Going Too Far(6)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"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 cle**age 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.