Pretty Amy Read online

  I needed to stop letting people put makeup on me.

  I turned and looked at myself in the mirror and felt that strange sensation you get when you’re walking down the street and you see someone who looks just like you, and for a second you think you’re looking at yourself and then you realize it’s just someone else, with a completely different life, who has your hair, or nose, or eyes.

  She stood behind me with her finger on her chin. “Something’s missing,” she said, and went to her closet. “This.” She handed me an old, silver-sequined flapper dress, which would have actually been pretty cool if it weren’t covered with huge brown rust spots. “Arms up,” she said, and she waddled behind me with the dress. At least she was letting me wear it over my clothes—whatever bacteria it housed would have to travel through a layer of fabric before it could reach my skin and turn my nerves into children’s paste. “Perfect,” she said, sitting on the bed to catch her breath. “Now at least you look interesting.”

  That would not have been the word I would have chosen. I looked like an extra from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

  “You’re worse than that kid they sent me last week. President of the chess club. Sure, chess is boring, but at least he was passionate about it.” She waited, probably so I could tell her what I was passionate about.

  But there was nothing, had been nothing since I was little and wanted to be a bird. After that, I just wanted a friend, a best friend, and after I had those friends, I didn’t hope for anything else. I thought if I did, they would get taken away, but they got taken away anyway.

  “What I’ve learned about you in the past twenty minutes is that your name is Amy, you are seventeen, you have a pet bird, and you do nothing,” she said.

  I looked down. Was she right?

  “You have your whole life ahead of you and that’s all you have to say about it?”

  It was exactly the sort of thing old people say to young people, when it appears to those old people that those young people are wasting their lives. But I wasn’t one of those young people anymore.

  This was my life, arrest or no arrest. I had done very little and wanted even less. It sounded a lot worse when she said it back to me, though, even with the arrest tacked on.

  “I might as well call the chess wiz back in here,” she said, closing her eyes again.

  I started to feel angry. Started to hear the words that usually would have stayed in my head come pouring out. “What do you want from me? I got arrested. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life because I don’t have a life anymore, okay?”

  She put her hand to her throat and sucked in hard. I had rendered her speechless. For once that day, she had no more questions, so I kept talking.

  “It’s easy for you to tell me that I’m wasting my life. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know there’s nothing that makes me special? That the only thing I may ever do that makes news is, as far as my parents are concerned, the worst thing I’ve ever done?”

  I watched her, waiting for a reaction. I’m not sure what reaction I wanted, but the one I got certainly wasn’t the one I expected. She gurgled and started turning blue.

  I ran into the hallway screaming for a doctor, a nurse, anyone to help.

  I hadn’t rendered her speechless. She had been having trouble breathing and I hadn’t even noticed. The person I’d finally chosen to tell everything that Daniel had wanted to hear, couldn’t hear me anyway.

  As I watched from the corner of the room, hoping they could resuscitate her, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was something to that personality test after all.

  …

  Mrs. Mortar had really gotten to me. Walking home, I tried to think about Aaron, tried to tell myself that he didn’t feel the same way she did, couldn’t feel the same way she did. But how did I really know how he felt?

  Maybe he’d realized after last night that I wasn’t who he had thought I was, that I was boring. Maybe, after last night, I would never see him again.

  I had spent all of ten minutes with Mrs. Mortar and she had dismissed me as a nobody, a loser. I had to ask someone who knew me if she was right.

  Instead of going home, I stopped at Joe’s. His house looked the way it always did: small, olive green with chocolate-fudge trim, with a rainbow daisy spinner, spinning like something was chasing it, stuck in the front yard.

  The only difference was that, for the first time in three years, I was going to walk up the driveway that we used to draw all over with chalk. I was going to ring the doorbell that we used to treat as a musical instrument, driving his mother and dachshund Spud crazy. I was going to stand on the porch we used to hide under.

  I rang the bell. I tried not to think about how long it had been since I was able to walk in without even knocking. How long it had been since I had even been inside. How hopeless I really must have felt to ignore all that and ring his doorbell anyway.

  I heard Spud start barking, that familiar yippy sound. I rang the bell again, hoping to drown it out.

  “Oh, are we talking again?” Joe asked as he opened the door. I heard Spud come up behind him, his nails scratching on the linoleum as his little legs ran toward the door. Joe looked at me like I was back from the dead. I guess in some ways I was.

  “Amy, what the hell?” he asked.

  “Sorry, I know, I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “No, what the hell are you wearing?”

  I looked down. In all the commotion at the nursing home, I had forgotten to take off Mrs. Mortar’s dress. “Trick or treat,” I said, shrugging. It was easier than explaining my zombie-wear.

  “Are you on something?” he asked, squinting.

  Considering how I looked, the odds were probably PCP. Joe held Spud at his side with his leg as the dog started to whine.

  “Do you think I’m boring?” I asked, itching my cheeks. I knew Mrs. Mortar’s makeup was toxic. Well, at least there was the possibility of me dying before I had to hear Joe’s answer.

  “What? Amy, what is wrong with you? If you’re on drugs or something, you need to leave.”

  Spud continued to whine, giving me big brown eyes that I knew were begging for a pet. I put my hands behind my back, trying to fight the urge.

  “Joe,” I said, opening my eyes wide so he could see they were clear, could see I was sober. “Do you think I’m boring?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  He sighed. “I think you’re annoying. I think you’re frustrating. I think you’re exhausting. But no, not boring.”

  “You’re sure?” I knew I sounded desperate, but at that moment there was little I could do to contain it. I couldn’t hide behind my mean girl when I was the one who had rung the doorbell.

  “Um, yeah.” He started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “Amy, I mean, you haven’t been to my house in years and you finally come here and you look…” He laughed again, harder.

  “I know,” I said. I guess I’d hoped he wouldn’t mention the part about me being the one to actually ring his doorbell.

  He picked up Spud and held him. “So, why are you here?”

  Why was I there? I looked down. Mrs. Mortar’s dress was so long it covered my sneakers. I couldn’t move. “I guess I just wanted to ask you that,” I said.

  “You’re acting weird, and not the way you usually act weird. Like, bald Britney Spears weird.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Not like I usually act weird. I assumed he meant toward him.

  I wanted Joe to say something else. I wanted to say something else. But what did he want to hear? What did I want to hear?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I was so far from okay, but how could I explain that to Joe? After his father left, he’d made it his mission to pretend he was. At seven, having watched his father pack up his car and drive down our street and away from him, his mom, and Spud, Joe tried to convince everyone h
e was fine, just like I was trying to do now.

  Joe waited for my answer. He held Spud tightly in his arms, even as he squirmed. Joe’s hands were motionless, anything to be regular, anything to be normal.

  My hands were still behind my back. I wanted to pet Spud. I wanted to let him lick my face the way he used to—well, once Mrs. Mortar’s makeup was safely removed.

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded. “Will you be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling like I was going to start crying. I didn’t want to cry, not in front of Joe. “I think I have to get home.”

  “Right,” he said, stepping back, realizing that whatever truce we had fashioned in that strange, delicate moment was over.

  “I guess I’ll see you at graduation,” he said, heaving Spud on his shoulder with one hand as he closed the door with the other.

  He wouldn’t, but I didn’t want to tell him that. At least he could believe I would be there. At least he wouldn’t know how bad things had gotten, not yet.

  Nineteen

  I came home to find Dick Simon sitting at the dinner table with my parents. He was in my seat, which bothered me a lot less than the fact that he was in my house. Forget about coming home to find one of your teachers sitting with your parents at the dinner table with a bib around her neck. Finding your lawyer is much, much worse.

  I was hoping he hadn’t been briefed on the Mrs. Mortar situation and wasn’t there to tell me that not only was I up on drug charges, I had been accused of attempted murder, too.

  My mother was in a pink-and-white-checkered half apron, and she was at the stove stirring a pot full of something I was sure she hadn’t made. She never wore an apron and she never cooked. She must have called the caterer. Not a caterer, the caterer. She used him so often he was referred to as the. That night, she was “making” her famous heated-up whatever she’d ordered, and then everyone could rave about how exceptional she was at dialing a phone and how knowledgeable she was about the mysterious world of temperature.

  Whatever. It meant this little visit had not been impromptu. They had invited Dick Simon over for a reason.

  “No need to get all dressed up for me,” he said, laughing.

  “You’re late,” my mother said, turning away from the stove to look at me. “What on earth?”

  I was still wearing that disgusting dress. I pulled it over my head and threw it in the trash. I didn’t really want to get into everything that had happened, so I took a seat at the table and said, “I made a new friend.”

  “Was it a transvestite?” my mother asked.

  Dick turned red and got that look on his face that a little boy gets when someone says the word penis.

  She huffed and went back to stirring; it smelled like she was burning whatever food we were eating. My mother can even mess up food that’s been cooked for her.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s a transvestite as long as it’s a law-abiding transvestite,” my father said.

  “I guess anyone would be better,” my mother said.

  I picked up the fork from the left side of the plate and ran the tines along my lips, trying to keep in what I wanted to say about Lila and Cassie.

  “Amy, your teeth,” my father said, grabbing the fork from my hand.

  “Dick, you saw those girls in court. You didn’t even have to hear them speak to know they were bad news.”

  “Nope,” he said. “I could spot them from a mile away.”

  “Not a care in the world for the rules they’re breaking,” she said, shaking her head. “I think I saw that Cassie girl spit on the floor in the courtroom.”

  “We’ve all been arrested. We’ll all be punished,” I said.

  I was just like they were. Why couldn’t everyone understand that?

  “We’ll see,” my mother said. It was her way of saying that someone would get back at Cassie and Lila for what they had done to me. Or at least, what she thought they had done to me.

  I guess I couldn’t blame my mother for blaming them for what happened. I mean, I blamed her for a lot of the things that had happened to me. Did that mean that, according to her logic, she would get what was coming to her? Was I what was coming to her?

  “Smells great,” my father said, which was code for saying he was hungry.

  I waved at the air in front of my face. It did not smell great. It smelled like burning paper, which is probably what it was, considering it’s not beyond my mother to forget to take something out of its container before she reheats it.

  I was tired of waiting for someone to explain why Dick Simon was there, so I asked.

  “This is just a thank-you for all the hard work he’s doing for you,” my mother said.

  I wondered why my full paychecks from Gas-N-Go weren’t enough.

  “Yes, indeed,” Dick Simon said like some Southern gentleman. “Your mother is one gracious hostess.”

  I just about puked in my salad bowl. I found it interesting that they were thanking him when he hadn’t really done anything yet—other than torture me—as far as I could tell.

  Finally, dinner was served. Luckily, Dick was the kind of guy who didn’t speak once food landed in front of him. He ate until his plate was clean, so this eliminated any chance of him asking me how I thought things were going, how my job was, whether I felt I was making progress in therapy, or whether I was ready to rip my hair out.

  My father was one of these men as well. This left my mother and me to make conversation, so we didn’t speak.

  My mother got up from the table to get dessert and came back with a white-frosted cake that read Thank You Dick in blue icing.

  I heard angry words in my head, cursing me for not making it home in time to find the cake in the fridge so I could have added For Being A in between the words that were already there.

  “Why don’t you two take a walk,” my mother said, after Dick Simon and my father had inhaled the cake I refused to eat with after-dinner coffee.

  Dick Simon got up and stood behind my chair, attempting to pull it out for me. I sat there for as long as I could, ignoring him while my mother glared at me.

  “Amy, Dick is waiting,” my father said.

  “Fine,” I said. As I walked out of the kitchen with him, I realized he hadn’t told one joke during all of dinner. I should have known something serious was about to happen.

  We went out the sliding glass patio door and into my backyard. Since we lived on one of those streets where everyone has a perfectly rectangular patch of backyard grass, we walked around the perimeter.

  “Jail isn’t pretty,” he said.

  I nodded. I didn’t need to be told that. I could guess. And what I couldn’t guess, I knew about from movies. It was inhabited by men and women who had one very noticeable defect or characterization. The woman with the scar that ran from the outside corner of her eye all the way down the corner of her mouth like the trail of a tear. A big fat guy who grunted and punched instead of speaking. The skinny little meth head with a face like a snake who helped people get things from some unknown source.

  “You don’t seem as scared as you should be,” Dick said.

  I stared at him. Of course I was scared, but I was also emotionally spent. If I had learned anything from my experience violating the law, it was that feelings are not a bottomless pit. You can run out of them, and I guess I had.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I looked around, but there were no chairs waiting for us in the yard. I sat down in front of a wild rose bush. He followed a minute later, falling to the ground in a way that made me wonder if he would ever get up again.

  He went on to tell me horror stories, but most of what he said sounded like those tall tales your grandparents tell about how they would have to walk ten miles to school every day, uphill, in the snow. It was hard to take someone seriously who made you afraid that you might find a whoopee cushion every time you sat on a chair in his office.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” he went on,
catching his breath. “I’ve had clients who’ve gone inside.” And when he said this he squeezed his thigh, or at least the portion he was able to squeeze in his very-small-by-contrast hand. “Maybe you think you know what it’s like in a general way, but you don’t really know anything about it until you’ve been there day in, day out, folding laundry and cleaning toilets and praying while you’re in the shower that you don’t get jumped.”

  I looked at the swing set my parents had bought me when I was nine. It was rusty and the swings moved slightly in the wind. When I was little, I would sit on the swing in the center and pump my legs until they ached. Flying so high, being just like AJ, feeling nothing but pure, simple joy. I wished I were swinging now.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. I knew jail would suck. Like that was news? Knowing it didn’t change anything. Maybe he should spend less time telling me about jail and more time working to keep me out of jail.

  “I’m just doing my job,” he said, closing his eyes and breathing. “My job is all about the truth. Sometimes it’s a hard truth and sometimes it’s a bend of the truth and sometimes it’s a slight shading of the truth. You should know what can happen.”

  “I thought you said you could get me probation.”

  “I can,” he said, unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to me. It was typed on his letterhead—Richard Simon, Esquire—and had a bunch of Sorry, so, so sorrys and I was in with the wrong crowd and I was making the wrong decisions and I am all different now. It also detailed how everything that had happened the night of my arrest was the fault of Lila and Cassie.

  “What the hell is this?” I shook the paper. I couldn’t help it.

  “Your get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, handing me a pen.

  “No,” I said, even though what I really wanted to tell him was where he could stick that pen. There was no way I was turning on Lila and Cassie.

  “This is the deal my buddy is presenting. Sign it and you get probation. I would suggest you take it.”

  “What does he want with Lila and Cassie?”

  “It’s not about them,” Dick said, waving away my comment. “It’s about scaring them enough to testify against other, more connected people, and on and on up the line.”