Pretty Amy Page 3

Lila smiled out of habit when the flash went off for her mug shot. She held a number just below her chest, facing forward and then turning to the right and the left. Her features all seemed to belong on a stuffed animal—perfect, pearly black teddy-bear eyes, a pink embroidery-thread stitch of a mouth and nose.

  Cassie gave them the finger as she held her number, gripping the board so both her middle fingers pointed straight up at the sky, her shoulders forming a perfect line, all her edges as sharp as a pocketknife.

  I looked like one of those crazy movie-star mug shots on TV: shocked and scared and stoned out of my mind.

  The cops took it upon themselves to call our parents and give them the news, which was probably the only thing that went my way that night. At least I didn’t have to deal with my mother screaming into the phone for the five minutes I would have been allotted for my call.

  The policemen also let us know that instead of paying bail, each set of parents would have to sign a piece of paper that stated they guaranteed we’d come back when we were called to our first court appearance.

  I didn’t think that would be hard to enforce. I doubted that, after this, any of us would be allowed out of our parents’ sights ever again.

  Cassie was zigzagging the holding cell, click, click, clicking her way from one end to the other, pacing with the force of a hamster on a wheel. Lila and I sat on opposite benches watching her, Lila with her knees up under her dress, making a tent the way I used to do with my nightgown when I was little. She was crying softly, like in one of those gauze-covered scenes where a forlorn girl looks out a rain-soaked window, the tears on her face mirroring the rain on the glass.

  I probably would have been crying, too, if Lila hadn’t started first and if I hadn’t been so high that my eyes felt like Ping-Pong balls. My plan to try and forget everything had brought me here.

  There was no way I was forgetting this.

  By that point we weren’t talking. Cassie and Lila had already fought about whose fault it was the whole ride over and all through booking. They never figured that out, but each did come to the conclusion that the other was a stupid bitch.

  “This is fucking bullshit,” Cassie said, clicking back over to the bars and kicking them. Kicking them so hard that her heel broke. It hung from her shoe like a just-ripe banana; she ripped it off and flung it through the bars.

  The parents all seemed to arrive at the same time. We could see each of them—Cassie’s parents, Lila’s mom, my dad—come into the station looking confused and teary-eyed as they entered, like they had all been hit in the head with a rock right before they walked in.

  When Cassie saw her parents she said, “Fuck,” and put her head down. They may have been the only people in the world who Cassie was truly afraid of. Her father had that father look to him, the one that says this is the life he has chosen and he will stick with it no matter what, a sort of smile hiding a scream. Her mom smoked Salems and was smoking one when she walked into the station. She was exactly like Cassie, twenty years later.

  I was glad it was my father who picked me up that night, his hair an assemblage of small brown cowlicks, so that it resembled frosting on a cupcake. He wore his long tan raincoat and unlike on TV or in the movies, it did not cover pajamas and there were no slippers on his feet. He had taken the time to get dressed.

  “Who the hell are you?” Cassie’s mother asked.

  “Jerry Fleishman, DDS,” he said, like he was reading the sign on the front of his office.

  I looked down and covered my face with my hands.

  “Who?” she asked again.

  “Amy’s dad,” he said, trying to make his voice sound proud despite the circumstances.

  “Congratulations,” she said, walking past him and up to the desk.

  “That one’s mine,” Lila’s mom said, pointing at her like she was a dog in the pound. “Lila Van Drake,” she continued, maybe because she didn’t want anyone to mistake Cassie for her daughter. Maybe because she didn’t want anyone to mistake me for her daughter.

  Lila’s mom was a woman who, after losing her first love and raising his two children, had married the first guy who came along, which made her act like she was always open to meeting someone new.

  “So that’s the famous Lila,” my father said.

  I’d forgotten that he’d never met her. My mother had forbidden Lila and Cassie to enter our house and it’s not like my father had driven me anywhere before Cassie got her license.

  “Amy talks about her all the time.” I pretended I hadn’t heard him, and luckily, that night I was too preoccupied to be embarrassed.

  “I know,” Lila’s mom said, and I realized I wasn’t too preoccupied to be mortified.

  …

  As we made our way outside, I walked behind my father, staring at the dirt that had somehow gotten all over my shoes.

  “Your mother says she can’t even look at you,” he said, not turning around.

  I nodded. I wanted to say thank you—for picking me up, for being able to look at me—but I just couldn’t say the words. I could never say the words.

  “So here I am.” He held his arms at his sides like he was acting out an enthusiastic ta-da. In one hand were his car keys, in the other a clear plastic bag with everything that had been confiscated upon our arrest: my wallet, my cigarettes, my phone, the pearl earrings he had bought me for my Bat Mitzvah. He sounded tired, very tired, but not from lack of sleep—from this, from me. “You look very nice, by the way.”

  I wanted to hug him, but his compliment was too late. He hadn’t been there to see me off; he’d had a pediatric dental emergency, a child who needed him more than I did.

  He opened my door and put his palm on my back. His hands were always cold, as if that truly were a requirement for dental school.

  He started the car and turned to look at me—I knew to make sure I had my seat belt on, a habit of his for as long as I could remember. He listened for the click and drove out of the parking lot.

  I thought about saying I was sorry, but I wasn’t even sure what I had done wrong, other than turning into the kind of girl my mother had warned me I would be.

  We rode in silence the whole way home, driving down the quiet, empty streets of my neighborhood, streets that wound and wound like ribbon candy, the hood of the car slicing through the sweet, warm air like the hull of a boat slicing water.

  My father stayed silent as we waited for the garage door’s routine rise. He stared straight ahead, watching the headlights bore two holes into the back wall of the garage, where our bikes hung. He turned off the car and looked at me. I needed him to tell me it would be okay. I needed him to hug me, to just be my dad.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked, finally starting to cry.

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said, touching my shoulder and then leaving me sitting in the car, crying.

  I guess I couldn’t blame him, but it felt like I was always waiting for tomorrow.

  Four

  That night I didn’t sleep. I didn’t even take off my prom dress. I sat with AJ, putting him on my finger and then on my shoulder.

  Pretty Amy, pretty Amy, he repeated as I cried into his yellow feathers. I love you, he squawked as he rubbed up against my wet cheek.

  I knew he was just saying the things I had taught him to say, but that night I really needed to hear them. It made me wonder if my mother had actually had some forethought in getting me AJ instead of the puppy I had begged her for. I had begged for a puppy, but I had really wanted a sister. I had really wanted a friend.

  I got a bird.

  She had said that birds were better than puppies because they could talk, and I couldn’t deny that for this one long night at least, she had been right.

  I stared out my bedroom window at Joe’s house across the street, into the dark windows and its two shining porch-light eyes. His mom was probably sleeping inside. Joe was probably somewhere with Leslie not sleeping and I had my nose up to the glass, praying that the night
would never end. Not in the way girls usually wish their prom night will last forever; I prayed for time to stop. I wasn’t ready for whatever was waiting for me the next day.

  Eventually daylight came, not all at once but slowly, like the sky was set on a dimmer switch. The moon and stars finally snuffed out.

  Good morning, AJ squawked as we heard my mother wake up. Heard her bedroom door open and close. Heard her walk down the stairs. Heard her breakfast noises in the kitchen. I guess she wanted to be able to have her coffee and hear the thwack of the morning paper against the screen door before she could deal with the fact that her daughter was a criminal.

  The choices of what to do at that moment floated in front of my tired eyes like mirages. I could either stay in my room all day in this dress, or I could go downstairs and get the initial yelling over with. I knew there would be yelling, probably a lot of it, and probably crying, too. Crying and questions: Was I not a good mother to you? Did I not give you everything you could have wanted? What did we do to make you turn out this way?

  I wished I had taught AJ to say, I don’t know.

  I put AJ back in his cage and finally decided to go downstairs because of the coffee. It was like some kind of warped Folgers commercial: me sniffing the air and thinking that there really is nothing better the morning after getting arrested than drinking a steaming-hot cup of java with my mom.

  I found her sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, which was odd, since she tended to change upon waking into her sweat suit. The kind that is shiny and puffy and has no real purpose for athletes, but that makes suburban moms feel like they’re up and at ’em and ready to go.

  She didn’t look up from the newspaper when she heard me, forcing me to stare at the back of it. I saw letters from grocery advertisements swimming around, forming words like spoonfuls of alphabet soup: FAILURE. DISAPPOINTMENT. FELON. FOSTER CARE.

  “Is there more?” I asked, pointing to the empty coffee maker. I figured it was the most civilized thing I could say at that moment and I really did want some coffee.

  She poked her head out from behind the paper. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “Do you think this is funny?”

  I shook my head. It seemed safer than anything that might come out of my mouth.

  “Then why are you still wearing that?” She spat out the word. The dress was an illusion. The dress was a joke. “Just sit down and don’t say another word.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to preempt a fight, getting right to what she wanted to hear, even if I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for yet.

  “Don’t be sorry to me,” she said.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to say next. Usually sorry was enough, even if I said it just like AJ would have if I’d taught him to.

  “You’re in serious trouble, Amy,” she said, as if I needed a reminder.

  “Then help me,” I said. It hadn’t worked with my dad. I don’t know why I thought it would work with her.

  She shrugged. “This is yours to handle.”

  “What does that mean?” I felt like I was a helium balloon and she had just let go.

  “Your father is calling his friend Dick Simon to represent you. Now that you can’t make your money selling illegal drugs to neighborhood kids, you’ll have to get a real job so you can pay for him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, but even as I said it, I knew it didn’t matter.

  “How could you do this, Amy?” she screamed, slamming her hands so hard on the table that her coffee cup shook.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my way of filling up space while she yelled.

  I’m sorry and I don’t know were probably the first words I’d taught myself—to make my mother leave me the hell alone.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised I was messed up. Anyone forced to wear a pink tutu and a Miss America ribbon that read Novocain Princess while holding a rolling-pin-sized syringe and touting her father’s dental practice on basic cable was bound to end up with some problems. Not unexpectedly, drug related.

  “Amy, answer me!” she yelled.

  I thought of AJ in his cage upstairs, the way he would squawk as loudly as my mother would scream—when she still bothered to scream at me—like he was trying to drown her out, make me not have to hear her angry words.

  “We didn’t—” I began.

  “We,” my mother interrupted. “What about you, Amy? You can’t hide behind your friends anymore.”

  “I—I’m not,” I stammered.

  Her eyes were wide, waiting.

  “We…” I paused. “I…” The words came out in trickles. “It wasn’t our fault…”

  “Really.” My mother chuckled angrily. “Whose fault was it?” She cocked her head to the side, waiting for my answer.

  Whatever thought I had of telling her the truth was squashed down—driven into the back of my throat by her cruel laugh. She didn’t want to hear what had really happened.

  She never wanted to.

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “Well, the police don’t agree,” she said, going at her nails like they were corn on the cob.

  “The police are idiots,” I mumbled.

  “And what does that make you?” She squinted.

  I had no answer. I hated to admit it, but she was right. As much as I’d whined about my life before, it was about to really suck now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, yet again. I think it was the most I’d ever said it. Maybe I was going for the Guinness World Record.

  “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done.” She started to cry. “You can deny it as much as you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have been arrested.” When she said arrested she started crying even harder, as if the words you and arrested coming out of her mouth in the same sentence made it all the more real to her.

  It made it all the more real to me. I couldn’t deny it anymore. The sun was up and I was still arrested. Nothing had changed—which meant everything had changed.

  “We’re through paying for your mistakes,” she said.

  Apparently overnight my mother had become versed in the tough-love theory of child rearing. I could picture her under the covers with a flashlight, my dad sleeping next to her, reading those pamphlets she had gotten when they first suspected, and then kept in her nightstand drawer: Teen Drug Use: 50 Warning Signs—Suggestions for Parents of Difficult Teens. I saw her reading and rereading and, knowing her, using a highlighter to figure out what they were supposed to do with me. Reading through the prescribed lists: Signs of drug use. Signs of rebellion. Signs that your teen is the Antichrist.

  “You’d better start applying for a job today,” she said.

  I had been hoping to lock myself in my room and crawl into bed, AJ on my pillow.

  “I mean it, Amy,” she said, like she knew what I was thinking.

  “Where am I supposed to find a job?”

  “I honestly don’t care,” she said, walking out of the kitchen, the bottom of her robe trailing behind her. “Just make sure it’s legal this time.”

  I guess that was all the help I was getting.

  Five

  My mother gave me back my wallet but kept my phone.

  “Now I know what you really needed this for,” she said as she put it in the cabinet on a high shelf above the desk in the kitchen, like I was a little girl and having something up that high would keep it out of my reach.

  I was grounded from my phone, from Cassie and Lila, and from breathing without asking first. I had to bring her my dress. She said she was going to take it back to the store, that she wouldn’t tolerate paying for something I hadn’t even used.

  As I walked toward Main Street, I couldn’t help but smirk when I thought about how she was going to explain to the cashier how this dress that had never been worn had fingerprint ink all over it.

  I stopped in at Gas-N-Go to buy cigarettes and filled out an application, one of those that come in a pack of fifty, white, light blue, and red, that
asks when your earliest possible start date is. Then it asks you to list your job experience, your references, and your special skills. For that one I wrote, You tell me. Like Cassie would have.

  My mother always called Cassie a hopeless delinquent. I guess that’s what I was now.

  After I filled it out, I followed a sign that said INTERVIEWS into the break room.

  It was a cardboard box sort of room, with a vending machine that hummed and gurgled like an old refrigerator and a long cafeteria table ringed by orange plastic chairs.

  A man I couldn’t help thinking looked like one of the cops who had arrested us sat in one of the chairs. He gestured for me to sit.

  I was so tired that for a moment, I thought I was back in the police station. Until I looked down and saw the job application in my hand, my name at the top.

  He was insanely sweaty and had to wipe his hand on his pants before he took mine, which he shook in a way that reminded me of an empty sock.

  “Name’s Mancini. You get hired, you’ll be required to call me Mr. Mancini.” His hands were cut up and ruddy like he treated them every night to a massage with a meat grinder.

  It made me look at my own hands. The fingernails were still painted the same light blue as my dress. I sat on them.

  “Job experience?” he asked.

  “I’ve done some babysitting,” I said.

  He looked at me skeptically. We both knew that babysitting had given me experience in little more than eating other people’s food.

  “Up to four kids at once,” I said, even though it was a lie.

  I decided to leave out that I spent most of my time raiding the mother’s bathroom cabinet for makeup. I’d take her lipstick, daring pinks like Fuchsia Frenzy or Hot Salmon, and picture her getting ready for a night out, searching in every cabinet and drawer and then forcing her doting husband to go to the grocery store to buy more.

  I liked picturing someone having a doting husband.

  “You ever work a cash register?”

  “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t, but how hard could it be?

  “Why should I hire you?” he asked, in the same kind of voice my mom used when she didn’t believe something I told her. The voice she used all the time.