Pretty Amy by Lisa Burstein Read Free Book Online Page B

she can do is sit and stare. That’s all she does,” my mom said, wrapping her purse strap around her hand like a tourniquet.
    “You don’t even ask me what I’m feeling,” I said, the words coming out before I even had a chance to think about them.
    “I shouldn’t have to ask; I’m your mother.”
    “Tell us then, Amy,” he said, leaning forward. The beanbag chair he was sitting on made a hissing noise.
    I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say it out loud—it was embarrassing. I felt like my life was over. Like overnight I had changed into someone I would feel bad for. Like I had taken my stupid, boring life for granted and now it was all gone.
    “See,” my mother said, when I didn’t answer.
    “Do you find it hard to talk about yourself?” he asked, looking at me.
    My mother snorted.
    “Thanks a lot, Mom,” I said.
    “What did I do?” she asked.
    He wrote something down on his pad. I hoped it was that my mother was acting like a bitch, because that’s what I would have written.
    “Maybe Amy and I should talk alone,” he said, and gestured toward the door.
    “She’ll get you into a conversation and twist it all around. That’s what she always does,” my mother said.
    “Even so,” he said, standing.
    My mother humph ed her she’s-all-yours humph as she closed the door behind her.
    Maybe he did actually know what he was doing. In five minutes he’d done what I couldn’t in seventeen years—shut my mother up.
    “She just cares about you.” He watched me for a moment. “Why do you think you ended up here?”
    “Because I was arrested,” I said.
    “Nothing beyond that?” He paused. “Once you know why you did certain things, it will be easier for you to undo them.”
    I thought about the macramé bracelets I used to make in middle school, the ones that started out in the shape of something like a sailboat—two colors of string, one for the mast and another for the sail—and then once they were woven together, showed no signs of their modest beginnings.
    It made me think about how I had made one for Joe, navy with flecks of yellow. I hated that just talking to him put him back in my head. That in addition to everything else that was crashing around in there, I had to deal with Joe again, too.
    “How can I undo this?” I asked. I could feel my voice cracking. Crying in front of my father hadn’t gotten me anywhere, and I doubted crying in front of this guy would, either.
    “You can start by talking to me,” he said.
    I waited, trying to decide if I could trust him.
    “No?” he asked.
    I kept my mouth closed tightly, like I was afraid of something he was trying to put into it. Besides, what was I supposed to say? How had I ended up here? Why did it matter, considering I was already here?
    “Fine, I’ll have to fill in the blanks myself,” he said. “It won’t be that hard. You think I haven’t heard your story before. I’ve heard it. Maybe there are different characters, a different setting, a different plot, but you,” he said, pointing, “you are always the same.”
    He was kind of a jerk for a hippie. I looked down. I knew he was just trying to get me to talk, but I still couldn’t believe I wasn’t even getting sympathy from the one guy who was being paid to give it to me.
    “Dick Simon tells me you have a few accomplices. Want to tell me about them?”
    Not like I would have, but he gave me no time to answer him, apparently too determined to prove his point.
    “Okay, I’ll guess, then. You needed some friends and they took you in. Before you knew it, you were using drugs. That was fine with you because you sort of wanted to try drugs, but also because you wanted to keep these girls as your friends. It’s hard for you to make friends.”
    I started rocking in the chair again, trying to drown out his words.
    He watched me. “I get paid to talk whether you listen or not.”
    “So talk,” I said, still rocking.
    He shrugged, talking over the creaking chair. “So