Chapter 7

Her Mother's Daughter

Prologue

"God, you're so hot!"

"Stop it." I frowned, pushing my boyfriend's hands away, looking over my shoulder and half expecting my mom to be sneaking up behind me.

"Come on, Amy." Greg grinned like a dog and the only reason I was going out with him was because he had a car.

"I said stop!" I slapped at his hand. "We're gonna be late for school."

"Shit, who cares?" He shrugged and his hand was coming back to my thigh, stroking me through my jeans. "Let's ditch, we'll go to my uncle's place."

"Yeah right." I rolled my icy blue eyes. "Last time we did that I got busted. My mom grounded me for a week and drove me to school every freakin' day for a month, remember?"

"I'll call the school," he insisted, sliding his left hand back and forth along my leg, his right arm going around my shoulders.

"And say you're my dad?" I shook my head and jerked away from him a bit. "Let's just go, okay?"

"Fine, whatever," he sighed, all pissed off now probably. Greg started his car and took off, almost getting clipped by some old guy in a Mercedes who honked long and loud and Greg gave him the finger.

I just sat back, thinking I'd have to dump the guy pretty soon. All he wanted was to make out with me all the time and I didn't mind it so much, but not like at seven in the morning. Not after trying to deal with my mom and bratty little brother. My mom especially though. I wanted to take off the stupid bra she was making me wear, like I couldn't leave the house without it, but I didn't want to give Greg any ideas.

That bra totally ruined my blouse and I'd tried to explain that to my mom, but all she cared about was how my nipples showed through it. You could hardly see them, but the straps of my bra? Duh! It was like silk, or something, kinda thin and it looked really cool, but not with that stupid training bra underneath it. God! I hated my tits anyway, they weren't growing hardly at all and I was fifteen already. I was pretty enough, I knew that, but nobody was ever gonna think I was beautiful, not with those little boobs I had.

That and I wanted to be taller, at least five foot ten cause everybody knows you can't be a model if you're not really tall, but right then I was still a good five inches too short. At least I was thin, not skinny, not like sick, but thin and that was cool. Some round hips and a nice butt, nice legs too. I always wore jeans though, when I could, just so I wouldn't like get bruised or scratched or anything. I didn't have any scars and I didn't want any. A girl at school had been roller blading and she scraped the fuck out of her legs, both of them, and that was like my worst nightmare. I took serious care of my body.

Blonde hair, very light almost platinum really in the summer and then golden in the winter, which is sorta cool. It's straight mostly and looks nice anyway around my shoulders. My eyes are killer though, ice blue like a winter sky, you know? They're pretty intense and people ask me all the time if they're real or not. I have a pretty face too, real pretty, except I want some serious lips, like bee stung Angelina Jolie lips, you know? Those are easy to get though. The rest of my face is fine, but my lips are just a little too thin, I think. Like my tits and I really hoped they'd start growing soon cause just having big puffy nipples and hardly anything else was so uncool in the ninth grade!

Greg was right though, I was hot. Lots of guys liked me, lots of girls wanted to be my friend. I could get a new boyfriend easy, an older one I was thinking. Greg was just sixteen and in tenth grade, my first real boyfriend, but there were other guys. Like a senior maybe, some of those guys, they liked me. I just couldn't be acting fifteen all the time, that was thing, so I was in kind of a hurry to grow up and I knew it. I hated being fifteen! Even more than I'd hated it when I was fourteen. It was like I was still a little kid and my mom was the worst!

She was acting all weird anyway though, like schizo mom! Sometimes she was like really cool, smiling and almost sort of human, and then she'd wig out over nothing at all. I'd asked her like two days ago if I could get my nose pierced and it was like the world was gonna end. I just wanted a little stud, an aquamarine one cause it would look so awesome with my eyes, but she wouldn't even think about it. She was practically screaming at me for that and I didn't even have it yet.

Dad wasn't any help either. All he did was work all the time, come home and bang my mom on Friday nights. They were like clockwork, ten o'clock, right after the movie, cause they always rented one, the door was closed and the bed was squeaking. That was so gross. My parents fucking, can you imagine anything more sick than that? Their bedroom is right next to mine too, so is it any wonder I tried to get out of the house and stay out as late as I could? Not like that was gonna happen though. Be home by ten, that was my rule, even on Fridays, and that was so fucked up!

I had to like ditch my friends, beg Greg for a ride home and of course he gave me a hard time cause all he wanted to do was fuck me. I let him do it, just twice though. The first time it hurt cause I'd been a virgin and the second time, well, it didn't feel like much of anything really. It was all over pretty quick. The kissing was nice though, I liked that part, but he didn't know how to have sex any more than I did. That was another reason to lose the guy and find someone older, someone who knew how to make it special for me. I really wanted to know what the big deal was, cause truthfully, I wasn't getting it.

And so that was a typical morning for me, right there. Blah!

The world really did end one day, which was weird. The whole thing was, you know? I woke up like normal and it was a Saturday. I live for Saturdays cause I can leave as soon as I wake up and not come back home until it's time to crash. Like I don't even have a psycho mom or a dad who doesn't even know I'm alive. Or a nine year old brother who gets every little thing he wants. The only one in my whole family I like is my little sister, Jilly, and she's just three. A total terrorist too, like she could give Osama bin-Laden some lessons, you know? Jilly rules the house, or she rules our mom anyway, so that's like the same thing. I like her though, just for that. She keeps my mom busy and out of my hair, sometimes.

I got up early and dressed, you know, some old jeans and my pink Skechers, a t-shirt that said "Forkboy" on it, whatever that means. It's cool anyway though. I grabbed my Ipod and popped a birth control pill, cause after the first time me and Greg did it I sorta freaked out a little. I had my period like two days later anyway, but still. A baby would destroy my chances at having a life. The women's health clinic hooked me up and I didn't even have to tell my mom or anything, I just asked for pills and filled out some papers and they gave me a scrip for it. I swiped twenty bucks from mom's purse and I was good to go. That had been over a month ago, I was working on my first refill now. They give you two refills on the prescription, then you have to go back, just so they know you're not like getting cancer or something. I dunno.

Anyway, I stashed my pills good, cause mom would go ballistic probably, like her head would explode if she found those. I went downstairs and the brat was up, little Jackie Junior, he was my dad's pride and joy. I could be like dead for a week and my dad wouldn't even notice, but if JJ scratched his nose funny, dad was all over it. God, I hated that little jerk. He always ratted me out too, not that he really knew about anything I might be doing, but if he could, he'd tell on me in a heartbeat. Swearing was a biggie, he loved telling mom and dad how I was saying bad words. Stupid little kid. Like anyone would honestly care? But of course they did, just because he did. I'd get a lecture on not swearing because it wasn't lady-like and not good for my brother and sister especially. How stupid is that? They watch television don't they? Give me a break.

"Where's Mom?" I asked him, just cause mom was like always up at sunrise, waking everyone else up too. Even on Saturdays.

"I dunno." JJ shrugged.

"Where's Dad?" I asked then, cause if Mom wasn't up, well, Dad shoulda been because Jilly was gonna be up soon, if she wasn't already.

"Living room." JJ was stuffing his face with chocolate cereal which was totally gross. "He's sleeping."

"Sleeping on the couch?" I narrowed my eyes and my brother nodded. "Great."

So Mom and Dad had another fight, that figures. Mom had gone out the night before, I knew that. Dad said she'd gone with some friends or something, her friend Stacy, and she was almost okay. I'd called her Aunt Stacy for a long time, until I'd gotten old enough to know she wasn't related to me at all and just one of my mom's friends. The woman wasn't married or anything, just a different boyfriend every time I saw her. Like she belonged to a boyfriend-of-the-month club or something. I figured Stacy had probably got my mom drunk, brought her home like two in the morning and pissed my dad off. This was gonna be a real fun house for the next week or so, until next Friday rolled around and my parents could have sex and makeup.

"Where you going?" JJ asked me.

"The mall," I shrugged. "Tell Dad I'll call later." As if he'd even care.

I wasn't gonna stick around and watch my parents argue, or worse, watch them totally ignore each other all day. Fuck that. Everytime they wanted to say something mean to each other they'd just say it to me, since I was the black sheep of the family. Amy the whipping girl, that was me, and I wasn't hanging around for that.

The problem was that it was still pretty early yet, so there wasn't anyplace to go. All my friends were probably still sleeping and I wasn't gonna like ring any doorbells at eight in the morning anyways. So I did what I usually do when there's nothing to do ... Nothing. We lived in total suburbia, like there were only three different kinds of houses, alternating up and down the long streets. Only the colors really changed and there weren't all that many to pick from. So it was like déjà vu over and over as I just walked along the sidewalk, listening to the Chili Peppers on my Ipod.

God, that place was so depressing. There weren't even any trees, you know? All the houses were like ten years old at the most and so the trees weren't much older, they were all skinny and useless. It would be fifty years before they were decent and by then who'd want to live in ugly pre-fab fifty year old houses? It was crazy and sometimes I just wished I could leave the whole planet behind. That's why I wanted to grow up and be a model and move away. I'd go to New York or Paris, someplace cool like that, and hang out at the cool parties and tell people I'd grown up an orphan.

But right then I was just walking around and bored out of my skull.

"Hi, is Brittany here?" I asked Brittany's mom who was an awful lot like my mom.

"Hi Amy. Yeah, I told her to clean her room." The woman rolled her eyes. "Go on up."

"Cool." I nodded and I'd known Brittany for a couple years, since I started going to middle school anyway. I guess she was my best friend, but mostly I didn't feel like I had one of those. She was just a friend.

I found her laying on her bed reading the newest Seventeen and when I opened her bedroom door, the girl jumped and started acting like she was cleaning, until she saw it was just me.

"I thought you were my mom," she said with a sheepish smile.

"She let me in." I shrugged and closed the door behind me. "What's up?"

"Nothing." Brittany was just as bored as me. "I gotta clean my room."

"Yeah, it doesn't look bad." I looked around and I didn't see anything wrong with it. She lived there, so what was the big deal if all the clothes weren't put away, or stuff was out on the dresser and floor maybe? My room was the same way.

"That's what I said." My friend smiled. "She's on the rag though."

"Yeah." I nodded. "My mom's always on the rag."

"What you doing anyway?"

"Nothing. Just bored," I said. "I'm gonna go to the mall later probably."

"It's boring there too." Brittany went back to her magazine and I sat down on her bed.

"Yeah, but at least there's guys there." I grinned and Brittany wasn't really all that cute so she was kind of up and down on boys. Like a love hate thing. She loved them and they hated her, or so it seemed.

"Where's your boyfriend?" she wondered.

"Jerking off." I giggled and watched her blush.

"Oh." She nodded like that might be true. Brittany was weird.

"You wanna go with me?" I asked her. "They're gonna open at ten."

"Oh, I don't know." She sucked her top lip. "My mom probably wants me to clean all day."

"Just ask," I said. "She ain't gonna say no if I'm here. That would be totally rude."

"Yeah, maybe." Brittany shrugged and I got the sense she didn't really want to go anywhere.

"Well, anyway, I'm gonna go." I'd already decided.

Brittany didn't want to go, which sucked because if she did her mom would have given us a ride, probably. Some money too maybe, since I only had like ten bucks. My parents didn't give me hardly any, since if I had some money I might actually have some fun. Probably they thought I'd buy cigarettes and alcohol maybe, or some dope. God! If I ever got another lecture on drugs and drinking I was gonna lose it. Like every other week my parents would say something, you know, they'd see something in the newspaper about a girl who overdosed or got in a car accident with her drunk boyfriend and now she's in a coma for the rest of her life. Get real.

I smoked pot, yeah, everybody I knew did it once in awhile. Mostly it just made me hungry and sleepy though, so what was the point? Sometimes it was funny though and that was cool. I couldn't afford any though and neither could Greg. Mostly I just got a little stoned at school sometimes cause the stoners were always out by the bleachers trying to get caught and if I said hi to one of those guys he'd give me a couple hits, just to see if he could cop a feel. I definitely didn't need a stoner boyfriend though so I'd get buzzed and take off. Those guys never learned.

So I was riding the bus, which blew hard chunks. There wasn't hardly anyone on it though, so I could stretch out which was cool. Mostly it was like old people and I had no idea where they'd be going or why. Probably they just rode around all day long. Pay a dollar and just sit there, watching the world go by. It must suck being old and not having anything to do but ride a fucking bus all day long. Like being young and riding the bus is any better, I reminded myself and I felt like I was just a half-step out of synch all the time. Something was missing and I didn't know what.

Maybe it was that ring, I thought to myself. I'd been at the mall for a couple hours already and I'd seen some people I knew, kids from school and whatever. Nobody I wanted to hang with though and so I had to act like I was waiting for someone else, you know, cause you couldn't be at the mall by yourself and hangout. I'd be a total loser then. So I smiled and shrugged and said I was waiting, and when my friends showed up we were gonna have so much fun it would be pathetic! I was a pretty good liar anyway so they believed me, plus it was hard for some of those wiener heads to imagine me being alone anyway, since I was so pretty. Like pretty people don't ever get lonely.