“Jo Jo,” Hasty said. “I
need you to fix something for me.”
friends on the low stone wall of the historic burial ground opposite the town common. They liked to sit there and freak out the adults. The adults retaliated through the selectmen who posted
“No Loitering” signs and insisted that the Paradise police enforce them. Michelle was seventeen.
She had dropped out of school after tenth grade and spent as much time as possible on the cemetery wall.
When Jesse Stone pulled his unmarked car up onto the grass beside them, the two boys Michelle was sitting with got up and moved sullenly away. Michelle did not. She took a last long drag on her joint, and dropped it in the street and scuffed it out with the heel of her red sneaker, looking all the time straight at Jesse as he got out of the car and walked toward her.
“You gonna bust me, Jesse?”
She put a heavy stress on the name, to remind him that she was not speaking respectfully to an officer of the law.
“Probably not,” Jesse said.
He sat down beside her on the stone wail.
“How you doing?” he said.
Michelle snorted, as if the question were too stupid to answer. Jesse nodded as if she had answered. The kids who had moved sullenly off lingered now, near the shopping center, watching. The traffic was sparse at midmorning, and the bird noise was easily audible in the buriai ground behind them. It was late in September and the leaves had just begun to turn on some of the early trees, showing a touch of yellow or red against the still predominant green. Jesse was quiet. Michelle looked at him sideways, puzzled, annoyed, and stubborn.
She was a small girl with a thin face that would have been pretty had it not been so empty. There was a streak of lavender in her blond hair, and her fingernails were painted black. She wore jeans and red sneakers and a blue sweater with the sleeves too long so that only the tips of her fingers were visible. She had a smail gold bead in one nostril.
She struggled to he as quiet as Jesse, but she couldn’t.
“You going to nm me off the wail or what.”
she said.
“No,” Jesse said.
“So how come you’re sitting
here?”
“I was thinking what a waste of time this deai is for both of us,” Jesse said.
“What deai.”
“You sit on the wall and smoke dope. I chase you off.
You come back. I chase you off. You come back. It’s a waste of my time and yours.“
“I’m not wasting my time,”
Michelle said.
“Really?”
“Really. It’s a free country. I should he able to do what
I want.“
“And this is what you want?” Jesse said.
“Sit on the wail. and smoke dope.”
“You can’t prove I’m smoking
dope.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“So why don’t you leave me alone
then?”
“Why don’t you go to school?”
“School sucks,” Michelle said.
Jesse grinned.
“Babe, you got that fight,” he said.
“You know that Paul Simon song, ‘When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all’?”
“Who’s Paul Simon?”
“A singer. Anyway, yeah, school sucks.
It’s one of the great scams in American public life. On the other hand, most people grind through it. How come you don’t?‘”
“I don’t have to, I’m
