Echols, Jennifer Read Online Free PDF

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.
    "They want you to do it during the night shift," she said.
    "I can handle that."
    She shook her head sadly. "They want you to do it during your spring break, so you can spend a week on night shift without missing school."
    It took a second to sink in. Then I screamed, "What? That cop is the Devil!"
    "No, he just understands how teenagers think."
    I wasn't sure this was true. The cop thought I had plans to spend my spring break getting drunk and showing off my tits. Yes, there was that. But there was more. I felt tears well up in my eyes as I pictured the vast blue Atlantic. My parents used to talk about taking me to Florida someday when they'd saved up money. That talk stopped a few years ago. Now I'd spent my entire life five hours from the beach without ever seeing the ocean.
    My first thought was for myself, of course. But my next thought was for my mom. While someone else supposedly chaperoned me in Miami, my parents were planning to take their first vacation in four years, to Graceland. They could still go while I served my time on night shift. Anyone else's parents would go. But I knew my mom. She would stay home now. Hell, she'd ride with me in the cop car if they let her. She would cancel her vacation because of me, and I