Pretty Amy Read online

  “You’ve met me twice.”

  “Perhaps your mother would be more suitable, or maybe you have someone else in mind?”

  I wanted him to think I was ignoring his question rather than the truth of the matter: there really was no one else. Well, I guess there was Joe, but considering what he thought about me, he would more likely be called for the prosecution.

  Sitting in the beanbag chair, I was eye level with a small wooden table that had a framed picture of a girl in a softball uniform on it. “You have a daughter?” I asked.

  He looked at the picture. “Yes, and a wife and a father and a mother, too,” he said.

  “Is she as messed up as I am?”

  “How was the arraignment?” he asked.

  I guess that was his way of changing the subject. How come he was allowed to do that and I wasn’t?

  “Amy,” he said.

  I didn’t want to talk about it. Not with him.

  I had wanted to talk about it with my parents, instead of going out for lunch to stuff our mouths so we couldn’t talk about it. I had wanted to talk about it with my father, while he squeezed my hand tight, tight, tight like he used to during the game we played when I was little. But they were paying this guy to talk to me instead.

  Daniel looked at me like he was trying to shake the last bit of salad dressing out of a bottle.

  “It was fine,” I said. So he knew I was upset, big deal.

  He sighed. “You’re just masking your fear and low self-esteem.” He turned the page of his pad. “You can choose to share what you’re feeling verbally or attempt unsuccessfully to hide it.”

  “I choose neither,” I said.

  I thought I was hiding it pretty well. I struggled off the beanbag chair and looked out the window. I saw my mother sitting in the car talking to herself—and I was the one in therapy.

  “You are a textbook case,” Daniel said.

  I could feel my filter waver. I wanted him to continue. Maybe he really did know something. Maybe he’d learned it from dealing with his own daughter. I turned to look at him.

  “You were craving someone, anyone to notice you,” he said.

  I could feel Aaron’s phone number in my bra. The paper made my skin itch, but having it there made it impossible not to think about him and I wanted to think about him. He had noticed me.

  “If negative attention was all you could get, you would take it,” he continued.

  I shook my head—though I couldn’t deny I had spent more time with my mother in the last couple of weeks than during all of high school. But that couldn’t have been the attention I wanted.

  I wanted Aaron’s attention and I had gotten it by being the girl everyone was telling me not to be. None of them understood.

  Daniel put his pen to his lips and stared at me. “You need to look inside yourself and think about whatever feelings you may have about all of this. It’s the only thing that will help you.”

  I didn’t want to do that. I was afraid if I started searching around in my feelings, I might never come back.

  He took a deep breath, made a big fuss about it, like breathing was the hardest thing he’d ever done. “Your mother says you moved into the basement. Why did you choose to do that?”

  I stared at his poncho. It was as green as a traffic light. Its symbolism was probably supposed to make me want to go, but all I felt was just the opposite. “She’s out in the car, if you want to ask her,” I said.

  Daniel should have considered himself lucky. I wasn’t the kind of person who went on and on about Momma and how weak and under Poppa’s thumb she was, her small mind and big dreams, too big for our shed-size house with a child-drawn curl of smoke coming from the chimney.

  Of course that wasn’t my story. My story was a lot more complicated. I had two parents who loved me as best they could. Who gave me everything I asked for and yet it still wasn’t enough. So, what did that say about me?

  Maybe it wasn’t about them. I wasn’t totally sure what it was about yet, but I didn’t think my parents were my real problem. I didn’t even know if I had a real problem.

  “I think you see it as some kind of symbolic hiding. As a physical way of keeping out the greater world.”

  “I’m not alone. AJ’s down there with me.”

  “Who’s AJ?” he asked, like I might be talking about an imaginary friend, like he had hit the mental-illness jackpot.

  “My bird,” I said.

  “Exactly my point. You let your bird in, but you won’t talk to a person.”

  “I like my bird.” Maybe Daniel couldn’t understand why I liked AJ better than most people, but he should have. If he knew as much about me as he claimed he did, he should have.

  He shook his head. His ponytail fell over his right shoulder. His hair was so long, longer than Aaron’s, longer than mine. He had to have been growing it for years, through who knows how many messed-up kids sitting across from him trying to deny they were messed up. I wondered how many of them he had actually helped. I wondered how many of them made him wish he’d never had a daughter.

  “You need to look at the people and things you choose to populate your life with, otherwise you’ll never understand why you do the things you do.”

  What was there to understand? Lila and Cassie were my friends. They were the only people in this world who understood me and now they were gone. They were gone and my life was gone. I didn’t need Daniel to help me figure that out.

  I held out my hand for the appointment card. The small, ivory, 1” by 2” rectangle that would tell me when I would have to come and see him next.

  “Do you even want to keep coming here?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a choice,” I said.

  “You have a choice to talk,” he said.

  “You’re only listening because my parents are paying you,” I said, glancing at my mother in the car. I could see her ripping at each nail on her right hand from pinkie to thumb. Then back again like a typewriter.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I am listening.”

  …

  I sat on the front stoop and smoked a cigarette while my mom went inside to iron my cap and gown. I would have to put them on and smile when the flash went off. I would have to pretend that it was my graduation day, that I knew what that day felt like, even though I never would.

  My mother hated when I smoked in front of the house, but we were beyond her saying anything about it. We were beyond me caring, even if she did.

  I pulled my skirt up high on my thighs, trying to tan my very white legs. They were suffering from my annoying schedule, too.

  I heard a bike bell jingling down the street. Joe, probably on his way home from school. This was getting ridiculous. I hated being in my house far too much to have to risk seeing Joe every time I was outside of it.

  All I wanted to do was talk to Aaron. All I wanted to do was talk to Lila. All I wanted to do was talk to Cassie. I guess I was going to talk to Joe. At least it wasn’t Daniel or my mom.

  I heard him getting closer, the bike bell like a jack-in-the-box being cranked, that scary, exciting sound. I took a drag. I wouldn’t get caught off-guard this time. I would be ready.

  Maybe he would ask me why I hadn’t been in school that day. Maybe he would ask me why I looked so annoyed. Maybe he would ask me why I was in a suit. I considered how much I would tell him. How much I would let him in this time, if at all.

  Maybe I would ask him if he had been the one who’d ratted me out to Mr. Morgan—him or his girlfriend.

  I looked down at my legs, pretending to ignore him; the sun was already starting to turn them pink. I heard him ride up his driveway, heard his garage door open, heard him drop his bike on the ground and go into his house.

  I guess we were back to avoiding each other. Back to that day early in sophomore year, when it was still warm enough to fool us into thinking it was summer—one of those days during fall when the leaves were just as yellow as the sun. When guys wore shorts and girls wore ta
nk tops, and everyone hoped that a foot of snow wasn’t just around the corner, even though it always was.

  Joe and I walked home most days when it was nice enough, as long as he didn’t have volleyball practice. Our walk took about fifteen minutes, longer than riding the bus, but on a nice day it was totally worth it to avoid those disgusting green seats and dungeon smells and intestinal sounds. We’d walk through the soccer field at the back of the school, which became a field of wild grasses and then undergrowth and woods before finally coming out at the mouth of our neighborhood—where the pavement and green street signs began.

  We were quiet as we walked the length of the soccer field. Even though we had known each other forever, the older we got, the harder it was to find things to say. Maybe it was because we had known each other forever.

  “Homework.” Joe sighed, indicating his stuffed backpack. “English.” He smiled.

  “You’d think with as much as you talk, you’d be good at it by now,” I said, falling into our lighthearted routine.

  It had started in seventh grade when Joe realized I was better at English than he was, and I realized Joe was better at math than I was. We’d joke that if we were one person, we might actually get into Harvard.

  He laughed. “You going to help me or not, Fleishman?”

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No geometry tonight.”

  “You will have geometry homework again,” he said, his voice going robotic. “It is statistically definite.”

  “Maybe if you give Spud a treat, he’ll help you.” I shrugged. I always acquiesced, but never right away.

  The ground below us turned from perfectly manicured green to hay-field yellow as we left the school grounds.

  “If I’d taught my dog to speak English, I wouldn’t still be going to high school,” Joe said.

  “If you’d taught your dog to speak English, you wouldn’t need help with your English homework.”

  We ducked into the woods. Branches broke under our feet as we walked. The sun speckled our skin with light through the leaves above. I guess that was why we still walked together—for this familiar talk and feeling and sound. It wasn’t something that could happen while we were at school, while we were inside the walls that pushed us into being the people we were supposed to be.

  “Maybe AJ can help me,” he joked. “Is he busy tonight?”

  “Fine.” I sighed. “Come over after dinner.”

  “Success,” Joe said, punching his fist into the air.

  I pulled out a cigarette and leaned against a tree, stopping to light it. I had only just started hanging out with Lila and Cassie and smoking was a part of that, whether they were around or not.

  “What are you doing?” Joe exclaimed, stopping to look at me.

  I shrugged and exhaled smoke into the smell of fresh pine, trying to seem casual, even though my stomach felt like it housed a flea circus.

  “Seriously?” Joe asked. “You’re smoking now?”

  It was the first time I’d had the nerve to smoke in front of him, to bring the new me into our old ritual. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting.

  Probably this.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t start a fire,” I said, still not admitting anything. I looked at the rough trail below. It was covered in fallen leaves—red, brown, and yellow. I could have started a fire easily. I held the discarded ashes in my hand.

  “When did you start?” he asked.

  “A while ago.” I shrugged, but the fleas in my stomach were doing a trampoline act. It had really only been a few weeks, but for some reason I didn’t want him to know that.

  “Why did you start?” His eyes were squinting from the smoke.

  “I like it,” I said. It was true. Not the smoking itself, the way it burned my lungs and made my heart race, but the way I felt holding a cigarette. Like a completely different person.

  “They make you smell,” he said, waving at the air in front of him.

  “Since when do you care what I smell like?” I pushed him playfully.

  He didn’t push me back.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re different,” he said, turning away from me and starting to walk away.

  “So are you,” I said, following after him.

  He was. Maybe I was flaunting mine, but he was different, too. We could pretend as much as we wanted on these walks, but that didn’t change anything that happened between bells ringing.

  “You’re really different,” he said, staring straight ahead.

  “Is that why you ignore me in school?” I guess these were the things that were hard to say, that caused our long silences, but if he was going there, I was, too.

  “You ignore me,” he said.

  I didn’t answer, just took a drag of my cigarette, letting him understand that we were talking about the same thing.

  “Why do you even like those girls?” he asked. He heaved his backpack up, and I couldn’t help looking at his hands. I saw the familiar twitch, even as he grabbed the shoulder strap tightly.

  “They’re nice,” I said. “They’re nice to me.”

  “Everyone says they’re sluts.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  He had no answer to that.

  We walked out of the woods, the trail below us turning to pavement that was glittery in the sunlight. I stomped the cigarette out. Once, twice, three times. Though I had wanted Joe to know I’d started smoking, I wasn’t ready for my parents to know it.

  “Besides, don’t guys like sluts?” I joked.

  “Are they making you do it?” he asked, still not looking at me.

  “No,” I said. They weren’t. They were letting me in.

  “I’m not going to walk home with you anymore if you’re going to smoke,” he said.

  “Is that a threat?” I tried to keep joking with him, but I knew it wasn’t working. He was serious. He was telling me that I needed to pick—him or them.

  That choice should have been easy. Our walks home were really the only time we saw each other during the school day. It wasn’t like he met me at my locker between classes or sat with me at lunch. Lila and Cassie did.

  “I bet AJ wouldn’t like it,” he said.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He stared straight ahead. His soft, amiable profile looked angry.

  “You’d better not tell my parents,” I said.

  “I bet that kid at camp wouldn’t have kissed you if you smelled like an old ashtray,” he said.

  “Joe, shut up.” I couldn’t believe he was talking about that. I don’t even know why I’d told him about it. Maybe because at the time I didn’t have anyone else to tell.

  It wasn’t like the kiss had been that good, or at least not as good as I’d thought it was supposed to be. The kid kissed like a plunger with a snake’s tongue. By the time we’d finished making out, the skin around my mouth was tender and pink, like I had fallen asleep in the sun with a ski mask on.

  I’d never told Joe about that part.

  “Not to mention, they’re horrible for you,” he said, his voice escalating.

  I knew cigarettes were horrible for me. Who didn’t know that? It wasn’t what smoking was about, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain that to Joe. He wasn’t a girl. He wasn’t me.

  “Why are you so mad?” I asked.

  “I’m not,” he said. “Do whatever you want.”

  We turned down our street. Joe was walking so fast it was hard to keep up with him. “Slow down,” I said.

  He was a whole house length in front of me, his legs pumping like he was on his bike. I would have had to run to keep up. He didn’t want me to keep up.

  I trailed him all the way to his house. I watched as he unlocked, then slammed his front door, without turning around to say good-bye.

  He was supposed to come over after dinner that night. We were supposed to sit on the floor of my bedroom while he tried to teach AJ swear words and I tried to teach him vocabulary words. But he neve
r did.

  He never came over again.

  Seventeen

  There was no gas at Gas-N-Go. There had been a time when they did sell gas, but it was long before me and long before Connor. What I think probably happened was that the place had gas when Mancini bought it and when it ran out, he was too cheap to buy more.

  Mancini never got rid of the pumps because, according to him, even though there was no gas, he still wanted people to think there was. So a customer would drive up and try to get gas, realize there wasn’t any, and stop in to the store to buy something, since they’d bothered to take the time to stop anyway. He was a marketing genius.

  Every time the doorbell rang that night to announce someone’s arrival, I hoped it would be Lila and Cassie, coming in to buy cigarettes and a chaser for whatever bottle of liquor they had taken from their parents, the way we used to. But it never was. Everything was different now. I couldn’t expect the things I used to expect, especially when it came to Lila and Cassie.

  It was always just one of the typical Gas-N-Go customers; they all said the same thing. It was like they were talking dolls on a conveyor belt and when they got to the counter, I pulled their string. If it was cold out, they usually said something about how cold it was. If it was hot out, ditto. Basically any weather system was contrasted in relation to some apex of that system. It was captivating.

  Men liked to drum their hands on the counter as they waited for their change and women liked to keep their hands on their purses like I was going to steal them. Kids my age tended to lean on the counter and play with the custom lone penny in the Take-a-Penny, Leave-a-Penny tray, sliding it back and forth like a rake in a baby Zen sand garden.

  Connor stayed close to the cash register. Apparently when he’d balanced it out after my last shift, it had come up fifteen dollars short. If I had known more about the stupid thing, I could have used that to my advantage and actually taken some money.

  “Do you need to stand so close to me?” I asked. Not only did he stay close to the cash register, he also stayed right on my ass.

  “Mancini told me I had to watch you.”

  I tried to move away from him. “You smell like old diapers,” I said, because he really did.