The Local News Read Free

backs to me, their bodies swaying and jostling as if sitting on the deck of a boat, riding out a storm. They had such an air of careless happiness—they always did, it was their specialty—it gave me a numb, worn-out feeling. Even then, even only sixty-three days into it, I was acutely aware of the weightlessness of other people’s lives, of the willowy way everyone else moved through the world. If I’d ever had such ease (maybe in flashes, in particularly unguarded moments just after waking), certainly it was lost to me now.
    I hated them anew.
    I didn’t go in. I turned back onto the main four-lane road and then made a left onto one of Fairfield’s residential streets. Away from the strip malls and gas stations, the roads were mostly empty, parents socked away in dens or living rooms, kids studying or messing around. We’d moved to Fairfield three years before, from another suburb that had done a better job at faking being a real town. At least in Abernathy they’d had some local shops: a little diner with corned beef sandwiches and eggs over easy, a used bookstore that smelled wormy and moist, a market run by an old guy named Ed who’d swat kids playfully on the wrist if they opened the beef jerky container that sat on the counter. Abernathy had black people. Abernathy had parks where kids actually played. And block parties with traffic cones lining the ends of the streets, picnic tablespiled with food in the middle of the road. Fairfield, on the other hand, was just one big square, three miles deep in each direction, houses inside of it, crappy businesses lining the perimeter on all four sides, as if the city planners had hoped to build a fortress against outside evils through a few well-placed Jiffy Lubes and Radio Shacks.
    I wasn’t really driving in any direction, just drifting past aluminum-sided houses and buzz-cut grass, signs for DEEVEY FOR MAYOR and VOTE NO ON 38. Porch lights made lawns look pale and shadowy. Yellow ribbons hung limply in the night air, glowing in my headlights. I slowed for two squirrels who stood in the street, fat and unafraid of cars. I wasn’t ready to go back home. Being on the eleven o’clock news would unite and distract us for a few minutes, but until then there were nearly two hours and Mom would ask desperate questions
(Anyone recognize him? Any new information?)
and Dad would sit in his chair, clicking between channels, acting as if he wasn’t listening or maybe really not hearing.
    On the radio they talked about three hundred dead or injured in an earthquake in Turkey. I thought about how Turkey had my favorite-named strait: Bosporus. When I’d first learned the word, it sounded like a swear. David Nelson and I went through a phase where when we stubbed our toe or got a bad grade, we’d say, “Oh, Bosporus!”
    That was what I was thinking about—Bosporus—when my rearview mirror lit up in a flash of reds and blues. For a second I thought dumbly,
Pretty.
The colors had a fireworks quality to them—sudden, startling—which disarmed me for the first beat or two. Then my brain pieced it together: cop car, cop car behind me, cop car behind me with its lights flashing at me. I grew suddenly aware of my flesh, my skin hot then cold. I pulled to the curb behind a double-cab pickup.
    When the officer leaned into my window, his face was smooth and pale, his eyebrows so blond they nearly blended into his skin. It gave him a plastic, alien appearance. “License and registration,” he said.
    “I’m only fifteen,” I blurted.
    He blinked slowly a couple of times, staring at me. “Then what are you doing operating a motor vehicle by yourself?” he said.
    “I—I … errands.” I thought of
The Trial,
Joseph K. being interrogated by the Magistrate.
    “Fifteen-year-olds aren’t allowed to do errands in motor vehicles by themselves,” he said.
    “No, I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    The officer called
me young lady
and asked to see my permit
(I’m hoping you at