Pretty Amy

by Lisa Burstein

  I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she was there. In true gossip-monger fashion, she liked nothing better than to talk to people who were directly affected by the gossip she spread. Lila’s departure was just that sort of thing.

  Joe had been right. I should have stayed at the prom—he should have let me stay at the prom. Or maybe I should have listened to him sophomore year when he tried to warn me. Should have cared when he’d told me it was him or them. I wondered where I would be right now if I had.

  Ruthie walked down each aisle with her arms outstretched, touching the surface of every item her hands came across.

  I swore that I could feel the fluorescent lights singeing my hair and burning the skin on my scalp. I could feel the ceiling pushing down on me, getting closer and closer every time I looked up. Like in those movies where the spy is stuck in a room that starts to push in on itself, the ceiling and floor like the right and left sides of a vise.

  I wished it were really happening—that the ceiling and floor were drawing together like magnets. That before Ruthie could say anything to me, Gas-N-Go would flatten to the pavement, our blood and bone oozing out.

  But my only consolation for the fact she was there was that she was probably touching more germs than she would be exposed to in a lifetime.

  She looked like Laura Ingalls in that beginning scene from Little House on the Prairie where she throws out her hands and spins through the field of wildflowers, but only in the arms. In the face, I realized, she kind of looked like an anteater.

  I tried very hard to ignore her, but I was so freaked out by seeing her, and trying so hard to ignore her, that I ended up looking right at her. Not like I could have avoided her, anyway. I knew I was the reason she was there.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while,” she said, smiling, her lips like two small snakes slithering on her face.

  I nodded; maybe if I didn’t talk to her she would lose interest and go away.

  She walked toward the counter and waited for an answer. She was not going to make this easy.

  Ruthie had never spoken to me directly before, and I didn’t know if I was more afraid that she might know who I was or might not know who I was. If she confused me with a friend of mine and told me about my own arrest, I was going to lose it.

  So I said what my mother said when she ran into people she hated. “Yeah, I’ve been busy.” Then to prove it, I dusted the counter and fiddled around with the gum rack. It was probably the most work I had ever done in my whole time employed at Gas-N-Go.

  “I can see that,” she said, in that condescending way that means, Yeah, right. She tapped her hands on the counter. “Summer job?” She looked around the place, like the answer was written in pieces on the walls.

  I nodded. It was not technically a lie—it was summer and it was a job.

  “Nice,” she said, which I knew meant she thought it was anything but.

  “Are you here to buy something?” I asked, trying to seem very disinterested.

  “I saw you in here and just wanted to stop by and say hi,” she said, smiling with those slithery snake lips again.

  She was obviously there to tell me something—tell me something or find out something. She had plenty on me already. I was working at a convenience store and not doing a very good job at a job you’d have to be an idiot not to do a good job at. Oh, and because of Tiffany’s jumpsuit, I looked like I had gained a good fifty pounds since the fateful prom night that had started it all.

  I prayed for Connor to come out of the back room. To fly out on his customer-service wings and barrage her with questions about how she was doing and what he could do for her today until she got freaked out and left. But I guess my living with Connor made him want to avoid me at work. Of course the one good thing that had come out of being his reluctant roommate was now coming back to bite me.

  “How’s Cassie doing?” she asked.

  I froze. What was she asking me? How was Cassie doing since Lila had gone? How was Cassie doing since the arrest? How was Cassie doing in general?

  I didn’t know how to provide the answer to any of those questions. I thought back to the night Cassie’s mother had been here, when I had tried without success to find out the answer myself.

  I figured saying, “Fine,” covered me, so that was what I said. I hoped it might be all she needed to hear so she would get the hell out of my store and the hell out of my face.

  “Good, I was worried about her,” she said, her snake lips quivering slightly. As horrible as my parents ever thought I was, I could see that Ruthie was a truly evil person. She wanted bad things to happen to people so she would have stuff to talk about.

  “I sure hope she’s taking care of herself,” Ruthie said, her eyes darting back and forth as if she were looking for a weakness in the wall that I had made of my face.

  I just kept nodding, even though I wanted so terribly to ask her why she was worried about Cassie, why Cassie needed to take care of herself, but then she would know that I hadn’t been talking to Cassie and would have more information than she had come in with.

  I started unpacking cigarette cartons, picturing myself smoking every one, sitting in an open field on a sunny day with a pothole-size ashtray next to me. Smoking my mind into an empty page, my only thoughts inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

  “Well, it happens,” Ruthie said, still eyeing me.

  “Yes, it does,” I said, making sure I emphasized it so she would know that I knew what it was, even though I had no idea.

  “If you’re going to have a baby shower for her, I would love to be invited,” she said, letting the words baby shower seep out, then appear in front of her and dissolve into shadows of themselves, like she was the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

  She had to be lying. Cassie was pregnant? She would have told me. At the very least, Lila would have told me. I looked down, too ashamed to admit I hadn’t known. Too sad to say that we were all so far away from each other that I had to hear from the human grapevine that one of my best friends was pregnant.

  “I know; I was shocked, too,” she said, winking. “She works nights at Pudgie’s Pizza if you want to see how she’s doing.”

  Hearing Ruthie say that, I could see Cassie clearly, her stomach rising like the pizza dough she kneaded. The small cells inside her being tossed like the chicken wings she covered in hot sauce, one-handed, in a silver bowl.

  “Who told you?” I asked in a voice I didn’t recognize. A voice that sounded like someone had squeezed my lungs together like an accordion and forced the words out of my mouth.

  “I don’t even know,” she said. “I’ve heard it so many places I can’t remember where I heard it first.” She leaned her elbows on the counter and rested her face on top of her hands, like we were buddies or something. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell you. I thought you guys were good friends.”

  Best friends, I thought, just like Lila and I were best friends. But now that didn’t mean anything.

  Ruthie leaned in so close to me that I could see the blackheads on her nose. I stared into them, hoping one would open up and swallow her face and then her neck, then her shoulders and her whole body, so that nothing would be standing in front of me but a big, black hole.

  “I guess Lila doesn’t know, either,” she said, acting like she had to think about it. In reality I knew she’d had this script written long before she came to see me. “When did she leave, a week ago?” Ruthie asked, smiling again.

  “She didn’t leave,” I said, still trying so hard to believe my lie.

  “Really? That’s what I heard. I also heard her parents aren’t even looking for her,” Ruthie said, one sentence spilling out after the next. “I don’t blame her for leaving, though; I would probably run away, too, if I were facing what you guys are facing, but everyone deals with that sort of thing differently, I guess.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me, just kept pushing forward with the rumors she wan
ted to spread. “Gosh, poor Cassie, with everything she’s going through already, to get pregnant right in the middle of it. I’m surprised she hasn’t killed herself.”

  “I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you,” I said, and watched Ruthie’s face go slack. It wasn’t what I had planned on, but the minute it came out I realized it was the perfect thing to say. For once, the words came easily. “When she finds out you’re telling everyone, I mean.”

  “Everyone already knows,” she said, walking toward the door. “Just like everyone already knows that you’re going to end up in jail, like the druggie loser you are,” she said. “Cassie’s telling everyone how stupid she thinks you are. That you were going to turn her in, but you couldn’t even go through with it. I heard Lila said the same thing.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I said, my body going tingly. It was hard to breathe. I grabbed onto the counter; it was the only thing keeping me from falling to my knees.

  The store around me went fuzzy, and my breathing got heavy.

  I was pretty sure I was having a panic attack. My vision turned to tunnels, my head felt woozy. I was cold and hot, shivering and sweaty. I knelt on the floor and closed my eyes to keep myself from collapsing.

  I heard the bell above the door ding as Ruthie left, probably on her way to tell everyone in town what a freak I was.

  For once she wouldn’t be lying.

  Thirty-two

  “Your parents want to talk to you,” Connor said, standing above me. I had been asleep on his couch, AJ’s cage crooked under my shoulder.

  I guess Connor had called my parents and told them how he’d found me the day before—down on my knees, hyperventilating and sweaty in the middle of Gas-N-Go. For once I was glad to be tattled on. It meant I finally got to go home.

  “Come on,” he said, jingling his car keys.

  “Can’t I change out of my pajamas first?”

  “We don’t have time for that. Your dad has an early appointment.”

  I shrugged. I could get dressed when I got home. I grabbed AJ’s cage and walked out to Connor’s car.

  I kept AJ on my lap for the drive and leaned my chin against the metal dome on the top of his cage. Maybe things weren’t as bad as I’d thought. If my parents forgave me, maybe everything could go back to the way it used to be—well, after I figured out what to do about Lila and Cassie.

  We pulled onto my street. It was early, quiet. Newspapers still sat in plastic bags on people’s dew-wet lawns.

  “Good luck,” Connor said as I got out of the car.

  I walked up the driveway, AJ’s cage swinging in my right hand. The porch light was still on, or maybe it was on for me. I turned the knob, but the door was locked. I rang the bell and waited.

  The door stayed closed.

  I rang the bell again, trying not to think how similar this felt to prom night—my hope high in my throat as I waited for the door to open.

  I heard a car pull up in the driveway and turned to find Dick Simon’s coffee-ice-cream-colored Cadillac. Something wasn’t right.

  “Mom!” I yelled, banging on the door. “Dad!” I rang the doorbell over and over—the way wind chimes might sound during a hurricane.

  My parents weren’t answering the door. I was locked out. I was in my pajamas. I had nowhere to go. I thought about all the times I had locked my door to keep my mother out of my room.

  I had to admit it felt pretty crappy being on the other side of it.

  I looked at Joe’s house, at his porch. I could run across the street and hide under it. Sit in a ball in my pajamas, the dirt below me, light leaking through the wooden slats above. There was no way Dick Simon would fit, but I knew that wasn’t a solution. Without Joe there, too, I was just hiding, and how long could I hide? I couldn’t stay down there forever. I would have to come out eventually.

  My choices became sitting on the cement stoop until my parents calmed down enough to let me in, if ever, or seeing what Dick Simon wanted. Dick Simon won after five minutes because it started to pour.

  I opened the passenger door. I was surprised he hadn’t gotten out of the car, until I saw that his stomach was wedged under the steering wheel. I put AJ’s cage on the seat.

  My hand went to where my pocket would have been and where my cigarettes would have been if I hadn’t been wearing pajamas. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, even as the rain saturated the fabric and stuck it to my skin.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. But decide soon, because you’re getting my upholstery wet.”

  I looked at the sky. The rain wasn’t stopping any time soon. I felt my shoulders deflate as I got in and moved AJ’s cage to the floor in front of me.

  He paused to look at me, his eyes puffed out like marshmallows. “You’re soaked.”

  I sucked on my pajama sleeve, trying to get any water that I could; my throat felt scorched. “Where are you taking me?” I asked, because I wanted to know, but also because I was trying to estimate how many of Dick’s horrible jokes I would have to hear before we reached our destination.

  I rolled down the window. His car smelled.

  “It’s a surprise,” he said, launching into a spate of jokes about surprises.

  I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, listening to his windshield wipers squeak back and forth while AJ tried to imitate the sound. We drove for what seemed like forever, or maybe that’s what everything feels like when you’ve been seemingly kidnapped in your pajamas by a guy whose car smells like ass covered up with pine air freshener.

  Dick shook me awake. “You don’t want to miss this part.”

  I opened my eyes. We were on the highway. I saw a brown sign that said CORRECTIONAL FACILITY NEXT RIGHT.

  “That’s us,” he said.

  “Why are we going there?” I asked, feeling helplessness tingle up through my fingers that were splayed out, bracing myself against the dashboard. I felt it move up my arms, to the center of my chest, causing my heart to race. It was exactly the way I’d felt the day before at Gas-N-Go, except now, I had a real reason to feel it. I held AJ’s cage tightly between my legs, squeezing so hard the bars probably left indentations on my skin.

  Dick didn’t say anything, just hummed as we took the exit. The idle sound of it, the lack of fear it displayed, magnified my own.

  The correctional facility didn’t look the way I had thought it would. It didn’t look like an evil fairy-tale castle. It looked like a school. Like a really well-secured school.

  The guard at the security gate waved us through.

  “Ready?” Dick asked.

  “Did I sleep through my trial or something?” I tried to act tough like Cassie, hoping her strong words would keep me strong, but I was terrified. This was jail-jail, the thing Dick had told me was a possibility that first day in his office, but which I was never prepared to believe—never equipped to believe.

  We were here now. I couldn’t deny it anymore.

  “Just wait; it gets better,” he said.

  We drove on past the gate. I could see pens with barbed wire on the top, just like the barbed wire I had seen as a child when we would drive downtown to temple. Back then, I’d thought it was silver ribbon that had been pulled through scissors so it curled, like on the top of a wrapped present.

  I took AJ from his cage and put him on my shoulder. If I was going to be forced to go in there, at least I would have him with me.

  “No pets allowed,” Dick said. “Put the bird back or they’ll take him away.” I rubbed AJ’s head and locked him in his cage.

  Dick parked in a spot marked VISITOR.

  “What? You don’t have your own?” I asked, still channeling Cassie, hoping it would actually make me feel unafraid, wondering if it ever worked for her.

  “I try not to make a habit of coming here.”

  At least there was one unexpected plus if I was convicted—no more surprise visits from Dick Simon.

  …

  Inside, we were met by a female guard
, who patted me down and ushered us through a metal detector. Then she asked for our IDs.

  “Don’t have it,” I said, indicating my cold, wet pajamas, and finally starting to breathe again.

  It looked like whatever Dick Simon’s little plan was, it was about to blow up in his big, fat face. Until he handed her a copy of my birth certificate and my Collinsville South ID.

  “How the hell did you get those?”

  The guard who was attending us looked at me. “Do you always talk to your father like that?”

  “This is not my father,” I hissed.

  Dick Simon laughed. “You just made my day.” He slapped his leg. “And I didn’t even get strip searched.”

  Once we made it past security, we walked through a locked doorway into the visiting area, which really just looked like a crappy high school cafeteria. There were signs on the walls that said things like: NO FIGHTING, NO RUNNING, NO YELLING, NO SWEARING. It was like a very intense swimming pool.

  I took a deep breath and told myself that if we were in the visiting area, it meant we were just visiting. I would be back in the car with AJ soon.

  Dick led me over to a table where a girl sat waiting for us. She was big. And when I say big, I mean watermelon-size breasts, elephant-size thighs, and a camel toe from a biologically engineered camel. So much for bread and water.

  “I’m Stubby,” she said, standing. She was so short that she looked like she was still sitting down. Apparently she thought I had other notions about the origin of her name, since she said, “Because I smoke so much.”

  For my own safety, I decided against telling her that was probably not the reason. She squinted as she looked at me, then she turned to Dick. “So, this is that brat you’ve been telling me about.”

  Fabulous. Not only was I being discussed among the Save Amy Brain Trust, I was also being discussed by random teenage convicts.

  Wait. Was I a random teenage convict?

  “What’s your name?” She reached out to squeeze my cheek, and I pulled away. “You’re going to have to be a lot friendlier than that if you don’t want me to kill you.” She looked at me like I was a piece of prime rib she was planning on eating with her hands.