Pretty Amy Page 12

  “Not all of us have the free time you do to devote to bathing,” he said.

  “Gross,” I said, inching away.

  “It’s a lot of work raising two kids, working, making ends meet.”

  As busy as I was, I still found time to shower. I guess Connor was one of those people who had to let everyone else know how horrible he thought his life was. It was enough to make a person in my position sick with envy.

  I heard the bell above the door and was relieved that someone was coming in, if only so it would end Connor’s pity party. That is, until I saw who it was.

  Leslie Preston walked down the aisles like she had been in to shop a thousand times before. Her honey-colored hair shone in the lights. Her teeth and eyes practically sparkled. It could only be my luck that I’d gotten a job where she bought her binge food.

  In addition to being Joe’s whatever, she had also been Homecoming Queen. In all likelihood she had been Prom Queen, too, not that I had been there to confirm it. So much had changed since prom. Since the night she and Joe had kept us out of the gym. I felt sick. At least Joe wasn’t with her.

  “Oh, crap,” I said. Having everyone see me with my mom in the hallway at school would have been bad, but having Leslie Preston see me here, in this shirt, with Connor, was worse—much, much worse.

  “Don’t swear,” Connor whispered. I guess my use of the word mattered more to him than why I was saying it.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I looked down, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me. The chances of that were slim, seeing that anyone given the choice of looking at Connor or me would have to choose me, especially if that person was about to eat.

  She walked to the cooler and grabbed a Diet Pepsi—probably her dinner—and slapped it on the counter like she was killing a spider.

  “Is that all for you this evening?” Connor asked in his disgustingly happy customer-service voice.

  Yeah, I thought, until she notices me and rips me a new one. Just this Diet Pepsi and a side of humiliation served cold. I kept looking down, but I knew she could see me, knew she was looking at me and thinking all the snobby things she always thought about me and now that she had validation for them, thinking them even more.

  “Do you take fifties?” she asked, pulling out a crisp one. She held it by the edge like she had just gotten her nails done, perfect pink gumballs at the ends of her fingers.

  “You’re not trying to pull one over on us, are you?” Connor asked in his singsong I am the best employee ever voice.

  She looked at him like his face was made of puke. That was how Leslie Preston looked at everyone, though I couldn’t blame her in this case.

  “Watch how I make the correct change,” he said to me, and I knew I was in for it. She was totally going to let me have it. Tell me what a loser I was, what a joke my life had become, ask me how I could even show my face after what had happened.

  I must have looked like I was praying, and in some ways I was—praying that I could truly hide, unlike the symbolic type that Daniel had accused me of.

  Maybe Aaron would come in and take me away from all this. He had found me before. I pictured his voice in my head—she’s the loser—as I steeled myself for her first strike.

  “See?” Connor said, but I wouldn’t look up.

  Forget correct change. I was about to have my ass handed to me by the Homecoming Queen.

  “That’s ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty.”

  She knew just how to torture me, making me wait, my heart beating like a fish dying in my chest.

  “Have a Gas-N-Go night,” Connor said.

  As I closed my eyes and prepared to be annihilated, the bell above the door rang and I realized she was gone.

  “Now did you watch me there?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest like he was my father teaching me how to ride a bike.

  Why hadn’t she said anything? Was she just trying to torment me? Preparing to come back with the whole Homecoming Court to laugh at me? Waiting to text everyone she knew that Amy Fleishman the druggie criminal was not only a druggie criminal but was also working at crappy, dirty Gas-N-Go?

  “I feel sick,” I said, took the bathroom key, and ran toward it. I locked myself inside and lit a cigarette.

  I needed Lila and Cassie. They haunted me like a smell that reminds you of something. Like when I would smell gasoline and think of riding in the motorboat at summer camp. I’d crave that feeling, just from the smell; could even see the lakefront, sun-sparkling water rapping against the dock, making the sailboats and canoes that were tied up dance in the shallows.

  I thought about Cassie and Lila and how it used to be. How for a short while this town, which we considered the world, felt like it was ours for the taking.

  I thought about how, if they had been next to me, I wouldn’t have cared that Leslie Preston had ignored me. That if they had been next to me, I would have ignored Leslie Preston.

  Now that they were gone, it wasn’t cool to reject everything we were supposed to embrace. Without them beside me, I couldn’t deny that I wanted to keep chasing the impossible dream of teenage-girl perfection, even though I was further away from it than I had ever been.

  Without them beside me, no one would understand why I’d made the choices I had, why they’d seemed like my only choices at the time.

  When presented with mediocrity or failure, I’d chosen failure. I’d chosen to be the best failure I could be.

  I guess I’d finally succeeded.

  …

  “I thought you were going to call me,” Aaron yelled as I stepped out of Gas-N-Go after work.

  I didn’t know it was him at first. It was dark and I didn’t see the black convertible idling at the far end of the lot until he beeped the horn.

  Maybe he had felt me calling for him, or maybe he just needed cigarettes.

  I walked over to him. It was a warm night. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. The lights on the dashboard tinged his skin ghostly green.

  I had thought about calling him, but the whole having to talk because we were on the phone thing, the whole having to fill the weird silences thing, kept me from going through with it.

  It was much safer to know that I could call him if I wanted to.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Waiting for you,” he said.

  He’d said exactly what I wanted him to say. Maybe talking to boys wasn’t that bad. Well, as long as they were doing the talking.

  “Cool shirt,” he said.

  I looked down. I was still wearing my red Gas-N-Go polo. Why did I look like such a dork every time I saw this guy? “It’s for work.”

  “Just another monkey suit,” he said.

  “Nice car,” I said, totally spazzing out. I couldn’t help it. It was nice, way too nice for him to be driving and way too nice for him to be waiting for me in.

  “My dad’s. He lets me borrow it at night sometimes. Get in.”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. I was supposed to come home right after work, but what were my parents going to do, arrest me?

  We drove out of the parking lot and onto Main Street, the top down, my hair blowing around. I kept trying to pull it back, but it kept coming loose, so I gave up and just let it fly.

  I looked at Aaron. Damn, he was cute, like a guy in a garage band cute. So cute that I never would have considered talking to him first. So cute that Lila should have been in the car instead of me.

  But I was in the car.

  From his profile, I could see he was smiling, one hand on the wheel, the other on the shifter. Red hairs had escaped his ponytail and were flying around his head like they were electric.

  I put my head back and watched the streetlights rush past like a movie on fast forward, blurry and buzzing. He turned up the music. I had to remember this feeling. Remember it so I could feel it later, but it was fleeting, fast, like the car. I knew it would stop when we did.

  We parked up the street from my house. I realized I hadn’t
even told him where to go. “You know where I live?”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  I wondered what else he knew about me. I wondered what else he wanted to know.

  “I didn’t think you were ready to go home yet,” he said.

  I shook my head and looked at Joe’s house. Hopefully he wouldn’t walk by and ruin everything, embarrass me with his letterman jacket and geek hands.

  We reclined our seats back and looked up at the sky. I waited for Aaron to say something about the stars, but he didn’t, so I didn’t, either.

  “I drew something for you,” he said, reaching into the backseat and handing me a piece of paper.

  It was me, wearing my suit, riding on his skateboard. He’d done it in pastels, so that it looked blurry at the edges, like I could have been skating to anywhere.

  “So you could see what you were missing.” He smiled.

  “Wow, thanks,” I said.

  “No big deal,” he said.

  Maybe it wasn’t to him, but I wasn’t used to cute boys giving me things. Phone numbers and pictures they had drawn of me. What was next?

  “You have cigarettes?” he asked.

  I gave him one and put one in my mouth, and he lit them both with his Zippo. “I like your lighter,” I said, spazzing out again. I didn’t like his lighter. I liked the way he held it, like anyone who saw him with it would know it was his.

  He leaned over and kissed me. He tasted like smoke. It was my first kiss with a cigarette in my hand. I tried not to drop it as he pulled me closer. I could feel it burning in my hand, could feel the ash growing. His crooked tooth pushed against my bottom lip, but it felt good, like he was telling me a secret.

  He kept kissing me as he threw his cigarette over his shoulder onto the street. I did the same, hoping it didn’t hit anything that would ignite. His hand was flat on my back, the hand that had held his cigarette resting on my knee.

  I tried to think about what bra and underwear I was wearing. I tried to think whether I had shaved my legs that day, but I couldn’t stop wondering why he was kissing me. I was wearing a shirt that smelled like deli meat and gas-station-bathroom air freshener. My hair was tangled and flat from the drive. He’d barely even talked to me. He didn’t even know me.

  Maybe that was why.

  He was such a good kisser. I kissed him harder; his tooth pierced my lip. His hands gripped me like I was the safety bar on a roller coaster. I could feel his nails digging into my knee. Maybe it didn’t matter why. It all felt too good to stop. It all felt too good to question.

  I should have known better.

  Eighteen

  Dick Simon decided that trash cleanup wasn’t good enough. He said I also had to show I had a deep caring for other people; besides, my mother was still complaining about not being able to get the smell out of her car.

  I protested that the quiz the social worker had given me had clearly shown I was meant to work with trash, but he said something about having to convince the judge I cared about the well-being of others.

  All this supposed self-improvement was not about improving me at all; it was for the benefit of some judge. Forget about being a better person, like Daniel kept telling me I had to be—my personal growth was less important than impressing some guy who essentially wore a dress for a living.

  “The elderly,” Dick Simon said.

  “How about kids?” I asked. Kids I could deal with. Old people scared the crap out of me.

  “No one wants you near their kids,” he said.

  I guess old people had nothing left to lose.

  I was sent to Blooming Maples, the old folks’ home down the block from my house. It had that hospital-like, boxy brick outside, that sterileness that it seemed to emit into the air around it like a force field. The sidewalk surrounding it was as white as a nurse’s uniform, which I guess was meant to prepare the residents for seeing that stark white on a daily basis.

  This was way worse than trash. Nursing homes are where old people gather to die. It’s almost like they think that if they store themselves together, maybe someone who has a little more life left will be able to spare some.

  Old people made me sad. This was going to suck.

  I found Mrs. Mortar lying on her bed with three pillows supporting her back so she could sit up. She wore a red kimono with red lipstick to match, as well as enough blush to stop a car. Of course, I had to give her props for wearing a red kimono. Other than my Gas-N-Go polo, I didn’t own anything red. Red scared me almost as much as old people.

  She was applying, or rather trying to apply, nail polish. She wasn’t really putting it on her nails so much as she was putting it on her whole fingertip. She had that shaking thing so many old people do; it looked like her fingers had been slashed with knives and hot-pink blood was coming out. She lifted her left hand to show me.

  “Nice,” I said, trying to be the cheery, helpful visitor I was supposed to be.

  “It’s amazing what a little color can do for a girl,” she said, and then looked at me more closely, as if realizing for the first time that she had no idea who I was.

  “Do you need help?” I asked, though I hoped she would say no.

  She either ignored me or didn’t hear me. Thank God some people are too proud to wear a hearing aid.

  “So tell me about you,” she said, putting the cap back on the bottle and blowing on her nails.

  After the arrest, there was the sitting, the listening, and then the people like Daniel, who wanted me to tell them about myself. Talking about my life had never been my favorite topic of conversation, and it wasn’t any better now.

  She sat and waited.

  “My name’s Amy,” I said, realizing it was the only safe thing I could really say. Even my last name was incriminating, if she could do a Google search.

  “Go on,” she said, in that way old women talk when they’re trying to sound like young women. In a voice that says, I’m still sexy.

  “I’m seventeen,” I said, thinking maybe that would appease her. As far away from seventeen as she was, I thought it had to be something.

  She grabbed a fur stole from the hospital-grade metal headboard and wrapped it around her neck. I think it was fur. It looked more like a snake of dust bunnies from a vacuum bag. “And?”

  She was worse than Daniel. At least he let me sit there staring. Of course, that might have been because she wasn’t asking me these things for my own benefit. She was bored and old and my visit was probably the most interesting thing to have happened to her in the past month.

  I suddenly felt sorry for her, especially for expecting anything from me. I guess I could have told her about my steamy make-out session with Aaron, but that was mine. He was mine. I didn’t want to share him with her.

  With anyone.

  I looked around the room. She had dried roses hanging on her wall in bunches, at least twenty of them. The red of the petals was covered with green, which also made the room smell like rot. At least, I hoped that’s what it was.

  “My first husband used to give me roses when we fought. I divorced him because he loved hot weather. I,” she said, indicating the wrap, “did not.”

  “Tell me more about you,” I said. Maybe she wanted to know about me, but I wanted to know about her. Staring down the barrel of incarceration was scary, but staring down the barrel of death had to be terrifying. Maybe she had some secret.

  “No, no, you don’t get to do that.” She pulled the wrap tighter around her neck and in the process covered it with nail polish and coated her nails with pieces of gray fuzz. “I’ve been through seven presidents, almost as many wars, two husbands, three kids, and a hysterectomy—you tell me about you.”

  “I have a pet bird,” I said.

  “Wow,” she said, “you’re a regular Amelia Earhart.” She closed her eyes, which let me know she was bored. Even she thought I was boring. “Haven’t you ever done anything crazy?” she asked, pulling her stole off and throwing it across the room. “Ma
ybe something that doesn’t involve a pet bird?”

  I thought about Aaron again. We had made out until my lips were chapped and raw, but that didn’t feel crazy, it felt right. I didn’t need to explain myself to him. Our lips were too busy to talk anyway.

  “Not really,” I said. There was also the arrest. Sure, it seemed like exactly the kind of thing you would tell people about years later—you can’t believe the crazy thing that happened to me in high school—but sitting in the middle of it took away any glamour.

  “Fine, let’s make this easier,” she said. “What will you do after you leave here?”

  I thought about it: Did I need to work? What appointment did I have? I realized I didn’t know, which I took to mean I had nothing to do after this. I was actually pretty excited about that.

  “Nothing,” I said, loving the plain blissfulness of the word.

  She shook her head and heaved herself out of the bed and into a pair of slippers that was sitting on the floor.

  Maybe I should have told her to sit down. I should have said, Don’t overexert yourself, but I was kind of hoping she would tire herself out enough that she would fall asleep and I could spend my remaining mandated time listening to her snore and rummaging through her room for the flask I knew she must have. The way she was acting, it was probable she had more than one.

  “Bring that over here,” she said, motioning to the dresser. “I’m not about to be the only woman in the room wearing lipstick.”

  Her makeup looked like it was from the Stone Age. I was positive I didn’t want it on my face and that if any of it did get on my face, it would probably cause a rash requiring immediate medical attention. At least there were nurses on staff.

  “Make like you’re giving your beau a kiss,” she said, puckering her own lips, which looked like that part in the movie when the protagonist’s aunt is about to give him a kiss and all you can see is puckered, quivering lips coming toward you on the screen.

  I could have protested, but she seemed to really be enjoying herself and at least she’d stopped asking me questions. Then she picked up the eye shadow and blush. She looked like she was having an epileptic fit and who knows—the way my face turned out, maybe she had one.