Pretty Amy (2 page)

She lit a cigarette. “I know, I know,” she said, exhaling, “I look like the lead singer of a Vegas lounge act. My brother already told me.”

“Not at all,” Lila said, looking to me like a combination of shocked and jealous.

I nodded in agreement. I was shocked and jealous. At Brian’s house later, two boys would have two girls to choose from. The way Cassie looked that night, she would be chosen first. I would be the one who was left, as usual, but that is the arithmetic that equals love in high school.

“Turn around,” Lila said, walking toward her and reaching for her dress.

“Fuck off,” Cassie said, pushing her away. “You can see my ass on the way out.”

Cassie pointed at me with the tip of her cigarette. “What the hell did you do to her face?”

“How do you know I did it?” Lila asked.

“Because Amy thinks light blue is daring.”

I hated to hear it, even though she was right.

“Don’t listen to her,” Lila said, holding my face between her hands and squeezing like a proud grandmother. “She wouldn’t know beauty if it crawled up her butt and pitched a tent.”

“Well, I know what it looks like when something crawls out,” Cassie said.

“Maybe it’s a little too much,” I said, looking over at Lila with eyes that begged for tissues, water,
turpentine
.

“It
is
too much,” Cassie said.

Lila stood there with her hands on her hips, her nails painted shiny silver, waiting for me to disagree. With Cassie on my side, there was no way.

“Fine,” Lila said, throwing me a box of those blessed tissues.

“At least now when we show up at Brian’s, he won’t try to be her pimp,” Cassie said, putting out her cigarette and walking downstairs.

…

Cassie started her rusted gold Civic, took off her red heels, and threw them over her shoulder. One of them barely missed my face.

“Hey, be careful.” I was sitting in the back, as usual. I picked up the shoes from where they had landed and placed them next to each other on the seat, so it looked like there had been someone standing there who had suddenly vanished.

“What do you want from me? I can’t drive in those things,” she said, lighting another cigarette.

Cassie, Lila, and I smoked a lot. We were proficient at leaning against things—walls and cars and fences—and we liked to lean against them and smoke. Like we’d seen James Dean doing in posters for movies we didn’t know the names of. When we couldn’t lean against things and smoke, we just smoked.

Lila lit her own cigarette and threw one to me in the back. “You can’t drive, period,” she said to Cassie, pulling the rearview mirror toward her so she could put on more lipstick.

Cassie glared at her and moved the mirror back.

“I’ll tell you if there’s anything coming up behind you,” Lila said.

“If I believed you could actually take your eyes off yourself for two seconds, I’d feel a little safer.”

“Then Amy can do it,” Lila said.

I just smiled. There was no way I was going to ride turned around with my knees on the seat, clutching the back window like some panting dog. Well, at least not while I was wearing a dress.

“Isn’t this great?” Lila said, watching her reflection in the window. “The three of us together for the most memorable night of our lives.” It was as if she wanted to see herself saying it, and then compare it with the way other girls had said it on nights like this.

I knew exactly what she meant, though. There was some kind of magic that resulted from being dressed up and young and headed for a night you were supposed to remember forever. I was about to try to put that incredible feeling into words when Cassie said, “This song sucks. Shut the fuck up and put in a new CD.”

Not quite what I would have said, but this was Cassie we were talking about.

“There’s no way I’m getting my hands dirty searching around the floor for your CD case. Why don’t you have an iPod like the rest of the world?” Lila asked.

“Why don’t you have a car?” Cassie retorted.

“Amy,” Lila demanded. And, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away with saying no twice, I rooted around on the floor, using only the very tips of my finger and thumb to pick up what I found. I didn’t find a CD case. I found a lot of sticky change, a glass pipe, and about twenty empty packs of cigarettes.

Cassie turned around. “It’s not there. My fucking brother.” That was the way Cassie referred to the members of her family. They were all her
fucking
something. Actually, that’s the way Cassie referred to everybody.

“Who cares?” Lila said, rolling down her window. She was not about to let Cassie ruin any part of this night for her.

The car screeched as we turned off Lila’s street, Macadamia Drive, a name that made it seem exotic somehow, but really it was just one of the streets named after nuts on the other side of Main.

Lila pulled her cigarette out of her mouth and checked to make sure there was a ring of lipstick around the filter. Things like that made her happy.

“Don’t worry,” Cassie said, “they can see your lips from space.”

…

We sat in Brian’s driveway arguing. Well, Lila and Cassie were arguing about whether we should walk to the door together or Lila should go on her own.

“I’m not sitting in the car like someone’s mother,” Cassie said, turning to me and gesturing for her shoes.

“But they don’t know you yet,” Lila said. “It’s probably better if I go alone and bring them out.”

“I don’t care either way,” I said, but the truth was, I kind of liked the idea of waiting in the car. There was no point in giving my date the opportunity to back out by letting him have a look at me first.

“Good, then let’s go.” Cassie slammed the door behind her and clomped up the walk.

She rang the doorbell and we waited. Waited for Brian to swing open the door and smile at us like a game-show host, telling us we looked stunning and introducing Cassie and me to our bachelors for the evening.

But the door stayed closed.

“I’ll do it,” Lila said, pushing her way through, her reasoning for Brian’s absence apparently the fact that Cassie didn’t know how to ring a doorbell. “They’re probably in the basement doing bong hits.” She rang the bell over and over so it made the impatient sound of a car alarm.

“Where are they?” Cassie asked.

“They have to be here,” Lila said, as much to herself as to us.

“Maybe we’re on
Punk’d
or something,” I said.

“That show is only for famous people, stupid,” Cassie said.

“Well, maybe we’re on a new show that we don’t know about yet,” I tried.

Cassie smirked. “Did you tell them the right night?”

Brian did attend a rival high school. It was possible he had been misinformed of the date of our prom. Even though I knew it was a crock, I attempted to hold onto this like a drowning person grabbing for an outstretched hand, because I was drowning.

I was.

Lila ignored Cassie and stuck her face to the sidelight window. She banged on the door like she was locked on the inside of it.

“There’s obviously no one home,” Cassie said, in a tone that suggested she was talking as much about Lila’s behavior as she was about Brian’s empty house.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I had been punched in the throat. This was supposed to be the night where my date would realize that he couldn’t live without me, that he would love me forever. But that date didn’t exist.

“I’m going to look around back,” Lila said, walking away in what appeared to be an attempt to shut Cassie up; this rarely worked.

“She’s so fucking clueless,” Cassie said, plopping down on the grass. She pulled out a handful of blades and burned them with her lighter. “Maybe he’ll come home if I burn his house down.”

I nodded. Not that I wanted her to burn his house down, but a small grass fire might attract some attention.

“This is so typical,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “I didn’t even want to go. Fucking Lila.”

“We don’t know they’re not coming,” I said. I wasn’t ready to let myself believe that this was going to be my memory of prom night for the rest of my life.

“Well, maybe
we
don’t,” she said, taking a long drag, “but I do.”

I stared at my nails. I had painted them in the same light blue as my dress. I thought about how the nail polish was still sitting on my nightstand, how when I got home I would scrub my nails raw and throw it away.

We looked up, startled by a crash that came from the back of the house.

Cassie shook her head. “You should never climb a trellis in heels.”

“You think Lila’s breaking in?”

She grabbed another handful of grass and lit it up. “You know what would be classic?” she asked, smiling like she was trying to keep a bird from flying out from behind her teeth. “She finds him in there with some other girl.” She watched me for a moment, gauging my reaction. “Don’t tell me that wouldn’t make you happy.”

It would have, so I didn’t.

Lila came around the side of the house. “No one’s there,” she said, as if that were news. “I did find this, though.” She threw a gallon Ziploc bag of pot on the ground in front of us.

“Holy shit,” Cassie said. “This is better than a stupid dance any day.” She held it up.

I knew Brian was a dealer, but I guess I didn’t know what that really meant.
This
was what that really meant.

“I’ve been stood up for my prom, in case you haven’t noticed,” Lila said.

“You’re the one who took it,” Cassie said, opening the bag and smelling it.

“Not for us; to piss off Brian. How can this be happening to me?”

“It’s happening to all of us.” I wasn’t about to let Lila take all the pain for herself, even though this was probably the first time she had ever experienced what I had felt so many times before—the pinprick pop and subsequent deflation of rejection.

“But he was my boyfriend,” Lila said.

I had to give her that. At least I hadn’t had sex with the boy who was dumping me. Though it did concern me that my date was rejecting me even with the knowledge that I might have.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Lila asked in a voice that seemed like someone yelling to the heavens after hitting her last straw.

“I have an idea,” Cassie said, shaking the bag.

I didn’t care what we did as long as it didn’t involve going home to my mother.

“How pathetic. My best prospects for dates are you two,” Lila said, a tear running down the side of her face, shiny and fat like a worm. “I can’t believe Brian would do this to me.” Lila looked like a wilted flower in the center of the lawn.

“Shut the fuck up about Brian; it’s over,” Cassie said. “Let’s go party.”

“I’m too upset,” Lila said, not moving.

I shrugged. Cassie could try, but I doubted we were going anywhere without Lila.

Cassie harrumphed and walked over to the front stoop. She pulled her dress up and her underpants down.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lila asked.

“Leaving him a present,” Cassie said as she peed all over the evening edition of the
Collinsville News
. “
Now
we can go have some fun.”

Two

Maybe Cassie meant to drive by our school, but maybe she just couldn’t avoid it. Collinsville is dissected by four major streets. Collinsville South High was positioned at the intersection of two of the major-est.

“Duck,” Cassie said as we drove by. The pot smoke was thick in the car. I didn’t think anyone could see us—not that anyone was looking, anyway.

Even though I was supposed to be ducking, I couldn’t help watching the limos lined up like a trail of ants marching from the street to the school driveway. Kids from our class were streaming out in cake-frosting-colored dresses and black tuxes; girls were hugging, boys were fist-bumping, and everyone was taking pictures with their phones.

I was hiding in a car smoking pot.

I wasn’t nearly as excited about having it as Cassie was, but I kept smoking. I’d only had pot a few times. Usually at parties, when other people were around to see me. I’d have just a small hit or two to look like I belonged there.

But that night, I inhaled and coughed, inhaled and coughed, until my lungs burned. I probably should have been scared to smoke that much, but I needed to be annihilated. I had to forget tomorrow, when I would wake up in one of the three hotel rooms we’d rented, alone in that big bed, my dress crumpled up on the floor like a discarded attempt at a love letter.

“Maybe Brian is there already,” Lila said. It seemed unlikely, but no less unlikely than being stood up for prom, no less unlikely than driving by our school in Cassie’s car pretending we didn’t want to be there.