Pretty Amy Read Online Free PDF Page A

be okay. I needed him to hug me, to just be my dad.
    “What’s going to happen?” I asked, finally starting to cry.
    “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said, touching my shoulder and then leaving me sitting in the car, crying.
    I guess I couldn’t blame him, but it felt like I was always waiting for tomorrow.

Four
    That night I didn’t sleep. I didn’t even take off my prom dress. I sat with AJ, putting him on my finger and then on my shoulder.
    Pretty Amy, pretty Amy , he repeated as I cried into his yellow feathers. I love you , he squawked as he rubbed up against my wet cheek.
    I knew he was just saying the things I had taught him to say, but that night I really needed to hear them. It made me wonder if my mother had actually had some forethought in getting me AJ instead of the puppy I had begged her for. I had begged for a puppy, but I had really wanted a sister. I had really wanted a friend.
    I got a bird.
    She had said that birds were better than puppies because they could talk, and I couldn’t deny that for this one long night at least, she had been right.
    I stared out my bedroom window at Joe’s house across the street, into the dark windows and its two shining porch-light eyes. His mom was probably sleeping inside. Joe was probably somewhere with Leslie not sleeping and I had my nose up to the glass, praying that the night would never end. Not in the way girls usually wish their prom night will last forever; I prayed for time to stop. I wasn’t ready for whatever was waiting for me the next day.
    Eventually daylight came, not all at once but slowly, like the sky was set on a dimmer switch. The moon and stars finally snuffed out.
    Good morning , AJ squawked as we heard my mother wake up. Heard her bedroom door open and close. Heard her walk down the stairs. Heard her breakfast noises in the kitchen. I guess she wanted to be able to have her coffee and hear the thwack of the morning paper against the screen door before she could deal with the fact that her daughter was a criminal.
    The choices of what to do at that moment floated in front of my tired eyes like mirages. I could either stay in my room all day in this dress, or I could go downstairs and get the initial yelling over with. I knew there would be yelling, probably a lot of it, and probably crying, too. Crying and questions: Was I not a good mother to you? Did I not give you everything you could have wanted? What did we do to make you turn out this way?
    I wished I had taught AJ to say, I don’t know.
    I put AJ back in his cage and finally decided to go downstairs because of the coffee. It was like some kind of warped Folgers commercial: me sniffing the air and thinking that there really is nothing better the morning after getting arrested than drinking a steaming-hot cup of java with my mom.
    I found her sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, which was odd, since she tended to change upon waking into her sweat suit. The kind that is shiny and puffy and has no real purpose for athletes, but that makes suburban moms feel like they’re up and at ’em and ready to go.
    She didn’t look up from the newspaper when she heard me, forcing me to stare at the back of it. I saw letters from grocery advertisements swimming around, forming words like spoonfuls of alphabet soup: F AILURE. D ISAPPOINTMENT. F ELON. F OSTER C ARE.
    “Is there more?” I asked, pointing to the empty coffee maker. I figured it was the most civilized thing I could say at that moment and I really did want some coffee.
    She poked her head out from behind the paper. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “Do you think this is funny?”
    I shook my head. It seemed safer than anything that might come out of my mouth.
    “Then why are you still wearing that ?” She spat out the word. The dress was an illusion. The dress was a joke. “Just sit down and don’t say another word.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to preempt a fight, getting right to what she wanted to hear,