B00BSH8JUC EBOK (7 page)

I was torn between duty and desire. “If I don’t show up at the police station, I’m going to be in big trouble. I’m probably already in big trouble.”

She gave me one very smoldering look, and I gave in. “All right. Suppose I meet you as soon as my last class ends? We can be together a little bit, and then I’ll go over there.”

“Sounds good to me, darlin’.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I had never been so fevered in my whole life. I kept thinking about being with her and how much I wanted it again and again and again.

Getting through the school day was a torment, especially gym class. While we changed out of our school clothes, my friends ragged on me about getting caught with the Engler doll, and I had to pretend to be miffed at Jaws.

“Thanks to you, I lost ten bucks on that doll,” Linda Franzione said.

“You got off easy. I’m the one that had to take the rap for the whole thing,” I said.

“Poor Kotter. All you had to do was stay after school a little bit,” Beth DeWitt said.

“Hey, she damn near killed me out there.”

“At least she didn’t tell Mrs. Engler,” Estelle said.

We went into the gym. Jaws was there, of course, and my body started to quiver. I made a show of ignoring her. Fortunately everyone assumed my coolness was petulance, not a desperate bridle on some rather intense cravings.

Jaws was having none of it, though. As she assigned us to teams for flag football, she stood right behind me and put her hands on my shoulders, taunting and tantalizing me, as she knew it would. I blushed and looked down and tried to figure out a way to breathe. My classmates snickered. Thank heavens they didn’t know the real reason why Jaws was singling me out.

My classes passed in agonizing slowness. If there had been any tests, I would have flunked them. I simply couldn’t concentrate on school work.

At the last bell I flew back to the gym. Jaws gave me a beckoning smile, her eyes dancing in welcome, but I was seething. “How could you do that to me in class today?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you just come over and start undressing me?”

“Are you that hot for it?” she teased.

“I can’t hide what I’m feeling. I’ll give it away.”

“Kotter, you’re already giving it away.”

I groaned in disgust. Jaws laughed, and after a moment, I laughed, too. “Come on,” she said. “The towel room waits.”

Not for us, it didn’t. The laundry service workers were in there, restocking the towels.

“Damn,” Jaws muttered.

I was disappointed but also relieved. “I can’t stay. I’ve got to get to the police station.”

“Listen, I have a hockey game tomorrow afternoon. Can you get there?”

“I think so. I’ll stop by after my police course. I might miss the first period, but I’ll be there.”

I took my time going to the station, which was only a few blocks from the high school. I didn’t want to arrive much before Randie started the class. She glanced at me when I slipped into a seat, but she didn’t say anything. I wondered wildly whether I might get away with my absence yesterday and grew positively giddy as she dismissed us. I stood up quickly, only to hear, “Kotter, could I see you for a moment?”

I hauled myself to the front of the room and gave her a winning look, which was all the defense I had. Randie was not charmed.

“Well?” she said.

How could such a simple word unnerve me? I blushed deeply and was grateful the Engler doll episode was silly enough for me to be embarrassed, because I had no intention of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Humbly I confessed to the doll and to being kept after school.

Randie was unforgiving. “I expect better from you. I’m fining you a twenty-dollar donation to the Police Softball League.”

I winced. As Randie knew, I was saving my allowance to go with some friends to a Melissa Etheridge concert next month in Willington, about an hour’s drive from Hillsboro. We were planning to make a day of it, so I needed money for my ticket, gas and dinner. I also had an eye on a new vest for the occasion.

“Come on, Lieutenant, I already had to stay after school. Isn’t this double jeopardy?”

“We’ll make it a forty-dollar donation, and since you brought it up, I’d like an essay from you on ‘double jeopardy.’ Any more questions?”

“No, ma’am.” I exhaled deeply. Considering what I had really done, I was still getting off easy.

My routine changed. I saw Jaws at every opportunity, although it was difficult to get time alone. She had a place on campus, but she shared it with two roommates and someone always seemed to be around. Sometimes we met in the towel room, but we were afraid of being seen together around school too often. Sometimes Jaws picked me up in her car, and we’d head for a secluded spot. I knew where the police patrolled, so we were fairly safe from detection, but the accommodations weren’t exactly luxurious. No matter what we did, we always seemed to be hurried and fumbling. We were living in a perpetual state of frustration, which was titillating but not very satisfying.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t hanging around the police station as much. I went to Randie’s classes but I quit arriving early or staying late. Some days I scarcely looked up from my notebook. I just sat there trapped in a sexual haze.

Randie let one week pass, but not two. She waited by the door after she dismissed us, and as I walked by, the last to leave, she collared me. “You and I are going to have a talk,” she said.

I assumed she would take me to her office, but she steered me toward the back of the station until I realized in panic where we were going. We were on our way to the interview room where the cops interrogated their suspects. It was known as “The Rathole,” because the idea was to get the suspects to rat, and what went on in there was called “The Confession Session.” Randie must have broken down a million people in there. I wanted no part of it.

She took me inside. The Rathole was a sad-sack, barren place, furnished with one long wooden table and a couple of chairs. The lighting cast an uncomfortable glare, and the sallow wallpaper had been fading for years, deliberately neglected. The room looked like a bad movie set, which was exactly what it was supposed to look like. It could work wonders on a guilty conscience.

Randie pulled the curtains across the two-way mirror that separated The Rathole from the observation room behind it. She turned off the microphone that normally let someone in the observation room listen in. We were cut off. Anything that happened in there was going to happen without witnesses.

“Sit down,” she said, and I sat. She leaned against the table and gave me a piercing look. “Now what the fuck is going on?”

I had never heard her use an obscenity before. It seemed so violent, she might as well have hit me.

“Noth—”

“And don’t give me any of your ‘nothing’ shit.”

“Okay, okay. Just give me a minute.”

Randie came over and put her hands on the chair’s arms, penning me in. “You don’t have that option. Spill it. Now.”

I spilled. Not only did I spill, but I gushed and I groveled. Once I got started, it was a torrent of words, and every single one of them was self-incriminating. No one could wipe the Fifth Amendment out of the Constitution as cleanly as Randie could.

I didn’t want to stop talking, because I didn’t know what would come next, but eventually I had to. For a while there was silence. Randie appeared to be thinking, but she did not seem upset. Her voice was mild when she spoke.

“We can’t have this,” she said. “You should have come to me, but I guess you didn’t know that.”

“You mean I’m not in trouble?”

“Not with me.”

She went to the telephone, mounted on the wall by the observation room mirror, and asked the Beer Belly Polka for an outside line. In horror I watched her punch in my home number. I wanted to bolt, but there was no place to go. Randie was the only person I had ever run to.

My mother must have answered the phone because Randie said, “Hello, Dr. Ives. This is Lieutenant Wilkes at the police station...No, everything’s fine. When there’s something wrong, we come to the door, like the Marines...If you don’t mind, I’ve asked Wendy Lynn to stay and help me out this evening. I hope you’re not having her favorite meal...Oh, she tends to skip dinner? Well, I’ll make sure she eats. I’ll bring her home myself, so ,you don’t have to worry. Bye-bye.”

Randie punched in another phone number, one I didn’t know. “Hey, you,” she said, a tenderness in her voice I had never heard before, “I’m heading out now. I’ve got Kotter with me. See you in a few.”

She hung up and turned to me. “Come on, Kotter, let’s get going.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To my world.”

I was confused, but I shut up. I didn’t imagine anything bad could happen to me in Randie’s world.

We went to her car, a later model of a Jeep Cherokee than the one she owned when I met her, and she drove toward the park, stopping in front of the modest house I would come to know so well.

“Is this yours, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, but I share it.”

I didn’t know what I would find inside—a boyfriend, kids, elderly parent—but I certainly didn’t expect a goddess. There stood Julie, upright and towering, in a flowing shift of vibrant red, black and green, the colors of her African heritage, its vertical stripes making her look even taller.

Randie, still looking spiffy in her police uniform, kissed this angelic creature and took her hand. She looked at me, and she nodded yes to the question roaring in my head.

I felt cold and warm at the same time. I felt disoriented, but I also felt more centered than ever before. I knew that for the rest of my life, I had a place to come to. Randie had taken me in. Once she had found a lonely kid and made her a part of a team, and now she was showing me there were other people like me and it was all right.

I swayed at the force of it, and Randie came over and gripped me as though I might fall. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I just didn’t expect this.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No, no! That’s the last thing I want.”

Then Julie spoke. Her voice was untroubled, as flowing as the shift she wore, as though it rose from a deep and peaceful place within. “Goodness, Randie, what have you done to this child? She’s as scared as a trapped rabbit.”

“I did scare her. She needed to be scared. It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

“Well, she doesn’t need to be scared now. She needs to feel welcome.” Julie came over and grasped both of my hands in hers, and I found myself relaxing in spite of myself. She had the hands of a healer, gentle and soothing and giving. I didn’t know then what she did for a living, but I knew whatever it was, it involved helping others. “Kotter, I’m Julie. Although you didn’t know about me, you’ve been a part of my life for a long time. Randie is always talking about you. I’m so pleased you’re finally here. Now can I get you something? Soda or juice?”

“Just some water would be fine, ma’am. Thank you.”

Julie gave Randie a long look of mocking sorrow. “Has Randie been filling you up with that militaristic crap? You don’t have to say ‘ma’am’ to me. ‘Julie’ is fine.”

She went into the kitchen and returned with some Evian in a glass that had the seal of the Hillsboro Police Department etched in it. I was thirsty. It had been a trying afternoon.

“Well, Julie,” Randie said, “we found out why Kotter has made herself so scarce of late.”

“Why is it?”

“It seems she was seduced by that student teacher.”

“The one who made her stay after school?”

“The very same.”

Randie and Julie regarded me speculatively, much the way a jury eyes the prisoner in the dock, gauging whether she is capable of committing the crimes of which she is accused. I shrugged. Guilty is as guilty does.

“Girls will be girls,” Julie said and laughed. I heard the liberating chimes of heaven in that laughter and felt saved. I was becoming more captivated with her by the minute.

Randie came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me, cradling me against her. I was getting more affection in this room than I’d had in a lifetime.

“What do you think we should do to you, Kotter?” Randie asked.

“I don’t care. Do whatever you want. Just let me stay here forever.”

“Personally, I think we should feed her,” Julie said. “It’s just spaghetti, Kotter. Is that okay?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Just spaghetti” turned out to be homemade pasta and tomato sauce from scratch. Julie enjoyed cooking. More precisely, she enjoyed cooking for others. We kept talking as she got the meal ready and sat down to eat.

“The problem with Kotter being seduced by the student teacher,” Randie said, mortifying me, “is that they are doing it in public places.”

“Oh dear. That won’t do,” Julie said.

“No, it won’t. I suppose we’re going to have to bring the student teacher here, too. I’m inclined to drive to her place, cuff her and put her in the back seat of a patrol car, but it might be counterproductive. What do you think, Julie?”

“Undoubtedly it would be. The rapport will probably be better if Kotter just invites her.”

They were toying with me. There was nothing to be done but sit and take it. Life would be full of these moments.

By the end of the evening, I had agreed to bring Jaws to their house, although I was as nervous about it as any girl taking her date home for the first time.

If I was fidgety, Jaws was positively stricken when I told her about it. “I don’t care if she is your friend. She’s a cop! Student teachers go to jail for molesting students, or haven’t you heard?”

“You only go to jail if you don’t cooperate,” I said. In a perverse way, I was starting to enjoy this. Randie’s intervention had given me the upper hand in a relationship that otherwise had gone almost exclusively Jaws’ way. “Consider yourself blackmailed.”

The next evening was Friday—no police class. It was dark and cool, with a wild wind rattling the brittle autumn leaves. I slipped out of the house without telling Wendell and Lynn where I was going. They had a dinner party at the college president’s house, one of those command performances, and wouldn’t be able to do anything except get exasperated when they discovered my absence.