In other words, dear readers, I am a juvenile offender. Yes, it's sad but true. I once strayed from the path of righteousness.
The time? Long ago, when I was but a young girl of 14. I was spending the summer before I started Posh Girls' School (on a full scholarship) at my grandparents' house down the shore. I was, it goes without saying, sort of a weird kid. I had a job with friends of my parents, working at an ice-cream stand, and I was pretty much content to go from the house to the stand to the beach and back again. I spent most evenings by myself, reading on the porch, or biking around the town.
I was perfectly content, but my parents were concerned. My two female cousins nearest me in age, with whom I'd always been close, were about to be a sophomore and a senior in HS, respectively. By this time, their much-wealthier parents had bought their own summer house in the next town over, where a lot of the area's Main Line families (read: lots of Old Money) had their summer homes. Being both older and cooler than I, they were at the center of "summer local" society, and they were going out every night to illegal parties and all-ages dances and all of the thing that the cool kids did, and my Mom, especially, thought that I should make an effort to "be more social."
So one Saturday night, when my parents went to Atlantic City for the night, and my brother and I were staying over at the cousins', my mom and my aunt put their plan into action. It was not much of a plan, frankly. They basically bullied my cousins into agreeing to take me out with them that night.
We were supposed to go into the center of town, to the pizza parlor that served as the de facto hangout for the cool kids. On the way there, my cousins basically flipped for me, and my sophomore cousin got custody for the evening. It turned out that we were just going to the pizza place long enough to meet up with her friends and find out where the night's rager would be.
Under no circumstances did I want to go along. I was socially awkward -- physically overdeveloped for my age and sort of emotionally left behind; I had just attended my first school dances and had enough trouble dancing with boys, let alone contemplating doing anything else -- and I didn't drink. But I wasn't allowed to go home, and I didn't have anywhere else to go. So, under protest, I went along. We crammed into the back of her friend Drew's Jeep -- a classic beach vehicle plastered with surf stickers and painted a cherry red. I knew many of her friends at least slightly -- I wasn't a total social outcast, and we did do things like go to the beach together, but still, it was awkward, eight or so of us, boys and girls, crammed into a car designed for four or five at the max.
We ended up at the end of the island just after dark had fallen. The beaches in this town are known for their massive, environmentally-friendly dunes, and we had to wend our way along a sandy path, in the dark, with crickets and frogs chirping around us, with spider webs in our perfectly-coiffed hairdos (hey, it was the '80's. In New Jersey. Although, to our credit, we were sporting the bi-level surfer cuts and not the infamous mall hair) and sand in our penny loafers. And my cousin's friend Drew was carrying his skateboard, for no apparent reason, which bumped into my legs with every step, and copping a feel through my t-shirt "by accident" every time we stopped to figure out where we were supposed to be.
We came over the ridge of the dunes in the moonlight onto the Hobie Cat beach. Hobie Cats are catamarans -- the light, two-hulled sailboats that are much in favor down the shore because you can launch them from the beach without a dock, and park them there all summer, above the high-tide line.
There were probably two hundred kids at this party. It was New Jersey, not California, so no bonfires, but a couple kegs, lots of wine coolers, music coordinated from a multitude of boom boxes (I remember it being Simply Red and UB40, but fill in your own cheesy '80's soundtrack here). There were couples making out in the dunes, by the water, and all over the abandoned Hobie Cats. In short, a typical summer party.
Now, nearly 20 years later, my cousin and I remember some details in perfect sync; in others, our accounts vary widely.
We both remember that we hadn't even been there long enough to fight our way to the kegs and get a beer -- or even to acquire a girly wine cooler -- when the police arrived. We still aren't sure how they got there -- either they were right behind us on the path to the beach, being very, very quiet, or they had come over the dunes -- a strictly forbidden act.
Immediately, everyone scattered. My cousin, who is like a sister to me in many ways today, nonetheless left me standing there, paralyzed with fear, and took off like a stone-cold coward. A moment later, as people tore up and beach and over the dunes, I realized I was in trouble.
I kicked off my shoes and ran, with the other stragglers, towards the cover of the dunes. As I was running, legs churning up the hard-packed sand, kids diving off into the scrub to the left and right of me, a police officer in full uniform, with his billy club out, ran right alongside and then passed me.
Now, this is where our accounts differ. My cousin claims that I am the only person in the history of the the universe who halted when the police yelled "Halt!" I, on the other hand, remember thinking, distinctly, that I was going to outfox the cops and double back. I stopped where I was and turned around, running back down the beach in the other directions and almost directly into the arms of the middle-aged cop bringing up the rear.
This was not a rent-a-cop. This was one of the Main Line Beach Town's few full-time patrol officers, a local guy who was simmering with rage towards the spoiled-rotten rich kids who invaded his town for three months each summer, a heavyset guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache who was pissed that his polyester pants were soaked to the knees with sea water, his brogans were filled with salt and seaweed and he was on the edge of a heart-attack from the simultaneous fun of chasing kids through the sandy dunes and destroying the town's fragile eco-system at the same time.
He was, needlessly to say, less than pleased with me. He literally dragged me -- his hand attached to my arm so tightly that it left bruises the next day -- back across the sand and dropped me onto a Hobie Cat with a snarl. Next to me, soaking wet and more than a little drunk, was a tiny blonde girl I'd never seen before who had apparently figured that no one would see her if she dove into the water.
"Do you know how much trouble you two are in?" the cop roared at us, and proceeded to break down a list of the possible charges.
Underaged drinking. Destroying a protected wilderness. Trespassing. Destroying private property. Theft by misadventure (because we'd been using the Hobie Cats to sit on and, um, other stuff). The list went on and on as my stomach twisted, and the girl beside me shivered blankly.
As the other cops roamed the beach, searching for stragglers, this guy stayed beside us, whispering a litany of trouble and woe. We would be thrown in jail, never to see the light of day again. We'd never get into college. We'd end up, drug-addicted prostitutes, trolling the Atlantic City boardwalk for johns. He had some serious anger-management issues, and I, at that point in my life, had never even gotten a detention. I couldn't wait for the earth to swallow me whole.
As we sat there, miserable and shivering, waiting for the cops to take us back to the station, a clump of teen-agers came walking up the beach. At the head of the pack, carrying, for no good reason, a skateboard, and waving at me was my cousin's friend Drew, whistling cheerfully.
"Hey, you! Missy! Do you know who that is?" the cop demanded, and I was trapped.
Even a socially-retarded bookworm knows that the code of teenage life is Never Tell, but the cop was now grandly adding a couple charges of "accessory after the fact" to our still-growing laundry list of charges.
Finally the girl next to me piped up for the first time.
"They're just a couple of asshole surfers," she said, as if this were a conversation she had often, "They probably think we're hysterical."
Moments later, we were handcuffed and escorted, none too gently, over the beach, and back down the narrow, sandy path. Without the use of our hands, we were at the mercy of the cops, who I may have mentioned were none too happy. My shoes were somewhere abandoned on the beach, so I stumbled over rocks and burrs and Lord knows what else as I tried to duck and weave to avoid the low-hanging branches and spider webs.
Luckily, when we emerged from the beach, we were handed off to a different cop, a middle-aged woman with mom hair who took one look at us -- me on the verge of hysteria, feet torn and bleeding, and Blondie dripping wet and weaving slightly where she stood -- and snapped into mom mode. She placed us in the back of the cars with a hand on our heads (I remember thinking, distinctly -- "I can't believe they really do that!"), and even put our seatbelts on for us.
Unfortunately, we rode the whole way back down the island with lights on and sirens blaring. It was a Saturday night and the main street was thronged with people, each and everyone I was convinced could see us as we sped down the road at a law-abiding 25 miles an hour.
I didn't even know the town had a jail. Or a police station, for that matter. It turned out to be next to the strip that contained the town's only mini-golf course -- packed, of course -- and an Uncle Bill's Pancake House, housed in the same drab, brown Quonset hut where we bought beach tags.
We were, thankfully, driven around to the back of the police station, where no one could see us, and unloaded. There, on the side of the platform, was my cousin, waving discreetly. I found out late that she'd had no idea what happened to me, and had found out only after sending the skateboard-toting Drew and his minions to do a little reconnaissance on the beach. In the meantime, her older sister had returned home to find out -- all stealth-like -- if I'd wandered back to my aunt's house in the meantime.
We were taken through the tiny police station and back into what must have been the drunk tank -- happily, devoid of drunks at the time. We sat side by side, still handcuffed, still shivering. The air-conditioning was arctic-level, Blondie was still soaked through, and I was still barefoot on the floor that had, I was convinced, seen a thousand puke-outs before me.
I remember thinking that my parents were going to kill me for losing my penny loafers -- Weejuns without socks were the in things that summer, and mine were supposed to last long enough to wear as part of the PGS uniform in the fall -- and not, strangely, imagining their reaction to the whole minor arrest issue.
After what felt like hours, the mean cop came and unlocked our handcuffs, finally, and took us into a hallway that doubled as a photo backdrop. We had to hold little signs in front of our faces as they took our photographs, and then our profiles. I remember debating whether or not to smile, as Blondie mugged drunkenly for the camera.
Afterward, they took us each to a separate desk in the squad room and started the interview. The mean cop demanded my parents' names and phone numbers and -- in the land before cell phones -- I had to tell him that they were totally out of reach.
"Oh, well," he said with a smirk, "I guess you're spending the night with us, then."
It was, at this point, that I began to panic, slightly.
"Wait. I'm staying with my aunt! I'm staying with my aunt! Could you at least call her? Even if she can't come get me?" I begged.
After a few tense minutes the cop nodded, and then he asked me for my school.
"Oh, God, why do you need to know that? I'm just going to be a freshman! I have a scholarship!"
I could just picture the nuns at PGS getting a packet complete with my mug shot the week before school started and booting me to the curb faster than you can blink. That, finally, was enough to make me cry.
I wouldn't tell the mean cop where I went to school, sobbing hysterically for my aunt instead, while in the meantime, the mom cop had her hands full with Blondie, who couldn't, it seemed, remember her name. After ten minutes or so of cacophony, the mean cop had had enough, and dialed my aunt's house in defeat.
I could hear her through the phone on the other side of the desk.
"That's -- you've got to be kidding. You've obviously arrested the wrong kid. She's the good one! Where are my daughters?"
The cop's night was not getting any better. Before he could answer any of her questions, she'd hung up. At the time, I was convinced that she'd thought a) it was a joke or b) I deserved everything I was getting, so at this point I was convinced that I was spending the rest of the weekend in jail.
The cop didn't make me go back to the drunk tank, however. He let me sit there as they tried to coax some information out of the increasingly incoherent blonde girl beside me. Just as they were about to give it up for a bad game, an EMT who -- daylighted? I don't know -- as a lifeguard wandered into the room for something.
"Oh, hey, Chrissie," he said nonchalantly, "What're you doing here?"
"Hey!" she answered brightly, "We kind of got caught on the beach. You know, um, swimming."
The mom cop looked over at at the EMT like he was her salvation.
"You know who this is?" she asked quietly.
"Sure. That's Chrissie, the mayor's daughter. She just got back from camp."
You could have heard a pin drop in the squad room.
"Jesus Christ!" the mean cop growled at no one in particular, "That's why she looks so friggin' familiar. Goddamnit."
By a strange coincidence, my aunt and the Mayor arrived at the squad room nearly simultaneously. In the short time before they'd gotten there, they'd located a blanket, a sweatshirt and a lot of hot coffee for Chrissie.
The Mayor looked less like a politician and more like a the real-estate agent his was in civilian life -- in all his tanned-skin, bouffanted-hair, pink-polo-shirted glory.
"So, I hear my daughter took a little swim after the lifeguards went off duty," he said, and he may not have looked like a politician, but he had a politician's oily charm, and velvet over steel voice, "Right, guys?"
In the blink of an eye, gone were the laundry list of charges, the threats to call our schools, the drunk-tank sleepover, the fingerprinting still hanging over our heads.
My aunt, who was not born yesterday (and, God, do I love her for it!), chose that moment to step in.
"So, this was all a big misunderstanding, it sounds like, hunh? I mean, if no charges have been filed, who knows if you interrupted a party on the beach or a little illegal swimming? Right, guys?"
It was a perfect imitation of the Mayor. After an uneasy moment, even the mean cop agreed, and they tore up the reports they'd been writing, discreetly.
As we walked out of the police station, my aunt's arm was around my shoulder.
"What happened to your shoes? Did they take your shoes? Did they think you were going to kill yourself with your shoes?"
"No, I, um, kind of lost them," I whispered. In the midst of the shakedown I'd just witnessed, I'd managed to stop crying, but I was ready to crumble at any moment.
"Oh, well, you needed a new pair anyway. We'll go shopping for them tomorrow."
"Um, aren't I going to be grounded or whatever? Like, forever?"
"Oh, please. This has my daughters written all over it. You know, they came back to the house looking for a sweater. I didn't realize that was code for my-baby-cousin-who-I-abandoned-in-the-dunes. I'm going to have to kill them, of course."
"It wasn't their fault! I was lost, um, in the crowd. I got confused."
"Yeah, and here's another thing -- run. Seriously. That cop was old and fat, if you'd have made it to the dunes, you'd have been home free. You know, if you were ever to attend another party. Which you would never do. Because, of course, it's wrong. As is underaged drinking," she added with a wink as she pushed me into her car.
By the time we got back to the house, my cousins were waiting on the porch, and my aunt had worked up a righteous head of steam. The thing that she was mad about, however, was the fact that we'd all scattered at the first sign of trouble.
"That's why you're family. You don't leave each other. I should have been picking all of you up from that station! Or none of you! Do you understand me?"
We finally tracked my parents' down at their casino late that night, and after my father stopped laughing, my mother forced him to come back. Unlike the rest of the family, who were treating the whole incident as something of a joke, my mother had worked herself into a lather by the time they reached my aunt's house.
My mother -- who, until that point, had never cursed in front of us, walked into my aunt's kitchen at 4AM screaming, at the top of her lungs, "What the f--- is wrong with you?"
Before anyone could react, she slapped me across the face -- the first time since I'd been in diapers she'd ever hit me.
"You could have been arrested! You could have gone to jail! You could have been THROWN OUT OF SCHOOL!"
She kept coming at me, but my father at this point had entered the kitchen and was, literally, holding her back.
"Um, this might be the wrong time to mention it," my aunt piped up as my mother raged at me, "But it is sort of our fault."
"What? What the hell are you talking about?"
I was stunned. My mother was like a total stranger.
"Well, we did make her go out tonight. Remember -- you wanted her to act like a normal kid? Yes, well, welcome to normal."
For a moment, I thought that my mother was going to have a nervous breakdown. Her face turned purple and she nearly leaped out of my father's -- who is over a foot taller and probably two hundred pounds heavier than my tiny mom -- arms. Then, she just collapsed in hysterics -- first laughter, then tears, as the rest of us just stared at her. After about twenty minutes, she'd finally calmed down, and she turned to me, and said in her perfectly quiet, ordinary voice,
"That was not the smartest thing you've ever done."
We finally got to bed around 5AM. Several hours later, my dad woke me up and told me that I was not allowed to "call out arrested" and drove me back home to work the late-morning shift at the ice-cream stand.
On the way there, in his low-key way, he explained that there was basically nothing that he or my mother could do at this point except trust me -- they'd done all their parenting and I was going to be on my own for much of the time from now on.
"It would help," he added mildly, "If we thought we could trust your judgment. I realize that you were in a bad position last night, but there was an alternative. There almost always is. Just like there are always consequences, like having to spend the morning serving ice-cream to screaming kids on two hours of sleep. Good luck with that," he said, as he dropped me off.
When I returned to the house that afternoon, wanting nothing more than a nap, my bathing suit was sitting on the kitchen table under a note.
"Come to the beach. Don't make us come get you."
There was nothing I wanted to do less. I was tired, embarrassed and ashamed. I had a purple handprint on my cheek, my feet were torn and scratched and sore, and I had faint bruises on my arms where the cuffs had bit in, and where the mean cop had grabbed me. I hadn't slept more than two hours, I had a crying hangover, and I hadn't eaten all day. But more than anything, I was afraid of the return of my mother, the insane woman, from the night before.
I changed into my suit and trudged back down to the beach, over the dunes, following the same path in my sneakers that I'd followed, barefoot and in reverse, the night before. As I reached the top of the hill, at the edge of the protected beach, I saw my whole family spread out -- my parents, my brother, all my aunts and uncles and cousins -- in their sprawling mass of blankets and beach chair and umbrellas. They'd obviously been looking for me, because my brother started screaming as soon as I crested the hill, "There she is. She's coming!"
As one mass, they stood up, put on their striped hats and police caps and mirrored sunglasses, and started singing "Jailhouse Rock." Badly. Out of tune and at the top of their lungs. Everyone was staring. And I had about 100 yards of beach to cover on my own.
By the time I hit the edge of the family plot, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Then, my dad handed me a literal ball and chain. And a set of Chinese handcuffs. ("They didn't sell the real ones. Sorry.")
"So," I said finally, trying to be a god sport, "I guess someone hit the Five and Ten this morning."
My dad gave me a giant hug and whispered in my ear, "Remember those consequences we were talking about? Be a good sport and get it over with."
So I laughed, and wore my ball and chain, and fell asleep on the beach several minutes later.
Thanks to Chrissie, the Mayor's daughter, there's no record of my transgression -- although I guess my mug shot might be floating out there, somewhere. But thanks to my cousin's friend, who was several grades ahead of me at PGS and incapable of keeping her mouth shut -- every single girl I went to school with thought I was a felon by the end of the first day of my freshman year.
By last period that day, the scholarship girl from the ghetto had, depending on who you talked to, robbed a J.C. Penney, cut a girl in a gang fight or was a drug dealer on a massive scale. For weeks, girls sidled up to me in the locker room, whispering, "Can you hook me up?" and it took me forever to figure out they thought I was their drug connection.
On the plus side, not a single girl was brave enough to say anything -- at least to my face. And by the time they'd figured out that I was about as dangerous as a Disney cartoon animal, the damage had been done. For the rest of my high-school career, I skated by on my altogether-unearned reputation as a slightly-mysterious badass.
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