Pretty Amy

by Lisa Burstein

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Tasting the Y-E-S—positive, strong, the way I wanted to feel, even though I was terrified.

  Yes, AJ tweeted, yes, yes, yes.

  I’d wanted the words to be perfect. It seemed like they should be profound or something for as long as everyone had been waiting to hear them, but all I could say was yes. I guess sometimes saying what you mean is enough.

  No one asked me if I was sure, no one said anything. I think they were afraid that if they started talking, I would change my mind.

  Five pens were shoved in my face, waiting to be picked like kids on a playground. I took my father’s and signed my metaphorical death warrant.

  My hand shook as I wrote my name. It was scary enough to admit that I was alone, without having to admit I had no idea who I was anymore. I would deal with that another day.

  Dick Simon took the paper and touched the back of my head, which for some reason I allowed. I hoped that my fall hadn’t caused a form of brain damage that made me want to respect my elders, because that would make the rest of my life a major drag.

  Thirty-six

  Even though I’d signed the paper, I still had to go to the judge’s chambers to hear my sentencing. “It needs to be made official,” Dick said. “Nothing is definite until the fat lady sings, and my wife ain’t much of a singer.”

  Basically, it meant that the judge had until the last minute to decide whether or not to give me another chance.

  Was that what I was being given? It didn’t feel that way. It felt like I was starting over, which I guess was the same thing, except starting over sounds terrifying by comparison.

  Dick met us on the courthouse steps. The sun was so bright that the white concrete columns seemed to reflect light like mirrors. I could feel myself sweating under my suit jacket. Hopefully this would be the last time I would ever have to wear it.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get to see me go to trial,” Dick said. “It’s the only thing I’m better at than telling a joke.”

  My parents just smiled. They had been smiling themselves silly since I signed that stupid paper. I was surprised that their cheeks weren’t bleeding.

  “Doing okay, Amy?” Dick asked.

  “She’s super,” my mother said, smiling more, if that were possible. Basically it meant that I was doing everything they told me to. Everything could go back to the way it used to be. Well, everything that didn’t involve Lila and Cassie.

  I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “You’re not nervous, are you?” Dick asked.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t sure what I was.

  “How much longer?” I asked, looking at my phone. Joe still hadn’t texted me back from the night before. Even though I’d apologized, maybe I was too late. Maybe a text wasn’t enough.

  “Ten minutes or so. Let’s go inside and sit down,” Dick said.

  We sat in the marble-floored hallway on wooden-backed chairs that faced away from the judge’s gold-lettered office door. My mother grabbed onto my father’s hand, her diamond ring glinting in the overhead lights. They had been touching each other more since I signed that paper than I think they had their entire marriage.

  “Amy, I’m just so proud of you.” My mother looked at me and started to cry, like it was my wedding day or something.

  My father pulled her in close and hugged her. “We both are.”

  I wished my mother hadn’t been so busy being proud of me to remember to nag me into carrying that lame Liz Claiborne purse, because nausea was high in my throat.

  I knew I was supposed to feel like I had been somewhere, or done something, or changed in some deep way, but mostly I just felt like I’d been treading water and while I wasn’t looking, someone had come by and drained the pool.

  “Do I have time to use the bathroom?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Dick Simon said, “just keep it to numero uno.”

  I wasn’t sure what number was about to heave out of me. I left them sitting there and ran toward the nearest bathroom. I could hear their voices echoing behind me, peeping like ladies at a tea party.

  I darted to the first stall, puked, flushed, and went to the sink. I turned on the tap and slurped water from it like it was a drinking fountain. Maybe I was nervous, or maybe I was just allergic to doing what my parents told me to.

  I felt someone pull me away from the sink and throw me against the wall.

  “You bitch,” Cassie spat. “I didn’t think I’d see you again, but I am so glad I did.”

  I looked around for a weapon. Then I looked at her stomach. I considered telling her I had fresh sutures in my mouth, but that was just the kind of nerdy thing that would make someone like her beat you even harder.

  She kicked the wall next to me. “You sold us out,” she said, her eyelids squeezed as thin as paper cuts.

  Cassie was going to massacre me. At least there would be lots of police around to see her do it.

  “I had to.”

  “Really? Well, I pleaded not guilty, because that’s what innocent people do, Amy,” she said.

  “But my lawyer said guilt didn’t matter.”

  “Your lawyer. You’ve got all these people telling you what to do and you’re still a fucking mess.”

  Maybe I was, but I was trying. I felt like I was saying what I wanted to, doing what I wanted to, what I needed to. Well, at least starting yesterday.

  “Did your mommy and daddy make you?” she asked.

  “Shut up.” I thought about Aaron and felt sick again. She had no idea.

  “I guess you didn’t know what to do without Lila around pulling your strings,” she said.

  “Or without you giving me crap all the time,” I said, squirming under her weight.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m about to give you some crap.” She smiled and lifted her fist.

  “Cassie, please, I’m sorry,” I said. Even though she was about to kill me, I was glad I had the opportunity to apologize. None of this had been her fault. She had been pulled into it, just like I had.

  “Cassie, please,” she mimicked.

  “What was I supposed to do? Lila left. You got pregnant,” I said. “What was I supposed to do, Cassie? Tell me.”

  She let go. “I am going to fucking kill Ruthie Jensen. I’m not fucking pregnant.”

  I looked at her. She was exhaling hard, hot, like a fire-breathing dragon.

  I should have known Ruthie was lying. “I’m glad,” I said.

  “You really think I’m that stupid?” she asked, her face turning red.

  “No. I mean, I didn’t know what to think.”

  We stood there staring at each other, with our hands at our sides, waiting.

  “So kick my ass already,” I said. I figured I might as well get it over with. Pull the Band-Aid off with one clean swipe. Maybe the judge would feel bad for me if I had a black eye.

  She reared up her fist. I closed my eyes and waited. I thought about how I had seen her do this to other people, other people who had wronged us, had talked about us behind our backs.

  I couldn’t believe I had become one of those people.

  I heard her punch the wall next to me and start cackling.

  “I’m getting rehab, just thirty days,” she said. “Your lawyer isn’t the only one who can make deals.”

  “You were screwing with me?” I pushed her into the sink.

  “Ow,” she said, pushing me back. “You deserved it. I mean, rehab is going to suck.”

  “I didn’t deserve that,” I said, pushing her again.

  “You want to start something now?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Me, too,” she said. “Lila.” Cassie shook her head. “What a crazy bitch. She made us look like serial killers or something.”

  I nodded. I guess I hadn’t thought about how strange it was that she’d taken off. All I had been thinking about was that she had left me. That had been all I cared about.

  “I gu
ess Brian’s gone, too,” Cassie said. “You know his friend, Aaron or whatever. He came to see me at work.”

  I felt dizzy. He had tried to get to Cassie, too. He was even more of an asshole than I thought he was. “Really,” I said, waiting for her to tell me her story, my story.

  “I threw a Pepsi in his face and told him to get lost,” she said.

  Cassie. She was so strong. That was why I loved her.

  “There’s no way I was going to fall for his bullshit,” she said.

  I guess I had fallen for some of his bullshit, but I felt like it meant something that I hadn’t even considered taking the blame for him. Maybe I was stronger than I thought I was.

  “Are you scared?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, but I could tell she was lying. I could tell that her tough words were just that.

  “My parents didn’t make me,” I said, realizing that they really hadn’t.

  “Whatever,” she said, fixing her hair in the mirror. “My parents made me.”

  I thought back to the night her mom had come in to Gas-N-Go, Cassie waiting in the car. Her mother had made her wait in the car. Her mother had made her stay away from me.

  “What kind of person just leaves?” Cassie asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. I guess Cassie and I were the kind of people who didn’t.

  “I forgive you,” she said. “Lila’s a bitch, but I forgive you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, realizing she was doing easily what I had found it so hard to do. Throwing out apologies and forgiveness like candy coming from a piñata. “Are you going to forgive Ruthie Jensen?” I asked.

  “No fucking way,” she said.

  I laughed. The kind of laugh I had thought I would never laugh again.

  Cassie laughed, too. “See you,” she said as she left the bathroom.

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you around.”

  Though I guessed I probably wouldn’t. Without Lila, Cassie and I were like a two-sided triangle, our lines continuing on and on with nothing to connect them. And I knew that day that Lila was never coming back.

  I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I took it out and a text from Joe flashed across the screen.

  Welcome back, Amy.

  I guess I wasn’t too late.

  …

  I found Joe waiting for me under his porch when I got back from the courthouse. I didn’t even take the time to change out of my suit. I ducked under the slats, smelling the wet earth, feeling the instant chill of being hidden from the sun. He handed me a juice box.

  “Took you long enough,” he said.

  I sat on the ground next to him.

  “Is it over?” he asked.

  “Mostly,” I said. It was, but there was still him, us to figure out. At least I hoped there was.

  “You look like you’re playing dress-up,” he said, laughing.

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling at my pants. “I’m going to burn this stupid suit.”

  We sat there listening to Spud bark in the yard, probably at a squirrel, maybe at a bird.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?” he asked, casually taking a sip of his juice box. I was allowed under the porch again, but being allowed back into his life required more.

  I shrugged. There was so much. Some had to do with him, but most didn’t.

  “I need you to tell me,” he said.

  Signing the paper had been easy, but Joe demanded words. He deserved them. I deserved them.

  “For choosing them over you,” I said quietly.

  He looked at me, waiting. He knew me well enough to know there was more I wanted to say. Something I was building up to.

  “For choosing”—it came out slowly, like someone checking the temperature of a pool with her toes first—“them over me.”

  He nodded.

  That was all it had ever been—so simple, yet so hard to admit.

  “It was always about you, Amy,” he said.

  Daniel had been trying to get the same thing out of me during all those sessions, but I hadn’t wanted to tell him. I’d wanted to tell someone who understood that it wasn’t just about the arrest—someone who knew what those words really meant and how important it was for me to say them.

  I guess I’d wanted to tell Joe.

  My eyes started to burn with tears. I took a breath, pushed the air back out.

  “Sorry I was kind of an ass about it,” he said, looking remorseful.

  “You really were.” I laughed, wiping my eyes. “But I was, too.”

  “You really were.” He laughed. He held his juice box in the air.

  “What are we toasting?” I asked, copying him.

  “This, I guess,” he said, clinking his with mine. “You being you. Me being me. No more pretending.”

  We both drank. That familiar slurping sound—my mouth filled with grape juice, sweet and wonderful. It tasted like Joe.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said, and I knew he meant it. I knew the weirdness between us that had begun freshman year had been because we’d started having feelings that scared us, that made us want to pretend we didn’t feel anything at all. That made ignoring each other safer.

  “I am,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “I will be.”

  “I almost failed English without you, Fleishman,” he said.

  “Spud never learned to talk?” I joked.

  “No,” he said, putting his hands on his legs and squeezing. They were shaking more than I’d ever seen them shake. Twitching like he was holding handfuls of bees.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, feeling selfish. Maybe some of those messages had been because Joe wanted to talk to me, too.

  “Same as always,” he said, a slat of sunlight hitting his face as he turned to me. I hadn’t been this close to him in a while. I had forgotten how green his eyes could get. How his eyelashes were the color of deer fur.

  “You don’t have to lie,” I said. “Considering what I’ve been through, I think I can take it.”

  “There’s time for that,” he said, taking the last sip from his juice box, pressing it flat.

  His hands started shaking again. I took them in mine—held them tightly, the way I had when we were kids. That familiar feeling, but charged with want. “What now?” I asked.

  He shrugged. He looked at me, his mouth open slightly. “Should we kiss?” he said softly, like I was a mouse he was trying not to scare.

  “We could,” I teased, still holding his hands. I could feel his fingers stroking the insides of my palms.

  “Do you want to?” he asked. “I mean, we don’t have to,” he said, stumbling over his words.

  I leaned in and kissed him. We’d already wasted too much time pretending. His lips and tongue were cold from the grape juice. But I felt heat blooming on my face, in my throat, and then through each strand of hair, as he stopped and breathed onto my neck. It wasn’t like kissing Aaron, when I’d kept wondering why. With Joe, instead of feeling uncertain, all I felt was sure.

  All I felt was right.

  “I missed you,” he said. He touched the sides of my face; he touched my lips. His hands were still.

  I kissed him again, harder. Punishing his lips for all the time we’d spent apart. I had missed him. I had missed me.

  “Thanks for the messages,” I said.

  “You would have done the same for me,” he said.

  We kept kissing, until our mouths and stomachs ached. In the time we had spent avoiding each other, Joe had actually become a pretty good kisser. Maybe he had always been a good kisser.

  “So, does this mean you’re finally going to quit smoking?” Joe asked, laughing into my lips.

  “Not going to give up on that, huh?” I asked.

  “Not this time,” he said, kissing me again.

  Thirty-seven

  Probation, a fine, and drug tests every month for a year. Dick said I was lucky. My parents just about wet themselves. I guess I did, too.

  They never f
ound Lila. She, like all attractive people, seemed to get away with things whether she tried to or not. There is a part of me that still wants to believe she was kidnapped. That she was taken by a wolf in the night, clenched between his jaws, struggling and bleating like a lamb. But that’s only when I’m feeling generous.

  Cassie went to rehab for thirty days. She’d made her deal by naming Aaron and some other people as the next ones up the line. I hoped they would have some anger management classes for her, too.

  Connor was still happy. Daniel was still attempting to help reluctant patients, and Dick Simon still told horrible jokes. He sent them along with the seemingly never-paid-off invoice he mailed me weekly. The last one had a joke about a guy who had to pay his bills by candlelight because he always kept his electric bill for last.

  As a self-imposed penance for breaking into Lollipop Farm, I volunteered to help Annie at night after I finished work at Gas-N-Go. I didn’t mind. I liked being with the dogs and they liked being with me.

  During the day, my father, Joe, and I were building AJ an aviary—a big, beautiful wooden structure the size of a sunroom—in our backyard. We would work before my father left for the office in the morning and during his lunch hour, the smell of fresh wood filling our patio.

  My mother wasn’t thrilled about having something imperfectly built by our hands in our yard for everyone to see, but I think she was starting to learn that you couldn’t hide behind perfection.

  Just like I was starting to learn you couldn’t hide behind failure.

  Unfortunately, I am only myself. I am scared and alone and unsure, but I am practicing. I am scared and alone and unsure, but that doesn’t mean I always will be.

  Like AJ repeating words, I can repeat being me, until I start to believe it.

  Sometimes Joe and I will sit on the swings in my backyard and admire what we are building. It’s just a skeleton of sand-colored wood and silver nails, but I can picture the day it will be ready; the day I will release AJ.

  I can see him on that first flight. His little yellow body moving fast and hard like a tennis ball hit back and forth and back and forth. Choosing to land, or fly, or just be, and having the space to do so.