Pretty Amy (16 page)

Joe and I walked home most days when it was nice enough, as long as he didn’t have volleyball practice. Our walk took about fifteen minutes, longer than riding the bus, but on a nice day it was totally worth it to avoid those disgusting green seats and dungeon smells and intestinal sounds. We’d walk through the soccer field at the back of the school, which became a field of wild grasses and then undergrowth and woods before finally coming out at the mouth of our neighborhood—where the pavement and green street signs began.

We were quiet as we walked the length of the soccer field. Even though we had known each other forever, the older we got, the harder it was to find things to say. Maybe it was because we had known each other forever.

“Homework.” Joe sighed, indicating his stuffed backpack. “English.” He smiled.

“You’d think with as much as you talk, you’d be good at it by now,” I said, falling into our lighthearted routine.

It had started in seventh grade when Joe realized I was better at English than he was, and I realized Joe was better at math than I was. We’d joke that if we were one person, we might actually get into Harvard.

He laughed. “You going to help me or not, Fleishman?”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No geometry tonight.”

“You will have geometry homework again,” he said, his voice going robotic. “It is statistically definite.”

“Maybe if you give Spud a treat, he’ll help you.” I shrugged. I always acquiesced, but never right away.

The ground below us turned from perfectly manicured green to hay-field yellow as we left the school grounds.

“If I’d taught my dog to speak English, I wouldn’t still be going to high school,” Joe said.

“If you’d taught your dog to speak English, you wouldn’t need help with your English homework.”

We ducked into the woods. Branches broke under our feet as we walked. The sun speckled our skin with light through the leaves above. I guess that was why we still walked together—for this familiar talk and feeling and sound. It wasn’t something that could happen while we were at school, while we were inside the walls that pushed us into being the people we were supposed to be.

“Maybe AJ can help me,” he joked. “Is he busy tonight?”

“Fine.” I sighed. “Come over after dinner.”

“Success,” Joe said, punching his fist into the air.

I pulled out a cigarette and leaned against a tree, stopping to light it. I had only just started hanging out with Lila and Cassie and smoking was a part of that, whether they were around or not.

“What are you doing?” Joe exclaimed, stopping to look at me.

I shrugged and exhaled smoke into the smell of fresh pine, trying to seem casual, even though my stomach felt like it housed a flea circus.

“Seriously?” Joe asked. “You’re smoking now?”

It was the first time I’d had the nerve to smoke in front of him, to bring the new me into our old ritual. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting.

Probably this.

“Don’t worry. I won’t start a fire,” I said, still not admitting anything. I looked at the rough trail below. It was covered in fallen leaves—red, brown, and yellow. I could have started a fire easily. I held the discarded ashes in my hand.

“When did you start?” he asked.

“A while ago.” I shrugged, but the fleas in my stomach were doing a trampoline act. It had really only been a few weeks, but for some reason I didn’t want him to know that.

“
Why
did you start?” His eyes were squinting from the smoke.

“I like it,” I said. It was true. Not the smoking itself, the way it burned my lungs and made my heart race, but the way I felt holding a cigarette. Like a completely different person.

“They make you smell,” he said, waving at the air in front of him.

“Since when do you care what I smell like?” I pushed him playfully.

He didn’t push me back.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re different,” he said, turning away from me and starting to walk away.

“So are you,” I said, following after him.

He was. Maybe I was flaunting mine, but he was different, too. We could pretend as much as we wanted on these walks, but that didn’t change anything that happened between bells ringing.

“You’re really different,” he said, staring straight ahead.

“Is that why you ignore me in school?” I guess these were the things that were hard to say, that caused our long silences, but if he was going there, I was, too.

“You ignore
me
,” he said.

I didn’t answer, just took a drag of my cigarette, letting him understand that we were talking about the same thing.

“Why do you even like those girls?” he asked. He heaved his backpack up, and I couldn’t help looking at his hands. I saw the familiar twitch, even as he grabbed the shoulder strap tightly.

“They’re nice,” I said. “They’re nice to me.”

“Everyone says they’re sluts.”

“Who’s everyone?”

He had no answer to that.

We walked out of the woods, the trail below us turning to pavement that was glittery in the sunlight. I stomped the cigarette out. Once, twice, three times. Though I had wanted Joe to know I’d started smoking, I wasn’t ready for my parents to know it.

“Besides, don’t guys like sluts?” I joked.

“Are they making you do it?” he asked, still not looking at me.

“No,” I said. They weren’t. They were letting me in.

“I’m not going to walk home with you anymore if you’re going to smoke,” he said.

“Is that a threat?” I tried to keep joking with him, but I knew it wasn’t working. He was serious. He was telling me that I needed to pick—him or them.

That choice should have been easy. Our walks home were really the only time we saw each other during the school day. It wasn’t like he met me at my locker between classes or sat with me at lunch. Lila and Cassie
did.

“I bet AJ wouldn’t like it,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?”

He stared straight ahead. His soft, amiable profile looked angry.

“You’d better not tell my parents,” I said.

“I bet that kid at camp wouldn’t have kissed you if you smelled like an old ashtray,” he said.

“Joe, shut up.” I couldn’t believe he was talking about that. I don’t even know why I’d told him about it. Maybe because at the time I didn’t have anyone else to tell.

It wasn’t like the kiss had been that good, or at least not as good as I’d thought it was supposed to be. The kid kissed like a plunger with a snake’s tongue. By the time we’d finished making out, the skin around my mouth was tender and pink, like I had fallen asleep in the sun with a ski mask on.

I’d never told Joe about that part.

“Not to mention, they’re horrible for you,” he said, his voice escalating.

I knew cigarettes were horrible for me. Who didn’t know that? It wasn’t what smoking was about, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain that to Joe. He wasn’t a girl. He wasn’t me.

“Why are you so mad?” I asked.

“I’m not,” he said. “Do whatever you want.”

We turned down our street. Joe was walking so fast it was hard to keep up with him. “Slow down,” I said.

He was a whole house length in front of me, his legs pumping like he was on his bike. I would have had to run to keep up. He didn’t want me to keep up.

I trailed him all the way to his house. I watched as he unlocked, then slammed his front door, without turning around to say good-bye.

He was supposed to come over after dinner that night. We were supposed to sit on the floor of my bedroom while he tried to teach AJ swear words and I tried to teach him vocabulary words. But he never did.

He never came over again.

Seventeen

There was no gas at Gas-N-Go. There had been a time when they did sell gas, but it was long before me and long before Connor. What I think probably happened was that the place had gas when Mancini bought it and when it ran out, he was too cheap to buy more.

Mancini never got rid of the pumps because, according to him, even though there was no gas, he still wanted people to think there was. So a customer would drive up and try to get gas, realize there wasn’t any, and stop in to the store to buy something, since they’d bothered to take the time to stop anyway. He was a marketing genius.

Every time the doorbell rang that night to announce someone’s arrival, I hoped it would be Lila and Cassie, coming in to buy cigarettes and a chaser for whatever bottle of liquor they had taken from their parents, the way we used to. But it never was. Everything was different now. I couldn’t expect the things I used to expect, especially when it came to Lila and Cassie.

It was always just one of the typical Gas-N-Go customers; they all said the same thing. It was like they were talking dolls on a conveyor belt and when they got to the counter, I pulled their string. If it was cold out, they usually said something about how cold it was. If it was hot out, ditto. Basically any weather system was contrasted in relation to some apex of that system. It was captivating.

Men liked to drum their hands on the counter as they waited for their change and women liked to keep their hands on their purses like I was going to steal them. Kids my age tended to lean on the counter and play with the custom lone penny in the Take-a-Penny, Leave-a-Penny
tray
,
sliding it back and forth like a rake in a baby Zen sand garden.

Connor stayed close to the cash register. Apparently when he’d balanced it out after my last shift, it had come up fifteen dollars short. If I had known more about the stupid thing, I could have used that to my advantage and actually taken some money.

“Do you need to stand so close to me?” I asked. Not only did he stay close to the cash register, he also stayed right on my ass.

“Mancini told me I had to watch you.”

I tried to move away from him. “You smell like old diapers,” I said, because he really did.

“Not all of us have the free time you do to devote to bathing,” he said.

“Gross,” I said, inching away.

“It’s a lot of work raising two kids, working, making ends meet.”

As busy as I was, I still found time to shower. I guess Connor was one of those people who had to let everyone else know how horrible he thought his life was. It was enough to make a person in my position sick with envy.

I heard the bell above the door and was relieved that someone was coming in, if only so it would end Connor’s pity party. That is, until I saw who it was.

Leslie Preston walked down the aisles like she had been in to shop a thousand times before. Her honey-colored hair shone in the lights. Her teeth and eyes practically sparkled. It could only be my luck that I’d gotten a job where she bought her binge food.

In addition to being Joe’s whatever, she had also been Homecoming Queen. In all likelihood she had been Prom Queen, too, not that I had been there to confirm it. So much had changed since prom. Since the night she and Joe had kept us out of the gym. I felt sick. At least Joe wasn’t with her.

“Oh, crap,” I said. Having everyone see me with my mom in the hallway at school would have been bad, but having Leslie Preston see me here, in this shirt, with Connor, was worse—much, much worse.

“Don’t swear,” Connor whispered. I guess my use of the word mattered more to him than why I was saying it.

I didn’t know what to do, so I looked down, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me. The chances of that were slim, seeing that anyone given the choice of looking at Connor or me would have to choose me, especially if that person was about to eat.

She walked to the cooler and grabbed a Diet Pepsi—probably her dinner—and slapped it on the counter like she was killing a spider.

“Is that all for you this evening?” Connor asked in his disgustingly happy customer-service voice.

Yeah
, I thought,
until she notices me and rips me a new one. Just this Diet Pepsi and a side of humiliation served cold.
I kept looking down, but I knew she could see me, knew she was looking at me and thinking all the snobby things she always thought about me and now that she had validation for them, thinking them even more.

“Do you take fifties?” she asked, pulling out a crisp one. She held it by the edge like she had just gotten her nails done, perfect pink gumballs at the ends of her fingers.

“You’re not trying to pull one over on us, are you?” Connor asked in his singsong
I am the best employee ever
voice.

She looked at him like his face was made of puke. That was how Leslie Preston looked at everyone, though I couldn’t blame her in this case.

“Watch how I make the correct change,” he said to me, and I knew I was in for it. She was totally going to let me have it. Tell me what a loser I was, what a joke my life had become, ask me how I could even show my face after what had happened.