Pretty Amy (27 page)

Everyone at my school was there without me.

Everyone at my school knew I wasn’t there.

Just like the prom.

I put AJ on my shoulder and went back upstairs. If I couldn’t be there, at least I could see it.

I turned on the computer.
You’ve got mail
, it said.

You’ve got mail
, AJ repeated.

I logged on to the school website. My username and password still worked. Even if they had gotten rid of me at school, they had forgotten to erase me from cyberspace.

The camera was fixed on the auditorium stage. The thick, red-velvet curtains were open, a mouth framing Mr. Morgan and selected dignitaries. Mr. Morgan stood at the center of the stage, smiling and hand-shaking and passing out rolled-up diplomas. The ceremony was almost over.

A line of my classmates waited next to the stage, each wearing the cap and gown I’d had to return for a refund. Ready to accept the diploma I would get by mail. They looked like they actually cared for once about what Mr. Morgan was going to say, because it was their name and his saying it signified something. Their being there signified something.

They were on the
T
s: Jeffrey Tate, Margaret Thistle, Holly Tolle, Scott Trafer, no
U
s, Becky Vackworth, Kyle Vaughn, Frank Vicksburg, Gloria Vining, Joe Wright, Julie Yablonski.

No Lila Van Drake, no Cassie Wick; he skipped them as if they didn’t even exist. I was sure he’d skipped me, too.

That’s what words or the lack of them could do, Daniel—they could make you disappear.

I was invisible again. Just as I had been during freshman year before I was friends with Lila and Cassie; from nothing to nothing in four years flat.

I watched Joe walk off the stage. He held his diploma with both hands, maybe so they wouldn’t shake, but maybe because he finally felt like he had done something his father’s departure couldn’t take away. He wanted to hold on tightly to that feeling. He had to have noticed I wasn’t there, but he was probably the only one.

The audience clapped as Mr. Morgan announced they should applaud all the graduating seniors. He congratulated the parents and families for making these special, amazing, wonderful kids, who were about to go out into the world and do special, amazing, wonderful things. Then he congratulated my classmates for all their hard work, for making it this far, for being special, amazing, wonderful kids who were about to go out into the world and do special, amazing, wonderful things.

I could hear them cheer, could see their caps being thrown up in front of the camera like migrating birds.

Congratulations
, AJ squawked.
Congratulations
.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Like Mr. Morgan had said, I was getting the same diploma. I was still graduating even if I wasn’t there. Maybe it didn’t matter, but I still pulled the power cord before I had to see any more.

I couldn’t help thinking back to the question my father had asked me, back to what Joe had said. Would I have been happy even if I had been there? Sure, with Lila and Cassie by my side, but what if I had never met them? What if I were still the girl with the half-blue face?

Would the pictures from that day have shown me smiling, attempting to hide how afraid I was? Pretending I felt normal and pretty and fine, because that’s what my parents wanted to see. Doing what I thought I was supposed to do and being who I thought I was supposed to be and knowing it would never be enough.

Twenty-nine

Instead of going to work that night, I went to Hully’s Tavern. I needed a drink. I needed several drinks.

I told Connor I was sick, and I was: sick of Dick and Daniel and my mother, and sick of the
I told you so
chorus I knew I would soon be hearing, sick of Connor and his frown-upside-down mentality, sick of working for money I never saw, sick of my father looking at me and seeing misery, sick of acting like I didn’t care.

Besides, I couldn’t risk being at Gas-N-Go on graduation night. If anyone from my class came in to buy beer and saw me, I was going to kill myself.

Of course, I couldn’t even get out of my neighborhood without spotting Joe. I could see him starting to walk down the street. He was wearing his varsity volleyball jacket and carrying a plastic grocery bag that was badly camouflaging a six-pack, C
OLLINSVILLE
S
OUTH
arched in white letters on his back.

“Hey, can I have one?” I yelled, walking faster to catch up.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Maybe he would give me some beer and I could hide under his porch drinking while he went to whatever party he was going to. Then I could stumble home later and actually sleep that night.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. His hair was still wet from the shower. His ears were still pink with warmth.

“I have money,” I said.

“You can do whatever you want,” he said. “I’d just rather not be involved.”

It was the kind of thing he’d said the day we stopped talking during sophomore year, when he told me I was changing, I was different, and because I’d wanted exactly that, I didn’t care.

“You can just say no; I don’t need the lecture.” He was allowed to drink, but I wasn’t because he thought I did more than drink, because I drank more than he thought I should.

“Fine,” he said. “No.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You did this to yourself,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t get mad at me.” His left hand was in his pocket. His right was gripping the grocery bag tightly.

I thought about the last time I had seen him, when he’d asked me if I was okay. Something had changed since then, something that made him not care about the answer to that question anymore.

“So you saw the police in my driveway?”

He shrugged. He didn’t even bother asking why they were there. It was assumed they were there because I was me.

“Noted, I’m a druggie loser,” I said. “I’ve also had a horrible day and would really like a beer, please.” I looked at him the way I had on prom night, when I was begging for him to let me in. When I was trying to say,
Just do
me
a favor
.

My backpack felt heavy on my shoulder. I heaved it to the other side as his phone chirped with a text.

He took it out and looked at it.

“Leslie?” I asked. “She can probably have all the beer she wants, right?”

He didn’t say anything, just punched buttons on his phone with his left hand. The beers clinked in the six-pack in his right.

“If you really want one, just take it,” he said, shoving the bag toward me. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“I don’t want to fight with you, either.”

We could say that, but we
were
fighting. Or maybe only I was.

I looked at the bottles through the plastic, like shiny green jewels sticking to the side with condensation. I thought I wanted one, but maybe I just wanted to have a beer with
him
, to talk to him the way I used to, to have things be normal again—to fall into our old, easy routine. But that was something I didn’t have the words to ask for.

“Just forget it,” I said, walking away. He hadn’t even asked me why I wasn’t at graduation. He probably hadn’t even noticed. I was such an idiot.

…

Hully’s Tavern was so old that it leaned to one side like a wrestler frozen in his rocking stance. As I walked in, I realized that my life had gotten pretty bad if I actually felt relieved just to be there. It was a bar people visited as a last resort because other bars wouldn’t take them. I had been there once before with Lila and Cassie and the bar’s leniency when it came to drinking age was exactly what I needed that night to get me good and smashed.

I went into the bathroom to change out of my work shirt. Even though I hadn’t been going to work, I couldn’t let my mother know that. So I’d acted like—even though I felt like my heart had been clawed out—I was ready for another night of providing mediocre customer service at Gas-N-Go.

Done in the bathroom, I swung my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the bar like a girl who was used to swinging a bag over her shoulder. Like a girl who had a bag over her shoulder all the time, a girl who moved easily between the personas of student and runaway.

I sat at the bar and waited for the bartender to take my order. There were two guys sitting next to me already enjoying their drinks. One of them looked like the coughed-up lung of a giant: red-skinned, sweat-covered, shaped like a blob. The other one wore a maroon windbreaker, a baseball cap, and white sneakers. He looked into his beer like a fortune-teller reading a crystal ball and twisted his glass back and forth. His other arm rested on the bar, his head in his hand, cocked sideways as if he was about to fall asleep, which was probably what happened to most people while they were waiting for someone to get them a drink.

Even though the bartender’s back was turned, I was sure he saw me waiting. There was a dirty mirror behind the dusty bottles on the filthy bar, but still he made me wait. He made me wait so long that my face got hot and I started to sweat, like I was feeling a kind of claustrophobia from time pressing down on me.

I scanned the rest of the bar and found that the only other female was a waitress who was filling endless bowls of pretzels that she stacked on top of one another for some supposed later patrons. She looked at me in that way you look at someone that says,
I used to be just like you and in a few years you’re going to be just like me.

“What does someone have to do to get a drink?” I finally asked. Customer service in Collinsville was dying on the vine without any help from me.

The bartender turned, smiled, and said, “You’re not old enough to know.” He filled a glass with beer and swung it back and forth in front of me like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. “What will you give me for it?” he asked, his eyebrows like drawn arrowheads piercing his forehead as he wiggled them up and down, waiting for my answer.

I was pretty sure I was the only seventeen-year-old ever to have been asked this question in a bar. I didn’t know what to say. Maybe just saying what I had wanted to say to Joe would have been easier.

Usually Lila or Cassie would come to the rescue in a situation like this. When I had been at Hully’s with them, I’d sat at a table and waited while they went up to the bar to get our drinks. They had gotten them without a problem. Had he asked them this question?

I took a deep breath. It seemed like the best thing to do. It was either that or run out of there screaming.

“Exactly what I thought,” he said, pouring the beer down the sink behind him. “Get out of here. You think I can’t smell underage snatch?”

“I’m not underage,” I tried, sliding the ten-dollar bill my mother had given me for dinner that night across the bar.

“You’re not worth getting fined for, sweetheart,” he said.

I guess that meant that Lila and Cassie were. There it was. Cold, brutal evidence that without Lila and Cassie, I didn’t matter. Put that in my manila folder, Dick.

“I’ve been arrested,” I said, thinking maybe I could scare him into giving me a beer.

“Really?” He laughed. “For what?”

“Selling drugs,” I said. Even though it wasn’t true, it sounded better than what had really happened.

“Who’d you sell to, My Little Pony?” He laughed again, slamming his hand on the bar with each
har, har, har
that came out of his mouth.

People saw me no differently than they had before the arrest. I was still a joke. The only difference was, I had no one to hide behind anymore.

I took my ten dollars off the bar and left him there, laughing.

It was almost nine and I walked along the quiet streets of Collinsville, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do. I couldn’t go home—not that I wanted to, anyway. I couldn’t go to work, and I definitely couldn’t take the chance of going anywhere I might be seen by my celebrating classmates, especially Joe.

I called Aaron from a pay phone. He was right—it did smell like homeless ass. He picked me up and we drove in silence to one of the new housing developments under construction on the other side of Main. The street was dark and bordered by big wooden frames waiting to be filled in with walls and floors and windows and doors, with moms and dads and sons and daughters.

With boys like Aaron.

With girls like me.

He parked the car and lit a cigarette. He didn’t lean in to kiss me right away like he usually did; he just stared straight ahead.

“Did you find Brian?” I asked. I knew the answer was no, that he would have told me if he had, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Aaron shook his head.

“Do you think they left together?” Maybe I wanted to plant an idea in his head, or maybe I was just trying to keep him answering questions so he didn’t have a chance to say whatever he was about to say. I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. I was pretty sure it involved breaking up with me. Though I wasn’t even sure if we were officially together enough to require a break-up.