Pretty Amy Read Online Free PDF

even if I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for yet.
    “Don’t be sorry to me,” she said.
    I didn’t know what I was supposed to say next. Usually sorry was enough, even if I said it just like AJ would have if I’d taught him to.
    “You’re in serious trouble, Amy,” she said, as if I needed a reminder.
    “Then help me,” I said. It hadn’t worked with my dad. I don’t know why I thought it would work with her.
    She shrugged. “This is yours to handle.”
    “What does that mean?” I felt like I was a helium balloon and she had just let go.
    “Your father is calling his friend Dick Simon to represent you. Now that you can’t make your money selling illegal drugs to neighborhood kids, you’ll have to get a real job so you can pay for him.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said again, but even as I said it, I knew it didn’t matter.
    “How could you do this, Amy?” she screamed, slamming her hands so hard on the table that her coffee cup shook.
    “I don’t know,” I said, my way of filling up space while she yelled.
    I’m sorry and I don’t know were probably the first words I’d taught myself—to make my mother leave me the hell alone.
    She shouldn’t have been surprised I was messed up. Anyone forced to wear a pink tutu and a Miss America ribbon that read Novocain Princess while holding a rolling-pin-sized syringe and touting her father’s dental practice on basic cable was bound to end up with some problems. Not unexpectedly, drug related.
    “Amy, answer me!” she yelled.
    I thought of AJ in his cage upstairs, the way he would squawk as loudly as my mother would scream—when she still bothered to scream at me—like he was trying to drown her out, make me not have to hear her angry words.
    “We didn’t—” I began.
    “We,” my mother interrupted. “What about you , Amy? You can’t hide behind your friends anymore.”
    “I—I’m not,” I stammered.
    Her eyes were wide, waiting.
    “We…” I paused. “I…” The words came out in trickles. “It wasn’t our fault…”
    “Really.” My mother chuckled angrily. “Whose fault was it?” She cocked her head to the side, waiting for my answer.
    Whatever thought I had of telling her the truth was squashed down—driven into the back of my throat by her cruel laugh. She didn’t want to hear what had really happened.
    She never wanted to.
    “I don’t know,” I said again.
    “Well, the police don’t agree,” she said, going at her nails like they were corn on the cob.
    “The police are idiots,” I mumbled.
    “And what does that make you?” She squinted.
    I had no answer. I hated to admit it, but she was right. As much as I’d whined about my life before, it was about to really suck now.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, yet again. I think it was the most I’d ever said it. Maybe I was going for the Guinness World Record.
    “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done.” She started to cry. “You can deny it as much as you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have been arrested.” When she said arrested she started crying even harder, as if the words you and arrested coming out of her mouth in the same sentence made it all the more real to her.
    It made it all the more real to me. I couldn’t deny it anymore. The sun was up and I was still arrested. Nothing had changed—which meant everything had changed.
    “We’re through paying for your mistakes,” she said.
    Apparently overnight my mother had become versed in the tough-love theory of child rearing. I could picture her under the covers with a flashlight, my dad sleeping next to her, reading those pamphlets she had gotten when they first suspected, and then kept in her nightstand drawer: Teen Drug Use: 50 Warning Signs—Suggestions for Parents of Difficult Teens. I saw her reading and rereading and, knowing her, using a highlighter to figure out what they were supposed to do with me. Reading through the prescribed lists: Signs of drug use . Signs of rebellion . Signs