Pretty Amy Read online

  “She’s so fucking clueless,” Cassie said, plopping down on the grass. She pulled out a handful of blades and burned them with her lighter. “Maybe he’ll come home if I burn his house down.”

  I nodded. Not that I wanted her to burn his house down, but a small grass fire might attract some attention.

  “This is so typical,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I didn’t even want to go. Fucking Lila.”

  “We don’t know they’re not coming,” I said. I wasn’t ready to let myself believe that this was going to be my memory of prom night for the rest of my life.

  “Well, maybe we don’t,” she said, taking a long drag, “but I do.”

  I stared at my nails. I had painted them in the same light blue as my dress. I thought about how the nail polish was still sitting on my nightstand, how when I got home I would scrub my nails raw and throw it away.

  We looked up, startled by a crash that came from the back of the house.

  Cassie shook her head. “You should never climb a trellis in heels.”

  “You think Lila’s breaking in?”

  She grabbed another handful of grass and lit it up. “You know what would be classic?” she asked, smiling like she was trying to keep a bird from flying out from behind her teeth. “She finds him in there with some other girl.” She watched me for a moment, gauging my reaction. “Don’t tell me that wouldn’t make you happy.”

  It would have, so I didn’t.

  Lila came around the side of the house. “No one’s there,” she said, as if that were news. “I did find this, though.” She threw a gallon Ziploc bag of pot on the ground in front of us.

  “Holy shit,” Cassie said. “This is better than a stupid dance any day.” She held it up.

  I knew Brian was a dealer, but I guess I didn’t know what that really meant. This was what that really meant.

  “I’ve been stood up for my prom, in case you haven’t noticed,” Lila said.

  “You’re the one who took it,” Cassie said, opening the bag and smelling it.

  “Not for us; to piss off Brian. How can this be happening to me?”

  “It’s happening to all of us.” I wasn’t about to let Lila take all the pain for herself, even though this was probably the first time she had ever experienced what I had felt so many times before—the pinprick pop and subsequent deflation of rejection.

  “But he was my boyfriend,” Lila said.

  I had to give her that. At least I hadn’t had sex with the boy who was dumping me. Though it did concern me that my date was rejecting me even with the knowledge that I might have.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Lila asked in a voice that seemed like someone yelling to the heavens after hitting her last straw.

  “I have an idea,” Cassie said, shaking the bag.

  I didn’t care what we did as long as it didn’t involve going home to my mother.

  “How pathetic. My best prospects for dates are you two,” Lila said, a tear running down the side of her face, shiny and fat like a worm. “I can’t believe Brian would do this to me.” Lila looked like a wilted flower in the center of the lawn.

  “Shut the fuck up about Brian; it’s over,” Cassie said. “Let’s go party.”

  “I’m too upset,” Lila said, not moving.

  I shrugged. Cassie could try, but I doubted we were going anywhere without Lila.

  Cassie harrumphed and walked over to the front stoop. She pulled her dress up and her underpants down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Lila asked.

  “Leaving him a present,” Cassie said as she peed all over the evening edition of the Collinsville News. “Now we can go have some fun.”

  Two

  Maybe Cassie meant to drive by our school, but maybe she just couldn’t avoid it. Collinsville is dissected by four major streets. Collinsville South High was positioned at the intersection of two of the major-est.

  “Duck,” Cassie said as we drove by. The pot smoke was thick in the car. I didn’t think anyone could see us—not that anyone was looking, anyway.

  Even though I was supposed to be ducking, I couldn’t help watching the limos lined up like a trail of ants marching from the street to the school driveway. Kids from our class were streaming out in cake-frosting-colored dresses and black tuxes; girls were hugging, boys were fist-bumping, and everyone was taking pictures with their phones.

  I was hiding in a car smoking pot.

  I wasn’t nearly as excited about having it as Cassie was, but I kept smoking. I’d only had pot a few times. Usually at parties, when other people were around to see me. I’d have just a small hit or two to look like I belonged there.

  But that night, I inhaled and coughed, inhaled and coughed, until my lungs burned. I probably should have been scared to smoke that much, but I needed to be annihilated. I had to forget tomorrow, when I would wake up in one of the three hotel rooms we’d rented, alone in that big bed, my dress crumpled up on the floor like a discarded attempt at a love letter.

  “Maybe Brian is there already,” Lila said. It seemed unlikely, but no less unlikely than being stood up for prom, no less unlikely than driving by our school in Cassie’s car pretending we didn’t want to be there.

  “He’s not,” Cassie said.

  “He could be,” Lila said. “Let me text him again.”

  Maybe our dates were already inside. I let myself believe it. Let stupid hope take over.

  “We’re wasted. I’m not going in there,” Cassie said.

  Lila looked at me in the side mirror. I’d seen that look before. It was time for me to observe and obey.

  “Then drop us off,” she said, still looking at me.

  “Yeah, drop us off,” I said, feeling stupid as I said it, knowing I was reciting just like AJ.

  Cassie huffed. “Ten minutes,” she said. “And you owe me.” She met my eye in the rearview mirror. “Both of you.”

  I knew that look, too.

  We parked a few blocks away and went in the back entrance of the school—the door we’d sneak into after we’d ditch out during lunch. We couldn’t arrive, just the three of us, in front of everyone. It would be as bad as walking up all alone.

  It was strange being there after hours; the hallways empty, overhead lights on, music coming from the gym. It smelled different, like dust and ammonia. The things you couldn’t smell when the halls were filled with people. I was so messed up that the gray lockers lining the hallway made me think of intestines, so messed up that the fact made more sense than it ever had. Like intestines, the hallways at school could dissolve you into a nameless, faceless drone. Unless you made yourself different.

  We walked past the cafeteria, the nurse’s office, the janitor’s closet, and the boys’ bathroom, our heels slapping the floor like horses’ hooves.

  “Let’s have a smoke first,” Cassie said, pushing open the girls’ bathroom door.

  “What if they are waiting inside for us?” Lila asked.

  “They made us wait,” Cassie said. “Now they can wait.”

  “Amy?” Lila asked.

  “I could have a smoke.” I shrugged.

  Smoking with my girls was something I was used to. I was not used to being stood up. I was not used to entering my prom through the back door of my high school, so no one else would know that I had been stood up.

  If having a smoke for five minutes allowed me to stop thinking about that, then yes, I wanted a smoke.

  “Fine,” Lila said as we followed Cassie inside.

  Smoking at school was definitely against the rules, but I guess I felt like what had happened to me was, too. Some cardinal prom law had been broken. That had to balance out anything I needed to do to pretend otherwise, even getting so high that my head felt like one of the shiny balloons that probably covered the gymnasium ceiling like bubble wrap.

  Our shoes echoed as we walked into the bathroom and all the way back to the last stall. We stood around the toilet as Cassie took a cigarette from her small red pu
rse and lit it.

  “I’m so fucked up,” Cassie said. She wobbled in her heels and started to laugh. Her laughter bounced off the sea-green tile walls.

  “Just try to keep it together till we get inside,” Lila said, grabbing the cigarette from her, taking a drag, and then passing it to me.

  I started to laugh, too. It was funny crowding into a bathroom stall in our fancy shoes and fancy dresses and fancy hairstyles; like sophisticated city women at a cocktail party—with a toilet.

  “Great, now you got Amy going.” Lila snickered.

  “Shh,” I said, trying to keep the giggles from escaping. They were starting to simmer up, like my lips were the hole in a volcano model that was ready to blow. I put my hand over my mouth. Just because we were breaking the rules so deliberately didn’t mean I wanted to get caught.

  Getting in trouble—in our fancy shoes and fancy dresses and fancy hairstyles—seemed like another cardinal prom law that wasn’t supposed to be broken.

  “I think if they’re not here yet,” Cassie said, taking a quick drag, “we should stay. We should stay and we should dance. This buzz is too good to waste in my car.”

  “You want to dance?” Lila laughed.

  “Sure, why not?” Cassie said.

  I couldn’t keep the giggles in anymore. Cassie dancing? I pictured her as Frankenstein—big and green, lurching to techno in her slutty red dress.

  “What?” Cassie said.

  “I didn’t know you liked dancing,” Lila said, looking at me like she knew exactly what I was picturing, trying so hard to keep her mouth from curling up into a smile.

  I let loose one of those laughs that come out when you’re trying not to and it sounds like you’re spitting all over yourself.

  “Shut up,” Cassie said, pushing me, but not in a mean way or the way she sometimes did to remind you that she could kill you if she wanted to, but you were lucky because she liked you.

  “Okay,” Lila said, calming her giggles. “Okay, we’ll stay and we’ll dance.”

  Cassie threw the cigarette in the toilet and lit another one.

  “I thought you wanted to dance,” I teased, realizing that I was starting to have fun. It was like I hadn’t exhaled since I’d begun getting ready that afternoon. I had been waiting for my date to take my hand, but laughing with Lila and Cassie would do for now.

  “In a minute,” Cassie said.

  “Can’t wait,” Lila said, smiling at me again.

  “You do realize we all have our cell phones,” I said.

  “You upload anything to YouTube and I’ll be uploading my own video,” Cassie said, inhaling sharply. “It’ll be worse than my dancing, believe me.”

  “I’m not sure what could be,” Lila said, laughing again.

  “Shut up,” Cassie said, giving Lila a light shove.

  Cassie’s dancing felt like a big joke. But her wanting to delay it made sense. Locked in the stall, it was only us. Boys made things complicated.

  Our dates might have been inside waiting for us, or they might not have, but standing in a circle around the toilet, we didn’t have to worry about that—yet. We could smoke and laugh and pretend this was just like any other time we were together, when the smoke was hovering above us like insects and we were laughing and whispering about nothing.

  When nothing felt like everything.

  “They are here; I know it,” Lila said as we left the bathroom. We turned the corner past the trophy case and walked toward the welcome table in front of the gym.

  Joe Wright and Leslie Preston sat there, she in a purple dress, he in a tux with matching tie. He was sweating and his usually spiky blond hair was matted down, as though he had just come off the dance floor.

  “We’re in hell,” Cassie muttered.

  “Tickets, please,” Leslie said, looking at us the way everyone looked at us—like we were flies that were bothering her.

  I didn’t really know Leslie, but I knew Joe, or had known him. He lived across the street from me. We’d played together when we were younger, like kids on the same street do. We’d shared a bus stop until last year, when I stopped taking the bus; we’d been friends until three years ago, when I started hanging out with Cassie and Lila.

  Were Leslie and Joe dating? It didn’t seem possible. Of course, she dated anyone there was to date, was on any committee there was to join, and was friends with anyone there was to be friends with. Well, except for losers and dorks, or rebels like Cassie, Lila, and me.

  “Our dates have them. I think they’re inside,” Lila said.

  “Names,” Leslie said, looking at a clipboard.

  “You know our names,” Cassie said.

  “Their names.” She squinted. I’d never said anything to her before tonight, but from the way she was acting, my guess was Cassie had, and that it involved swear words.

  “Brian Reynolds and Kevin and Aaron,” Lila listed, ticking them off on her fingers.

  “Kevin and Aaron?” Leslie asked.

  Lila shrugged.

  She didn’t even know their last names. I wasn’t sure if that, or the fact that we were now begging to get into our own prom, was worse.

  “Not here,” Leslie said, looking at her list.

  The gym door opened—three girls from our class leaving to go to the bathroom. Three girls dressed just like Cassie, Lila, and me, having a totally different night. The music was loud, bass thumping. I saw kids from our class jumping up and down in circles in the middle of the dance floor in their stockinged feet. I saw a glimpse of blue and white balloons and sparkly lights as the door slammed shut.

  We should have stayed in the bathroom.

  “Can’t we just look?” Lila asked.

  “Not without tickets,” Leslie said. “This prom took a lot of work and cost a lot of money, not that you would know.”

  “We bought tickets,” Lila said.

  “Then where are they?” she asked.

  “Probably scalped for weed,” Cassie said under her breath.

  I looked at Joe. He looked down. I couldn’t remember who’d stopped talking first. Who’d started glancing away when we saw each other on the sidewalk, in the hallway. I guess it didn’t matter. We’d fallen into that rhythm as easily as we had fallen out of our old one.

  The gym door opened again. A slow song seeped out as school gossip-monger Ruthie Jensen entered the hall. She stood there in her pale pink dress, acting as though she wasn’t listening.

  It was like she had a sixth sense for when your life was sucking.

  “Come on, you know us,” I whispered.

  “Sure,” Joe said, looking through me, “but you still need a ticket.”

  “We go to this school. Why would we not buy tickets?” I was this close. There was no way I wasn’t getting inside, with or without a date.

  “School policy,” he said, shrugging.

  Leslie smiled and snuggled into him.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. He had no reason to be nice to me. We never liked seeing each other. It was always uncomfortable. I hated that he knew who I had been before I was me.

  “You don’t have your tickets?” Ruthie asked, trying to gather more information. She pulled her pale pink wrap tightly around her. She was telling everyone about this.

  “Let’s go,” Cassie said, turning toward the door. “Thanks a lot, assholes.”

  I didn’t bother asking if she still wanted to stay and dance. It didn’t even seem funny anymore.

  I looked at Joe, giving him one last chance. He didn’t take it.

  …

  We drove around aimlessly, smoking cigarettes.

  “Well, that totally sucked,” Lila said.

  “You suck,” Cassie said.

  I took a drag and watched the ash fall like snowflakes as I tapped it on the open window. “Which one was supposed to be my date?” I asked.

  “Aaron, I guess,” Lila said.

  “Who cares?” Cassie said.

  “What does he look like?” I closed my eyes
. Maybe I was out of it enough to create a fake memory.

  “I don’t know,” Lila said.

  “Like I said, who cares?” Cassie said.

  I opened my eyes. Why did I care? He had stood me up. He obviously didn’t care.

  “Brian’s friends with him on Facebook, if you want to look him up,” Lila said, trying to give me her phone.

  I held up my hand like a crossing guard, my light blue nails still mocking me. I dropped it in a fist on my lap and shook my head. There was no way I could handle the possibility of seeing what Aaron was really doing right now.

  “This is so boring. Isn’t there anywhere else we can go?” Lila asked.

  “Everyone we know is at the stupid prom or hiding from us,” I said.

  “Brian isn’t hiding from us.”

  “Okay, whatever,” Cassie said, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “He forgot,” Lila said, having convinced herself. “He does a lot of drugs. He only has a select number of brain cells left.”

  “That explains why he likes you, I guess,” Cassie said.

  I snorted. I couldn’t help it.

  “Shut up, Amy.”

  I covered my mouth.

  “This is just like some sort of fucked-up fairy tale,” Cassie said. I could see her smiling to herself in the rearview mirror. “Like Cinderella, except all twisted up and without Cinderella.”

  “So, what does that make us?” Lila asked. “The ugly stepsisters? Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome,” Cassie said, lighting another cigarette and swerving onto the shoulder. “Fucking car,” she said as she righted us.

  “I am not ugly,” Lila said, crossing her arms and screwing up her face like a kid having a temper tantrum.

  “We know,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes.

  “All dressed up and no place to go,” Lila wailed, like a cringeworthy audition from that one girl in drama club, the one who never gets the part.

  Her prayers were answered by the lights and sirens of a police car coming up behind us.

  “Fucking police,” Cassie said as they pulled us over.

  I looked at the enormous bag of Brian’s marijuana on the seat next to me. Crap.

  We definitely should have stayed in the bathroom.

  Three