Going Too Far(8)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"They want you to do it during the night shift," she said.

"I can handle that."

She shook her head sadly. "They want you to do it during your spring break, so you can spend a week on night shift without missing school."

It took a second to sink in. Then I screamed, "What? That cop is the Devil!"

"No, he just understands how teenagers think."

I wasn’t sure this was true. The cop thought I had plans to spend my spring break getting drunk and showing off my tits. Yes, there was that. But there was more. I felt tears well up in my eyes as I pictured the vast blue Atlantic. My parents used to talk about taking me to Florida someday when they’d saved up money. That talk stopped a few years ago. Now I’d spent my entire life five hours from the beach without ever seeing the ocean.

My first thought was for myself, of course. But my next thought was for my mom. While someone else supposedly chaperoned me in Miami, my parents were planning to take their first vacation in four years, to Graceland. They could still go while I served my time on night shift. Anyone else’s parents would go. But I knew my mom. She would stay home now. Hell, she’d ride with me in the cop car if they let her. She would cancel her vacation because of me, and I would suffer the Punishment Worse Than Jail: guilt. It was enough to drive a girl to drink. Again.

"I know it seems like the end of the world to you," Lois said, patting my knee. "That’s exactly what he was counting on. But an adult can see that you are very, very, very lucky, and you should be grateful. Isn’t this better than going to court?"

I considered this question. Bad things could happen at court. Probably I wouldn’t get locked up, but there was an outside chance. I shivered and pulled my jacket closer around me.

If I got to ride in the ambulance, it might be better than going to court. I did not like ambulances, and I liked being closed into them even less. But Quincy, my paramedic friend, would ride with me. He understood my problem and could help me out. He’d been an ass to me at the bridge, but I figured he’d been putting on a Disapproving Adult act in front of the other Disapproving Adults.

Riding on the fire engine would be even better. I’d get a lot of sleep. There wasn’t much to this town, so there wasn’t much to catch on fire. Definitely better than going to court.

But I might have to ride with the cops. Specifically, my cop. In that case, I wasn’t so sure it was worth it.

Chapter 4

Lois got off work at 6 a.m. and offered to take me home. She said I was supposed to stay in jail until my parents came to sign me out. But when I told her if they hadn’t shown up by now, they wouldn’t be here until the lunch crowd thinned out, she said screw that. Her exact words were, "Screw that. I’ll take you on home, hon."

Like any fifty-year-old who had a little money saved up and considered herself a free spirit, Lois drove a VW Bug with a yellow faux flower in the dashboard bud vase to match the yellow paint job. As we stopped at the edge of the jail/courthouse/city hall parking lot to turn onto the highway, a police car pulled in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cop raise his hand in greeting to Lois—and then he erked to a stop half in the parking lot, half on the highway. Yes, it was my cop. I wouldn’t have thought he would notice me in the passenger side of Lois’s car with the streetlights glinting off the windshield. However, I did have blue hair, which was like walking around with a Sims arrow over my head.

He rolled down his window and scowled at Lois, willing her to roll down her window, too. Uh-oh. He would call her out for transporting a hardened criminal without authorization. He would take me back inside. My heart pounded and my body braced for another blow from this man who’d decided I needed a nemesis, as if I didn’t get enough of that from my dad already.

Lois floored it. The g-force pressed me back against the seat as the Bug tore onto the highway. The little engine whined in protest. "Give it a rest, Officer After," Lois muttered. "I’ll put you over my knee and spank your bottom."

I turned to stare at her in surprise.

She glanced nervously over at me. "What."

"Nothing." I didn’t want to admit I’d been too drunk to figure out the cop’s name until now. And since she was nice enough to drive me home, it seemed rude to broach the subject of sexual relations during the graveyard shift at the police department. If she wanted to engage in extramarital spanking with a man ten years her junior, well, that was between her and Officer After and his wife and fourteen kids and Lois’s iguana, et cetera. Though I seriously doubted that Lois—or anyone else—ever inflicted corporal punishment on Officer After. The whole way home she checked her mirrors, expecting blue lights to burst on behind us. But he had let us go.

She pulled into the diner parking lot. Gravel popped beneath the tires. Wiping his hands on a rag, my dad glowered out at me from behind the counter. Then he turned back to the grill.

"I don’t want to see any more of you," Lois told me, "at least until next weekend. Keep your nose clean." She tapped the tip of her nose twice. Some of her heavy makeup had rubbed off overnight. Red veins showed through.

Yes ma ‘am, I will, would have been the polite thing to say. But I did not make promises. "Thanks for everything."

Instead of the diner, I headed for the trailer. It had come with the diner. My parents had decided we would live in it temporarily to save money until the diner got established as the town’s premier eatery and they could afford to build their dream home. We lived here still.

The whole thing shook when I slammed the metal door behind me. The floor creaked as I walked to the bathroom. After my fainting spell in the jail, my body wanted to go for a jog and prove to me that it was not sick, it was not wasting away, it was okay. But my head throbbed. I needed more time to recover from the beer. And I was scheduled to work all morning. Something in my dad’s glower had told me I’d better not use jail time as an excuse to skip out of work. I could jog later. I showered with the curtain open, mopped up the water on the floor with a towel. Then I slipped on a low-cut shirt that seemed inappropriate for work, yet 50 percent less inflammatory than my Peer Pressure T-shirt under the circumstances, and went to face the music.

I made my entrance through the front door so I could bus dishes and greet my dad with my arms already full. My mom sat in a booth with a couple of regulars, probably complaining to them about what I’d done now. She looked like the before on one of those TV makeover shows. Bad perm. Forty pounds overweight. Enormous T-shirt with a picture of a kitten, paws on its head, and a thought balloon: "Is it the weekend yet?" Which made absolutely no sense because both my parents worked through the weekend. We all did.