Pretty Amy (8 page)

No wonder I was so
sullen
, Daniel.

Putting AJ back in his cage, I couldn’t help but wonder where the hell I was going to find someone who was worse off than I was now.

…

After my parents fell asleep that night, I went into the computer room, determined to look up Aaron online. Lila and Cassie were out of my life, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I could find him. He had agreed to go to the prom with me, for whatever reason; he had liked me enough to say yes, even if he hadn’t gone through with it.

I turned on the computer. My parents had stupid AOL, so when the computer logged on, it told them they had mail. They had mail and I had nothing.

I opened Facebook, went to Brian’s profile, and there he was, Aaron Chambers: terracotta hair in a ponytail; loose, worn jeans with holes in both knees; a smile with one crooked tooth. Activities and Interests: skateboarding, horror movies, music. Relationship Status: single.

My life would have been so different if only Aaron had shown up for our date. I wouldn’t be working at stupid Gas-N-Go. I wouldn’t be doing whatever Dick Simon told me to do. I wouldn’t be trying to keep Daniel and Joe out of my head. Lila and Cassie would still be my friends. Most likely we wouldn’t even have been arrested.

Looking at Aaron’s profile in the dark computer room, the monitor the only light, I could try to pretend that things hadn’t gone so wrong. I could try to forget everything that had happened.

I could write our conversation in my head. Could make him say the things he was supposed to say, just like the girl in the bathroom. Hear him tell me the things I wanted to hear:
He was so happy he found me, he was sorry, prom night hadn’t been his fault.

I could try and believe it. I could try and fool myself.

Nine

Gas-N-Go was probably a place you wouldn’t choose to spend more than five minutes in, and for that night at least, I had six hours to go.

“This kid,” Mr. Mancini said, slapping the back of my manager, Connor, “knows everything. You have a question, you go ask him. He’s got his own way of doing things and I don’t want to step on his feet. Tell you the truth,” he said, leaning in like he was telling me a secret, “he knows more than I do.”

I wasn’t sure how much of a compliment that was. I would have ventured to say that the expired milk I had been instructed to
scratch at with those girly nails of yours so the date won’t show
knew more than Mr. Mancini did.

Connor would have been described as a big boy, even at twenty-two. His hair was brown and as dry and fake-looking as doll hair, and as far as I could tell, it covered every part of his body. It tufted through the neck of his Gas-N-Go polo like a baby bird reaching for food. It clothed his bare arms. I could only dream about the rest.

I smiled and nodded in that silly way you do when you’re in a new place and you’re not really listening at all, just nodding and saying
absolutely, great, super
, since you know that once you’re on your own you’re going to do what you want anyway.

“You’ll have her clean the bathrooms, right?” Mancini asked.

There was no way I was cleaning the bathrooms. I had to hang on to some dignity.

“Remember that you don’t want to let just anybody in there,” Mr. Mancini said, looking around to see if anyone was listening. In reality, there was no one in the store. “You have to be careful who you give the key to. Someone comes in all twitchy or something, you say, ‘Out of order.’”

Connor nodded and crossed his arms.

I stared at the obligatory aisle of car accessories—air fresheners in the shape of pine trees and rainbows smelling like Christmas and new cars. Windshield wiper fluid the color of blue Kool-Aid. Assorted cans of oil stacked up like soda.

“And if anything gets a little dicey, there’s a baseball bat behind the counter for emergencies.” Mr. Mancini sniffed and looked around. “So, you got everything?”

Everything
was a red Gas-N-Go signature polo that came down to my knees and a hair net I had to wear while working in the deli that I vowed to continually lose.

As he left the store, he winked, like Connor and I were being left alone on a couch by some perverted father who was hoping to live through his son’s sexual exploits. I might have looked desperate, but there was no way I was that desperate.

We watched his truck—which was teal with pink detail so that it looked like someone had swallowed a can of paint and then puked it all over the sides of the cab—as it roared away.

“Let’s start with the cash register,” Connor said, indicating I should follow him behind the counter. He walked in that way you do when you’ve done something thousands of times before. A walk that said there were no surprises. A walk of resignation.

“How long have you been working here?” I asked, eyeing the chip and candy aisle. Things were stocked in terms of their taste-bud quotient: the remarkably salty, the obscenely sweet, the mind-numbingly sour, the throat-hackingly bitter.

“Does it matter?” He continued before I could answer. “You have to do this all manually.” He turned a key on the side of the register so it was in nonrecording mode. “Why don’t you try ringing up a pack of gum?”

I tried, but it didn’t quite work out. I rang it up for $99 instead of $0.99.

He came around my side and voided it. “All right, now watch this time.”

I didn’t watch. I thought about how I had come into so many places like this without giving the people behind the counter a second thought. Now I realized they all had some reason to be there. There was no way you chose this without a metaphorical gun at your back.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I said, but I think he could tell I was lying.

“I know it’s not rocket science, but it pays the bills. It keeps my kid in diapers,” he said, shrugging.

“You have a kid?” I covered my mouth, trying to hide the shock in my voice, but luckily he didn’t seem to notice.

“Two. Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet.

I hadn’t asked to see a picture, but I accepted it when he gave it to me, like you are supposed to do when someone gives you a picture of his children. “Cute,” I said, like you are supposed to say when someone shows you a picture of his children.

It was one of those holiday pictures. The kids sitting on a bed of cotton meant to be snow, wearing red and green and bells and bows and holding fake wrapped presents in their hands. The cotton made them look like they were pieces of strange jewelry sitting in a box.

He smiled, like parents do when they are presenting pictures of their kids. “Do you have any?” he asked, like he was hoping this was something we could bond over.

“No,” I said, so quickly I think he could tell I was offended by the question. “I’m only seventeen.”

“I had my first when I was your age,” he said.

I tried to picture it—me, with a
baby
. It was obvious I could barely take care of myself, but I guess I couldn’t talk. What if I were still working at Gas-N-Go five years from now and training someone else? Would I tell her that I had been her age when I was arrested for the first time?

The first time
. I shook my head.

“Listen, I get it. You think you’re too good for this place,” he said.

I had
thought
I was too good for it, but I was realizing that what I thought had little to do with reality.

“You think I want to be here?” he asked, his voice rising. “You do a poll and I would say most people would choose to be somewhere else, doing something else, and if they really had the option, being someone else.”

He was right, and I hated thinking that even before all this, I was
most people
.

“But, here we are,” he said. “You can choose to stay and make the best of it, or you can leave.”

Make the best of it. That was something I had heard my whole life. Most of the time I could, because I wanted to believe something was waiting for me at the end of the tunnel I was perpetually looking through. But now, what was the point?

He tapped his foot. “You just take all the time you need. It’s not like we’re on the clock or anything.”

I looked at the cash register. I looked at him. I shrugged.

“Why don’t you just get going on those bathrooms? I find the bathroom to be a place of serenity, especially the ones here. They’ll give you a lot of time to work things out.”

“You find cleaning up after other people’s crap to be some kind of meditative experience?”

“Only when I’m not the one doing it,” he said, handing me a mop and bucket.

…

After work, I walked home. The town was so quiet that it looked like a movie set—building façades darkened, houses with porch lights on, gaslights lining the street every twenty feet like Johnny Appleseed had planted them that way.

On nights like this, Cassie, Lila, and I would hang out in the oceans of cemetery that surrounded our town. We would stumble, drunk, down the rows next to all those grocery-store flowers, still in their plastic, still with the price tags on. Maroon bows holding the stems together, sitting in their stands, petals fluttering and ribbons blowing like wind socks in the breeze. We would dance past the high obelisk stones set up like a giant chess game, past stones flat to the ground like fallen dominoes, past stones popping out of the soil like vegetables in a garden. I always wondered, if we could be there like that, could death really mean anything? Could life?

Homework-doing and dishwasher-emptying and everyday-ness and who the hell we were meant to be became noiseless whispers when we were faced with the death that bordered our town, squeezed at it like a clutching fist.

It would never be that way again.

A few blocks from my house, I heard Joe’s bike coming up behind me. I’d ridden around with him enough after dinner in middle school to recognize the sound. It was so distinct that I used to know from the dinner table that he was coming up my driveway, in the summer when the windows were open. The bell was broken so it jingled when he rode it. You would have thought he would have just taken the bell off, but then you would have thought a lot of things about Joe.

“I heard what happened,” he said, pedaling up next to me. He was wearing his varsity volleyball jacket. A big white ball on the right shoulder, his name embroidered on the left.

I knew someone would confront me about the arrest eventually. I guess I’d just hoped it would be someone else.

“Nothing happened,” I said. I looked up. The stars were faint, like they all needed their bulbs changed.

“Okay,” he said, walking his bike next to me. The tires clicked like a prize wheel. “I won’t say
I told you so
.”

“You never told me anything,” I said, lighting a cigarette. But that wasn’t true. He had told me to stay away from Cassie and Lila. Not that he knew what he was talking about.

“No,” he said. “You just didn’t listen.” Then he made a big deal about coughing and waving the smoke out of his face.

I tipped my head back and exhaled, the smoke shooting up like water from a whale’s blowhole. “I’m not in the mood, Joe.”

“I’m not judging. I’m just talking to you.”

“It’s the same thing,” I said. Maybe he thought that because he was on his bike, that bike, he could talk to me this way. But he couldn’t.

He looked at me. The silence made me anxious. I tried not to think about what he’d said the last time I saw him. Maybe I used to be nice, but nice was boring. Nice hadn’t gotten me anywhere. I was still figuring out where mean was going to get me.

“So, that’s it, then?” He gripped his handlebars tighter, another trick he used to keep his hands still.

“I guess.” I was glad we were done. I was afraid that if we kept talking, I might break down and start crying right there on the street. It would have been easy to talk to him like I had when we were who we used to be. When we would hide under his porch with peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches and grape-juice boxes. But I didn’t know him anymore. He was a stranger. Like Daniel, like anyone else who was trying to pretend they gave a crap.

Joe had wanted to keep the old Amy in a little box that he could take out after school and on weekends to be her friend when he was bored. And when that wasn’t good enough for me, I became not good enough for him.

I stopped and stomped out my cigarette.

“You should have stayed at the prom.” He shrugged.

I guess we
weren’t
done. I guess he was going to try to present his simple Boy Scouts solution to a far more complicated situation. Like he always did.

“You didn’t let me in, remember? You and your
girlfriend
.” I wasn’t sure why my voice had such an edge to it. Maybe because I didn’t want to believe the words.

“Leslie’s not my girlfriend.”