"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 ass**le. 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."
"There were no men in the cell with her."
"Would you give it a rest, After?" Lois said.
"Better yet," I said weakly, "give it a rest right now."
The cop removed his fingers from my wrist. "Do you have any medical conditions we should know about?" he asked me in his Official Capacity.
"Do I? What year is this?" I remembered running five miles that morning. "No, not today." I sat up slowly on the desk.
"Here, sweetie." Lois handed me a Sprite. I popped the top with tingling fingers and took one gulp.
"Drink faster," the cop said. "You can't have food or beverage in the cell."
"You are not going to put her back in there," Lois said in disbelief.
"Lois, I didn't pick her up for jaywalking. You're going to let her spend the night sipping Sprite and watching
TV?"
"The other three are spending the night at home with their mamas, in bed."
They stared each other down for a few seconds. "Shouldn't you be on patrol?" Lois hinted.
The cop cussed, stalked across the room, and flung open the door. This time an even larger piece of the cold night stepped inside as the door closed very slowly. He was gone.
"Thank you," I sighed.
"Mmmm-hmmm." Lois helped me down from the desk and back to my metal folding chair. She sat down, too, and spoke softly into her headset.
When she stopped talking and looked at me again, I asked. "What's his problem?"
"He's a good cop," she said. "A little too good, maybe."
"What's so good about him? He harassed me." I set down my Sprite and put my head in my hands. "If this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, I'll be gone to Birmingham soon. All I want is to graduate in June. And go to Miami next week."
She murmured into the headset. Then she asked, "Miami? What for? Spring break?"
"Yeah," I said dreamily.
"With your folks?"
"No, thank God. Tiffany and Brian and I are going with a bunch of seniors from school. It's chaperoned, but loosely. Everybody wants to go on this trip. Each year, the football coach gets the cheerleading sponsor drunk on the first night, and nobody hears from them again until the end of the week. It's a tradition."
Lois slumped a little in her chair. "I hate to be the one to break this to you, sweetie."
"Break what to me?" As if spending the night in the police station was too good to be true.
"I hope you don't think the officer who arrested you is through with you. I overheard him on the phone with the Powers That Be a little while ago. He's got your number."
"He's got my number?" Did she mean my phone number? He was planning to call me, despite his wife and fourteen children and the storage shed? He must he going through a midlife crisis.
"He's hitting you where it hurts," Lois said. "He wants to make sure you kids don't get out of these charges with your parents paying a fine. He wants you to pay. But he wants you rehabilitated, not sent to juvy. So he came up with a plan."
"I hate plans."
"One of you will spend a week riding with the fire truck, one with the ambulance, and one with the police patrol. All the people you dragged out to the railroad bridge in the middle of the night."
"What about the fourth one of us?" I asked, knowing the answer already.
She rolled her eyes. "I think everyone assumes that lawyer will get his druggie son off, like he always does."
Of course.
"And by the end of the week," she said, "you'll have to turn in a proposal to the Powers That Be for a project to discourage other kids from doing what you did."
God, how Goody Two-shoes. But I was sure I could bullshit my way through this stupid proposal in my sleep. "It doesn't sound too bad. The riding around part actually sounds like fun. Maybe they'll let me drive." It probably would sound like fun if I didn't feel right now like I'd been run over by that train.