Nine Inches (4 page)

“You pulled me over three times last month. And the third time, the night you were in the unmarked car, you tried to give me a backrub. It kinda scared me, Lieutenant Finnegan.”

He sti
ff
ened a little, and I could see I’d hit a nerve.

“Look, Donald, I’m really sorry about that. I got carried away, you know? I do that sometimes. But I hope you’ll give me another chance.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave me a sly look, like he thought I knew exactly what he meant.

“I mean, you can’t get a good backrub in a car. You need to be able to take your shirt o
ff
, stretch out on a bed, and relax.” He reached across the table and laid his hand on mine. “Why don’t you come by a
ft
er your shi
ft
tonight.
Th
at way we can take our time.”

I slid my hand out from under his and stood up.

“Please listen to me, Lieutenant Finnegan.” My voice was shaky, and I was surprised to realize I was on the verge of tears. “I don’t want a backrub. I didn’t want one when you pulled me over, and I don’t want one now. I think you have a problem, and you should probably get some help.”

“Whoa, hey.” He held up one hand, as if he were stopping tra
ffi
c. “I’m just trying to be nice here.”

“And just so you know” — I held up the phone — “I’ve been recording this entire conversation.”

It took him a few seconds to process what I was telling him. I could see it in his face, that awful moment of clarity.

“Jesus, Donald. Why would you do that?”

“Look, I don’t want to get you in trouble. I’m just asking you to leave me alone. Is that so hard to understand?”

I waited awhile, but I never got an answer. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard the question. He just lowered his head into his hand and started cursing so
ft
ly, telling himself how fucking stupid he was, how he knew this was gonna happen, how he’d told himself to stop and had kept on doing it anyway, and now he was totally fucked, wasn’t he, muttering this pitiful monologue that followed me all the way down the hallway and out the door.

A YEAR
and a half went by before the next time I got pulled over. Lt. Finnegan was retired by then, forced to leave the department a
ft
er a bunch of people had complained about his strange behavior. Apparently, I wasn’t the only young guy in town who’d gotten a backrub along with his tra
ffi
c ticket. It was a minor scandal for a week or two, but they hushed it up somehow, and he managed to leave the force without facing any charges or losing his pension. Last I heard, he was living in Florida.

Lots of other things had changed, too. I’d become Eddie’s right-hand man at Sustainable, managing the original restaurant while he opened a new one in Rosedale. We were working hard, making good money, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever have the time or the patience to go back to school. Shortly a
ft
er my nineteenth birthday, I’d moved out of my parents’ house, into a studio apartment across the street from the bike shop.
Th
e rent wasn’t too steep, and I needed the privacy now that I’d gotten together with Karen, one of the new waitresses we’d hired a
ft
er Malina and Jadwiga had gone back to Poland. We got along okay, though she could be kind of moody and relied on me for pretty much her entire social life, not that I had a whole lot to o
ff
er in that department. Mostly we just got high and watched TV.

I’d lost touch with most of my high school friends, but hadn’t made any new ones except for Adam and Eddie.
Th
e three of us had gotten pretty tight over the past year, ever since we’d started our weed business. Using Eddie’s money and Adam’s connection, we’d developed quite a sideline, buying in bulk and selling to a handful of carefully selected clients, moving a pound here and a kilo there, lots of pro
fi
t with what seemed like minimal risk. We transported our product in Sustainable’s delivery cars, hidden in pizza boxes tucked inside insulated pouches. It was my idea, and I was pretty proud of it. You could drive right up to the front door of a dealer’s house, make a cash transaction, and no one would suspect a thing.

So I wasn’t nervous that night in April, heading over to Rick Yang’s house — he was one of our best customers — with a large onion-and-pepper in one box and a pound of weed in another. I’d done it a dozen times before, never a problem.

It all went down so fast. I barely had time to register the lights in my rearview mirror when I saw two more cop cars right in front of me, blocking the intersection. I got out with my hands on my head, like they told me to, and the next thing I knew I was lying facedown in the street, with my hands cu
ff
ed behind my back.

It’s funny what goes through your head at a time like that. I didn’t think about my parents, or about Eddie and Adam, or even about Karen. I didn’t wonder about what kind of trouble I was in or consider how my life might have been di
ff
erent if I’d gone to Uganda. What I thought about while they searched the Prius was something I’d almost forgotten, a stupid thing I’d done while applying to college.

Th
e applications were due on December 31, and I’d le
ft
my safeties to the last minute. I was just so sick of the whole process by then — it had consumed almost a year of my life — fed up with answering the same useless questions over and over, tailoring my responses to whoever was doing the asking. It was ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and there I was, sitting at my desk, staring at the question
Why Fair
fi
eld?
and I guess I just lost it. Instead of repeating my usual bullshit about a liberal arts education, I went ahead and told the truth:
You’re my Safety School, motherfucker!
And then I pressed
SEND
before I had a chance to stop myself. It felt so good I did the same thing for Roger Williams and Temple. I’d never told anyone about it, not even when people were scratching their heads, wondering how it was possible that an honor student like me had been rejected by all three of his safeties.

Th
at’s what I was thinking about when they found the weed. I was thinking about the kid who’d
fi
lled out those applications, remembering how cocky and obnoxious he’d been, so sure of his own worth, and the world’s ability to recognize it. I was lying on the street with my cheek pressed against the blacktop, thinking about what an asshole he was, and how much I missed him.

GRADE MY TEACHER

SIXTH PERIOD WAS ENDLESS. VICKI
stood by the Smart Board, listening to herself drone on about the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder, but all she could think about was Jessica Grasso, the heavy girl sitting near the back right corner of the room, watching her with a polite, seemingly neutral expression. It was almost as if Jessica grew larger with each passing moment, as if she were being in
fl
ated by some invisible pump, expanding like a parade
fl
oat until she
fi
lled the entire room.

She hates me,
Vicki thought, and this knowledge was somehow both sickening and exciting at the same time.
But you wouldn’t know it from looking at her
.

Vicki hadn’t known it herself until last night, when she read what the girl had written about her on grademyteacher
.com. She had stumbled upon the post while conducting a routine self-google, exercising a little due diligence so she didn’t get blindsided like her old friend and former colleague Anna Shamsky, a happily married mother of three who’d lost her job over some twenty-year-old topless photos that had appeared without her knowledge on a website called Memoirs-of-a-Stud.com.
Th
e site was the brainchild of an ex-boyfriend of hers — a guy she hadn’t thought about since college — who had decided in a
fi
t of midlife bravado that the world needed to know a little bit about every woman he’d ever slept with (“Anna S. was a sweet innocent sophomore with boobs to die for,” he wrote. “When I was done with her, she could give head like nobody’s beeswax”).
Th
e surprisingly steamy photos — Anna’s youthful breasts totally lived up to the hype — had spread like a virus through the entire Gi
ff
ord High School community before the subject herself even remembered they existed, and by then there was nothing to do but submit her resignation.

Vicki didn’t have to worry about nude photos — she’d never posed for any, not even when her ex-husband had asked her nicely — but that was just one risk among many in a dangerous world. She told herself she was simply being prudent — in this day and age, googling yourself was just common sense, like using sunscreen or buckling your seatbelt — but she was sometimes aware of a tiny
fl
utter of anticipation as she typed her name into the dialog box, as if the search engine might reveal a new self to her, someone a little more interesting, or at least a little less forgettable, than the rest of the world suspected. She remembered feeling oddly hopeful last night, just seconds before she found herself staring at
this:

OMG my math teacher Vicki Wiggins is an INSANE B*#@&! One day she called me a FAT PIG for eating candy in class. I know I’m no supermodel but guess what she’s even worse! Hav u seen the panty lines when she packs her HUGE BUTT into those ugly beige pants? Hellooo? Ever hear of a thong? Everyone cracks up about it behind her back. She might as well be wearing her extralarge granny pants on the outside. Vicki Wiggins, you are the pig!

Vicki’s
fi
rst reaction to this was bewilderment — she honestly had no idea what the writer was talking about — followed by a combination of searing embarrassment (she’d had her doubts about those beige pants) and righteous indignation. In her entire career — her entire adult life! — she’d never called anyone a fat pig. She wouldn’t dream of it. As a woman who’d struggled with her own weight, she knew just how hurtful such epithets could be.

What made it even worse was that she realized she was making a mistake even as she clicked on the link, violating her long-standing policy to stay as far away from grademyteacher.com as possible. It was just too depressing, and she wasn’t even one of the truly unpopular teachers, the unfortunates whose names were
fl
agged with a big red thumbs-down icon — people like Fred Kane, the marble-mouthed biology instructor whose average score was 2.4 out of 10, or Martha Rigby (a mind-boggling 1.8), the ancient English teacher who regularly referred to the author of
Great Expectations
as
Th
omas Dickinson. Vicki herself was stuck in the middle of the pack (5.5, to be exact), with fewer than a dozen comments to her name, most of which contained a variant on the phrase “Boring but okay.” By contrast, Lily Frankel, the lively and hip young drama teacher, had received a whopping sixty-two reviews for an overall rating of 9.3, highest on the entire faculty, thereby earning herself a coveted smiley face with sunglasses and a crown.

Vicki read the post over and over — the author was identi
fi
ed only as “Greensleeves,” a pseudonym that meant nothing to her — wondering what she could have done to provoke such a hateful and dishonest attack. You’d think that if someone despised you enough to call you an insane bitch, you’d have a pretty good idea of who it was, but Vicki’s mind was blank, unable to produce a suspect. It wasn’t until she gave up and went to bed that the answer came to her, almost as if it had been jarred loose by the impact of her head against the pillow.

SHE’D BEEN
circulating through her classroom during a quiz — this was back in February, either right before or right a
ft
er winter vacation — when she spotted Jessica Grasso munching on a Snickers bar. Some teachers allowed snacks in class, but Vicki wasn’t one of them, and she’d been teaching long enough to know that you had to stick to your guns on stu
ff
like that. Not wanting to embarrass the girl, who’d never given her any trouble, Vicki tapped her on the shoulder and spoke in a barely audible whisper as she held out her hand.

“Please give me that.”

Instead of surrendering the contraband, Jessica took another bite. She was a big girl with a pretty face — except for the ridiculous raccoon eyeliner — and sleek dark hair that swept down across her forehead, partially obscuring one eye. She chewed slowly, taking a languorous pleasure in the activity, staring straight at Vicki the whole time.

“Did you hear me?” Vicki demanded, this time in a normal voice.

Jessica’s expression remained blank, but Vicki detected a challenge in it nonetheless. She began to feel foolish, standing there with her hand out while the girl gazed right through her. It was possible — she wasn’t clear on this point in retrospect — that Vicki lowered her gaze, taking a moment or two to perform a less-than-charitable assessment of Jessica’s
fi
gure.