Pretty Amy (18 page)

“Wow,” she said, “you’re a regular Amelia Earhart.” She closed her eyes, which let me know she was bored. Even
she
thought I was boring. “Haven’t you ever done anything crazy?” she asked, pulling her stole off and throwing it across the room. “Maybe something that doesn’t involve a pet bird?”

I thought about Aaron again. We had made out until my lips were chapped and raw, but that didn’t feel crazy, it felt right. I didn’t need to explain myself to him. Our lips were too busy to talk anyway.

“Not really,” I said. There was also the arrest. Sure, it seemed like exactly the kind of thing you would tell people about years later—
you can’t believe the crazy thing that happened to me in high school
—but sitting in the middle of it took away any glamour.

“Fine, let’s make this easier,” she said. “What will you do after you leave here?”

I thought about it: Did I need to work? What appointment did I have? I realized I didn’t know, which I took to mean I had nothing to do after this. I was actually pretty excited about that.

“Nothing,” I said, loving the plain blissfulness of the word.

She shook her head and heaved herself out of the bed and into a pair of slippers that was sitting on the floor.

Maybe I should have told her to sit down. I should have said,
Don’t overexert yourself
, but I was kind of hoping she would tire herself out enough that she would fall asleep and I could spend my remaining mandated time listening to her snore and rummaging through her room for the flask I knew she must have. The way she was acting, it was probable she had more than one.

“Bring that over here,” she said, motioning to the dresser. “I’m not about to be the only woman in the room wearing lipstick.”

Her makeup looked like it was from the Stone Age. I was positive I didn’t want it on my face and that if any of it
did
get on my face, it would probably cause a rash requiring immediate medical attention. At least there were nurses on staff.

“Make like you’re giving your beau a kiss,” she said, puckering her own lips, which looked like that part in the movie when the protagonist’s aunt is about to give him a kiss and all you can see is puckered, quivering lips coming toward you on the screen.

I could have protested, but she seemed to really be enjoying herself and at least she’d stopped asking me questions. Then she picked up the eye shadow and blush. She looked like she was having an epileptic fit and who knows—the way my face turned out, maybe she had one.

I needed to stop letting people put makeup on me.

I turned and looked at myself in the mirror and felt that strange sensation you get when you’re walking down the street and you see someone who looks just like you, and for a second you think you’re looking at yourself and then you realize it’s just someone else, with a completely different life, who has your hair, or nose, or eyes.

She stood behind me with her finger on her chin. “Something’s missing,” she said, and went to her closet. “This.” She handed me an old, silver-sequined flapper dress, which would have actually been pretty cool if it weren’t covered with huge brown rust spots. “Arms up,” she said, and she waddled behind me with the dress. At least she was letting me wear it over my clothes—whatever bacteria it housed would have to travel through a layer of fabric before it could reach my skin and turn my nerves into children’s paste. “Perfect,” she said, sitting on the bed to catch her breath. “Now at least you look interesting.”

That would not have been the word I would have chosen. I looked like an extra from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

“You’re worse than that kid they sent me last week. President of the chess club. Sure, chess is boring, but at least he was passionate about it.” She waited, probably so I could tell her what I was passionate about.

But there was nothing, had been nothing since I was little and wanted to be a bird. After that, I just wanted a friend, a best friend, and after I had those friends, I didn’t hope for anything else. I thought if I did, they would get taken away, but they got taken away anyway.

“What I’ve learned about you in the past twenty minutes is that your name is Amy, you are seventeen, you have a pet bird, and you do nothing,” she said.

I looked down. Was she right?

“You have your whole life ahead of you and that’s all you have to say about it?”

It was exactly the sort of thing old people say to young people, when it appears to those old people that those young people are wasting their lives. But I wasn’t one of those young people anymore.

This was my life, arrest or no arrest. I had done very little and wanted even less. It sounded a lot worse when she said it back to me, though, even with the arrest tacked on.

“I might as well call the chess wiz back in here,” she said, closing her eyes again.

I started to feel angry. Started to hear the words that usually would have stayed in my head come pouring out. “What do you want from me? I got arrested. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life because I don’t have a life anymore, okay?”

She put her hand to her throat and sucked in hard. I had rendered her speechless. For once that day, she had no more questions, so I kept talking.

“It’s easy for you to tell me that I’m wasting my life. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know there’s nothing that makes me special? That the only thing I may ever do that makes news is, as far as my parents are concerned, the
worst thing I’ve ever done
?”

I watched her, waiting for a reaction. I’m not sure what reaction I wanted, but the one I got certainly wasn’t the one I expected. She gurgled and started turning blue.

I ran into the hallway screaming for a doctor, a nurse, anyone to help.

I hadn’t rendered her speechless. She had been having trouble breathing and I hadn’t even noticed. The person I’d finally chosen to tell everything that Daniel had wanted to hear, couldn’t hear me anyway.

As I watched from the corner of the room, hoping they could resuscitate her, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was something to that personality test after all.

…

Mrs. Mortar had really gotten to me. Walking home, I tried to think about Aaron, tried to tell myself that he didn’t feel the same way she did, couldn’t feel the same way she did. But how did I really know how he felt?

Maybe he’d realized after last night that I wasn’t who he had thought I was, that I was boring. Maybe, after last night, I would never see him again.

I had spent all of ten minutes with Mrs. Mortar and she had dismissed me as a nobody, a loser. I had to ask someone who knew me if she was right.

Instead of going home, I stopped at Joe’s. His house looked the way it always did: small, olive green with chocolate-fudge trim, with a rainbow daisy spinner, spinning like something was chasing it, stuck in the front yard.

The only difference was that, for the first time in three years, I was going to walk up the driveway that we used to draw all over with chalk. I was going to ring the doorbell that we used to treat as a musical instrument, driving his mother and dachshund Spud crazy. I was going to stand on the porch we used to hide under.

I rang the bell. I tried not to think about how long it had been since I was able to walk in without even knocking. How long it had been since I had even been inside. How hopeless I really must have felt to ignore all that and ring his doorbell anyway.

I heard Spud start barking, that familiar yippy sound. I rang the bell again, hoping to drown it out.

“Oh, are we talking again?” Joe asked as he opened the door. I heard Spud come up behind him, his nails scratching on the linoleum as his little legs ran toward the door. Joe looked at me like I was back from the dead. I guess in some ways I was.

“Amy, what the hell?” he asked.

“Sorry, I know, I shouldn’t have come here.”

“No, what the hell are you wearing?”

I looked down. In all the commotion at the nursing home, I had forgotten to take off Mrs. Mortar’s dress. “Trick or treat,” I said, shrugging. It was easier than explaining my zombie-wear.

“Are you on something?” he asked, squinting.

Considering how I looked, the odds were probably PCP. Joe held Spud at his side with his leg as the dog started to whine.

“Do you think I’m boring?” I asked, itching my cheeks. I
knew
Mrs. Mortar’s makeup was toxic. Well, at least there was the possibility of me dying before I had to hear Joe’s answer.

“What? Amy, what is wrong with you? If you’re on drugs or something, you need to leave.”

Spud continued to whine, giving me big brown eyes that I knew were begging for a pet. I put my hands behind my back, trying to fight the urge.

“Joe,” I said, opening my eyes wide so he could see they were clear, could see I was sober. “Do you think I’m boring?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just answer the question, please.”

He sighed. “I think you’re annoying. I think you’re frustrating. I think you’re exhausting. But no, not boring.”

“You’re sure?” I knew I sounded desperate, but at that moment there was little I could do to contain it. I couldn’t hide behind my mean girl when I was the one who had rung the doorbell.

“Um, yeah.” He started to laugh.

“What?”

“Amy, I mean, you haven’t been to my house in years and you finally come here and you look…” He laughed again, harder.

“I know,” I said. I guess I’d hoped he wouldn’t mention the part about me being the one to actually ring his doorbell.

He picked up Spud and held him. “So, why are you here?”

Why was I there? I looked down. Mrs. Mortar’s dress was so long it covered my sneakers. I couldn’t move. “I guess I just wanted to ask you that,” I said.

“You’re acting weird, and not the way you usually act weird. Like, bald
Britney Spears weird.”

“Sorry,” I said.
Not like I usually act weird.
I assumed he meant toward him.

I wanted Joe to say something else. I wanted to say something else. But what did he want to hear? What did I want to hear?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I was so far from okay, but how could I explain that to Joe? After his father left, he’d made it his mission to pretend he was
.
At seven, having watched his father pack up his car and drive down our street and away from him, his mom, and Spud, Joe tried to convince everyone he was
fine
, just like I was trying to do now.

Joe waited for my answer. He held Spud tightly in his arms, even as he squirmed. Joe’s hands were motionless, anything to be regular, anything to be normal.

My hands were still behind my back. I wanted to pet Spud. I wanted to let him lick my face the way he used to—well, once Mrs. Mortar’s makeup was safely removed.

“No,” I said.

He nodded. “Will you be okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling like I was going to start crying. I didn’t want to cry, not in front of Joe. “I think I have to get home.”

“Right,” he said, stepping back, realizing that whatever truce we had fashioned in that strange, delicate moment was over.

“I guess I’ll see you at graduation,” he said, heaving Spud on his shoulder with one hand as he closed the door with the other.

He wouldn’t, but I didn’t want to tell him that. At least he could believe I would be there. At least he wouldn’t know how bad things had gotten, not yet.

Nineteen

I came home to find Dick Simon sitting at the dinner table with my parents. He was in my seat, which bothered me a lot less than the fact that he was in my house. Forget about coming home to find one of your teachers sitting with your parents at the dinner table with a bib around her neck. Finding your lawyer is much, much worse.

I was hoping he hadn’t been briefed on the Mrs. Mortar situation and wasn’t there to tell me that not only was I up on drug charges, I had been accused of attempted murder, too.

My mother was in a pink-and-white-checkered half apron, and she was at the stove stirring a pot full of something I was sure she hadn’t made. She never wore an apron and she never cooked. She must have called the caterer. Not a caterer,
the
caterer. She used him so often he was referred to as
the
. That night, she was “making” her famous heated-up whatever she’d ordered, and then everyone could rave about how exceptional she was at dialing a phone and how knowledgeable she was about the mysterious world of temperature.

Whatever. It meant this little visit had not been impromptu. They had invited Dick Simon over for a reason.

“No need to get all dressed up for me,” he said, laughing.

“You’re late,” my mother said, turning away from the stove to look at me. “What on earth?”

I was still wearing that disgusting dress. I pulled it over my head and threw it in the trash. I didn’t really want to get into everything that had happened, so I took a seat at the table and said, “I made a new friend.”