"Everybody reads Julius Caesar in high school," I told her, loudly enough for the cop to hear. "You don't need a college education to be a cop. What for? You just need to be able to drive. Read. Write." I watched him X through another section of the form. "Or not."
"Don't," she warned faintly.
I put my arm around her again and asked the cop, "Can you take her cuffs off? I'll vouch for her."
His eyes finally flicked up to mine. Probably because everything was a bit blurry to me, I hadn't registered his face at all before. I don't know if it was the alcohol or the adrenaline draining away, but I noticed his eyes for the first time now, framed perfectly in the rectangle of the rearview mirror. They were a strangely dark brown in his light face. He looked down at his form.
"Why not?" I asked. "Do you feel threatened? Big strong guy like you?"
He actually turned around in his seat and glared at me through the metal grid between us. One of the taunts I'd flung at him had hit home. He did feel threatened. What in the world for?
" Yow!" I yelped as Tiffany reached behind me with her cuffed hands and pinched a big hunk of my butt.
The cop was out of the car. He opened Tiffany's door. She scooted backward toward him across the seat, and he knelt to unlock the cuffs.
"Those boys just want to get in your pants," he said. "You know that, right?" I guessed he was talking to Tiffany. He wasn't looking over her shoulder at me.
Then his eyes met mine, and returned to Tiffany's cuffs.
"That's not true," Tiffany said.
Well, of course it was true. But if Tiffany didn't know this, now was not the time to clue her in.
"How do you know we weren't trying to get in their pants?" I asked.
The cop stopped fiddling with his key in the cuffs, sat back on his haunches, and stared at me.
Tiffany's chant of "Oh my God oh my God" morphed into "Shut up shut up."
The cop said, "You've got such a mouth that you'd get yourself and your friend in worse trouble just to have the last word."
"Some people just don't know when to shut up," I said. "Shut up!" Tiffany wailed.
I began to think this was good advice. The cop gave Tiffany's cuffs just a few more seconds of attention. She pulled her arms free with a sob and rubbed her wrists. Then he slammed her door, rounded the back of the car, and opened my door. "Get out."
I climbed out and stood against the car, trying not to flinch when he slammed the door again. He stood directly in front of me and looked way down at me. I was about to get it like Eric and Brian.
Maybe not. His glance traveled briefly down to my Peer Pressure T-shirt. Or the absence of said T-shirt over my cleave. Theoretically this could have worked to my advantage. But I was unwilling or unable to Work It under the intensity of those deep brown eyes. Despite myself, I looked around to make sure the old cop's car was still a few yards away and he had not abandoned me to this cop and the forest and an unrequested sexcapade.
Now the cop managed to collect himself. He pulled his gaze from my shirt up to my eyes. Probably he was checking whether my pupils were dilated. All I could do was hope the pot had worn off enough by then to make my pupils normal size. I gazed right back into his dark eyes as if I had nothing to hide.
He nodded toward Tiffany in the car. "How much has she had to drink?"
"Give her a break, would you? I know she's blotto, but this is her first time drunk. Hell, it's her first drink. Drinks."
"Mmph," he said. Thank God he believed me. I might have gotten Tiffany off the hook. "And what about you?"
"Me?" I laughed. "I'm guilty."
He nodded. "What about the pot?"
I felt myself flash hot. Maybe he was bluffing. I asked, "What pot?"
The cop put his fists on his hips and cocked his head to one side. There probably was a line drawing of him like this in the dictionary, illustrating the word skepticism. "I might not have been to college," he said, "but I have been to the police academy."
He pronounced police academy carefully, like it was a foreign word. I thought he was poking fun at himself. I almost laughed. I wasn't quite confident enough to laugh.
He went on, "What do you think we do at the police academy, surf the Internet?"
"I can honestly say I never gave it much th—"
"You know your boyfriend got expelled from Auburn for dealing pot out of his fraternity house," he said.
"That's why we're dating."
"You wanted some pot."
"Not so much that. It's just that Eric is my kind of people."
"Eric is—" He stopped himself with a grimace. Then he tried again. "You're an i—"
He was about to call me an idiot. Which I couldn't argue with, considering the present situation. But it was shocking to have a cop tell me so. Or almost tell me so. "I'm a what?" I taunted him.
He shook his head. "You can't tell a seventeen-year-old anything. They think they're immortal. They don't listen. Seventeen-year-olds have to see it for themselves."
"See what?"
He sighed through his nose. "Before I pulled y'all off the bridge, I glanced in your boyfriend's car. All I saw was two gallon jugs of beer. I don't have anything like possession on you. Come clean with me now, and maybe we won't do a drug screen on your boyfriend. You know if we do, we're charging him with driving under the influence of narcotics."
They certainly were. I backed against the cold car for strength and looked over at Eric's shoulders hunched into the other police car. Actually, I'd been dating him, if you could call it that, for only a few weeks. He had come home to live with his parents and "get his head together" (translation: "smoke a lot of weed") after the aforementioned untimely removal from the institution of higher learning.
But I knew him well enough to predict what his reaction would be. If I ratted on him and he got in trouble, he would call me a stupid bitch. If I didn't rat on him, they tested his piss, and he got in worse trouble, he would call me a stupid bitch.
"It was just me and him," I said in a rush. "Tiffany and Brian didn't know. They would have wigged out completely. We smoked it before we ran into them. Eric and I were baked and hungry, and we went to McDonald's for Big Macs. I saw Tiffany in the bathroom. I must have been obviously tanked, because Tiffany hinted she was going on the spring break senior trip next week without ever having a drink. She was afraid of looking naive. And I'm like, 'Oh! Poor baby. I can buy you some beer.' Brian doesn't drink, either, but he went along with it. Probably for reasons you mentioned previously."