Read Online Pretty Amy by Lisa Burstein - Free Book Online Page A

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    “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