Up on stage, the guys draped their arms around each other’s shoulders and began a Rockette-style kick line.
They did a few do-si-dos, and then the audience
screamed as Travis turned a cartwheel, nearly flashing two hundred parents and grandparents. In the distance, Celeste could hear the high blare of police sirens.
“Get out of there!” she moaned. “You’re the world’s biggest idiot! Go!”
The guys finished their dance and vaulted onto the golf cart, leaving the bathrobes heaped on the stage.
Travis grabbed the wheel and floored the accelerator.
The cart shot forward, but Travis lost control. With an awful cracking noise, he drove right off the side of the ramp. The audience, including Celeste and Devon, winced as the cart fell three feet down onto the patio, landing with a tremendous crash. The guys scrambled out and ran across the school lawn like crazed nudists, just as three police cars, sirens wailing and lights flashing, pulled up at the curb.
“Shit, Celeste!” Devon screeched, pointing at the crashed golf cart. Celeste followed her finger. There, next to the cart, struggling to his feet with his hand clapped over one eye, was Travis. Of course.
Chapter Two
Celeste gasped as the first cop reached her boyfriend.
Yelling his name, she pushed through the thronging audience toward the front. The line of graduates at the side of the stage had deteriorated into a mob of black robes, all shoving one another to see what was going on. Behind her, the audience was roaring. As Celeste fought her way forward, she realized that she had no idea what she was going to do once she reached the stage. Grab Travis away from a police officer and spirit him away in the broken golf cart? Celeste to the rescue! Doubtful.
By the time she got to the front, Devon struggling behind her, a mustached young cop was already slapping handcuffs on her thong-clad boyfriend.
“Travis!” Celeste panted. He turned. The flesh
around his right eye was already red and puffy, but his big dark eyes still managed to melt her. “You’re hurt!”
“Hey, Celeste,” he said weakly.
“Okay, let’s go,” the heartless policeman com-
manded. His mustache hung over his lip like a small, dead animal. “This one’s got to come down to the station with me.”
“Travis, are you being arrested?” Celeste squeaked.
Travis and his friends had pulled stupid pranks all through high school, but no one had ever actually been arrested before. Usually the pranks just ended with parents coming home and yelling for a while.
“Uh …” Travis looked at the cop uncertainly.
“Well, we’ve got to hold him at the station until we can sort out what’s going on here and track down his buddies,” the cop said.
Travis looked over his shoulder as the cop hustled him toward the police cars at the curb. “Cel—will you come down to the station? I might need bail or something.”
Celeste managed to nod as she watched Travis’s bare butt cheeks make their way toward the cop car.
✦ ✦ ✦
Celeste gripped her bag nervously as she approached the beige cinder-block police station on Palmetto Drive. Her
palms were slippery with sweat. Taking a deep breath, she swung open the heavy glass door. It closed behind her with a bang. The place seemed very quiet after the traffic noise of the busy street. An odor of gym shoes and bologna sandwiches hung in the air. Behind a scarred wooden reception desk, a middle-aged cop with gray hair looked up from his newspaper. “Help you?” he inquired, peering over his reading glasses.
“Um, yes, I’m here to see Travis Helding?” Celeste tried to steady her voice. She could feel goose bumps rising on her arms from the arctic air-conditioning.
The desk officer glanced at a thick sheaf of papers on a clipboard. “Room two. Just go down the hall, second door on the left.”
“Thanks,” Celeste said, summoning her Pinyon-
employee smile for the second time that day. She started down a long, fluorescent-lit, linoleum-covered hallway.
Could this place be any more depressing? she thought, stopping to moisten her dry mouth at the water fountain and noting the wad of old chewing gum stuck in the drain.
The first thing she saw when she pushed opened the door to room two was Travis, minus the handcuffs and now wearing what looked like orange hospital scrubs, sitting at a table in the middle of the room. He raised his head toward Celeste as she entered and grinned, his usual confidence apparently restored. His eye was now shiny blue-black and almost swollen closed. Even sitting in an interrogation room, he looked adorable. Celeste shot him a worried look and only then noticed the array of people seated against the walls of the room: Mr.
Ransick, Dr. Weaver, and—Celeste gulped—her own
mom and dad. The police must have called them. A suf-focating silence lay over the room, broken only by the ticking of a wall clock. Celeste tried to arrange her face in a pleasant, serious, yet charming expression, but she knew she just looked vaguely stupid instead.
Meekly, Celeste crept over and took the seat next to her mom. She arranged her bag in her lap. Only then did she peek sideways at her parents. Her mom was shaking her head slowly back and forth with her lips pressed together, but her father … Celeste gulped inaudibly. Mr. Tippen’s heavy dark eyebrows were drawn together, almost down to his nose, and his face was bright red.
Celeste stared straight ahead at the clock. Twelve fifty-five. After thirty seconds, she slid her eyes over toward her father. He caught her glance. “Hurrrrmm,”
he rumbled in his throat. It sounded like a diesel engine echoing against the cement walls.
Celeste looked at the floor. She’d helped Travis get out of trouble before, but that had been for stupid things like ditching study
