"Thought we'd need them when you got hit by a train," the cop said.
"What train?"
The low hum escalated into a roar as the train's headlight emerged from the dark trees at the far side of the bridge. In a few seconds, the locomotive had reached the middle. Two beer cups blew over the metal wall and floated downward, disappearing into the darkness.
A few more seconds and the locomotive passed us. The engineer chose this moment to lay on the head-splitting horn. Eric and Brian, chained close to the tracks, each put one free hand up to one ear.
I stumbled a few paces before I realized the cop was dragging me backward by the elbow toward his car, cussing.
We passed a knot of emergency response personnel chatting together, disappointed there was nothing for them to do. "There's McPherson," called Quincy, the paramedic I happened to know. "I could see even when you were thirteen years old that you were nothing but trouble."
"Of all the freaking nerve!" I screamed back at him, but the cop shoved me into the car and closed the door.
I tried the handle. Locked.
Do not panic. I made myself breathe slowly. At least the cop had forgotten about handcuffing me. And I couldn't panic in front of Tiffany. Stretching the shoulder belt to the limit, she lay sideways and sobbed into the vinyl seat.
I pulled her head into my lap and wiped her wet hair out of her eyes. "Have you put the yearbook to bed yet? You could add something to the list of accomplishments under my senior picture. 'Managed to get the valedictorian arrested.’"
She sniffed. "It's not funny, Meg. They might take valedictorian away from me. They might take away our scholarships to UAB."
I seriously doubted the University of Alabama at Birmingham was watching the police blotter for incoming freshmen. "They can't even keep my name straight," I told her. "I've been getting registration forms addressed to Mr. Mac McRearson. I almost wish I was going to live in the dorm so they'd give me a boy for a roommate." But I planned to work my way through college to pay for an apartment. I didn't want to live in a dorm with visitation hours and curfews and monitors. I'd had enough of the Big Brother treatment from my parents at home. And my arrest wouldn't help that situation for the next few months.
Tiffany laughed a little, sniffed again. "I'm going to need a new boy, too, after this."
That was the truth. Now that Tiffany and Brian had been arrested together, a date at the putt-putt golf course wouldn't hold the same romance. While tank cars and flatbed cars and boxcars decorated with graffiti continued to rumble by, the cop got down in Brian's face and shouted at him. Then he got up in Eric's face and shouted at him. Through the rolled-up windows of the police car and over the roar of the train, I couldn't hear what he was saying.
But judging from the look on Brian's and even Eric's face, it was pretty intense. One of the spectator firemen took a step in their direction as if to coax the cop to back off.
A second cop put a hand on the fireman's shoulder and held him in place. The second cop was older than our cop. Not nearing retirement age, but way too old to be wearing a patrolman's uniform without getting a promotion to detective.
The endless train behind them made me dizzy. I looked down at Tiffany, who had resumed mouthing. "Oh my God."
"We're getting off easy, Tiff. Too easy, come to think of it. Why are the boys the ones who get yelled at, like they're the only ones who matter? We should be offended."
"Then go tell the police officer how offended you are," Tiffany snapped. "Let him handcuff you to the bridge."
I tried the handle once more, jokingly. "Door's locked." But I began to shake again in the warm car.
"I shouldn't have said that." Tiffany sat up awkwardly and leaned her head on my shoulder. "You have a thing about being locked up. I'm glad I'm handcuffed and not you."
Me too, I didn't say. I had thought of Tiffany as a walking, talking version of Microsoft Excel, but she had more soul than I'd given her credit for.
We both jumped, probably delayed a few seconds by our hampered reflexes, as our cop opened his door. The racket of the train followed him inside. The last of the train cars had cleared the bridge. I watched its flashing taillights disappear around a bend in the tracks.
The cop shoved his muscular frame into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut. Then he said a few words into his CB, reached for a clipboard, and began filling out forms. He never glanced at us through the metal grid that separated him from us dangerous criminals. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his thick cop-neck.
I looked for Eric and Brian and saw them in the backseat of the old cop's car, which was parked on the far side of Eric's Beamer. The dejected fire truck and ambulance eased out of the clearing and up the road without flashing their lights.
"What are you so mad about?" I asked the cop. "Is it true that a couple of teenagers got killed here a long time ago?"
"It's true," he said without looking up. "And y'all came close to adding four more to the body count tonight."
"Not four," I said. "If I'd gotten caught on the tracks, I would have been the only one killed. My boyfriend wouldn't cross the street to save my life."
"Some boyfriend." The cop drew broad strokes through parts of the form that did not apply to us, perhaps previous convictions or gainful employment or significant other.
"How'd you find us down here?" I asked.
"You were out of luck. Beware the Ides of March."
A wave of that paranoia I'd felt on the bridge washed over me. It was March 15. Then my drowning brain struggled to the surface.
But before I could make a smart-ass remark, Tiffany lifted her head from my shoulder. Her own drunken brain must have recognized the Ides of March line from Shakespeare. "Oooh, were you an English major in college? I'm going to be an English major!"
"At this rate," the cop said, "you're not majoring in anything."
It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming at the cop. Surely he could see how freaked out Tiffany was already. If she thought her college English degree was threatened, she was liable to melt into a pool of tears and beer right here on his torn vinyl police car seat. And it would serve him right to have to clean it up.
"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 h*ps 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."
"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."