Pretty Amy Read Online Free PDF Page B

that your teen is the Antichrist.
    “You’d better start applying for a job today,” she said.
    I had been hoping to lock myself in my room and crawl into bed, AJ on my pillow.
    “I mean it, Amy,” she said, like she knew what I was thinking.
    “Where am I supposed to find a job?”
    “I honestly don’t care,” she said, walking out of the kitchen, the bottom of her robe trailing behind her. “Just make sure it’s legal this time.”
    I guess that was all the help I was getting.

Five
    My mother gave me back my wallet but kept my phone.
    “Now I know what you really needed this for,” she said as she put it in the cabinet on a high shelf above the desk in the kitchen, like I was a little girl and having something up that high would keep it out of my reach.
    I was grounded from my phone, from Cassie and Lila, and from breathing without asking first. I had to bring her my dress. She said she was going to take it back to the store, that she wouldn’t tolerate paying for something I hadn’t even used.
    As I walked toward Main Street, I couldn’t help but smirk when I thought about how she was going to explain to the cashier how this dress that had never been worn had fingerprint ink all over it.
    I stopped in at Gas-N-Go to buy cigarettes and filled out an application, one of those that come in a pack of fifty, white, light blue, and red, that asks when your earliest possible start date is. Then it asks you to list your job experience, your references, and your special skills. For that one I wrote, You tell me . Like Cassie would have.
    My mother always called Cassie a hopeless delinquent. I guess that’s what I was now.
    After I filled it out, I followed a sign that said I NTERVIEWS into the break room.
    It was a cardboard box sort of room, with a vending machine that hummed and gurgled like an old refrigerator and a long cafeteria table ringed by orange plastic chairs.
    A man I couldn’t help thinking looked like one of the cops who had arrested us sat in one of the chairs. He gestured for me to sit.
    I was so tired that for a moment, I thought I was back in the police station. Until I looked down and saw the job application in my hand, my name at the top.
    He was insanely sweaty and had to wipe his hand on his pants before he took mine, which he shook in a way that reminded me of an empty sock.
    “Name’s Mancini. You get hired, you’ll be required to call me Mr. Mancini.” His hands were cut up and ruddy like he treated them every night to a massage with a meat grinder.
    It made me look at my own hands. The fingernails were still painted the same light blue as my dress. I sat on them.
    “Job experience?” he asked.
    “I’ve done some babysitting,” I said.
    He looked at me skeptically. We both knew that babysitting had given me experience in little more than eating other people’s food.
    “Up to four kids at once,” I said, even though it was a lie.
    I decided to leave out that I spent most of my time raiding the mother’s bathroom cabinet for makeup. I’d take her lipstick, daring pinks like Fuchsia Frenzy or Hot Salmon, and picture her getting ready for a night out, searching in every cabinet and drawer and then forcing her doting husband to go to the grocery store to buy more.
    I liked picturing someone having a doting husband.
    “You ever work a cash register?”
    “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t, but how hard could it be?
    “Why should I hire you?” he asked, in the same kind of voice my mom used when she didn’t believe something I told her. The voice she used all the time.
    I thought about it. He probably shouldn’t. Considering what had happened last night, the place would probably burn down just because I was in it. I shook the thoughts out of my head. I wasn’t about to start crying in front of this guy.
    “Do you not want the job?” he asked.
    I didn’t want it. I needed it; a much worse position to be in. “I can start right away,” I said, forcing myself to smile so hard