Pretty Amy (9 page)

“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t care if Leslie was his girlfriend. I didn’t care about any of this. I started walking faster. It was stupid. It wasn’t like I could outwalk his bike, but I wanted to get away from him. From everything he made me think about and not want to think about.

“You still should have stayed,” he said.

I wondered whether, if he’d known how things would turn out that night, he would have let us stay, even without our sacred tickets. He probably would have, but he didn’t, and he hadn’t, and it was too late now.

“My mom is even more naggy than usual, so…,” I said, making the international sign for
Hurry up
.

“I’m on my way out, anyway,” he said, hopping back on his bike. He took his right hand off the handlebar and shakily saluted me. What he used to do when we were little and he thought I was being bossy.

I stood there. I didn’t know how to react. If I had been the old me I would have laughed. I would have laughed and he would have laughed
.
But I was the new me, so I stood there. The street was dark and quiet.

He pedaled away, the bell on his bike becoming fainter and fainter as his back reflector light got smaller and smaller, like a lens closing, as he made his way down the street.

…

I found my mother lying on the couch, waiting up to make sure I came home. Not only because this was what she always did, but because Dick Simon had told her that I couldn’t get in any more trouble, which just gave her another excuse to be a total pain in my ass.

She was watching David Letterman with one eye open and one eye flat and closed against the pillow. She wore her flannel nightgown even though it was summer. I guess she wanted to look the part for her newly instated nightly vigil. Like some sailor’s wife on a widow’s walk, a lit candle held in her praying hands.

“How was it?” she asked, sitting up and looking at me. The TV covered her pale pink nightgown and exposed skin with fluorescent blue.

Freshman year, that used to be a question I could answer, when I went to dances and football games and came home at a decent hour. When I could say
Fine
and that was all I ever had to say, even if it wasn’t true. It was better than going back over whatever trauma I had suffered. It was easier than saying the real words.

Not this time.

“It sucked. I feel like I’m losing ten brain cells for every minute I’m standing behind that counter.”

“Don’t take this out on me.” She squinted. “Besides, that’s probably less than you were losing when you were spending all your time smoking those doobies.”

“Great, Mom, perfect. For your information, no one has ‘smoked a doobie’ since 1979.”

I saw a light flick on behind her eyes, like she’d remembered our appointment with Daniel and she was determined to prove that she really was trying. “I care about you, Amy,” she said in her practiced
I am a good parent and I’m doing the best I can
voice.

I turned away from her, practically running for the refuge of my room, which that night felt like no refuge at all. As I walked up the blue-carpeted stairs I had walked on every day since I was five, I realized that my room was not mine. I hadn’t chosen to live in it, just like I hadn’t chosen to live in this house, or live on this street, or be born into this family.

I hated my room and everything in it. I hated the pink carpet. I hated the sheets on my bed. I’d liked them when I received them for my thirteenth birthday, to replace my cartoon-character ones. But that night, I realized sheets were a pretty crappy birthday gift.

I lit a cigarette and smoked out the window, but it felt like Joe’s house was staring at me. I stubbed it out and yanked down the shade. I even hated my view.

I hadn’t gotten any of the things in this room because I’d really wanted them. I had gotten them because they were what my mother thought I was supposed to have. She had bought me all of these things because she was trying desperately to turn me into the daughter she wanted me to be.

There was no chance of that anymore.

I grabbed a sleeping bag from my closet, and AJ’s cage, and made my way back downstairs.

My mother was still lying on the couch. “There’s dinner in the fridge,” she said.

I ignored her and unlocked the basement door.

“What are you doing?”

“This is my new room.” I rolled the sleeping bag down the basement stairs and hugged AJ’s cage tightly.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

I walked down the stairs before she could say anything else.

She followed me, ducking her head so she didn’t hit the ceiling. “There’s no reason to get dramatic.”

“I’m moving out. I can’t live here anymore.”

“Living in the basement is not moving out.”

“It’s as close to it as I can get.” I set my sleeping bag on the small green carpet and hung AJ’s cage from one of the rafters on the ceiling.

“This is insane. Where’s your father?”

I got into the sleeping bag and turned away from her, watching AJ’s cage swing back and forth, back and forth.

“Amy, please, it’s disgusting down here,” she said.

Usually the wavering in her voice would have been enough to make me turn and look at her, but everything was different now.

“Fine,” she said, walking up the stairs, “do what you want. Live down here all alone; see if I care. I’m going to bed.” She slammed the door behind her.

It
was
dirty; I had to give her that. It was also uncomfortable, and I hadn’t had enough arms to carry both AJ and a pillow, so my head lay right on that terrible green burlap carpet that looked like puked-up spinach. It was itchy and with my only other option being sleeping on concrete, I made a covert mission back up the stairs to get my mattress and pillow.

While I was in my room gathering supplies, I called Lila’s cell. My mother hadn’t thought to take the cordless phone out of my room.

Before the arrest, Lila, Cassie, and I were together all the time. It was hard to believe that it had been almost a week since I had spoken to either of them. It made my stomach feel like I was going down the first huge hill of a roller coaster when I thought about it.

“Amy, oh my God, how are you?” Lila whispered as she picked up the phone.

“Horrible,” I said. It felt so good not to lie. I was horrible. I was worse than horrible.

“Aren’t you on twenty-four-hour watch or something?” Lila whispered.

“You still have your phone?” I asked. It was a dumb question. I mean, I had called her, but I was surprised.

“The police said I should keep it in case Brian tries to call me.”

She was talking to the police. Why wasn’t I talking to the police?

I could hear her climb out the window to her balcony and light a cigarette.

“Have you talked to Cassie?” I asked, mostly out of selfishness. I didn’t want them to become inseparable in my absence.

“Forget Cassie.” She took a drag. “Have you?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

At least one nice thing was coming out of this—I was the favorite now.

I heard her dog, Barnaby, bark as he settled down in his customary position next to her. She adored him, even though he was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen. He was sheared, with a terrier’s head and long spindly legs like a goat. Sometimes I felt like the human version of Barnaby.

I listened to the air on the line. I could hear cars going by and the smoke exhaling out of her lungs like a sigh.

I wanted to say I missed her, that I didn’t blame her. But I was too scared, because I knew if I did she would have to reciprocate. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m bored,” she said. “And horrible.” She laughed.

“I know,” I said.

“My fingers are still black from that ink,” she said.

I looked at my hands, still painted with that light blue polish. They were chipping.

“Mine are okay,” I said. What were we even talking about?

“This sucks,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

We sat there, quiet, listening to each other breathe, until she said she heard her mom coming and had to go. As much as I hated to realize it, we had nothing else to say anyway. This was my life now. Without Cassie and Lila it was like I was on a seesaw minus one kid, lonely and powerless.

After I hung up I went to the bathroom. I poured nail-polish remover onto a cotton ball and breathed in, filling my nostrils with the horrible smell. I scrubbed my nails clean, until they were pink and raw. Then I took the bottle of polish off my nightstand and threw it in the trash.

Ten

The next morning I woke up facedown and open-mouthed on the basement floor. I looked with bleary eyes around my new home.

I was surrounded by boxes filled with old winter clothes, shoes that had lost their mates, and clothes I had grown out of—hand-me-downs waiting to be handed down to someone who never came. They were filled with my parents’ old notebooks from college, photo albums from before they knew me, and wedding presents they’d never used. Things my parents no longer wanted to look at but couldn’t bear to part with.

There were shelves stacked with the books I’d loved as a child. All the girls I’d wanted to be like. A pile of yellow hardback Nancy Drew books, shiny paperback Ramona books, a pale purple copy of
Margaret.
Ramona didn’t care; she told the world to piss off with her short hair and freckles. Margaret, with her hair like spun gold, cared too much. Nancy, the fiery redhead, was too smart to worry about anything.

When I was young, I’d wished for their strength and wit and intelligence and compassion. Their words were my words, but then one day they were gone.

As I got older, I had to live in images. Started living with an outlined face and body layered upon me by a huge overhead projector lit by the sun. Staying with me constantly, reminding me and everyone else of what I was not.

I went upstairs and found my father sitting at the kitchen table, eating his morning bagel and staring. I grabbed some coffee and settled into the seat I always sat in. My mother and father had a seat they always fought over, the one at the head of the table, and my father sat in it that morning, as he would when my mother wasn’t around. Even before the arrest, I lived a life of fascination and intrigue.

“How’s life down under?” my father asked, waking from his trance to look at me.

I shrugged. I knew he had asked in an attempt to make me laugh, had probably been working on that line since my mother had told him about my decision, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“Have you seen this yet?” He held up the
Collinsville News
and shook it for emphasis.

“What now?” I asked.

He tossed it over to me. It was open to the Police Blotter. I read the following:
Three local girls arrested in connection with area-wide drug-distribution ring, caught en route from the Collinsville South High Prom.

“Your mother thinks we’ll have news crews camped out on our lawn,” he said.

I was less concerned about that and more concerned that it was now forever in black and white that we had been dateless for the prom.

“It doesn’t even use our names.”

“She still thinks people will know,” he said.

I guess that was how Joe had found out.

But my mother wasn’t worried about Joe; she was worried about her supposed friends and acquaintances, who from what I could tell would corner her at the grocery store, their carts boxing her in at right angles, wedding rings tapping like timers on the hot-dog-colored hand-grips while they demanded information. Apparently the food she purchased to make dinner, perfect triangles of green, white, and brown on my plate, was supposed to be a pie chart illustrating her skill as a mother.

This news would, as my mother would say, blow that out of the water
.

“You don’t have to stay down there,” he said, taking the paper from me.

I shook my head. Moving back into my room would be as good as telling my mother she was right, not just about sleeping in the basement, but about all of it. I grabbed the other half of his bagel and took a huge bite.

“Watch your right maxillary tooth,” he said.

I closed my mouth and put my hand in front of it. I was at my father’s office every couple of months for a filling. It was lucky that he was a dentist, or my parents would be broke. It was like my teeth were made of talc. They were cavity prone, sensitive, and, before braces, had looked like fence posts put in by a blind man.

“Where is she?” I asked, trying to gauge how much longer I had to drink my coffee before slipping back downstairs and locking the door.

“She’s getting ready for your big shopping trip,” he said, grabbing the other half of his bagel.

Were we going to buy my supplies for jail, like we had every year when I went to summer camp? Going down the list Camp Eagle Lake provided and buying a flashlight and bug spray and a rain poncho?