Pretty Amy (29 page)

“Connor, come on,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said, crossing his arms and standing above me.

“Fine, but we’re getting AJ right after,” I said, walking back to the bathroom to get dressed.

Why was I talking to him like that? I felt like a child.

My clothes were gone, taken out of the laundry basket. Tiffany must have come and tossed them into the washing machine. At least I wouldn’t need to wash them in Prell.

I ended up having to borrow something from Tiffany and I was blessed with one of her pre-baby outfits. A denim jumpsuit, probably not unlike what someone would wear in jail. Except it was acid-washed and the sleeves and ankles had elastic around them so that it looked like the suit was filled with air when I put it on. As a bonus, it had gold studs along the collar and American flags placed endearingly on each breast pocket.

I looked like a homosexual fighter pilot.

I was standing in their bedroom, looking at myself in their full-length mirror, when Connor came up behind me. “If you tell me I remind you of your wife in this outfit, I’m going to lose it.”

“Not at all. She looked way better in that than you do.”

I took it as a compliment. I pulled the fabric out at the sides of my thighs. “Well, she’s got the hips for it.”

“I’ll be waiting for you outside of Daniel’s office when you’re done. No funny business.”

“You think I’d try to go anywhere wearing this?”

…

Daniel was silent as I walked in. Apparently my outfit had rendered him speechless. It was odd, considering some of the things he actually left the house in—that day, a long, white linen tunic and shorts.

“I know, I know. I look like an ass.”

“You said it; I didn’t.” He wrote something down on his pad, probably,
Note to self: acid-washed is out.

“So just say it already.” I sat down in the rocking chair across from him.

“Say what?”

“That I am in destruction mode.”

“You said it; I didn’t,” he repeated with a sad smile. “You don’t look so good.”

“Of course I don’t look good. Lila’s missing. I mean, she could be dead, or hurt, or worse.”

I didn’t even want to get into how I was feeling about the whole missing my graduation thing, and then on top of that the whole I have a more insecure outlook than Connor’s three-year-old daughter thing. And, of course, the whole Aaron thing.

“It’s pretty sad that you’d rather think she was dead than face the alternative.”

And it was, so I didn’t say anything.

“I know you’re angry, and you should be. She abandoned you.”

“Everyone has,” I said. It was really true. Everyone but AJ.

“You mean your parents,” he said.

He had no clue.

“They’re angry. Besides, staying with Connor was my idea,” he said.

“Of course it was.”

“They need space from you. Considering everything you’ve indicated to me, I’m not sure why you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” I said. “Not about that.” I wasn’t, really. But even though I couldn’t ignore that I had done a lot of crappy things, none of them had made my parents kick me out of my house.

“Uh huh,” he said, writing something else down.

We sat there for a minute, his way of telling me he didn’t believe anything I was saying.

“Would you kick your daughter out?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said, without even thinking about it.

“What would she have to do?” I asked.

“Are we talking about me or about you?” he asked.

I looked down at my legs, the acid-washed denim spreading out like I was wearing clothes in a pool.

“This is why action matters, why choice matters. Anesthetizing yourself from your feelings has consequences,” he said.

“Everything has consequences,” I said. “I’m tired of consequences.”

“Then sign the paper,” he said, as if he had caught me.

“You have a copy of it on you?”

“More jokes.” He shook his head.

It wasn’t a joke. If he had a copy I probably would have signed it, just to screw over Aaron.

“You really are hurt,” he said.

“I miss AJ,” I said.

“Your bird,” he said, like he was reminding me. Like he wanted me to understand that I was talking about something that couldn’t really miss me back. That AJ was safe because I could think he felt anything about me, and he could never act or tell me differently.

“You need me to relay something to your parents?” he asked.

I knew what they wanted to hear, what they all wanted to hear, but I wasn’t there yet, at least not for the right reasons. I balled up my body like a fist and closed my eyes. Without my parents there pushing me to turn on Lila and Cassie, it was finally only my decision to make.

I kept bitching about everyone just letting me make my own choices, but the truth was, I was too much of a chicken to make one anyway.

Thirty-one

Connor took me straight to work after my appointment with Daniel. He let me know that my mother had dropped off AJ and some of my clothes at his apartment—conveniently, I thought, while I wasn’t there.

Connor brought me one of his Gas-N-Go polos to wear, but he forgot to bring my pants, or at least that was what he claimed. My guess was that, more likely than forgetting, he just didn’t want to go through my clothes and run the risk of seeing a pair of my underwear.

I stood behind the counter and pulled his shirt over the top of the denim pantsuit. I looked at my reflection in the front window. I looked enormous.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and I had to wear my Halloween costume over my coat and snow pants. I hated that feeling. I closed my eyes.

I couldn’t believe that after all this, after everything, looking like I was fat still bothered me more than any of it. I guess it wasn’t necessarily true, but I suppose it was better to focus on that instead.

I heard the bell above the door ring and opened my eyes to find Ruthie Jensen walking in. She hadn’t lost her sixth sense for knowing when your life was sucking. And mine was beyond sucking now.

Feeling like I was fat was about to become the least of my problems.

I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she was there. In true gossip-monger fashion, she liked nothing better than to talk to people who were directly affected by the gossip she spread. Lila’s departure was just that sort of thing.

Joe had been right. I should have stayed at the prom—he should have let me stay at the prom. Or maybe I should have listened to him sophomore year when he tried to warn me. Should have cared when he’d told me it was him or them. I wondered where I would be right now if I had.

Ruthie walked down each aisle with her arms outstretched, touching the surface of every item her hands came across.

I swore that I could feel the fluorescent lights singeing my hair and burning the skin on my scalp. I could feel the ceiling pushing down on me, getting closer and closer every time I looked up. Like in those movies where the spy is stuck in a room that starts to push in on itself, the ceiling and floor like the right and left sides of a vise.

I wished it were really happening—that the ceiling and floor were drawing together like magnets. That before Ruthie could say anything to me, Gas-N-Go would flatten to the pavement, our blood and bone oozing out.

But my only consolation for the fact she was there was that she was probably touching more germs than she would be exposed to in a lifetime.

She looked like Laura Ingalls in that beginning scene from
Little House on the Prairie
where she throws out her hands and spins through the field of wildflowers, but only in the arms. In the face, I realized, she kind of looked like an anteater.

I tried very hard to ignore her, but I was so freaked out by seeing her, and trying so hard to ignore her, that I ended up looking right at her. Not like I could have avoided her, anyway. I knew I was the reason she was there.

“Haven’t seen you for a while,” she said, smiling, her lips like two small snakes slithering on her face.

I nodded; maybe if I didn’t talk to her she would lose interest and go away.

She walked toward the counter and waited for an answer. She was not going to make this easy.

Ruthie had never spoken to me directly before, and I didn’t know if I was more afraid that she might know who I was or might not know who I was. If she confused me with a friend of mine and told me about my own arrest, I was going to lose it.

So I said what my mother said when she ran into people she hated. “Yeah, I’ve been busy.” Then to prove it, I dusted the counter and fiddled around with the gum rack. It was probably the most work I had ever done in my whole time employed at Gas-N-Go.

“I can see that,” she said, in that condescending way that means,
Yeah, right
. She tapped her hands on the counter. “Summer job?” She looked around the place, like the answer was written in pieces on the walls.

I nodded. It was not technically a lie—it was summer and it was a job.

“Nice,” she said, which I knew meant she thought it was anything but.

“Are you here to buy something?” I asked, trying to seem very disinterested.

“I saw you in here and just wanted to stop by and say hi,” she said, smiling with those slithery snake lips again.

She was obviously there to tell me something—tell me something or find out something. She had plenty on me already. I was working at a convenience store and not doing a very good job at a job you’d have to be an idiot not to do a good job at. Oh, and because of Tiffany’s jumpsuit, I looked like I had gained a good fifty pounds since the fateful prom night that had started it all.

I prayed for Connor to come out of the back room. To fly out on his customer-service wings and barrage her with questions about how she was doing
and what he could do for her today
until she got freaked out and left. But I guess my living with Connor made him want to avoid me at work. Of course the one good thing that had come out of being his reluctant roommate was now coming back to bite me.

“How’s Cassie doing?” she asked.

I froze. What was she asking me? How was Cassie doing since Lila had gone? How was Cassie doing since the arrest? How was Cassie doing in general?

I didn’t know how to provide the answer to any of those questions. I thought back to the night Cassie’s mother had been here, when I had tried without success to find out the answer myself.

I figured saying, “Fine,” covered me, so that was what I said. I hoped it might be all she needed to hear so she would get the hell out of my store and the hell out of my face.

“Good, I was worried about her,” she said, her snake lips quivering slightly. As horrible as my parents ever thought I was, I could see that Ruthie was a truly evil person. She wanted bad things to happen to people so she would have stuff to talk about.

“I sure hope she’s taking care of herself,” Ruthie said, her eyes darting back and forth as if she were looking for a weakness in the wall that I had made of my face.

I just kept nodding, even though I wanted so terribly to ask her why she was worried about Cassie, why Cassie needed to take care of herself, but then she would know that I hadn’t been talking to Cassie and would have more information than she had come in with.

I started unpacking cigarette cartons, picturing myself smoking every one, sitting in an open field on a sunny day with a pothole-size ashtray next to me. Smoking my mind into an empty page, my only thoughts inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

“Well, it happens,” Ruthie said, still eyeing me.

“Yes, it does,” I said, making sure I emphasized
it
so she would know that I knew what
it
was, even though I had no idea.

“If you’re going to have a baby shower for her, I would love to be invited,” she said, letting the words
baby shower
seep out, then appear in front of her and dissolve into shadows of themselves, like she was the Caterpillar from
Alice in Wonderland
.

She had to be lying. Cassie was pregnant? She would have told me. At the very least, Lila would have told me. I looked down, too ashamed to admit I hadn’t known. Too sad to say that we were all so far away from each other that I had to hear from the human grapevine that one of my best friends was pregnant.

“I know; I was shocked, too,” she said, winking. “She works nights at Pudgie’s Pizza if you want to see how she’s doing.”

Hearing Ruthie say that, I could see Cassie clearly, her stomach rising like the pizza dough she kneaded. The small cells inside her being tossed like the chicken wings she covered in hot sauce, one-handed, in a silver bowl.

“Who told you?” I asked in a voice I didn’t recognize. A voice that sounded like someone had squeezed my lungs together like an accordion and forced the words out of my mouth.