Pretty Amy Read online

  I wondered how even the Assistant DA knew that Lila and Cassie were more popular than I was. I shook my head.

  “Perhaps the real owner of the evidence you were found with, perhaps his or her compatriots,” he said.

  Brian, I thought. Lila would kill me.

  “You could get a year inside if you don’t sign it.”

  “Then what am I paying you for?”

  “For this,” he said, still trying to hand me the pen. “I’d take the chance while I still had it.”

  “What will happen to Cassie and Lila?”

  “Do you think they would ask that about you?”

  I didn’t have to answer. They were my best friends—that had to mean something. I had to be able to count on someone other than AJ.

  “You’ll change your mind. Everyone does,” he said, struggling to stand.

  “Well, maybe everyone does,” I said, standing before he could, “but I’m not everyone.”

  “Sure you are,” he said. “Everyone is someone until they’re faced with a traumatic situation, and then they become everyone. You’re not special, you know.”

  I stood above him. What was with everyone needing to tell me how ordinary I was? Other people were allowed to go on being ignorant and boring and regular and plain, without it being shoved in their faces every five minutes.

  “I’m having a little trouble getting up,” he said, reaching for my hand. The back pocket of his pants had gotten caught on one of the thorny rose branches and I could hear the seam tearing as he struggled.

  I grabbed his hand and helped him up. Then, I ripped the paper he’d given me into little pieces and threw it across the yard. He stayed behind, picking them up.

  I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table looking anxious. Like the decision I was supposed to make was a baby she was waiting for. “You’d better go get Dick,” I said.

  “What have you done now?” she asked, running toward the door, not even giving me the chance to respond.

  Considering how that question had been answered lately, I couldn’t blame her.

  I went down to my basement hovel to call Lila. I doubted that my mother had gone after Dick because she cared about his well-being—I knew it had to be because if anyone saw him scavenging around on the lawn with his pants falling off, the Collinsville rumor mill would have been up and running for new business.

  AJ chirped from his cage as I opened the basement door. Maybe Mrs. Mortar thought having a bird was lame, but at least I knew AJ would never rat me out. Well, could never rat me out.

  As I picked up the phone, I wondered what I would say. If I called Lila and told her what Dick had said, would it give her ideas? Would telling her what my lawyer wanted me to do help her to see a way out that she may not have had before?

  I dialed her number. Maybe she wouldn’t answer. I could feel satisfied that I had at least tried to call her to tell her what was going on. And then spend the rest of the night smoking and trying to forget.

  “How’s the job?” she asked, without even saying hello. It was obvious that her caller ID was working, and that she was screening her calls. It seemed odd that it was the first thing she would ask me about, too. Like a family member who doesn’t know you well, asking about something so basic and universal.

  “How do you think?”

  “I’ve seen you in there when I walk by,” she said, as I heard her light a cigarette.

  She’d walked by and hadn’t stopped. I felt my stomach turn. Where was she going? Why hadn’t she taken me?

  I heard her inhale, waiting for me to talk. Was she mad at me?

  “What have you been doing?” I asked. Other than walking by and not stopping?

  “Nothing. I’m so bored,” Lila said, sucking in hard on her cigarette.

  “Yeah,” I said, though I was hoping for an excuse. I was the one with forty-seven appointments every day, but even I found the time to pick up a phone. But it’s not like she could have called me. I didn’t have a cell anymore. And maybe she wanted to stop when she walked by Gas-N-Go, but her lawyer had also told her to separate herself from me.

  “Brian and I got back together.”

  “Seriously?” Only Lila could resnare a guy she’d essentially just stolen a thousand dollars from.

  “I blamed it on Cassie.” She exhaled. “He’s been so sweet to me. He feels really bad. It’s so nice to have someone to talk to about everything.”

  I had tons of people to talk to about everything, but none of them understood. Well, Aaron understood. I considered telling Lila about him, but I knew I couldn’t risk it. If Lila knew I was hanging out with Aaron, she would do her Lila thing and take him away.

  “Brian calls me every morning to wake me up and then every night before I fall asleep,” she said with an actress’s sigh.

  “You won’t believe what my lawyer just said to me.” I couldn’t believe I’d actually said it, but I would have said anything to make her shut up about Brian.

  “Your lawyer,” she said, exhaling sharply, waiting.

  “He wants me to testify against you guys.” I whispered the last part; I don’t know why. It just seemed like the sort of thing you would whisper to someone.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Who else am I going to tell?”

  “I don’t know; your therapist?”

  It was mean, but I ignored it. “Lila, calm down, I’m not doing it.”

  “I don’t even see my lawyer. I can’t even remember his name,” she said.

  “I told you, I’m not going to do it.”

  “The whole thing sounds pretty sneaky to me.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Silence.

  A drag in and a drag out. “I don’t even think I would have told you about it. I wouldn’t have needed to.”

  “I wanted to be upfront with you,” I said. “He told me it wasn’t even about you. It was about scaring you into turning on other people.”

  “What other people?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, even though I did know. Brian and then whoever was above Brian.

  Silence.

  “Lila.”

  A drag in and a drag out. “Listen, we probably shouldn’t even be talking. I bet this line is tapped or something. Maybe I’ll come and see you at work sometime this week.”

  Which I knew was her way of saying she would never come by.

  I could have called Cassie after that, but if I told her what I had just told Lila, she would probably come over and kick my ass. Though, considering the way I felt after talking to Lila, having my ass kicked would have been an improvement.

  Stupid Dick. That confession didn’t mean anything. I knew my real confession wouldn’t have been about the arrest at all. It would have been about that little girl on the swings in my backyard, and the way she felt when she was in the air. How it made her believe that she could be anyone and do anything. How it made her forget everything else.

  My real confession would have been to apologize to her for turning into me. For letting her dreams drain out, until I became someone she wouldn’t even recognize.

  Twenty

  “You’re late,” Connor said. I looked at the It’s Always Time for Pepsi clock and realized that even though 7:15 p.m. meant it was time for Pepsi, it also meant I was fifteen minutes late for my shift.

  The thing about Connor was that it looked like someone had given him mouth-to-mouth and the air had just stayed inside him, like his body had been floating around Lake Erie for three weeks and when someone finally found him, they hadn’t bothered to wring him out or dry him off.

  Weirdly, his bulk was the thing I liked best about him, because he made me feel thin.

  “Sorry,” I said easily, which meant I probably didn’t really mean it.

  He picked up his clipboard. “I need to do inventory,” and he said need like someone in the desert says they need a glass of water. In that case necessary, in this case pathetic.

  I rolled
my eyes. I couldn’t help it.

  “What if someone comes in here and wants something, and we don’t have it?”

  I shrugged. They’d probably just go somewhere else, which would make my life a hell of a lot easier anyway.

  “Listen, I know how much you hate being here,” Connor said, motioning to the store around him, “but you don’t have to make life unpleasant for me, too.”

  “Fine,” I said. I could give him that. Even though I hated it there, Gas-N-Go might just be his one refuge. That was only slightly less sad than my current situation.

  He started to walk into the back and then stopped. “Why don’t you do some dusting until a customer comes in, if that’s not too much to ask?”

  By dusting, I knew he meant the food. I took the feather duster from behind the counter and started on the dry goods. The food needed to be dusted because it sat for so long without anybody buying it, which kind of unraveled Connor’s whole “need to do inventory” claim. Not only was it dusty, but the boxes of cake mix, or instant rice, or crackers had been there for so long that they looked weathered. Like they’d been sitting out in the sun for years, or like someone had dipped them in a vat of bleach. They looked like Connor. He had the same paleness and flatness about him.

  He’d washed his Gas-N-Go shirt so many times it had started to turn pink. Well, not pink, but that faded red color that’s just a little more red than pink. There’s nothing sadder than faded red, because it always seems like it’s trying so hard to be red again.

  I wondered if I looked that way now, and if not, I feared it was only a matter of time. The scary thing was that Connor seemed happy with the way he looked, the way the store looked, the way the world looked.

  The only time I could ever remember being happy was when I was with Lila and Cassie. Same for being happy with the way I looked or the way the world looked. I was able to see the beauty in things, even in myself. With them next to me, the negative voices in my head were drowned out.

  Lila and Cassie had given me that and now Dick Simon was asking me to betray them, was telling me that if I didn’t, they would probably betray me. It was hard to decide which would make me feel worse.

  As I was dusting the chip aisle, a few of the bags fell from the shelf. For some reason, it felt really good watching them fall and then stepping on them as I moved, hearing the crunch beneath my feet.

  I decided to make a game of knocking over as many food items as I could before a customer arrived. I got to about twenty. I was working very slowly.

  The guy who came in was on his way home from work. His tie was hanging out of the front right pocket of his pants like a red and blue tongue, and his hair looked like it’d had quite a few runs of his fingers through it, in that way men brush their fingers through their hair when they’ve had a stressful day—less an act of vanity and more an act of waking up their brain for whatever is ahead. He was looking around furiously.

  When I saw a customer acting like this, I was supposed to ask how I could help him, but that night I didn’t feel like it. I watched as he walked across the food items on the floor and crunched a bag of Doritos with his foot.

  I wanted to run over and join him, to jump up and down on the bag like a trampoline, but I figured I could just wait until he left.

  “What happened in here? It looks like there was an earthquake or something.”

  “Rats,” I said, and shrugged. “We set the bait, but every so often a few big ones come out and climb the shelves.”

  He shook his head and went back to looking for whatever he was looking for. Even the threat of massive rodents couldn’t deter him. He came up to the counter almost a full five minutes later with a bag of Cheetos and a Mountain Dew. These were the items he had been searching for.

  I was not impressed and I guess I showed it with the look I gave him as I rang him up, because he said, “They’re the cheesiest,” and then sort of growled.

  “How do you know?” I asked, even though I knew he was just reciting from the cardboard display with Chester Cheetah, smiling like a crocodile, at the back of the store.

  I’d stared at it while Connor trained me on the deli meats, and I’d wondered how exactly Cheetos knew they were the cheesiest and if I would ever know what the cheesiest was if I had never tried them. Apparently if I hadn’t had Cheetos, then I did not even know what cheese tasted like. Without Cheetos I was incomplete until I ate them and then after I ate them I would see that they were so very much the cheesiest that I would become addicted to them, and like I needed another vice, Chester; like I needed one more thing that whispered to me while I was trying to sleep at night.

  Thanks a lot.

  The guy just shrugged. He was obviously not as affected by it as I was.

  He dug around in his pants for the last six cents he owed me, even though I knew that he probably had a ten in there or something that he just didn’t feel like breaking. One of the things I’d learned about people while working at Gas-N-Go was that they were either deathly afraid of receiving change or they saw it as some kind of accomplishment when they had it exact. The look in their eyes as they were searching their pockets, part pleading, part apologetic, and then the look they got when they found it, was the look a dog gave you when he fetched something.

  As he rummaged, he said the stupid things all people say, like, “I know it’s hiding in here somewhere,” and “Why do you only find pennies when you don’t need them?” He then proceeded to take out everything he had in his pockets and put it on the counter, which included his tie, his wallet, a pack of gum that looked like it had been soaked in water, a Starburst wrapper, a bunch of wadded-up pieces of paper, and a cell phone.

  “I just cleaned this counter,” I said. I probably wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t thought he was the type of guy who would take it. I probably wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t wanted him to leave so desperately, so I could go back to crunching chips under my feet and not thinking.

  “This just isn’t my night,” he said, and he returned everything except for the wallet back into his pockets. “Just take it out of this,” he said, and gave me a ten.

  I knew it.

  I also knew that if Daniel had been there, he would ask me why I was so angry and why I was taking it out on this guy. Why I wasn’t realizing that I was really angry at myself for being in this situation, for having to choose between myself and Cassie and Lila. That it had nothing to do with this Cheetos-loving, change-hating, small-talk-making guy who was just trying to live his life.

  But Daniel wasn’t there.

  When he leaned in to accept his change, I smelled chlorine on his hair and realized that he swam. I pictured him in his goggles and his cap that fit over his head. I saw him diving down into the blue-green pool water, his feet kicking like a paddleboat motor and swimming back and forth between the shallow and deep ends, getting nowhere. Just like me.

  Maybe that was why I was so angry at him.

  …

  Aaron was waiting in his black convertible again when I got off work. Mrs. Mortar had been wrong. Walking toward his car, I couldn’t help feeling tingly, like someone was watching me live my life and giving me a high five. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to, but one I had felt when Lila, Cassie, and I were hanging out. I’d always thought it was them, but maybe it was just what it felt like to not be ignored.

  “Hey,” he said. Maybe this was becoming a thing. Maybe we were becoming a thing. Lila might have had Brian, but I had Aaron. That had to be worth something.

  “Hi,” I said, putting a cigarette in my mouth and giving him one. Hi. I obviously wasn’t getting any better at talking to him, even after our make-out session.

  He lit them both, the flame illuminating his face in the darkness. A face that I still couldn’t believe he wanted me to kiss.

  I got in the car without him telling me to. Maybe I was getting better at some things.

  Instead of parking on a street by my house, we parked at the back of Gas-N-Go by the big gre
en Dumpster I emptied the trash into every night after my shift. I made up some excuse about Neighborhood Watch, but really it was Joe. I didn’t want him to see us together. Things were weird enough between us after my front-porch freak-out.

  “I missed you,” Aaron said in between kisses.

  I chose to believe that, rather than what I knew it probably was—the way he got me to take my bra off. It was in my pocket and his hands were up my shirt, cupping my chest like he was climbing a fake rock wall. But he missed me, and I was getting to second base for the first time. Not that I would have anyone to tell about it.

  “Me, too,” I said, kissing him back, trying to ignore how hard he was squeezing.

  I had missed him. Missed this, this escape to a place where I didn’t have to think about the arrest or Lila or Cassie or my parents or Dick or Daniel. Where all I had to think about was the feel of leather seats, the taste of smoke, the sound of a car when it’s just turned off. Click, click, click.

  He pulled away and gestured to me for another cigarette. His Zippo snapped open and closed. “How’s it been going?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to ruin the mood with all my crap, even though there was a lot of it.

  “You hang up the sketch I gave you in your room yet?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It looks really good.” I hadn’t. I didn’t have a room to hang it up in. I kept it in my pillow along with his phone number. Like the opposite of The Princess and the Pea, I wanted to feel it under my head as I slept. Every morning, the pastels had smeared a little more, turning my pillowcase into one of Daniel’s tie-dyes.

  “That’s how I see you,” he said.

  I didn’t know how to respond. The girl in that picture was fearless, was free; she was anything but the way I saw myself.

  “I just want you to know,” he said. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re dealing with, but I’ve been through this before. I can help you.” His hair was a mess. He took it out of his ponytail holder and combed it with his fingers, the cigarette still in his mouth.

  “Thanks,” I said.