Pretty Amy Page 5

  “Have a seat,” he said as he closed the door behind us. This was not as easy as it sounded. The room was filled with chairs and couches—a leather love seat, a woven beanbag chair that looked like a huge Hacky Sack, a recliner, a rocking chair, a few metal folding chairs, and one that seemed like it had come from his dining-room set.

  My mother looked confused. Maybe this was our first test. Maybe the chair we chose told him something about us. I took the rocker. My mother sat in the one from the dining-room set. He sat in the beanbag chair, which I had assumed was his, anyway.

  I waited for someone to start talking. I’m not sure what my mother was doing because I was looking down, watching my feet push me back and forth in the rocking chair. Filling the room with a noise that could have been heard from the hallway, and which might have sounded like two people going at it really heavily on the couch.

  My mother glared at me to get me to stop, which just made me rock harder. I couldn’t help it. It felt good to be doing something so simple.

  She shifted in her seat. It was just like her to choose the chair that would make her the least comfortable.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Plenty of people need help at one time or another in their life.” I could feel him looking at me.

  I stopped rocking. I guess he was waiting for me to say, I’m one of those people; I need help; it’s my time. But there was no way I was saying that in front of my mother. I’d asked for her help and gotten Dick Simon.

  “Oh, I’m not afraid or anything.” My mother laughed her meant-to-be-charming laugh. “All of this has just been a lot to take.”

  “It is stressful when a family member is facing incarceration. Amy, what are your feelings about all of this?” he asked, coaxing me with his grin.

  “She feels nothing. Her life is careering into a ditch and all she can do is sit and stare. That’s all she does,” my mom said, wrapping her purse strap around her hand like a tourniquet.

  “You don’t even ask me what I’m feeling,” I said, the words coming out before I even had a chance to think about them.

  “I shouldn’t have to ask; I’m your mother.”

  “Tell us then, Amy,” he said, leaning forward. The beanbag chair he was sitting on made a hissing noise.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say it out loud—it was embarrassing. I felt like my life was over. Like overnight I had changed into someone I would feel bad for. Like I had taken my stupid, boring life for granted and now it was all gone.

  “See,” my mother said, when I didn’t answer.

  “Do you find it hard to talk about yourself?” he asked, looking at me.

  My mother snorted.

  “Thanks a lot, Mom,” I said.

  “What did I do?” she asked.

  He wrote something down on his pad. I hoped it was that my mother was acting like a bitch, because that’s what I would have written.

  “Maybe Amy and I should talk alone,” he said, and gestured toward the door.

  “She’ll get you into a conversation and twist it all around. That’s what she always does,” my mother said.

  “Even so,” he said, standing.

  My mother humphed her she’s-all-yours humph as she closed the door behind her.

  Maybe he did actually know what he was doing. In five minutes he’d done what I couldn’t in seventeen years—shut my mother up.

  “She just cares about you.” He watched me for a moment. “Why do you think you ended up here?”

  “Because I was arrested,” I said.

  “Nothing beyond that?” He paused. “Once you know why you did certain things, it will be easier for you to undo them.”

  I thought about the macramé bracelets I used to make in middle school, the ones that started out in the shape of something like a sailboat—two colors of string, one for the mast and another for the sail—and then once they were woven together, showed no signs of their modest beginnings.

  It made me think about how I had made one for Joe, navy with flecks of yellow. I hated that just talking to him put him back in my head. That in addition to everything else that was crashing around in there, I had to deal with Joe again, too.

  “How can I undo this?” I asked. I could feel my voice cracking. Crying in front of my father hadn’t gotten me anywhere, and I doubted crying in front of this guy would, either.

  “You can start by talking to me,” he said.

  I waited, trying to decide if I could trust him.

  “No?” he asked.

  I kept my mouth closed tightly, like I was afraid of something he was trying to put into it. Besides, what was I supposed to say? How had I ended up here? Why did it matter, considering I was already here?

  “Fine, I’ll have to fill in the blanks myself,” he said. “It won’t be that hard. You think I haven’t heard your story before. I’ve heard it. Maybe there are different characters, a different setting, a different plot, but you,” he said, pointing, “you are always the same.”

  He was kind of a jerk for a hippie. I looked down. I knew he was just trying to get me to talk, but I still couldn’t believe I wasn’t even getting sympathy from the one guy who was being paid to give it to me.

  “Dick Simon tells me you have a few accomplices. Want to tell me about them?”

  Not like I would have, but he gave me no time to answer him, apparently too determined to prove his point.

  “Okay, I’ll guess, then. You needed some friends and they took you in. Before you knew it, you were using drugs. That was fine with you because you sort of wanted to try drugs, but also because you wanted to keep these girls as your friends. It’s hard for you to make friends.”

  I started rocking in the chair again, trying to drown out his words.

  He watched me. “I get paid to talk whether you listen or not.”

  “So talk,” I said, still rocking.

  He shrugged, talking over the creaking chair. “So you’re using, and that gets heavier and heavier, and you all decide, hey, it might be fun to sell drugs; let’s give it a go. But before you know it you’re in over your head and before you know that, you’ve been arrested. Do I have it about right?”

  “We never sold drugs,” I said, slamming my feet to a stop.

  “Who’s going to believe you?” he asked, his eyes squinting. He had a small silver hoop in his left ear. With that and his ponytail and his tie-dye, he reminded me of an older version of one of the druggie boys at school. The same boys I smoked pot with at parties to look like I belonged with them. Maybe this was what they turned into when it was time to grow up and be boring.

  “It wasn’t like that.” He didn’t know anything. He just said all of those things because it was easy. Easy to judge me quickly and put me into the category he deemed fit.

  “That’s the way you’re presenting yourself. Silent, sullen, misunderstood. Without words, you are every rebellious teenage girl in the world.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. He was. He had to be. Before I was friends with Lila and Cassie, I had been every teenage girl in the world. Being rebellious made me special—at least, that’s what I had thought.

  That equals special, when it’s as close as you’re ever going to get.

  Of course there had been others before me. Kids just like me who stared out from the pages of my shiny yearbook and said, Be like me and become yourself.

  Probably a kid just like he had been. Maybe that was why he thought he knew all about me.

  “Okay, then what is it that should make any judge care about you or not? What makes you matter?”

  I said nothing. I had no answer. I had been searching for that all through high school. The thing was, I had never been called on it before.

  I wondered if he had ever sat in a room like this one while a therapist of his own forced him to defend the person he was. Maybe that was why he’d become a therapist, because he had no defense.

  “That is what we’re looking for. That will get you probation,” h
e said, grabbing a date book off his desk. “Are you ready to let me help you?”

  “How can you help me?” I asked.

  “Keep coming here, start talking, start realizing that I am not the enemy,” he said.

  “I don’t think you’re the enemy,” I said, even though I kind of did. Adults were the enemy, that’s what Cassie always said. Especially adults who wanted to open up your head and play around in there.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s the first step. Just think of all we can accomplish.” He leaned toward me. I could see my reflection growing larger in his glasses. Two little Amys levitating above his eyes.

  Even though I heard AJ’s voice in my head repeating Screw you, screw you, screw you like an uncontrollable mantra, I held out my hand for the appointment card.

  “It’s settled, then. By the way,” he said, holding the door open for me, “if you’d like to start referring to me as something other than you, my name is Daniel.”

  Eight

  Hungry Amy, hungry Amy, hungry Amy, AJ tweeted as I closed my bedroom door behind me. I pulled him out of his cage and put him on my shoulder, feeding him seeds from my hand as I snuggled into feathers that smelled like home.

  I perched him on my finger and launched him, his yellow and green wings spreading as he flew around the room. Watching AJ always made me feel better. It reminded me of when I was little and would watch at the kitchen window as the robins flew in our yard to catch worms. So little that I believed I could be one of them when I grew up, like my father was a dentist and my mother was a mother.

  Something I wish I had never admitted to Joe. Something I would never admit to Daniel.

  What no one understood was that AJ was the only one who really knew me. He was the only one who knew the whole story, the only one I had let see me cry in the safety of my room during my freshman year of high school. Even if my mother said she shouldn’t have had to ask how I was feeling, it’s not like she ever did.

  In high school you are not given a choice as to who you become, you are signed up long before that based on looks, smarts, and talent, and then corralled into your group. The problem was, I didn’t like my group. Girls who were not popular but not dorks, either, who were not pretty but not totally disgusting. Girls who floated somewhere in between, somewhere boring; who didn’t get asked on dates, who never had to stay out past curfew, who never had to lie to their parents.

  Joe had still been my friend outside of school, but in school he had been rounded up, too. He’d become friends with the boys on the volleyball team, and from what I could tell, he liked it.

  In my room during those nights, with AJ repeating how pretty I was and me struggling to believe it, I would lie on the floor in my pajamas and look at my yearbook that told me differently. I looked at the pictures of the chosen girls, attempting to rebuild myself with their features. Ordering their noses and eyes and chins and mouths like the yearbook was a menu. Closing my eyes and seeing the girl I could be if I only had a choice in the matter.

  I would tell myself that tomorrow would be better. And then when tomorrow wasn’t better, say, Well then, next week will be better, next month, next year.

  Someday.

  Back then, I still believed my life would improve if only I were patient. Obviously, I was an idiot.

  But I would fool myself. It was the only way I was able to survive.

  Like that day in freshman year when I decided for some insane reason to wear orange jeans. I must have looked like a traffic cone.

  I was in the bathroom with one of the girls in my group. She was the one I was closest to, but we weren’t really close at all. We gave nothing to each other because we wanted so much to be liked by other people.

  I had yet to meet the kind of girlfriends I had heard you could have in high school: the ones who know your every thought and can finish your sentences like you’re connected at the brain stem, the girls who you cross canyons of maturity with, equally dirty and out of breath when you reach the other side hand in hand.

  Friends like Lila and Cassie.

  We were both pretending to wash our hands. The girl from my group looked up at me, then at herself, then back at me, but she did it in a way that I was not supposed to notice.

  I knew what she was doing, because I was doing the same thing, my brain working very much like one of those old room-size computers, calculating, then comparing within a decimal point each feature, each freckle: her blond hair was shorter than mine, she was paler, her eyes were brown and smaller than mine, she had a flat chest.

  Using some perfect example that had been saved on my brain’s hard drive, I continued to compare our features and then, based on those findings, I started complaining about how ugly I looked.

  I said something like: God, I look so horrible today.

  To which the ever-trusty girl beside me retorted: No, I look horrible today, just like she should.

  Then it was my turn: But look at my nose.

  Her turn: Look at that zit with its own parking garage on my chin.

  Me: Well, I’m fat.

  Her: No, I’m fat.

  Me: My hair is totally wrong.

  Her: Are you kidding? I love it! I wish my hair looked like that.

  Me: I’ll never have a boyfriend. I’m so ugly. I should probably just get it over with and kill myself.

  Her: Then I should kill my whole family for creating something as disgusting as I am.

  And on and on, layering on the complaints and then the compliments until the warning bell rang for our next class.

  She never even mentioned my orange jeans. That was how much we could lie to each other. That was how little we cared.

  That year, I could only wake up every morning because I knew there was someone worse off than I was, or at least someone who would tell me that repeatedly until I believed her.

  But that was all before I was friends with Cassie and Lila, and now that I wasn’t allowed to be friends with them anymore, I was right back where I started. I’d have to learn how to do everything all over again, all by myself.

  No wonder I was so sullen, Daniel.

  Putting AJ back in his cage, I couldn’t help but wonder where the hell I was going to find someone who was worse off than I was now.

  …

  After my parents fell asleep that night, I went into the computer room, determined to look up Aaron online. Lila and Cassie were out of my life, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I could find him. He had agreed to go to the prom with me, for whatever reason; he had liked me enough to say yes, even if he hadn’t gone through with it.

  I turned on the computer. My parents had stupid AOL, so when the computer logged on, it told them they had mail. They had mail and I had nothing.

  I opened Facebook, went to Brian’s profile, and there he was, Aaron Chambers: terracotta hair in a ponytail; loose, worn jeans with holes in both knees; a smile with one crooked tooth. Activities and Interests: skateboarding, horror movies, music. Relationship Status: single.

  My life would have been so different if only Aaron had shown up for our date. I wouldn’t be working at stupid Gas-N-Go. I wouldn’t be doing whatever Dick Simon told me to do. I wouldn’t be trying to keep Daniel and Joe out of my head. Lila and Cassie would still be my friends. Most likely we wouldn’t even have been arrested.

  Looking at Aaron’s profile in the dark computer room, the monitor the only light, I could try to pretend that things hadn’t gone so wrong. I could try to forget everything that had happened.

  I could write our conversation in my head. Could make him say the things he was supposed to say, just like the girl in the bathroom. Hear him tell me the things I wanted to hear: He was so happy he found me, he was sorry, prom night hadn’t been his fault.

  I could try and believe it. I could try and fool myself.

  Nine

  Gas-N-Go was probably a place you wouldn’t choose to spend more than five minutes in, and for that night at least, I had six hours to go.

  “This k
id,” Mr. Mancini said, slapping the back of my manager, Connor, “knows everything. You have a question, you go ask him. He’s got his own way of doing things and I don’t want to step on his feet. Tell you the truth,” he said, leaning in like he was telling me a secret, “he knows more than I do.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of a compliment that was. I would have ventured to say that the expired milk I had been instructed to scratch at with those girly nails of yours so the date won’t show knew more than Mr. Mancini did.

  Connor would have been described as a big boy, even at twenty-two. His hair was brown and as dry and fake-looking as doll hair, and as far as I could tell, it covered every part of his body. It tufted through the neck of his Gas-N-Go polo like a baby bird reaching for food. It clothed his bare arms. I could only dream about the rest.

  I smiled and nodded in that silly way you do when you’re in a new place and you’re not really listening at all, just nodding and saying absolutely, great, super, since you know that once you’re on your own you’re going to do what you want anyway.

  “You’ll have her clean the bathrooms, right?” Mancini asked.

  There was no way I was cleaning the bathrooms. I had to hang on to some dignity.

  “Remember that you don’t want to let just anybody in there,” Mr. Mancini said, looking around to see if anyone was listening. In reality, there was no one in the store. “You have to be careful who you give the key to. Someone comes in all twitchy or something, you say, ‘Out of order.’”

  Connor nodded and crossed his arms.

  I stared at the obligatory aisle of car accessories—air fresheners in the shape of pine trees and rainbows smelling like Christmas and new cars. Windshield wiper fluid the color of blue Kool-Aid. Assorted cans of oil stacked up like soda.

  “And if anything gets a little dicey, there’s a baseball bat behind the counter for emergencies.” Mr. Mancini sniffed and looked around. “So, you got everything?”

  Everything was a red Gas-N-Go signature polo that came down to my knees and a hair net I had to wear while working in the deli that I vowed to continually lose.

  As he left the store, he winked, like Connor and I were being left alone on a couch by some perverted father who was hoping to live through his son’s sexual exploits. I might have looked desperate, but there was no way I was that desperate.