Pretty Amy by Lisa Burstein Page B

Simon said, looking around and sniffing in that way people do when they know more about something than you do. “Depends on the docket. Could be fifteen minutes, could be more.”
    Just like that, my destiny had been whittled down into the estimated time it took for an album to download.
    Finally, Lila walked in, her mother two paces behind her and her lawyer two paces behind that. I felt myself rise involuntarily to greet her, and then felt my mother tug at the back of my jacket as she hissed, “Don’t you dare.”
    I saw Lila look over at me. She seemed tired, had big blue bags under her eyes, a reflection of the eye shadow above them. Even from where I was sitting, I could see that her eyes looked glazed and bloodshot. I wondered if it was because she wasn’t sleeping or because she had been spewing the contents of her stomach all morning like I had.
    Cassie walked in with her father. Her mother walked behind them, and Cassie’s lawyer walked behind all of them, like some weird wedding procession. As Cassie sat, she put her head down, not even bothering to look and see where Lila and I were sitting.
    “Not to worry; those two are rookies,” Dick Simon said, tipping his head toward Lila’s and Cassie’s lawyers. “Court appointed.”
    I couldn’t care less about their lawyers; Lila and Cassie were not wearing suits. They weren’t even wearing skirts, and they definitely weren’t wearing headbands. I glared at my mother, adding yet another line to the seemingly never-ending list of all the ways she didn’t get it.
    At some point the judge came in, a man so tall and skinny that his robe hung like his shoulders and neck were a clothes hanger. He was younger than my father and Dick Simon and his hair was shiny with gel. I heard someone say, “All rise,” and then some other stuff I couldn’t bear to listen to, and before I knew it we were waiting for Case Number 276, our case, The State of New York v. Lila, Cassie, and Amy . We waited through real criminals: guys who were charged with possession of illegal firearms, women charged with prostitution, dirty-looking people scrubbed clean and put into orange jumpsuits to face the judge. Men charged with assault wearing shackles around their ankles and cuffs that pulled their arms behind their backs.
    As I saw each one, I knew with more and more certainty that we did not belong here. We were nothing like these people. These people were real criminals. Our only crime was being stupid.
    It felt like my stomach was an elevator and as I waited, it traveled down one floor for each number called until 276. At which point someone would snip the cable and it would go sailing fast to land at my feet.
    There was a digital clock at the front of the courtroom below the judge’s bench; it was the size and shape of a license plate, with big red numbers like a bomb timer. As I stared at it, counting down the seconds until the end of my life, it became blurry, and then the room around it became blurry, and when I looked down at my hands that had been gripping the bench in front of me, they were also blurry.
    Then I heard someone call our case and say my name and everything I had been charged with, and it was like my whole head was underwater. The court reporter’s voice sounded distant and muffled, in the same way it feels when you’re dreaming and you try to scream, and nothing but a moan comes out.
    Count one: Possession. Count two: Possession with intent to sell. Count three: Sale. Your standard PISS, as Dick Simon had put it so eloquently.
    I felt Dick pull me up and take me to the front of the courtroom. We stood behind the table with the pitcher of water that no one drank from, clear plastic glasses stacked together neatly at its side.
    The judge asked me the questions he had asked every plaintiff before me.
    “Are you correctly named in the indictment?”
    I answered “Yes,” and then Dick Simon nudged me and I said, “Yes, Your Honor.”
    “Are you selecting Richard