42

THERE WE SAT, ROTTING behind bars in a jail cell, waiting to be granted our one and only phone call, which would likely be our last-ever connection to the real world.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

Okay, that’s a humongous exaggeration.

Truthfully, we sat—just the three of us—at a table in a carpeted room with two windows and no bars.

We’d been sitting there for almost thirty minutes.

When we were first brought in here, a cop—not the one who arrested us—sat down, dropped a big yellow notepad on the table, and, after introducing himself (Officer Borg), asked us what happened.

At first, I thought this might be a strategy. Good cop, bad cop. Pretty soon, I thought, the bad, insane cop would come in and work us over. The only light would be a lamp shining down directly on us.

But that didn’t happen. It was just the one cop, who wasn’t exactly nice but wasn’t menacing, either. The lights stayed on the whole time. There wasn’t even a lamp in the room.

Officer Borg just blinked a lot and let us talk.

And we did talk. Or I did, anyway. I told him I had stolen the turnstile and how I’d stolen it. I told him about climbing the fence and pulling up the turnstile and pushing it over and carrying it through the streets. I described our exact route. I even started to tell him why I stole it. But it turned out that Officer Borg was as unimpressed with symbols as Eric and Kirsten.

“Okay, son, that’s plenty,” he said, flipping his notebook closed.

After he left the room, I said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I got you both into this.”

“You better be,” Eric said. By how he said it, though, I could tell he wasn’t angry.

“If this ends up meaning I can’t play ball,” Kirsten said, “I’ll kick your butt.” She blew a strand of hair away from her mouth.

“Why don’t you sound more concerned?”

“Something tells me we’ll be fine,” Kirsten said. She nudged me with an elbow. “No thanks to you.”

“Fine?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

She smiled. “There have to be some advantages to being a star athlete, right?”

A few minutes later, our parents arrived.

All six of them.

Together.

We watched them move as a group to a row of chairs to the right of our “cell.” Then they moved to the waiting area outside our window. Their chairs faced a different direction, so they didn’t see us as they sat down.

My dad sat in the middle, holding a clipboard. The others leaned in and watched him fill out a form. My mother, who sat next to Dad, pointed to the form and said something. Dad nodded his head.

I was still pissed at him. No, not just pissed. A part of me was seething. What he did—the things he told Kirsten, the things he didn’t tell me or Mom—it was going to take a long time to forgive him. Maybe I never would.  

But it was weird. Even as I knew I wasn’t done being pissed at Dad, even as I understood that I was currently sitting in the clink because of my half-baked plan to get back at him in the only way I could think of, even as I believed that a lot of this was his fault—even after all that, I was still glad to see him there.

Go figure.

Maybe it had something to do with all the other people who were there, too.

Gazing out at them, I realized that this was the first time I had ever seen them in the same room together. As far as I knew, my mom and dad had ever interacted with Kirsten’s mom and dad. After all the stuff that had happened because of decisions and choices they made, this was the first time they’d actually had to face each other.

If it was uncomfortable for them, good.

Okay, so maybe that was partly why I was glad to see them. Maybe I just wanted to see them suffer.

Maybe.

But it wasn’t the only reason.

As I watched them lean toward one another, I couldn’t help thinking that it was kind of great. Bailing your kids out of jail wasn’t the best circumstance to meet, I’ll grant you that—but I’d take what I could get. Especially since, surprisingly, they weren’t fighting with one another. They weren’t at each other’s throats. Just the opposite. They were working together to take care of the problem.

As I thought about all this, I got up and reached for the door handle. It was unlocked. (Really, in retrospect, this was the most pitiful jail cell ever.)

Stepping into the waiting area, I said, “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton. Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Howard. Hey, Mom and Dad. I’m glad you guys could all make it.”

Behind me, I heard Eric and Kirsten agree that I was certifiably nuts.