Pretty Amy (30 page)

“I don’t even know,” she said. “I’ve heard it so many places I can’t remember where I heard it first.” She leaned her elbows on the counter and rested her face on top of her hands, like we were buddies or something. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell you. I thought you guys were good friends.”

Best friends
, I thought,
just like Lila and I were best friends
. But now that didn’t mean anything.

Ruthie leaned in so close to me that I could see the blackheads on her nose. I stared into them, hoping one would open up and swallow her face and then her neck, then her shoulders and her whole body, so that nothing would be standing in front of me but a big, black hole.

“I guess Lila doesn’t know, either,” she said, acting like she had to think about it. In reality I knew she’d had this script written long before she came to see me. “When did she leave, a week ago?” Ruthie asked, smiling again.

“She didn’t leave,” I said, still trying so hard to believe my lie.

“Really? That’s what I heard. I also heard her parents aren’t even looking for her,” Ruthie said, one sentence spilling out after the next. “I don’t blame her for leaving, though; I would probably run away, too, if I were facing what you guys are facing, but everyone deals with that sort of thing differently, I guess.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me, just kept pushing forward with the rumors she wanted to spread. “Gosh, poor Cassie, with everything she’s going through already, to get pregnant right in the middle of it. I’m surprised she hasn’t killed herself.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you,” I said, and watched Ruthie’s face go slack. It wasn’t what I had planned on, but the minute it came out I realized it was the perfect thing to say. For once, the words came easily. “When she finds out you’re telling everyone, I mean.”

“Everyone already knows,” she said, walking toward the door. “Just like everyone already knows that you’re going to end up in jail, like the druggie loser you are,” she said. “Cassie’s telling everyone how stupid she thinks you are. That you were going to turn her in, but you couldn’t even go through with it. I heard Lila said the same thing.”

“You don’t know anything,” I said, my body going tingly. It was hard to breathe. I grabbed onto the counter; it was the only thing keeping me from falling to my knees.

The store around me went fuzzy, and my breathing got heavy.

I was pretty sure I was having a panic attack. My vision turned to tunnels, my head felt woozy. I was cold and hot, shivering and sweaty. I knelt on the floor and closed my eyes to keep myself from collapsing.

I heard the bell above the door
ding
as Ruthie left, probably on her way to tell everyone in town what a freak I was.

For once she wouldn’t be lying.

Thirty-two

“Your parents want to talk to you,” Connor said, standing above me. I had been asleep on his couch, AJ’s cage crooked under my shoulder.

I guess Connor had called my parents and told them how he’d found me the day before—down on my knees, hyperventilating and sweaty in the middle of Gas-N-Go. For once I was glad to be tattled on. It meant I finally got to go home.

“Come on,” he said, jingling his car keys.

“Can’t I change out of my pajamas first?”

“We don’t have time for that. Your dad has an early appointment.”

I shrugged. I could get dressed when I got home. I grabbed AJ’s cage and walked out to Connor’s car.

I kept AJ on my lap for the drive and leaned my chin against the metal dome on the top of his cage. Maybe things weren’t as bad as I’d thought. If my parents forgave me, maybe everything could go back to the way it used to be—well, after I figured out what to do about Lila and Cassie.

We pulled onto my street. It was early, quiet. Newspapers still sat in plastic bags on people’s dew-wet lawns.

“Good luck,” Connor said as I got out of the car.

I walked up the driveway, AJ’s cage swinging in my right hand. The porch light was still on, or maybe it was on for me. I turned the knob, but the door was locked. I rang the bell and waited.

The door stayed closed.

I rang the bell again, trying not to think how similar this felt to prom night—my hope high in my throat as I waited for the door to open.

I heard a car pull up in the driveway and turned to find Dick Simon’s coffee-ice-cream-colored Cadillac. Something wasn’t right.

“Mom!” I yelled, banging on the door. “Dad!” I rang the doorbell over and over—the way wind chimes might sound during a hurricane.

My parents weren’t answering the door. I was locked out. I was in my pajamas. I had nowhere to go. I thought about all the times I had locked my door to keep my mother out of my room.

I had to admit it felt pretty crappy being on the other side of it.

I looked at Joe’s house, at his porch. I could run across the street and hide under it. Sit in a ball in my pajamas, the dirt below me, light leaking through the wooden slats above. There was no way Dick Simon would fit, but I knew that wasn’t a solution. Without Joe there, too, I was just hiding, and how long could I hide? I couldn’t stay down there forever. I would have to come out eventually.

My choices became sitting on the cement stoop until my parents calmed down enough to let me in, if ever, or seeing what Dick Simon wanted. Dick Simon won after five minutes because it started to pour.

I opened the passenger door. I was surprised he hadn’t gotten out of the car, until I saw that his stomach was wedged under the steering wheel. I put AJ’s cage on the seat.

My hand went to where my pocket would have been and where my cigarettes would have been if I hadn’t been wearing pajamas. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, even as the rain saturated the fabric and stuck it to my skin.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way. But decide soon, because you’re getting my upholstery wet.”

I looked at the sky. The rain wasn’t stopping any time soon. I felt my shoulders deflate as I got in and moved AJ’s cage to the floor in front of me.

He paused to look at me, his eyes puffed out like marshmallows. “You’re soaked.”

I sucked on my pajama sleeve, trying to get any water that I could; my throat felt scorched. “Where are you taking me?” I asked, because I wanted to know, but also because I was trying to estimate how many of Dick’s horrible jokes I would have to hear before we reached our destination.

I rolled down the window. His car smelled.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, launching into a spate of jokes about surprises.

I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, listening to his windshield wipers squeak back and forth while AJ tried to imitate the sound. We drove for what seemed like forever, or maybe that’s what everything feels like when you’ve been seemingly kidnapped in your pajamas by a guy whose car smells like ass covered up with pine air freshener.

Dick shook me awake. “You don’t want to miss this part.”

I opened my eyes. We were on the highway. I saw a brown sign that said C
ORRECTIONAL
F
ACILITY
N
EXT
R
IGHT.

“That’s us,” he said.

“Why are we going there?” I asked, feeling helplessness tingle up through my fingers that were splayed out, bracing myself against the dashboard. I felt it move up my arms, to the center of my chest, causing my heart to race. It was exactly the way I’d felt the day before at Gas-N-Go, except now, I had a real reason to feel it. I held AJ’s cage tightly between my legs, squeezing so hard the bars probably left indentations on my skin.

Dick didn’t say anything, just hummed as we took the exit. The idle sound of it, the lack of fear it displayed, magnified my own.

The correctional facility didn’t look the way I had thought it would. It didn’t look like an evil fairy-tale castle. It looked like a school. Like a really well-secured school.

The guard at the security gate waved us through.

“Ready?” Dick asked.

“Did I sleep through my trial or something?” I tried to act tough like Cassie, hoping her strong words would keep me strong, but I was terrified. This was
jail
-jail, the thing Dick had told me was a possibility that first day in his office, but which I was never prepared to believe—never equipped to believe.

We were here now. I couldn’t deny it anymore.

“Just wait; it gets better,” he said.

We drove on past the gate. I could see pens with barbed wire on the top, just like the barbed wire I had seen as a child when we would drive downtown to temple. Back then, I’d thought it was silver ribbon that had been pulled through scissors so it curled, like on the top of a wrapped present.

I took AJ from his cage and put him on my shoulder. If I was going to be forced to go in there, at least I would have him with me.

“No pets allowed,” Dick said. “Put the bird back or they’ll take him away.” I rubbed AJ’s head and locked him in his cage.

Dick parked in a spot marked V
ISITOR
.

“What? You don’t have your own?” I asked, still channeling Cassie, hoping it would actually make me feel unafraid, wondering if it ever worked for her.

“I try not to make a habit of coming here.”

At least there was one unexpected plus if I was convicted—no more surprise visits from Dick Simon.

…

Inside, we were met by a female guard, who patted me down and ushered us through a metal detector. Then she asked for our IDs.

“Don’t have it,” I said, indicating my cold, wet pajamas, and finally starting to breathe again.

It looked like whatever Dick Simon’s little plan was, it was about to blow up in his big, fat face. Until he handed her a copy of my birth certificate and my Collinsville South ID.

“How the hell did you get those?”

The guard who was attending us looked at me. “Do you always talk to your father like that?”

“This is not my father,” I hissed.

Dick Simon laughed. “You just made my day.” He slapped his leg. “And I didn’t even get strip searched.”

Once we made it past security, we walked through a locked doorway into the visiting area, which really just looked like a crappy high school cafeteria. There were signs on the walls that said things like: N
O
F
IGHTING,
N
O
R
UNNING,
N
O
Y
ELLING,
N
O
S
WEARING
.
It was like a very intense swimming pool.

I took a deep breath and told myself that if we were in the visiting area, it meant we were just
visiting
. I would be back in the car with AJ soon.

Dick led me over to a table where a girl sat waiting for us. She was big. And when I say big, I mean watermelon-size breasts, elephant-size thighs, and a camel toe from a biologically engineered camel. So much for bread and water.

“I’m Stubby,” she said, standing. She was so short that she looked like she was still sitting down. Apparently she thought I had other notions about the origin of her name, since she said, “Because I smoke so much.”

For my own safety, I decided against telling her that was probably not the reason. She squinted as she looked at me, then she turned to Dick. “So, this is that brat you’ve been telling me about.”

Fabulous. Not only was I being discussed among the Save Amy Brain Trust, I was also being discussed by random teenage convicts.

Wait. Was I a random teenage convict?

“What’s your name?” She reached out to squeeze my cheek, and I pulled away. “You’re going to have to be a lot friendlier than that if you don’t want me to kill you.” She looked at me like I was a piece of prime rib she was planning on eating with her hands.

“Tell her your name,” Dick said.

I closed my mouth tightly and shook my head. I’d had no idea what not wanting to talk really meant. Daniel’s office was a joke compared to this.

She leaned over the table, her hands palms down, her nails scratching against it as they closed into fists. Her face had turned bright red, so that it looked like she had a huge tomato on top of her body. “When I ask you a question, you answer it.”

“Amy,” I said very quietly. I was afraid if I talked too loudly, her head might explode the way glass did from a high-pitched noise.

“I had a girlfriend named Amy once,” she said, looking wistful for a second. “I hated that bitch. She’s not the reason I’m in here, but if anybody found out what I did to her, I’d never leave.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Dick Simon had hired this girl. That she was acting. That I was on
Punk’d
, or the new show I had wished we were on when we’d been stood up at Brian’s house on prom night.