Amy With a Y
by T.M. Shine

The sensation comes and goes. I feel my bare foot on carpeted stairs and everything feels ... not all right ... but better.
It started two weeks ago, when I turned 23. I was sitting in the one-bench park across from my apartment building scribbling in the margins of the newspaper. I was playing with my name like I did in middle school, trying different versions: Amy, Aimie, Aimee. I remember when I thought that could change everything about me.
Anyway, I was looking down at the loopy letters and noticing how I still used open circles to dot the i’s, when I saw the picture of the parents sitting on a frilly canopy bed. The couple was thin and orangey-tan, as if they played tennis every day. But they seemed awkward among the fat and fuzzy bears that sat beside them on the colorful quilt. Hanging from one of the bed’s four posts was a white sweatshirt — a “hoody” — and another post was striped barber-pole style with blue and gold crepe paper.
I read a little. Apparently, blue and gold were their daughter’s school colors and her first name was the same as mine. Amy with a Y. But then I went back to the photo. The vanity set had one of those three-legged, fairy-tale chairs before a large oval mirror; tasseled pillows were everywhere. All the furniture was cream-colored, and atop a wall-length bureau were small trophies with blue metallic plating. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were for. From one angle, the figures on them looked like itty-bitty archers aiming arrows. But when I put my face real close to the paper, they just looked like tiny, gold-dipped girls with their backs arched proudly, swanlike.
The gist of it was that Amy Brennan was gone. She was killed in one of those accidents where the driver was doing 800 mph with 11 kids in a Mazda Protégé or something. Seven of the kids died and the 18-year-old driver got manslaughter for being stupid or whatever, because he wasn’t drunk.
This was the one-year anniversary of the accident so I figured they must have asked all the parents how they were coping and Amy’s parents were the only ones who must have wanted to be in the paper. I wanted to feel sorry for them because they went on about her SAT scores and how she’d already been accepted at some place called Dartmouth and that she never even got the chance to ride the mountain bike they bought for her 17th birthday, but my eyes just kept going back to the room.
It was near the end of the article that they mentioned it was a two-story house, and that’s when I started feeling the carpeted stairs under my feet. Every place I’ve ever lived has been a one-story. The apartment I share now isn’t even an apartment, really. They call it an “extended efficiency” because it has a full-size refrigerator; otherwise it would just be an efficiency. I almost had my own room when my oldest sister moved out to Sacramento. Not to go to college or anything, just to go. “I’m going to take one giant step,” she said. And that’s what she did. From Boynton Beach, Fla., to Sacramento, Calif. One giant step.
I was going to have my own room, but then my parents divorced and I ended up at my aunt’s house, sharing a room with my mom of all people. I quit school and moved out when I was 16 and a half. At first, I thought about going to Sacramento but I hadn’t even heard from my sister since she left. A friend she went to high school with told me she was selling yogurt.
For a while, after I moved out, I lived with a friend’s parents. She had her own room until I got there and then she hated me in two weeks. “I can’t stand it anymore. I keep stepping on you!” she screamed one night. Before I left her house, I would lie on the floor in a sleeping bag dreaming of what my own giant step would be.
But once I left, I seemed to make only little steps that led to nowhere. I met this older guy who I thought was going to take care of me but he got fired from his job for stealing a case of Dustbusters and things were never the same. I did get this neat job taking photos of people getting on the river tour boats. I really didn’t know anything about photography but this lady taught me how you just line up their faces with the life preserver ring and everybody’s happy. She moved to Boston to work in a bridal shop and I took over. Nobody ever complained about my pictures but the people were so ugly and from Ohio that I started to get sick of it pretty quick. Plus, the captain started touching my hair all the time. So, I quit.
For the past three months, I’ve been working for this auto parts place but they’re a bunch of jerks, too, and I was thinking about quitting last night while I was walking past the Brennans’ house. It’s about the fifth time I’ve been by there in the past two weeks. After reading the article again, I thought I knew the area in Delray where they lived, and I was right. It even says “The Brennans” on the mailbox. It’s the only two-story on the block and when I went by in the early evening the first couple of times, the whole upstairs was black. But after 10, the lights go on in one bedroom and I’m sure Amy’s room is the one facing the street, because it’s always dark.
The second time I came, I was going to knock on the door right away, maybe ask directions or something to see what they were like and peek up the stairway. In my head, the steps are maroon, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. I’d prefer beige or another airy color. Anyway, I chickened out and thought it better if I returned on another night and was honest about it. Tell them I saw them in the newspaper and how their daughter’s room was lovely and my name is Amy, too, and those trophies — were they for archery? I couldn’t tell. And I’ve dreamed of having a canopy bed to hang my “hoody” on and being surrounded by fluffiness and an army of fat, loyal bears because then ... I don’t know. I think I would feel safe and ... better — better than I’m feeling right now. If I could just sleep in that bed for one night and you would love me and I would love you back. I could make that promise.
I wanted to say all that but they would probably freak and think I’m weird. And maybe I am. So, I chickened out the next time, too.
But tonight, something is going to happen. It doesn’t even look as if anyone is home and the sensations are coming in a wave now — I feel my fingers on the cherry-wood banister, my face in the pillows, my sanity beneath the quilt. The gravel walkway leading up to the side door is sharp and coarse but I have already taken off my shoes.
The carpeted stairs will be so soft.