Echols, Jennifer (3 page)

Chapter 3

The cop lightened up on the way to the police station. Or maybe it was just that the radio in the police car blasted Beck, which made the bad drug trip and forced incarceration a little more homey. I would have thought a cop would ride around in stark silence so nothing would distract him from his sworn duties. At the very least, I would have thought he'd listen to a country station. Maybe the last prisoner in the car had switched the radio to the Birmingham pop station as a joke.

Tiffany slouched against me, half asleep. Only the shoulder belt kept her from sagging into the floorboard. I was sleepy, too. The cop's interrogation had drained every drop of life out of me. And the drone of the car's engine lulled me. But I stayed in the middle of the seat. I tended to Tiffany, stroking her hair out of her eyes. This way, I could fool the cop, keeping the center seat belt lax across my lap without fastening it. I did not wear seat belts. Besides being a lot cheaper than a car, riding a motorcycle usually got me around this problem.

Tiffany shook her head and roused a little without opening her eyes. "Meg, you know what we are?"

"Criminals?" I guessed.

"Yes, but what else?"

"Felons?"

"We're no-goodniks!"

In the rearview mirror, I saw the cop smile. Obviously he liked Tiffany a lot better than he liked me.

She opened her eyes and saw him smiling, too. "Mr. Policeman, do you think we're no-goodniks?"

"Yes, but not for long."

"Well, I want you to know, for what it's worth, that I've learned my lesson. I have learned some things about myself tonight. They are all very bad."

I rubbed her thigh soothingly. I hadn't learned anything about myself tonight. I already knew these bad things.

"Your friend tells me this was your first drink," the cop said.

"Oh, no," she said.

"It was your first drink," I said through my teeth.

"I don't want to lie to the policeman." She sat up straighter. "Mr. Policeman, I went to England with my grandma last summer, and I had a can of shandy, which is beer mixed with lemonade. I bought it out of a Coke machine. My grandma said it was okay. Clearly it was wrong of her."

"Did you catch a buzz?" I asked.

"I don't know. I ate a lot of fish and chips with it."

The policeman laughed. Dimples showed in both his cheeks when he laughed.

I decided to try my hand at him. "Do you watch
Cops
on TV?"

"I love
Cops,"
he said. "It's like my life, but with the boring parts taken out."

"Do you watch
Reno 911?"

"Yes. That's probably even more true-to-life than
Cops.
At least around this town." He parked and cut the engine in front of the jail/courthouse/city hall, beside Tiffany's mom's minivan. "Sit tight just a minute, ladies." He slid out from under the steering wheel, closed the door, and spoke to the old cop through the rolled-down window of the other police car, with Brian and Eric in the backseat.

Eric said something to me through the glass. It did not look good. Then he struggled with his arms cuffed behind him. Finally his head and shoulders disappeared, and his cuffed hands rose above the windowsill. He shot me a bird.

I pointed out the spectacle to Tiffany. "I'm glad I'm not going to the prom. He might refuse to go with me now."

Tiffany rubbed her temple. "Invite him. We'll all double-date. Can you imagine where they would take us out to dinner?"

"McDonald's." I said with conviction as our cop opened the door.

The old cop was already hauling Brian and Eric out of his car. The message Eric had been trying to send me rang through the parking lot and echoed against the building. "You told him about the pot. He faked you out, you stupid bitch!"

"Well! That is not a very nice thing to say." I was actually kind of concerned about being faked out, and disappointed in myself. I had to keep up my rep around the Big House.

Our cop didn't even look at me. I was just another snitch to him. "Don't say anything else to each other," he intoned to the space between us.

"Pot?" Tiffany echoed behind me.

"Not you," our cop assured her. "I know you're not that much of a no-goodnik." He laughed and Tiffany giggled like they were old friends. God, these squares were
made
for each other.

Inside the police station, the cops didn't seem interested in fingerprinting us or taking our mug shots or dressing us in orange. Possibly this was because they didn't want to make a bigger scene. Tiffany's parents were already there to fuss over her hysterically. She clung to them like a terrified Pekingese who had gotten separated from her owners in a tornado. I had wondered why Tiffany didn't go Ivy League for college, with her grades and test scores. I sure would have gone farther than Birmingham if I'd gotten a scholarship somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't just another small town traded for this one. But after witnessing the collective fawning between Tiffany and her parents, I understood she wasn't ready to venture far.

"Call me tomorrow," she said as she left.

"I will," I said, knowing I wouldn't. I did not call people. Her parents took her home.

Brian's father arrived soon after. He was grim and quiet, like Brian. There was probably a lot of Silent Treatment going on in that household, and it probably worked. He took Brian home.

Then Eric's father blustered in. He acted like it was the policeman's fault for making the arrest, the city's fault for making the bridge off-limits, my fault for seducing his child. At least, I assumed he meant me when he said "that punk whore." He blamed anyone but Eric. He even dared to shout at my cop.

Not like the cop had shouted at Eric, right up in Eric's face. That was too personal. No, Eric's father paced around the cop and waved his arms, never looking directly into the cop's dark eyes. The cop stood there silently. He stared straight ahead like one of those soldiers on the Travel Channel who guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or Buckingham Palace with an expressionless face. He looked like he could use a shandy. Eric's father took Eric home.

Then the cop spent a long time on the phone in an office with a glass wall. I tried not to watch him, but he kept looking at me while he talked into the receiver. Probably he was telling his wife how much he loved her and how he would never cheat on her with a blue-haired girl-felon, if such a creature existed. After a long while, he hung up and returned to the main room, where he said something to the old cop that I couldn't quite catch. He leaned against the cement-block wall and folded his arms.

I yawned and stretched and shifted in my metal folding chair. I was watching an
Andy Griffith
rerun on the dispatcher's tiny TV. The dispatcher, whose name was Lois, had three grown children, eight grandchildren, two cats, two dogs, an iguana, lots of gold jewelry, and much bigger cleavage than mine. She lived at 2043 Sunny Level Cutoff and did not mind giving out her address to juvenile delinquents.

"Do you want to call your parents again?" the old cop asked me. His name was Officer Leroy. He had never married and did not have any children of his own, not even an iguana. "When I talked to your dad, he sounded like he was already awake."

Yes, my dad was already awake. My parents owned a diner called Eggstra! Eggstra! Underneath the name, the sign said
Our specialty is breakfast,
as if this were not painfully obvious already. It was open twenty-four hours a day, which is the only reason I could see that anyone would ever eat there.

"They're not coming," I said without looking up from the TV. I chuckled. This Barney Fife was a real laugh riot. I was still drunk.

"I'll try calling them." Officer Leroy picked up the phone on the dispatcher's desk.

"Please don't bother. This is the last straw," I repeated what my dad had said to me on the phone. "They've washed their hands of me."

In December when I skipped school with Davy Gillespie and Billy Smith and came home plastered, my dad had warned me this would happen. He'd told me that was my last time worrying my mother sick, and next time I would be dead to them. I hadn't exactly kept my nose clean since then. I'd done plenty with Eric. But I hadn't gotten caught, until now.

Officer Leroy put the phone down. Even though I still studied the exploits of Officer Barney Fife, I could feel Officer Leroy studying
me.
"I'm acquainted with your dad," he said finally. I got this a lot. Translation:
Your daddy is a hard-ass bastard.

I snorted. "You played ball with him in school, right?"

"Seems you're his comeuppance." He slapped my cop on the shoulder and called a goodbye to Lois, who was speaking into her headset and typing at her computer. She waved back vaguely. Officer Leroy pushed open the door. Part of the cold night elbowed its way in as the door closed slowly behind him.

"Well, come on," my cop said to me. He shoved off the wall with one boot.

As I stood up to follow the cop, Lois called, "After." It seemed like she was talking to the cop. Yeah, I would have liked this tour of the jail
after.
After I was sober. After it was daylight. After I was sure I wouldn't have to spend the night here. But she heard something on her headphones, and her eyes glazed over. She spoke into her headset again and turned away.

The cop nodded a greeting to a guard watching his own TV, raked back a barred door, and led me down a cement-block hallway lined with jail cells. There were lots of sleepy catcalls, which I could handle. But one gentleman grabbed the bars of his cell, said, "Good evening, Clarice," and proceeded to list which of my body parts he planned to explore with his tongue. It took everything I had left in me to keep walking by him at the same slow pace.

"Shut up, Jerry," the cop said.

"Is this what you wanted me to see?" I asked the cop, trying to keep my shaking voice even.

"No, this is." The cop slid open an empty cell at the very end of the hall and motioned me in.

I stopped.

I breathed.

"Come on," he said.

I stepped toward him, stepped even with him, stepped past him into the cell, my heart pounding. I felt myself begin to panic. I whirled to face him and reached out with one hand to his shoulder. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just trying desperately to connect with him, like a friend, anything.

He started back. "Never touch me while I'm in uniform!" he shouted. The blush crept back into his white face. As if I were trying to come on to him and lead him astray from his wife and fourteen kids and storage shed, shiny and new from the Sears catalog.

"Okay," I whispered. I cradled the offending hand in the other hand and faced the far cement-block wall. The metal bars slid shut behind me with a
clang.
I tried to slow down my breathing. Red lights blinked behind my eyes, which was not a good sign. "Can you leave the door open a crack?"

"No."

"Can you leave it unlocked?"

"No."

"Can you put the key where I can reach it?" "Like on
Andy Griffith?
That defeats the purpose of jail."

"Right." He was about to walk away. He was about to saunter back down the hall and leave me in this cell with two bunks secured to the wall with metal brackets, one metal toilet, and Hannibal Lecter next door. I couldn't slow down my breathing, and I could hardly see past the red blinking lights.

"Meg."

Creepy, this cop. "How do you know my name?"

"I'm well acquainted with your driver's license. I've pulled you over twice in the past few months for riding your motorcycle without a helmet."

Oh
yeah.
Now I vaguely remembered this asshole. But —and it was amazing that my brain could process this in its current state—my driver's license listed my name as Margaret, not Meg. Somehow he knew I was Meg and not one of the other nicknames for Margaret, all of which I’d been called by my elderly relatives when I was little. "How do you know I'm not Maggie?" I asked the cement block wall. "Peg? Margot? Of course, Margot has always reminded me of a fungus." I was panting. "Meg, look at me."

I began to turn. As I shifted my head, the darkness closed in. The cop appeared through the bars at the end of a long tunnel that collapsed as I watched.

*

My skin shrank against my bones. I could feel myself shrinking and floating up.

*

One more nose full of ammonia and I knocked the smelling salts away with my hand. The cold of Lois's metal desktop soaked through to my shoulder blades. I turned away from the close-up of her Rolodex and faced the cop's belt buckle. He pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist and looked at his watch, checking my pulse.

I reviewed what must have happened. I fainted on the floor of the jail cell. Ew. And the cop picked me up in his big strong arms and carried me here.

Ew?

"She's faking," the cop said, hating me with his dark eyes. "She made herself pass out by hyperventilating." Yes, ew.

"It doesn't matter whether she's faking or not," Lois called from somewhere across the room. "Most high school girls would get upset if you threw them in the pen with a bunch of men."