Pretty Amy Page 10

  My hands shook as I gave him a cigarette. I thought about Joe putting his hands in his pockets. I concentrated on trying to make them stop.

  He brought a silver-and-black Zippo to his mouth, flipped it open with one hand, lit his cigarette, and slapped it shut. The whole thing took seconds, but it felt like he was doing it in slow motion. “Thanks,” he said.

  Maybe he had just stopped to get a cigarette. Maybe it had nothing to do with me.

  It probably had nothing to do with me.

  I tried to make myself say something, but I hated talking to boys. Unlike AJ, they couldn’t be controlled as to what they were going to say next. I took another drag.

  “I know you,” he said.

  I coughed and tried to pretend that what he’d said was not the reason.

  He laughed. “Where do I know you from?”

  I couldn’t tell him. Telling him that he’d stood me up for my own prom would have been way too embarrassing. It would tell him that I still cared enough to remember.

  “I’m friends with Lila and Cassie,” I said, wishing I could have been wearing my favorite jeans and tight black T-shirt, wishing that my hair wasn’t pulled back in a headband like I was a nun.

  “What are you all dressed up for?” he asked.

  Of course he hadn’t followed me. If he had, he would have known that I had just come from court and that I was trying to do everything I could to forget it.

  “I work here,” I said, thinking fast. “I’m supposed to be a librarian.”

  “You don’t have to lie,” he said.

  I shrugged. Maybe Brian had told him what happened.

  “I’m Aaron,” he said. He might have known about the arrest, but at least he didn’t know that I’d been stalking him on Facebook. That I knew his first name, last name, and middle name.

  “Amy,” I said, waving hello with the cigarette in my hand.

  He smiled. His crooked tooth looked sharp, like a shark’s. “Though you do make a cute librarian.”

  I tried to keep myself from coughing again. “This suit sucks,” I said. It seemed cooler than saying thank you. It seemed cooler than getting all squishy over what he said, even though that was how I felt. “I’m only wearing it because I was just at the courthouse,” I said, trying to counteract the nerdiness of the suit with some badass-ness.

  He nodded. “We all have them,” he said. “We’re all forced to wear our stupid monkey suits for the stupid monkey man when we do something wrong.”

  I felt my cheeks get warm. “What did you do?” I asked.

  He put a finger to his mouth and shushed.

  “Wow, that bad?” I asked.

  “That good,” he said, flicking the ash off his cigarette.

  I tried to decide if anything that had happened so far was good. There was this. This was good. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if everything else hadn’t.

  “What did you do?” he asked. I considered telling him, but maybe he would be able to put the pieces together. Realize that he was supposed to have been my prom date.

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about what I did, either,” he said.

  I looked at his skateboard.

  “You wanna try it out?” he asked.

  “I’m wearing dress shoes,” I said, then regretted it. Why had I reminded him I was dressed like a loser?

  “So?” he said, holding the skateboard out to me upside-down, the way you might hand someone a rifle butt-first. The deck had a mural of blue sky and white-capped mountains hand-painted on it. The wheels were covered with stop-motion birds, so that when they spun it must have looked like the birds were flying.

  There was more to this boy. More that I wanted to know.

  “I guess I could,” I said, but then I remembered my mother, sitting at the table inside eating her Cobb salad. She would come looking for me soon.

  I shook my head. “I should go.”

  “You got a cell phone?” he asked.

  “Not that I’m allowed to use anymore.”

  “Parents,” he said. He pulled a sketchbook from his backpack. Maybe he had painted that beautiful mural. He ripped out a piece of paper, wrote something down, and handed it to me.

  It was his phone number.

  I tried not to act surprised, tried to act like boys gave me their numbers all the time, especially when I hadn’t asked for them.

  “I had to use the pay phone up the street from my house the last time they took mine away,” he said. “You know who uses a pay phone? No one. It smelled like homeless ass.”

  I looked at him. With his number in my hand I was afraid to do anything else, to say anything else. I was afraid he would take it back, especially if my mother came out looking for me.

  “I should go,” I said again.

  “You got another smoke?” he asked.

  I gave it to him. My hand was still shaking. He put it behind his ear.

  “See you around, Amy,” he said. He dropped the skateboard next to him. It landed perfectly on its wheels like a cat would on its legs.

  As he skated away, I looked at his number; the paper was as soft as fabric. I folded it smaller and smaller and hid it in my bra. Maybe he hadn’t said what I wanted him to say, but he had found me.

  He had found me.

  Fifteen

  I was supposed to hang up my suit so it wouldn’t get wrinkled, which was why the next morning it was crumpled next to me on the basement floor, under AJ’s cage.

  I’d spent the night before feeding him peanut butter from my finger, which he loved but which always made him a little bit sick. He pooped all over the pants and when I showed them to my mother triumphantly, as in, Look, I can’t wear these, she reminded me of the matching skirt just as triumphantly.

  I was stuck. There was no way she was going to believe that AJ had pooped all over the skirt, too.

  I had to meet my high school principal and after that I had another therapy appointment with Daniel. My mother informed me that I would have just enough time after that to eat dinner before I had to go to work. She could have told me I was supposed to go up in the space shuttle and I would have had to believe her.

  I’d slept with Aaron’s number in my pillowcase. I guess I wouldn’t be calling him anytime soon.

  My life had turned into a series of appointments, each one more unbearable than the last. Being arrested turned me into the type of person who had to look at her calendar. Of course the people I was seeing and the things I was doing totally sucked, but I guess if someone saw it without bothering to read it, I would look like a really popular person.

  I tried not to think how sad even having that thought was.

  “Get ready; we’re going to be late,” she said.

  When I asked my mother what loophole had been discovered that allowed me back on school grounds since my suspension, she answered that when a parental guardian accompanies you, you can go anywhere.

  Yeah, anywhere that sucks.

  I could only assume I was being called back to the hallowed halls of Collinsville South High for another one of Mr. Morgan’s life lessons. The stories he had told me every time I was called into his office. They all had the same gist to them. Good kid—in my case, good girl turns bad—ends up poor, pregnant, or dead. The means by which she got to each of these ends was always different, depending on what I had been caught doing. I think I knew how the story was going to go that day.

  Collinsville South had the traditional look of a brick colonial house, complete with ivory white columns and thick window trim, like the frosting on a gingerbread house. I couldn’t even hack it in a building that looked like Rydell High on steroids.

  There had to be something seriously wrong with me.

  We parked on the street in front of the school. Toilet paper hung from the branches of the huge oak trees on the lawn. Red streamers vined up the columns at the entrance of the building so that they looked like huge candy canes.

  My classmates’ lame attempt
at a senior prank.

  “What a mess,” my mother said, tsk-tsking.

  “They do it every year on the last day of school,” I said quickly, before I felt the punch in the gut of realizing what that meant.

  It was the last day of school.

  It was the last day of school and I was here with my mom, in a suit.

  Our appointment was at noon, my usual lunch period. Had Cassie, Lila, and I been in school that day, we most certainly would have been doing something to celebrate the fact that school was over and that we had plenty of days of celebration yet to come that summer. Probably smoking cigarettes in the parking lot and drinking stolen parental alcohol from a flask, chased by juice boxes from our lunches.

  Laughing and making fun of everyone else we went to school with for not having the sense to get buzzed like we had.

  But instead, I walked through the front doors of my school and prayed that I could go back to being as invisible as I had felt during my freshman year. If anybody saw me, my loosely held label as bad girl was over. I had to get in and out before the bell rang for next period.

  Mr. Morgan stayed seated in his chair when we were brought in. I looked at his desk, trying to find any clue as to why the hell we were there. In the past, all that Mr. Morgan had held against me were canary-yellow disciplinary slips. I had no idea what he held against me that day.

  One thing I did know was that my offense could not be written away with the word tampon. Skipping classes to get a tampon, or being late to get a tampon, or not being able to swim during gym class because I forgot a tampon, were not going to work that day. There was no way Mr. Morgan was going to believe that the police had mistaken a box of tampons for a huge bag of weed.

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Morgan,” my mother said, fake as ever, as we sat in the empty seats set up for us on the other side of his desk.

  “Yes, well,” he said, “I wish it were under better circumstances.”

  Then they both looked at me, in case anyone had forgotten what those circumstances were.

  “I know this is a disappointment to your family, Mrs. Fleishman.”

  She nodded and looked down.

  “It is a disappointment to the family of our school as well,” he said, leaning forward in that way people do to punctuate what they are going to say next. He went on to tell us that in addition to being suspended from school, which would be on my permanent record—big deal, I have a more perilous permanent record to contend with now—I was also not allowed to attend the senior carnival or graduation. When he said it, he looked at me with those eyes of his that were more eyelid than eyeball, and waited for my response.

  Perhaps he thought that after everything that had been taken from me, this would affect me the most. But I just wanted to get out of there. Besides, if you’ve ever had a fat woman deputy stick her hand up your prom dress looking for drugs, not much else can faze you.

  My mother, apparently, did not agree. “You can’t do this,” she said. “It has to be against the law.”

  “Actually, it is the law. School-board law. Any student caught using drugs or alcohol on his or her way to or from the prom can be barred from graduation. It’s meant as a deterrent. And though we don’t know for sure that Amy used drugs, I think it’s pretty safe to assume…” When he said this, he looked at me with his smug I know things about you that you don’t know about yourself look that all high school principals have. Though I was pretty sure Mr. Morgan didn’t know the difference between his wife and a train tunnel.

  “I didn’t even go to the prom,” I said.

  My mother looked at me. I guess I hadn’t told her that part.

  “That may be true, but you were on school grounds; we know that,” he said.

  They knew that. I thought about Ruthie. I thought about Leslie. I thought about Joe.

  “What is it supposed to deter her from now?”

  “Now it’s a deterrent for other students. It’s our newly amended zero-tolerance policy. Considering what she’s done, I’d say we’re being generous.”

  “I’ll still get a diploma, right?” There was no way I was going through the last four years of high school again.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “In the mail, like some GED, like some mail-order education? No, thank you,” my mother said. Her ring finger went to her mouth and she started to chew.

  “It will be the same diploma everyone else gets, Mrs. Fleishman.”

  “Well, if she’s getting the same diploma, why shouldn’t she be able to accept it like everyone else? Isn’t she going through enough right now?”

  “That is our decision,” he said, folding his hands together on the desk in that way you fold your hands together when your side of a discussion is over.

  “Well, am I still allowed to attend?” my mother asked. Her question was like asking the groom if you could still come to the wedding, even though he decided not to marry your daughter.

  Mr. Morgan looked at her with a look I had given her myself numerous times; it was a look that asked, What the hell is wrong with you?

  “We’ll be broadcasting the ceremony via webcast for the first time this year for out-of-town relatives, people with large families,” he said, sounding really proud of himself. “You’re welcome to watch it.”

  “You can’t stop me from going. I’ve already purchased my tickets,” she said, standing and grabbing me from my seat, trying to get us out of the room before he could tell her no.

  I was actually glad. The bell was going to ring in seven minutes. Being told I was not going to graduation would be eclipsed as the worst thing that had happened that day if I got caught in the hallway with my mom, looking like this, while classes were changing.

  “You can do whatever you like, as long as Amy isn’t there,” he said, looking at her with a You flipped out and I suppose I understand why with a daughter like that look.

  “If the general public can go, then I should be allowed to go, too. It’s discriminatory to let some people attend and not others, and I haven’t done anything wrong.” I could see tears forming in her eyes.

  Since the arrest, much like me, she had gained the ability to cry at will. But unlike me, she didn’t hide it. All of a sudden her eyes were filled with tears, like there was a valve she’d turned on.

  “Good luck to you, Amy,” he said.

  I didn’t bother saying thank you like I was supposed to. His luck would do me no good now.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said, pulling her out of the office. I had to put my arms around her to hold her up as I brought her into the hallway. Three more minutes and everyone would see me in this suit, with my mom, with my arms around my mom, who was crying, in this suit. I rushed her out of the hall and through the front doors of the school.

  “When do I get to be proud of you?” she asked.

  I knew it was a rhetorical question, but it didn’t make hearing it any easier.

  We got in the car and drove. I could hear the bell ringing in the distance as we turned out of the parking lot. Safe. I was safe.

  My mother was breathing like she had just run a marathon.

  “After you are finished at Daniel’s,” she said, not looking at me, “you are going to put on your cap and gown and we are going to take our graduation photos.” She grabbed my wrist, hard, as if she would fall down into the seat of the car like it was quicksand.

  And because it hurt, I said okay. At least she didn’t want to take pictures of me in this stupid suit.

  Maybe Mr. Morgan didn’t understand why my mother wanted to go to graduation without me, but I did. There were aunts and uncles and canasta group members to consider. There were pictures to be taken for those people to see.

  I guess my mother just needed some normalcy. If she went to graduation she would at least be able to get a program with my name in it—surely they wouldn’t have had enough time to remove my name and reprint it. And she could take a long shot of the graduating seniors, just the backs of t
heir heads, which would all look the same. She could point to any one of them and say, “That’s my Amy.”

  I suddenly felt bad for her. I suddenly felt bad for me.

  “When we’re finished with the pictures, you are going to return that cap and gown and get a refund. There’s no reason to pay good money for something you’re not even going to use.” I could see her starting to tear up again.

  I turned and stared out the window so I didn’t have to look at her.

  Maybe she would let me put it toward my Dick Simon fund. Of course, it only paid for about half a minute of his services. There’s a real glimpse into what a high school diploma is worth. Four years of hardship, toil, boredom, and memorization; of each day feeling the happiest you think you could possibly feel and then sadder than you ever imagined, equaling the length of time it took for Dick Simon to constitute a really good burp.

  Sixteen

  Before Daniel could sit down, I ran for his beanbag chair. It was hard sitting in it wearing a skirt, but I didn’t care.

  He was wearing another tie-dye—blue blobs covered the V cut into his chest by the bright green Guatemalan poncho he had over it. It was the first time I’d actually seen someone wearing one of those in real life. Well, someone who wasn’t Guatemalan.

  “Why are you sitting there?” he asked, reaching over me to get his notepad. He kept looking at me, and I guess that meant my answer had better please him.

  So I took my time and crafted a response that would make any cold-blooded psychologist proud. “I just wanted you to feel as uncomfortable in here as I do,” I said, even though it was obvious I was the one who was uncomfortable. The beanbag chair sounded like someone sanding a piece of wood as I shifted awkwardly.

  “Uh huh,” he said, sitting in the recliner.

  I pulled my skirt down and readjusted myself. At least my mother had let me leave my jacket with her in the car.

  “You seem to be taking things well,” he said in a voice I knew meant he thought just the opposite.

  I looked at him. If I opened my mouth I was afraid I would start crying and be unable to stop.

  “You might want to try talking to me,” he said. “I may be called as a character witness for the case.”