“What do you mean, figure out where to send me?”
“I don’t know what that means yet. You got kicked out of school and you’re too young to join the army, so we have some difficult goddamn decisions to make.”
“Do you mean boarding school? What?”
“I mean exactly what I said. We don’t know what we’re going to do with you yet.”
“It was Mr. Martin,” I said. “Why won’t you believe me?”
“You’ve been fixated on him since Todd disappeared. I get it. You think you saw Todd get into a car with him.”
“I think I saw it?”
“They took your accusation seriously. They questioned him and searched his house. They’ve come back and questioned him again and again. I’m not saying he didn’t do it. I’m saying that if they can’t find enough evidence to arrest him for it, you need to let it go. Once you start accusing him of breaking into the house and planting drugs in your backpack, it’s gone too far.”
I just stared out the window for the rest of the car ride home.
Mom sent me to my room. I sat on my bed, listening to her crying downstairs.
Around noon she told me that lunch was ready. We sat at the dining room table, eating bologna sandwiches in silence. When we were done, I returned to my room.
I could fix this. I wasn’t going to let Mr. Martin ruin my life. I wasn’t going to go to a youth correctional facility because of him. He’d won this particular battle, but now I knew that I needed to step up my game.
When Dad got home from work, he didn’t even come to check on me. I just heard him and Mom talking. It sounded like they were arguing, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, hi,” Dad said.
“Hi.” It sounded like Tina’s dad. “You know why I’m here, right?”
“I think so.”
“I do not expect to see your son anywhere near Tina. Do you understand me? Nowhere near her. They will not be seeing each other, ever again, under any circumstances. If I see Curtis, I’ll kill him. Do you hear me? Do I need to repeat it?”
“Okay, look, I know you’re mad,” Dad told him.
“You have no idea how mad I am.”
“He will never see Tina again. I promise. But I can’t stand here and let you threaten to kill him.”
“You keep your drug-dealing kid away from my daughter and we won’t have any problems.”
“All right, all right. I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”
I heard the door close. A moment later, Dad walked into my room. “Don’t call Tina ever again.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean it.”
“I said that I won’t!”
Dad left, slamming my bedroom door behind him. Then he apparently decided that I should not be granted any privacy, because he opened it again, then walked away.
The lawyer, Mr. Nickles, wore a rumpled grey suit and looked frazzled. He adjusted his glasses and stroked his mustache as he looked at my file.
“Possession with intent to sell is a felony,” he said. “You could be looking at up to five years’ incarceration.”
Mom, Dad, and I all gaped at him across the desk. “Are you serious?” Dad asked.
Mr. Nickles nodded. “It’s unlikely, but we have to look at that as a worst-case scenario. Now, the possession part is pretty straightforward. He had a bag of pot in his backpack, which was found by a state trooper in the presence of the school principal. Curtis says it was planted there, but, surprise, everybody who’s arrested on drug charges insists that they don’t know how it got there.”
“I know how it got there,” I said.
“Quiet,” Dad told me. “Let him talk.”
“Intention to sell is a little harder to prove. If his backpack was filled with cash and the product was divided out into lots of small baggies, we’d know exactly what he meant to do with it. The fact that it was all in one bag helps his case. What does not help his case is that he had two ounces in there. That’s when a judge starts to think, hmmm, maybe he’s not just saving that for personal use. Getting caught with anything more than one ounce is very, very bad.”
“What if—” I started to say, but Dad elbowed me in the side.
“Now, if you were an adult and you got busted with that much marijuana on school grounds, you’d be screwed. Fortunately, you’re fourteen years old, and if you were intending to sell marijuana on school grounds, you were only intending to sell it to other fourteen-year-olds, and maybe some thirteen-year-olds. Still very bad, just not as bad as it could be. So let’s discuss your options.”
I leaned forward.
“Option one, you plead not guilty. It goes to trial. The guy you’re accusing of planting the bag in your backpack will be questioned. Maybe he breaks down on the witness stand and confesses, but most likely he denies it. Ultimately, a jury is going to find it difficult to believe that a construction worker is breaking into somebody’s home—or having a friend do it—to hide a fairly expensive bag of drugs in a teenager’s belongings. I believe you, Curtis, and I’d do my best to make a jury believe it, but I’m telling you, it’s a longshot. Same thing with intent to sell. Even if somebody could vouch for you being a complete pothead, two ounces is a lot of weed. That’s a hundred and twenty joints, depending on how generously you roll them. Were you going to throw a huge party and give free pot to all your friends? Again, that’s a longshot for a jury. If you’ve got more than an ounce, we automatically assume you’re selling it. I’d do everything I could to make the jury see things your way, but I’ve got
