Pretty Amy (12 page)

Not like we could have told her, anyway. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other, or to her unless she talked to us first, which seemed like a hurdle to the whole therapy thing. Apparently I was supposed to have some sort of psychic connection with the girls around me, but I tried saying,
OMG, WTF
,
This f-ing sucks!
telepathically, like I might send a text, but I received no response.

“You each have your refuse sticks and bags,” she said. “You will be required to pick up at least two pounds of trash, and we will stay here until every last one of you picks up your two pounds,” she yelled, standing in the seat. “This is to teach you accountability to your community. You need to learn that the things you do affect those around you.”

I didn’t think you were supposed to spell out things like that. I thought you were supposed to allow the patient to make her own connections. Evidently she didn’t have time for that.

She also didn’t have time for introductions. I didn’t find out her name, which was Ginny, until she passed around a time sheet. On the top was her name and below that six others that I tried to match up with the girls around me. I wondered if they were doing the same thing and if I had been mistaken for anyone else. I hoped it was the waif-thin girl with the Barbie-doll blond hair or the pretty brunette with full, red-grape-colored lips. It would have been nice to have someone see me that way for once.

We went to work, hobbling like hobos on the side of the road, scattering like little bugs on the shoulder of the highway. Ginny yelled through her megaphone as we worked, telling us to view the trash we picked up as a gathering of all the souls we affected with our drug use. To see each piece as one more person who forgave us.

I picked up an empty box of adult diapers and wondered who that was supposed to be.

“Hey,” whispered the waif-thin girl with the Barbie-doll blond hair. “What’d you do?”

I looked over at Ginny. She was busy shining her megaphone. “Pot,” I whispered back. “I got pulled over with my two best friends on the way from prom.”

“That was you?” she said, her eyes getting wide. “Cool.”

I got respect for being bad—that’s something Daniel and my parents would never understand. Something Joe would never understand.

“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t help basking in her admiration.

“Cocaine,” she said. “Well, I got caught shoplifting, but I had cocaine on me.”

“Crap,” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “I’m pretty much screwed.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Not as much as me,” she said.

“It was a lot of pot,” I said.

“It was
cocaine
,” she said.

“No talking,” Ginny yelled from her newly shined megaphone.

Without Lila and Cassie, was this the way the rest of my life was going to be? Empty conversations with girls I barely knew and would probably never
know
, where we talked about whose life sucked more?

Like before.

We went back to work. The side of the highway is where average trash goes to die. I picked up used condoms splayed out like squashed earthworms after a rainstorm and plastic bags of unidentified brown, yellow, and green stuff. I grabbed greasy wet paper bags with any number of surprises inside: maggot-infested, half-eaten hamburgers; the contents of someone’s car ashtray; fruit like rotted-out teeth. The list of shit went on and on, while Ginny yelled through her megaphone, “Remember why you are doing this. Remember that you can make a difference. That your life has consequences, that your actions have repercussions.”

I tried to do what Ginny asked, but it’s hard to heal when you’re supposed to find significance in picking up a used tampon.

Besides, wasn’t I the only person who had been affected by my drug use?

I was the one who had been arrested. I was the one who would have to answer for it and who had to go through all this crap. I was the one who had to try to figure out what to do next.

Thirteen

When my parents and I arrived for my arraignment, we found all of the lawyers schmoozing and shaking hands like they were at a cocktail party, asking about one another and one another’s families in small oscillating circles around the courtroom. This was like their prom, coming together from all their small towns to the big, important courtroom in the city.

The plaintiffs and their families looked like they were waiting in line at the DMV: rows and rows of torsos and heads that sat like marble busts until their number was called. Of course, we sat all the way in the back.

My mother probably hoped that there would be less likelihood of being seen, and as for my father, he always wanted to sit in the back so he would be close to the bathroom. That day, I was thankful for his embarrassing habit, because I had been throwing up steadily all morning.

Of course, I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave once the arraignment started, but I’d brought a white-and-tan Liz Claiborne purse that my mother had bought me back when she still thought she could change me.

When she saw me carrying it, she said, “At least you’re finally getting some use out of that. It was a good choice with the navy suit.”

I didn’t tell her I planned to use it as a barf bag.

The white headband she’d made me wear dug into my scalp. I looked around the room trying to find Cassie and Lila, but I didn’t see them. My mother liked to be early and so we found ourselves like this all the time—sitting in a line, my mother, my father, and me, waiting longer than other people waited for whatever we were waiting for.

The bench felt and looked like the wooden pews that filled our temple, and for a moment I found myself wondering if there was some supply store that only churches, temples, and courtrooms used.

I saw Dick Simon come in and heard him walk over to one of the groups of lawyers and give them a hearty hello. He was carrying a stack of binders, balancing them with his chin, as he made the rounds shaking everyone’s hands.

“It’s as cold as my wife’s side of the bed in here,” he said, laughing. “There’s my girl.” He pointed at me and walked toward us.

“How are we all doing today?” he asked, sitting next to me.

How did he think we were doing? I hate it when people say things because they’re used to saying them in other situations, without any thought that they are saying them in a completely inappropriate situation now.

We all looked at him, but none of us answered. He took my hand between both of his, making it look like our hand sandwich had the meat on the outside and that the meat was moldy olive loaf.

I pulled my hand away—just because this guy was my lawyer didn’t give him any right to touch me.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said, and I could smell ketchup on his breath, ketchup and root beer. He certainly wasn’t nervous. He was gorging himself at every drive-thru in town, while I couldn’t even keep down a piece of toast.

“This will be over before you know it,” he said. The thing people say before you get a shot. Before something painful and horrible is about to happen.

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.