Pretty Amy Read online

  I looked around. Cassie and Lila still weren’t here. Had they gotten out of this somehow?

  “Hey,” he said, smiling at me, “why did the strawberry get a lawyer?”

  I gagged and opened my purse.

  “Because it got itself into a jam,” he said, slapping his knee. Then he burped, loud and long.

  My father laughed. He couldn’t help himself. If I had been without an audience I might have laughed, too. Laughed and then cried.

  “I always know when I’m going to win a case because I’m gassy. Don’t worry, I should be able to recreate the same conditions on your trial date, if it gets that far.”

  Why was he talking about a trial date? I’m sure my face looked green.

  “It won’t get that far,” he said.

  “How long until Amy’s case?” my mother asked, sticking her whole hand in her mouth, so she could get at all her nails at once.

  “Not sure,” Dick Simon said, looking around and sniffing in that way people do when they know more about something than you do. “Depends on the docket. Could be fifteen minutes, could be more.”

  Just like that, my destiny had been whittled down into the estimated time it took for an album to download.

  Finally, Lila walked in, her mother two paces behind her and her lawyer two paces behind that. I felt myself rise involuntarily to greet her, and then felt my mother tug at the back of my jacket as she hissed, “Don’t you dare.”

  I saw Lila look over at me. She seemed tired, had big blue bags under her eyes, a reflection of the eye shadow above them. Even from where I was sitting, I could see that her eyes looked glazed and bloodshot. I wondered if it was because she wasn’t sleeping or because she had been spewing the contents of her stomach all morning like I had.

  Cassie walked in with her father. Her mother walked behind them, and Cassie’s lawyer walked behind all of them, like some weird wedding procession. As Cassie sat, she put her head down, not even bothering to look and see where Lila and I were sitting.

  “Not to worry; those two are rookies,” Dick Simon said, tipping his head toward Lila’s and Cassie’s lawyers. “Court appointed.”

  I couldn’t care less about their lawyers; Lila and Cassie were not wearing suits. They weren’t even wearing skirts, and they definitely weren’t wearing headbands. I glared at my mother, adding yet another line to the seemingly never-ending list of all the ways she didn’t get it.

  At some point the judge came in, a man so tall and skinny that his robe hung like his shoulders and neck were a clothes hanger. He was younger than my father and Dick Simon and his hair was shiny with gel. I heard someone say, “All rise,” and then some other stuff I couldn’t bear to listen to, and before I knew it we were waiting for Case Number 276, our case, The State of New York v. Lila, Cassie, and Amy. We waited through real criminals: guys who were charged with possession of illegal firearms, women charged with prostitution, dirty-looking people scrubbed clean and put into orange jumpsuits to face the judge. Men charged with assault wearing shackles around their ankles and cuffs that pulled their arms behind their backs.

  As I saw each one, I knew with more and more certainty that we did not belong here. We were nothing like these people. These people were real criminals. Our only crime was being stupid.

  It felt like my stomach was an elevator and as I waited, it traveled down one floor for each number called until 276. At which point someone would snip the cable and it would go sailing fast to land at my feet.

  There was a digital clock at the front of the courtroom below the judge’s bench; it was the size and shape of a license plate, with big red numbers like a bomb timer. As I stared at it, counting down the seconds until the end of my life, it became blurry, and then the room around it became blurry, and when I looked down at my hands that had been gripping the bench in front of me, they were also blurry.

  Then I heard someone call our case and say my name and everything I had been charged with, and it was like my whole head was underwater. The court reporter’s voice sounded distant and muffled, in the same way it feels when you’re dreaming and you try to scream, and nothing but a moan comes out.

  Count one: Possession. Count two: Possession with intent to sell. Count three: Sale. Your standard PISS, as Dick Simon had put it so eloquently.

  I felt Dick pull me up and take me to the front of the courtroom. We stood behind the table with the pitcher of water that no one drank from, clear plastic glasses stacked together neatly at its side.

  The judge asked me the questions he had asked every plaintiff before me.

  “Are you correctly named in the indictment?”

  I answered “Yes,” and then Dick Simon nudged me and I said, “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Are you selecting Richard Simon to represent you in this case?”

  And I said, “Yes, Your Honor,” even though I wanted to say, Are you kidding me?

  “Do you understand the charges brought against you?”

  This I didn’t answer right away, because I didn’t. I didn’t understand why this was happening to me. I didn’t understand how I ended up in this room with a judge staring down at me, with these criminals who were nothing like me, with these people who should never have crossed paths with mine. I wanted to say that I didn’t understand and I didn’t agree. I wanted to yell, I object, I object, I object.

  But instead I said, “Yes, sir,” my mouth almost touching my chest because my head was down so far.

  “How do you plead to the counts against you?”

  Dick Simon said we were deferring our plea, and then proceeded to point out everything he’d made me do to repent for the plea we were deferring: the job, the shrink, the volunteer work. But, to his credit, he made it look like I had pursued this on my own, to help me work through whatever demons were inside me that had caused me to act out in such an antisocial and morally reprehensible way.

  I could feel Cassie’s eyes rolling. I could feel Lila wondering why I hadn’t told her about any of this. I could feel my mother looking around, hoping no one recognized her, and my father seeing me up there on the wrong side of the courtroom and having something catch in his throat.

  The judge released me until my trial. I would have that time to formulate a case, to come to some tough decisions. And, hopefully, to gain enough maturity to understand the “full impact” of what I’d done.

  After my portion of the case was completed, Dick Simon rushed us out. Shielding us with his body, balancing his binders like pizza boxes, he pushed us from the courtroom like we were taking part in a fire drill. He closed the door behind him just as Lila’s name was called.

  “You need to detach yourself now,” he said, out of breath and red in the face from hurrying us those ten feet. He leaned against the wall, wheezing. “You need to show up front that you are no longer associated with those girls in any way. That you have so separated yourself from them and from what you’ve done that you don’t care what happens to them.”

  My mother and father nodded, engrossed in his every word. This was territory unfamiliar to them. They would take any advice Dick Simon gave.

  But I wanted to see how Lila would react, what Cassie would say. I wanted to see if either of them would cry, or scream, or do any of the things I was too afraid to do.

  I wanted to know if they were as scared as I was, and trying just as desperately to hide it.

  Fourteen

  “So, what are we in the mood for?” my father asked as he started the car.

  What was I in the mood for? A gun with one bullet in it. A bottle of strong liquor. A rewind button. Certainly not lunch with Jerry and Beverly.

  I didn’t know what other families did after their daughter had been arraigned on drug charges, but my family strapped on a feed bag.

  “Whatever,” I said, which I had said on many other occasions when I had been asked for my opinion, but I had never truly meant it before. I hoped they didn’t see it in a crying-wolf kind of way and saw it in the way it was int
ended—as one more sign that I had given up.

  My mother glanced at my father, a look that even in profile I knew said, Why did we have this child if she can’t answer a simple question?

  I saw her turn and face the window and go through a Rolodex of restaurants in her mind, side-referencing articles she had read in magazines giving you tips for every situation. Every situation, it seemed, but what to eat after your daughter has been officially charged for selling drugs that weren’t even hers.

  We ended up going to one of those restaurants where the waiters and waitresses dressed up in costumes, like it was Halloween every day. It was exactly what I didn’t need—loud, boisterous, terrifying.

  The person who came to seat us wore a penguin suit; as he waddled us over to our table I wondered how much worse it could get. Not only was I a suspected felon, I was at this place with my parents, in a suit. I had been so upset about the arraignment, I hadn’t even insisted that they let me go home and change first.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Well, you have to eat something,” my mother said.

  I pushed my chair away from the table and crossed my arms. I guess I was just supposed to deal with the fact that instead of actually talking about what had happened and what could happen, my parents were doing what they always did—ignoring my feelings and covering them up. On that day, it was by eating at a place they should have taken me for my birthday when I turned six.

  “You can’t just sit there taking up space,” she said from behind her menu. “Just order something to pick at.” I could hear in her voice that to her, this conversation was over.

  It wasn’t.

  When the waitress arrived dressed as a sexy nurse, I ordered six entrees, soup, salad, and jalapeno poppers.

  “Obviously someone needs a little more time. She can’t make up her mind; everything looks so good.” My mother laughed. Then smiled her Please bear with my crazy family smile.

  The waitress smiled back her The customer is always right smile and said she’d put their orders in.

  “We know what’s going on. You don’t need to be difficult. This is hard on all of us,” my mother said with a quiver in her voice.

  “Then why are we here?” I asked. If it was so hard on all of us, why was she expecting us to stuff our faces like we were preparing to hibernate for the winter?

  “Amy, listen to your mother,” my father said, which was his way of saying that he wasn’t, but at least one of us should be.

  “So we can have one moment of peace in this horrible day.” She put her menu down on the table in front of her and turned full around in her chair. “This was a great choice, wasn’t it, Jerry?”

  I wanted to give her the finger. Everything in my body was telling me to, but I couldn’t do it. I played with the ice in my water glass.

  My father was cleaning his glasses with a napkin. He used the time we fought to clean and primp up various things—his nails, his wallet, his pockets.

  “I just don’t understand why you can’t be cheerful like her,” she said, pointing with her chin to the waitress. “At least while we’re out.”

  My father nodded, even though I was pretty sure he still wasn’t listening.

  “Your grandmother was a nurse, you know,” she said, as if this solidified the point she was trying to make.

  “She’s not a nurse, Mom, she’s a waitress. It’s her job to be cheerful.” There was an edge to my voice that I couldn’t control. Why were we talking about our waitress? Why weren’t we talking about me?

  “Do you hear this?” She looked at my father.

  He was elbow-deep in the French onion soup that had just arrived, and appeared to be more interested in the cheese that had melted over the sides of the bowl than in my mother. I couldn’t blame him; French onion soup cheese probably was more interesting than my mother.

  “Amy, stop fighting,” he said, twirling the melted strands around his spoon.

  “How am I supposed to react?”

  “All I said was that you could at least try to enjoy yourself. She has to deal with customers all day and she’s still smiling.”

  “Mom, she looks like a hooker.”

  “Well, she might look like one, but at least she hasn’t been arrested for it.”

  “So,” my father said, forever the subject changer, “Brenda’s getting married.”

  Brenda was my father’s newest and youngest hygienist. I’d only met her once, and though it was while my father was filling several cavities for me, the only thing I could remember about her was a dried-out perm and dye job. She kept trying to hold my hand and I kept pulling it away and shoving it under myself like a fussy toddler. Her insistence on intimacy bothered me more than her hair, and her hair was pretty freaking bad.

  “That’s wonderful. How lovely,” my mother said, her voice trilling. It didn’t matter who was getting married. It could be a twelve-time convicted rapist and a pit bull and it would still be lovely. “When’s the date?” she asked, not because she really cared, but because that was what you asked when someone was getting married.

  My father said he didn’t know, and it forced me to think about where I would be on whatever date had been chosen. Maybe instead of going resentfully with my parents to Brenda’s wedding, I wouldn’t even have the option.

  That day it was never more real that I could actually be locked up, and, instead of dealing with it, my parents wanted to talk about weddings and slutty waitresses.

  I needed a cigarette. So I said what people say in movies when they need a cigarette. I said I needed some air.

  As I walked out of the restaurant, all I could see in front of me was beautiful billowy smoke and the feel of it tugging at my lungs. Like a cartoon pie cooling on a windowsill with a beckoning finger of cinnamon steam.

  The only place to smoke was right in front of the restaurant, next to one of those ashtrays that are really just trash cans filled with sand. I found the sexy nurse out there smoking with some guy dressed as a pirate and considered whether or not to tell my mother about it.

  I took a cigarette out of my pocket and realized my lighter was at the table in my Liz Claiborne barf bag.

  Crap.

  Asking for a light from people you don’t know isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when you’re dressed like a young Republican and are out with your parents. So I stood there with the unlit cigarette in my mouth, hoping one of them would notice. I must have looked like one of those guys who are about to get it from a firing squad, minus the blindfold.

  After being ignored for what felt like days, I finally broke down and asked the pirate. There was no way I was asking the nurse.

  He sighed and made a face like I had just asked him to help me move my grand piano across the street.

  During the whole process he didn’t look at me once. Which was fine, because I didn’t want to look at him, either. The outer parts of his cheekbones were covered by big red zits with white pustules in the middle that looked like he had balls of butter-cream frosting stuck to his face.

  The nurse did look at me. I knew she couldn’t help it—being a girl, she had to make sure that she was the best-looking one in a ten-foot radius and if she wasn’t, she needed to prepare herself for it.

  She must have recognized me as the girl who had ordered enough food for six people and then insanely decided she wasn’t hungry at all, because she started laughing. At least, I hope that was why she started laughing.

  Her laugh was the last, last straw during a time filled with last straws.

  “Problem?” I asked, thinking that’s what Cassie would have said if she were standing next to me. Lila wouldn’t have had to say anything, because people didn’t laugh at Lila.

  “What?”

  I considered ignoring her, saying nothing and smoking my cigarette. But something in my empty stomach gave me courage. “I said, do you have a problem?”

  She started laughing harder, then the pirate started laughing, which meant that anybo
dy looking at this scene from far away would see these two and assume they were laughing at me, which they were.

  I wasn’t scary without Cassie. I wasn’t cool without Lila.

  I was just me. Wearing a suit.

  Apparently the world didn’t care who I wanted to be. I couldn’t change who I was. And now, I didn’t have Lila and Cassie to hide behind anymore, either.

  I walked around the corner and sat on the curb next to a Dumpster. I could still hear them laughing, the kind of uncontainable laughter that I hadn’t laughed since I’d been arrested. The kind of uncontainable laughter I would probably never laugh again.

  I would definitely tell my mother I’d caught the waitress smoking.

  I was just about to put out my cigarette and go back inside when I heard a skateboard coming down the street. It sounded like waves, like a conch shell against your ear. That full, empty sound.

  Maybe it was Aaron. I conjured up my stupid daydream, the one I used to fill my head when I couldn’t deal with any of the other stuff in there—that he would find me, that he would apologize, that he would tell me that prom night hadn’t been his fault. I went through what he would say, what I would say. The same lines I had written and played over and over again.

  The difference this time was that when I looked toward the sound, he really was there.

  It was him.

  Aaron.

  He was skateboarding down the sidewalk like it was made of water, his red hair pulled back, wearing the same loose, worn jeans with holes in both knees from his Facebook picture. He carried a backpack, like he might have been coming from the library, but I doubted he ever went to the library.

  I ducked and hid around the side of the Dumpster.

  It didn’t seem possible. I was full-on hallucinating. The arraignment had pushed me over the edge.

  I peeked out to find him walking toward me, carrying his skateboard under his arm. He was real, but what was he doing here? Had he followed me?

  I lit another cigarette with the end of my last one; any excuse to stay put, anything other than looking like I was waiting for him. Then I remembered I was wearing a suit.

  “You got another one of those?” he asked. His eyes were blue. I hadn’t noticed that in his picture.