"Mmph," said the cop.
"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. She never would have done it if she'd had time to think about it. And I never would have done it if I hadn't been stoned. Ditto walking onto the bridge. Completely unpremeditated."
I tried to gauge the cop's reaction. I couldn't see a thing. His dark eyes could have been laughing at me, or considering how I would look when I got out of prison just in time to join the AARP.
"Interesting," he said. "You've broken a lot of laws tonight."
Definitely laughing at me. I lashed out. "Let's list them, shall we? What fun. Trespassing. Possession of marijuana. Underage purchase of alcohol. What else? Public intoxication, loitering, unlawful assembly. Corruption of a minor. Wait, can you corrupt a minor when you yourself are also a minor?”
"You tell me. You're wearing the Peer Pressure T-shirt."
So he had noticed. "Yeah, I saw you taking in my Peer Pressure T-shirt," I said, just to test how much he'd noticed.
He'd noticed, all right. His white face and neck flushed pink against his dark blue uniform.
I was horrified, truly. I'd gathered over the years from the way men on TV talked about Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus that forty-year-old men were really into teenage girls. I wouldn't have thought a blue-haired teenage girl would make the cut, but clearly there was no accounting for taste.
And here was this cop, out working hard at 11:30 at night, innocently providing for his wife and fourteen kids at home, scrimping and saving money for that new aluminum shed he'd had his eye on for storing the riding lawn mower. And I'd gone and flaunted my boobs in his face. It really wasn't his fault for looking.
He sighed through his nose again. His blush slowly retreated, and he was back in charge. "Are you even sorry?"
Yes, I was sorry for distracting him from the little missus for two seconds. Better not bring that up. "I'm sorry you arrested Tiffany. And maybe I'm sorry you arrested Brian." I was mad at Brian for abandoning Tiffany, but he had saved me from being handcuffed. Without the ulterior motive of getting himself out of more trouble, unlike Eric. "Do you want me to be sorry for getting stoned?"
"Are you sorry you almost got killed?"
"We didn't."
"You did!" Now he was furious, shouting down at me, finally giving me the Brian/Eric treatment. "Are you so drunk you didn't see that train?" He looked like he was going to lay into me again. I cringed, waiting for it.
But he thought better of it. His mouth snapped shut, and he took a step back.
Turning toward the bridge, he stared into the blackness. With my eyes adjusted to the pool of light from the cop cars, I couldn't even see past the No Trespassing sign. But the bridge had really made an impression on this cop. Seemed like he could see the bridge even in the dark.
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!"