A-Sides Read online

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  Sad and seventeen, pierced and tatted, arms like pick up sticks, skin fish belly white and sagging, Amy X could have been the recruiting photo for the rehab clinic which she was habitually in and out of.

  “You’re a hard woman to get up with,” the reporter said. Amy simply looked at her with her doe eyes, and smiled colorlessly with her meth eroded teeth. Every drug known to man had probably found its way into her sclerotic veins at one time or another.

  “Not so surprising,” she said, in a voice too soft and cultured to fit comfortably with her latest incarnation as a haggard skel. “It’s hard to suddenly be seen after being invisible for so long.”

  The fluorescent lights at the rehab center were soft, not bouncing off the white walls, but gently probing against them with a bluish cast. It had been home for Amy, but not for much longer.

  “I’m given to understand,” the reporter said, “that you and your father were estranged. Would you like to talk about that?”

  “What’s to say?” Her tone was more declarative than questioning. “It’s the same sad story, and not very interesting. Successful, driven father has no time for wife or child; wife drifts away, child ends up first on skid row, then in a shooting gallery.” She held her forearms out, supinated. Scars, now healed, but ugly and pinkish and gnarled against all the unhealthy white, tracked up and down her inner forearm.

  “He could have stopped it, you know. All he had to do was take a little time for his own. I guess you’ve heard it all before, but he was always the man in the white hat, but always for someone else. Never for me, or my mom, not even himself, and I think it finally ate him up. Consumed him, if you will. But he wasn’t the only one that paid; there are a lot of victims in his wake.”

  “You see yourself as a victim?”

  Amy was silent for a second before speaking, looking around at her disconsolate environs, mentally cataloging the many ills of her wasted body, the dear toll of years churning in a chemically induced meat grinder.

  “Don’t you?” She paused again, then smiled that ghostly smile.

  “I see,” the reporter said. “How did you find out what had happened?”

  “We’re only allowed visitors from people on a list, and only a couple of them. When my mom went away, Sheila -his secretary- tried to fill in, but it got to be too much for her, trying to take care of two junkies; one addicted to Big Pharma, the other to any chemical that could be cooked up by a half bright chem major looking for a high. By the time it all came to an end, she was more of a nurse than a secretary. She’s the one who told me what happened.”

  “And how did you take it?”

  Another, self-examining sigh.

  “Relief. More than anything. For Sheila, too, I think.”

  Amy stopped for a second, determined to tell the reporter something she believed was important; something bigger than the context the reporter had dictated.

  “He named me, you know? It was a big deal for him. Do you know what my name means?”

  The reporter waited.

  Amy smiled her unsound smile. “It means ‘beloved’.” Her smile melted away as her flesh had.

  “I could have been the good daughter with the horse in the stable, and the prep school, and the sweet sixteen bash, and débutante’s parties. If he had just taken the time for his own. Now he’s gone, and all I have for a dad is a monster bank account. But, see, it’s not that much of a change. The only good that can come from it is that I can get well now.”

  “What do you mean,” the reporter asked, puzzled. “Why should this time be any different?”

  Amy looked at the reporter as if she were a drooling moron with an IQ to match her hat size.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” She sighed. “I don’t have to try to make him notice me, anymore.”