Echols, Jennifer Read Free Page B

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."
    "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