Chasing Amy? (for lack of a better title)

"You ever wonder what it would be like to be dead?" she asked, her voice thick and heavy with dope.

I was sitting in a small, cramped apartment in downtown Chicago, near Boystown, the city’s famous rainbow flag-lined gay district. It was her apartment, the stoned girl lying languidly on a cat hair and cocaine dust-coated black futon, a wisp of marijuana smoke forming a perverse joke of a halo around her head.

The acrid smell from the multi-colored glass pipe she took a hit from every few minutes tickled the back of my throat and burned my red-tinged eyes. I was blinking constantly and had to remove my glasses to rub them more than once.

As I sat in the dim single-bulb light watching my friend get wasted, a solitary thought continuously ran through my mind, like a hamster spinning his wheel in a futile effort to escape his cold, metal prison: I drove five-hundred miles for this?


We met in high school, Amy and I, through our intertwined circles of friends, toward the beginning of my senior year. She was a sophomore, but most of her friends were older, so she was never hassled by school security for being on the wrong side of the building. They simply assumed she belonged there.

I don't remember the first time we spoke, or what we talked about. Trivial high school nothings, I'm sure. Our first date was a concert at a local club, a real shithole of a dive, one of Omaha's finest, a smoke-filled bar-slash-bowling alley filled with horny chain-smoking teenagers wearing flannel shirts or black goth fetish gear in a painful attempt to look cool.

We had been eying each other for a couple weeks, flirting in our group's usual way, an innocent ass grab or poke of a boob, when I found myself with an extra ticket to the show. With a feigned casualness that I hoped masked my sweaty palms and racing heart, I asked her if she wanted to go.

I don't think she cared what bands were going to be performing. The important thing was that it gave us our first opportunity to be alone together. We stayed for the first band that played, and maybe the second, exchanging meaningful glances throughout (as meaningful as they can be at that age, anyway), the whole time the bass pounding through our bodies like constant waves crashing against the shore. Neither of us cared to hear the headlining band.

I don't know how long we made out in my car, parked in her father's driveway. At the time, it seemed like hours, to which to fog that clung to the inside of the car's windows could attest. All I know for sure is that by the time I left, after one last furtive kiss, I had a new girlfriend.


"Wanna go shopping?" she chirped, alert and bubbly, as if the haze that had been clouding her mind had suddenly lifted.

I glanced up from Amy's battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, which I had found on her bookshelf. She was sitting up on the futon now, taking one last hit from her oft-used pipe. Her dark brown hair, once long and soft, cool to the touch, was now a short, stringy mess. The hazel eyes that used to look at me with warmth and affection were dull and lifeless, streaked with crimson. She was looking at me, but she might as well have been looking through me.

"Uh, sure," I said, thinking the fresh air might do her some good. "What do you wanna buy?"

"Movies," she replied, stretching her thin arms over her head, which caused her rumpled shirt to rise up slightly, revealing an unfamiliarly gaunt belly.

"Okay," I said, replacing Holden Caulfield's struggle toward adulthood on the bookshelf. "And maybe we can grab a bite to eat while we’re out?" When I had gotten to Amy’s apartment earlier that afternoon, I did a cursory examination of the kitchen, the cupboards and refrigerator, and found nothing but empty cereal boxes and bottles of wine cooler.

Amy stood up and sort of sashayed toward the bathroom, swaying back and forth, as she walked. I wanted to jump up and steady her, but I knew she'd bat me away with a swipe of her arm. I just sat on the floor beside the bookshelf and watched.

"I'm just gonna hop in the shower real quick," she said.

"Don't forget to brush your teeth," I mumbled under my breath, frightened by what I might smell on hers.

She whirled around and caught hold of the doorframe.

"What?"

I shrugged and shook my head.

Amy glared at me for almost a minute before backing into the bathroom and closing the door. “Out in a minute,” she called. I heard the squeak and rattle of the building's old water pipes before a steady, if weak, stream started flowing from the showerhead.

I sighed and leaned my head back against the bookshelf. I closed my eyes and waited for the water to stop.

The door opened some time later, twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Amy walked out in a rush of steam, wrapped in a threadbare green towel, her wet hair hanging down over her eyes. She looked better, was moving more steadily. Across from the futon, which doubled as her bed, was a stocky wooden dresser. I can't deny feeling a twitch in my jeans when she bent down to open the drawer that contained her bras and panties, the thin towel riding up her backside, revealing a still-curvy bottom.

She glanced over her shoulder and caught me watching. "Like the show?" she laughed, wiggling her rear at me.

I shifted uncomfortably against the bookshelf, self-consciously resting my hands in my lap. "It's not like it isn't anything I haven't seen before," I replied.

"True," she said as she let the towel fall around her ankles.

I sat there and watched her get dressed. Then we went shopping.


Amy only cheated on me once while we dated; at least, once that I know of. I had been sitting in the commons between classes and heard some friends talking about her. At the sound of her name, I piped up and asked what they were talking about.

"Sorry, Jeff, we didn't see you sittin' there," said Milo, whose lanky frame was curled over a deck of "Magic" cards. He and Benny were comparing and organizing their collections.

"What were you sayin' about Amy?" I asked, leaning forward with my hands clasped under my chin.

Milo and Benny first looked at each other, then the floor, then the wall, anywhere but at me.

"Nothin', man. Just a, you know, a rumor or whatever. It's probably nothin'," stammered Benny as he shuffled through his own deck of cards.

"Guys, what is it?" I asked, quickly growing tired of their evasions.

Milo sighed, set his cards down and tried to look me right in the eye, but his gaze kept darting around my head, to my nose, my ears, my forehead. I hadn't seen him this nervous since the time he tried to ask out the uber-popular (and way out of his league) Stacy Kingman when we were freshmen.

"I saw Amy hanging around with Tim the other day."

"And?" My eyebrows rose expectantly.

"They were, um, kinda makin' out a little," Milo said in a rush, eager to end the line of questioning so he could get back to his cards.

My heart began to thud in my chest. I stood up and walked outside into the crisp autumn air. I took a deep breath in a vain attempt to clear my head, but it didn't work. I was ruined for the rest of the day, unable to stop thinking about Amy, wondering what I had done wrong.

I confronted Tim that night, at a park near school where kids from my school would hang out, smoke and drink. He was a big fella, at least half a foot taller than my five-foot-ten, if not more. When I got to the park, he was standing in a circle of kids, holding court over this or that.

I didn't know what I was going to say to him as I walked down the gentle slope from the parking lot toward the park. I thought about the past couple months with Amy, the time we spent together, what she told me about her parents, her mother in particular, and I knew that getting angry wasn't the way to go. This girl has been through enough, I thought, and she doesn't need me complicating things. I walked up to Tim and asked if I could talk to him for a minute.

"I thought you were gonna try and pick a fight that night," he'd later tell me. Fighting, however, was the furthest thing from my mind; for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he could wipe the floor with me.

"This is her choice," I told him. "Not mine. Not yours, either. Whoever she wants to be with, it's up to her, okay? Take care of her."

Tim said he would with a bemused expression on his face. We shook hands and I walked back to my car, content in the delusion that Amy was gone from my life, that she was someone else's problem now.


We rode the 'L' train in silence. Amy listened to her iPod while I covertly watched the other passengers, silently wondering what their stories were, the haggard mother of three rambunctious children, or the shaggy-looking, unshaven man wearing an old, worn military jacket and clutching to his chest a bottle wrapped inside a paper bag as though it were a life-preserver. I glanced at Amy as she sat with eyes closed, calm and peaceful in her drug-induced haze, and felt bizarrely proud with the certainty that their histories couldn't come close to that of the girl sitting beside me.

The train slowed at our stop and we disembarked. We walked along the graffiti-decorated platform and out into the cool night air. There was a Best Buy a couple blocks from the station. When it was in sight, Amy pointed at the big yellow sign and said, "Mmooovies."


After Amy and I had been dating for a couple weeks, she told me about her parents.

"They met in a mental hospital," she said one night as we lay cuddling on the beat-up, old, dog-gnawed couch in my parents' basement. I was lying on my back with my head propped up on some pillows and she was on top of me, her head resting on her hands, which she clasped over my heart. I held her against me, my hands gently caressing her lower back underneath her treasured Kurt Cobain T-shirt. Her skin felt warm, comforting, like a soft flannel blanket on an icy winter night.

We had been watching some stupid "reality" show on MTV because, as Amy told me, "it's great, it's like watching a car wreck in slow motion." At the end of the show, one of the roommates, a bleach blond valley girl whose bra size was bigger than her IQ, tearfully confessed to having cheated on her boyfriend back home by sleeping with some yutz she met at a bar the night before. Amy chuckled, her body quivering against mine.

It's not that she delighted in other people's misfortunes or miseries. I think she instead held herself up to them, as though their lives were a mirror against which she measured herself and defiantly stated that she had survived worse.

She turned her face away from the television and looked at me, still smiling from the banality of the show. Her breath smelled of mint, with a hint of tomato sauce from the pizza we had shared earlier. Her eyes flickered from light brown to green and back again in the shimmering light of the television.

"A mental hospital," I repeated quizzically, squinting my eyes and furrowing my brow while searching her face for some clue as to whether she was kidding or not.

"Mmhmm," she said, lifting her head slightly in order to free one of her hands so she could mute the TV with the remote that sat on the coffee table in front of the sofa and tuck a few stray strands of long brown hair behind her ear. Before she set her head back down, she inched forward and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

I licked my lips and tasted her chapstick. "Seriously?" I asked, still incredulous. After all, my friends and I had been joking for years that our parents were nuts, when, of course, none of them actually were.

"My mother was a patient. My dad, you know how I told you he's a drug rep, a door-to-door salesman for some pharmaceutical company? Well, one day he knocked on the door of the place my mother was in."

"What was she in for? I mean, why..."

Amy turned her head again, this time toward the back of the couch, resting her cheek on her hands.

"Depression," she said quietly. "She'd tried to kill herself a couple times. You know, her wrists, and maybe pills once, I don’t remember."

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "Wow, that's pretty fucked up," but instead I swallowed the words and continued to rub her back. I was pretty sure she knew how fucked up it was and didn't need me reminding her.

She grinned slightly, to herself, and let out a little chuckle.

"What're you smilin' about, missy?"

She turned back to me and stared for a minute or two, as if trying to pierce my soul through my eyes.

Amy smiled softly again, and laid her head back on her hands, facing the back of the couch. "The only person I've ever told about my parents is Rachel, and I really only told her because she's my best friend and she was around when...when..." Her voice cracked, just barely, and I felt her choke back a lump in her throat. Her heart was like a jackhammer against my stomach.

"Hey, it's okay," I said, pulling one of my hands free of her shirt. I started to stroke her hair. "Whatever it is, you don't have to..."

She cut me off. "No, I do. I want to." She looked at me again and her eyes and cheeks were wet. "I don't know why, but you...you help. Just being around you, you make me feel better."

I gently placed my thumb on her cheek and wiped away the tears. "And I'm not goin' anywhere. I'll always be here."

She gave me a wan smile. "Promise?"

I leaned forward, kissed her and tasted the salt of her tears on her skin. "I promise."

Amy seemed to take comfort in my clumsy high-school-romance platitude. Her heart stopped racing and her body relaxed against mine. She rested her head on her hands again and when she spoke, it was with a certainty that hadn't been there moments earlier.

"When I was ten, I found my mother slumped over the steering wheel of her car. I didn't know what was going on, y'know? I just slapped the button next to the door to open the garage door. I don't know how long she’d been there, but she survived."

"God, that's horrible, sweetie," I said, unable to stop myself.

"Oh, I'm not done yet," she half-laughed. "A few years later, I guess I was thirteen, maybe not quite thirteen, I found her again. She was sprawled out on the floor of the bathroom, random pills scattered around her like she had dropped an open bag of Skittles."

Amy shuddered at the memory and I felt her body tense against mine. It must have been five minutes before she spoke again.

"That's when I started cutting myself," she said softly. "I mean, what was I supposed to do, y'know? There's no instruction guide for something like that. So I stole one of my dad's razor blades and just..."

I stayed quiet, unsure of how to respond.

"You probably think I'm a freak now." Her voice wavered. I had never seen anyone so vulnerable before. I wanted to hold her in my arms until the pain stopped, even if it took forever.

"No, no, no," I said, my mind racing, searching for the right words that might magically make everything okay again. "I, uh, I've always thought you were kind of a freak. That's why I like you."

Amy looked at me for a moment, her wet eyes glistening in the light from the TV. It started slowly, a low rumble in her belly. She tried to stifle it, tried to keep looking at me with a straight face, but it was a losing battle. Amy burst into laughter, her body convulsing with every breath she took. It was contagious and before I knew it, I was laughing right along with her.

She wiped her eyes free of tears, these ones from laughing so hard, and playfully punched me in the stomach. "Jerk," she managed between guffaws. The waves of laughter started to subside and she rested her head back on my chest, an occasional spasm of giggles rippling through her.

"I probably looked like a half-wrapped mummy at Mom’s funeral," Amy said when her breathing finally returned to normal, "because of all the bandages." This image in her head brought on a whole new round of mild laughter.

"I was, you know, all dressed in black except where you could see my arms and legs," she said. "It helped, kind of. The cutting. Took my mind off...everything else." She shifted her head and peeked at me from under droopy eyelids. "But now I have you for that."

I hugged Amy close to me, wrapping my arms around her prone body, and, smiling, said, "That's what I'm here for, sweetie."


Amy wandered aimlessly, it seemed, through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up a DVD, glance at its packaging and replace it, giggling to herself all the while. She was still high, of course. I lagged behind her slightly, watching her, and wondered if anyone else could tell.

"'Tombstone!'" she squealed. She ran up to me holding a DVD in front of her face. "I have two guns," she drawled, quoting Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday from the movie, "one for each of you."

She giggled and clutched the movie to her chest. "I love this movie," she said in a singsong voice. "We're going to watch this movie."

"Okay," I said. I couldn't help but laugh. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even if her preferred method of attaining it was not.

When we got back to the apartment, she handed me the DVD and told me to unwrap it. She went to the dresser and pulled something out, hiding it from view. "I'll be out in a sec," she said, heading toward the bathroom.

I set our Chinese take-out on the low table in front of the futon, then cut the plastic wrapping off the movie and placed the DVD in the player that sat atop the television. I grabbed the remote and settled onto the futon. I opened a container of orange chicken and wondered what was taking Amy so long.

She finally emerged from the bathroom about ten minutes later, a calm smile planted squarely on her face. She walked with a looseness I couldn't place, as if all the muscles in her body had gone slack. She was holding a hand to the inside of her elbow, gently fingering a small red dot of skin as she plopped down beside me. She was so relaxed she practically oozed against me, melting into me, her head resting on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pressed PLAY on the remote.

"This is nice," she said dreamily, her voice leaden with sleep. Soon she was snoring gently, lost in her drug-fueled dreams.

"Yeah," I sighed, pulling a blanket around us. "Real nice."