iPod, Kool-Aid, Jell-O, Liz Claiborne, McDonald’s, Miss America, Mountain Dew, My Little Pony, Neighborhood Watch, Pepsi, Pepto-Bismol, Ping-Pong, Play-Doh, Prell, Rolodex, Salem 100’s, Salems, Scrabble, Seagram’s, Smurfette, Starburst, Strawberry Shortcake, Technicolor, YouTube, Ziploc, Zippo.

  To my parents

  (who are nothing like the ones who appear in this book)

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Unfortunately, I am only myself. I am only Amy Fleishman.

  I am one of the legions of middle-class white girls who search malls for jeans that make them look thinner, who search drugstores for makeup to wear as a second skin, who are as sexy and exotic as blueberry muffins.

  I am a walking, talking True Life episode. Your high-school guidance counselor’s wet dream, and one of the only girls I know to get arrested on prom night.

  When my mother dropped me off at Lila’s, rather than running like hell the way I usually did, I sat next to her in our minivan and waited for a speech. The speech mothers give to their only daughters on nights when those daughters are all dressed up and the mothers look all wistful and teary.

  I assumed she was building up to it, was working through exactly what she was going to say so it would be perfect. I knew from TV that she must have practiced in the mirror, but maybe, faced with having to say all those things to me, she’d frozen up. I could understand that.

  When I saw Lila peek out to see who was sitting in her driveway, and then felt my phone vibrate with a text that I knew must say, WTF R U DOIN?, I figured I had waited long enough.

  “So this is it…,” I said. My mother stared at Lila’s small, birdshit-gray house and bit at what was left of her nails. After I’d started hanging out with Lila and Cassie, my mother gnawed at her nails the way a baby sucked her thumb. “…my senior prom,” I continued.

  Maybe she was overwhelmed. Her little girl was all grown up. Her ugly duckling had finally become a swan.

  “I don’t want to ruin this for you, so I’m choosing to hold my tongue.”

  My mother loved using old-time folksy sayings. Hold your horses. The early bird catches the worm. The penis with two holes puts out the fire faster.

  All right, fine, I made up that last one.

  She had been holding her tongue for a while now. When yelling at me about my “degenerate” friends hadn’t helped, she went for the semisilent treatment.

  Stupid me for trying to get her to talk.

  “There’s something very wrong with this, Amy,” she said.

  She meant that Lila’s boyfriend, Brian, had arranged a date for me. My mother had never met this boy. I had never met this boy. It may have seemed wrong to her, but I was used to Lila bringing the boys. And, it was still my senior prom. It was still my night, and she couldn’t even have a special, sappy moment with me.

  “I want to tell you to have a good time, to enjoy every moment, to be safe, but I know you won’t listen anyway. I know you’ll do what you want to do.”

  She was talking to herself again.

  My mother’s favorite hobbies were talking to herself and bitching. Though I suppose those were hobbies for most mothers, my mother honed them like skills. If bitching were karate, my mother would be a black belt.

  I looked down at my dress. It was strapless and light blue to bring out my eyes, which weren’t blue, but raccoon gray, and picked up whatever color I put next to them. The bodice was tight and shiny, like what a superhero might wear, and the skirt flared out and fell just below my knees. When my mother had seen it hanging on the bathroom door earlier tonight, she’d said it looked trampy, which made me even happier that she hadn’t been there when I picked it out.

  She also hadn’t been there when I got my shoes and clutch purse dyed to match. Sure, she had given me money, but she hadn’t been there. Not like I would have asked her to be there, but she hadn’t offered, either.

  “Thanks for the memories,” I said, opening the door.

  Her only job tonight was to tell me I was beautiful, that I was her beautiful baby girl all grown up, but she couldn’t even do that.

  “I can’t help the way I feel,” she said, like some self-help-book junkie. Well, not like one—she was one. For Chanukah last year she had gotten me an itchy sweater and Chicken Soup for the Daughter’s Soul. The inscription had read, FYI.

  Seriously.

  …

  I found Lila sitting at her vanity, playing with her hair. She was wearing a lilac dress and smelled of lilac perfume, like some flower-variety Strawberry Shortcake doll. Her vanity was really just an extra chair from the kitchen and a small desk with a mirror propped up on it, but nonetheless the effect was the same.

  Lila saw me walk in but stayed seated. This was what she did; she liked to force you to watch her for a moment, to drink her in. And since I knew this, I hung in the doorway and waited while she put on mascara.

  As lame is it sounds, Lila was the kind of person who danced through life on her tiptoes, a ballerina with woodland animals holding up the train of her dress. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I was one of those woodland animals.

  “What were you doing out there?” she asked without turning around. This was another game she liked to play—she was busy and you were interrupting her.

  “The usual. Ruining my life and ruining my mother’s in the process.”


  She swept a blush brush over her cheeks. She hadn’t dipped it in anything, so I wasn’t sure if this was also part of her act or if it was some beauty secret I was unaware of.

  “What do you think?” she asked, standing with her hands on the skirt of her dress, then twirling around slowly so I could see her from every possible angle.

  “You look great.”

  Lila asked how she looked, in one way or another, at least every twenty minutes. Sometimes I was supposed to say You look great. Sometimes I was supposed to say You don’t look fat, or I love your jeans, your hair, your shirt, you smell soooo good.

  It was okay. I knew it was my payment for hanging out with her.

  Besides, I can’t really say anything about needing constant reassurance. Just because I don’t get it from Lila doesn’t mean I don’t need it. I’d taught my parrot, AJ, to say Pretty Amy, among other things. And when I’d asked him how I looked that night, he’d obliged as usual.

  “You really mean it?” Lila asked.

  “I love your dress,” I said, just like I was supposed to. I guess when it came to Lila I was just like AJ, repeating meaningless phrases.

  “You need more eye shadow.” She pushed me down into her seat. Once she got going it was hard to stop her, and before I knew it, she had redone my whole face.

  Rather than the soft, natural effect I’d had when I arrived, after Lila was done I looked like I was ready to go up onstage. Not the way people onstage look when they’re actually onstage, but the way they look when you see them close up before or afterward.

  “Much better,” she said, stepping back to appraise her work. I knew how I wanted to respond, but instead, I responded how I usually did when it came to something I didn’t agree with. I said nothing.

  I wondered if she had done this on purpose, like some bride/bridesmaid thing. Lila did act like a bride at a wedding that never ended. She always had to be the most beautiful, the most interesting, and in this case, the least likely to be mistaken for a blind prostitute.

  Cassie threw open the bedroom door and entered the room looking like the photo on a slutty Halloween Devil costume, all fire-engine red and skin and cleavage.

  “Wow,” we both said. Well, really I said it, but I could see Lila’s mouth open to make a word and stop in a perfect O. I’d never seen Cassie in anything other than an oversize flannel shirt and cargo pants. She usually dressed like a lumberjack—it might have been part of the reason Lila put up with her.

  That night, it was obvious that Cassie was far too attractive to be as crabby as she was. Maybe that was why she always tried so hard to hide it.

  She lit a cigarette. “I know, I know,” she said, exhaling, “I look like the lead singer of a Vegas lounge act. My brother already told me.”

  “Not at all,” Lila said, looking to me like a combination of shocked and jealous.

  I nodded in agreement. I was shocked and jealous. At Brian’s house later, two boys would have two girls to choose from. The way Cassie looked that night, she would be chosen first. I would be the one who was left, as usual, but that is the arithmetic that equals love in high school.

  “Turn around,” Lila said, walking toward her and reaching for her dress.

  “Fuck off,” Cassie said, pushing her away. “You can see my ass on the way out.”

  Cassie pointed at me with the tip of her cigarette. “What the hell did you do to her face?”

  “How do you know I did it?” Lila asked.

  “Because Amy thinks light blue is daring.”

  I hated to hear it, even though she was right.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Lila said, holding my face between her hands and squeezing like a proud grandmother. “She wouldn’t know beauty if it crawled up her butt and pitched a tent.”

  “Well, I know what it looks like when something crawls out,” Cassie said.

  “Maybe it’s a little too much,” I said, looking over at Lila with eyes that begged for tissues, water, turpentine.

  “It is too much,” Cassie said.

  Lila stood there with her hands on her hips, her nails painted shiny silver, waiting for me to disagree. With Cassie on my side, there was no way.

  “Fine,” Lila said, throwing me a box of those blessed tissues.

  “At least now when we show up at Brian’s, he won’t try to be her pimp,” Cassie said, putting out her cigarette and walking downstairs.

  …

  Cassie started her rusted gold Civic, took off her red heels, and threw them over her shoulder. One of them barely missed my face.

  “Hey, be careful.” I was sitting in the back, as usual. I picked up the shoes from where they had landed and placed them next to each other on the seat, so it looked like there had been someone standing there who had suddenly vanished.

  “What do you want from me? I can’t drive in those things,” she said, lighting another cigarette.

  Cassie, Lila, and I smoked a lot. We were proficient at leaning against things—walls and cars and fences—and we liked to lean against them and smoke. Like we’d seen James Dean doing in posters for movies we didn’t know the names of. When we couldn’t lean against things and smoke, we just smoked.

  Lila lit her own cigarette and threw one to me in the back. “You can’t drive, period,” she said to Cassie, pulling the rearview mirror toward her so she could put on more lipstick.

  Cassie glared at her and moved the mirror back.

  “I’ll tell you if there’s anything coming up behind you,” Lila said.

  “If I believed you could actually take your eyes off yourself for two seconds, I’d feel a little safer.”

  “Then Amy can do it,” Lila said.

  I just smiled. There was no way I was going to ride turned around with my knees on the seat, clutching the back window like some panting dog. Well, at least not while I was wearing a dress.

  “Isn’t this great?” Lila said, watching her reflection in the window. “The three of us together for the most memorable night of our lives.” It was as if she wanted to see herself saying it, and then compare it with the way other girls had said it on nights like this.

  I knew exactly what she meant, though. There was some kind of magic that resulted from being dressed up and young and headed for a night you were supposed to remember forever. I was about to try to put that incredible feeling into words when Cassie said, “This song sucks. Shut the fuck up and put in a new CD.”

  Not quite what I would have said, but this was Cassie we were talking about.

  “There’s no way I’m getting my hands dirty searching around the floor for your CD case. Why don’t you have an iPod like the rest of the world?” Lila asked.

  “Why don’t you have a car?” Cassie retorted.

  “Amy,” Lila demanded. And, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away with saying no twice, I rooted around on the floor, using only the very tips of my finger and thumb to pick up what I found. I didn’t find a CD case. I found a lot of sticky change, a glass pipe, and about twenty empty packs of cigarettes.

  Cassie turned around. “It’s not there. My fucking brother.” That was the way Cassie referred to the members of her family. They were all her fucking something. Actually, that’s the way Cassie referred to everybody.

  “Who cares?” Lila said, rolling down her window. She was not about to let Cassie ruin any part of this night for her.

  The car screeched as we turned off Lila’s street, Macadamia Drive, a name that made it seem exotic somehow, but really it was just one of the streets named after nuts on the other side of Main.

  Lila pulled her cigarette out of her mouth and checked to make sure there was a ring of lipstick around the filter. Things like that made her happy.

  “Don’t worry,” Cassie said, “they can see your lips from space.”

  …

  We sat in Brian’s driveway arguing. Well, Lila and Cassie were arguing about whether we should walk to the door together or Lila should go on her own.

  “I’m not
sitting in the car like someone’s mother,” Cassie said, turning to me and gesturing for her shoes.

  “But they don’t know you yet,” Lila said. “It’s probably better if I go alone and bring them out.”

  “I don’t care either way,” I said, but the truth was, I kind of liked the idea of waiting in the car. There was no point in giving my date the opportunity to back out by letting him have a look at me first.

  “Good, then let’s go.” Cassie slammed the door behind her and clomped up the walk.

  She rang the doorbell and we waited. Waited for Brian to swing open the door and smile at us like a game-show host, telling us we looked stunning and introducing Cassie and me to our bachelors for the evening.

  But the door stayed closed.

  “I’ll do it,” Lila said, pushing her way through, her reasoning for Brian’s absence apparently the fact that Cassie didn’t know how to ring a doorbell. “They’re probably in the basement doing bong hits.” She rang the bell over and over so it made the impatient sound of a car alarm.

  “Where are they?” Cassie asked.

  “They have to be here,” Lila said, as much to herself as to us.

  “Maybe we’re on Punk’d or something,” I said.

  “That show is only for famous people, stupid,” Cassie said.

  “Well, maybe we’re on a new show that we don’t know about yet,” I tried.

  Cassie smirked. “Did you tell them the right night?”

  Brian did attend a rival high school. It was possible he had been misinformed of the date of our prom. Even though I knew it was a crock, I attempted to hold onto this like a drowning person grabbing for an outstretched hand, because I was drowning.

  I was.

  Lila ignored Cassie and stuck her face to the sidelight window. She banged on the door like she was locked on the inside of it.

  “There’s obviously no one home,” Cassie said, in a tone that suggested she was talking as much about Lila’s behavior as she was about Brian’s empty house.

  I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I had been punched in the throat. This was supposed to be the night where my date would realize that he couldn’t live without me, that he would love me forever. But that date didn’t exist.

  “I’m going to look around back,” Lila said, walking away in what appeared to be an attempt to shut Cassie up; this rarely worked.