Sketchy

by Samms, Olivia

I turn right, toward the police station.

  I keep setting the metal detector off. I take the earrings out of my lobes, the bangles off my wrist, my rhinestone belt, my silver ring… and the damn metal detector still goes off.

  “You think it could be my nose ring?” I so do not want to be strip-searched by this female officer.

  “Take it off and we’ll see,” she orders.

  “Oh, man, if I take it out, it’d be a bitch to get it back in. Don’t you have a wand thingy—like what they use at the airport?”

  She sighs. “Fine, step to the side.”

  I do, and she passes the wand thingy over my body, traveling up and down my torso, between my legs, under my armpits—very awkward.

  “Um… the nose ring is in my nose,” I remind her.

  She fondles the police badge pinned on her shirt and glares at me.

  I see my fuzzy reflection in the thick Plexiglas divider behind her and I shut up. I look like a street person. I’m soaked, no coat, wet shoes—one without a heel. I have filthy hands, and bird poop is glued to my frizzy hair. I feel the need to explain myself. “I’m normally well put together. An hour ago my hair was lying vertically, not horizontally, and my boots? They used to be suede; now they look like cardboard. And I was wearing a fabulous coat, but she took it for some reason.”

  Officer lady so doesn’t give a shit and suppresses a yawn—her nostrils flare.

  “The reason I’m here is because I have to talk to someone about the Willa Pressman case. The girl who was raped? It’s very important.”

  The wand thingy goes nuts as she passes it by my nose. I bite my tongue, wanting to say, “Told ya so.”

  She sighs. “You’re free to go.”

  I look around the station. “But, um, where do I go?”

  “See that jolly-looking fellow behind the desk?” She points. “Go share your very important information with him. I’m sure he’ll love to hear your story.”

  I look over and see a three-hundred-pound, toady-looking man. “Him?” I ask.

  She nods and belly laughs.

  “Okay, I’ll do that, I guess. If I have to.” I swallow. “Thank you, though. Thanks for not kicking me out… with the way I look.”

  She’s obviously not used to many thank-yous during her day and looks down at her pudgy feet in her sensible shoes and shifts her weight.

  I gather up my metal paraphernalia, dump it into my bag, and hobble over to Mr. Toad. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and say, “I would like to talk to somebody about the Willa Pressman case. I think I may have some new information for them.”

  “Down the hallway, on the left. The name Sergeant Daniels is on the door.” He grunts. “But I wouldn’t rush in; knock first.” He leans in close, like he’s about to tell me a secret, and hands me a lollipop. “Don’t let her know I’m not mean.” He looks at the female cop and laughs. “It’s a game with me… keeps her squirming. I like seeing her squirm,” he rasps.

  “Okay, thanks.” I unwrap the lollipop—orange, my favorite, and now that I think of it, my breakfast—and pop it into my mouth.

  “Remember to knock first,” he croaks.

  The uneven sound of my heels echoes off the cold cinderblock walls as I clunk down the hallway. Not wanting to disturb any serious police business, I take my boots off, mourn their condition one last time, and stuff them into my bag. I continue down the hall, cautiously shoeless.

  I come to a closed door, and like Mr. Toad promised, “Sergeant Daniels” is spelled out in tarnished brass letters.

  Daniels. The name rings a bell. Detective Daniels. Oh, shit.

  Athena Day School for Girls—fall, eleventh grade—a year ago. It was an assembly day—“Just Say No to Drugs Day.” A Detective Daniels was the guest speaker, and I’m sure he felt pretty lucky walking into a high school packed with hundreds of horny teenaged girls in uniforms—he being the only male on the premises. And I vaguely remember that he was sort of cute, in a tall, blond kind of way. Giggles erupted when he walked in accompanied by Sally, a drug-sniffing beagle.

  “Shit,” Aggie said to me. “He brought a canine with him.”

  “You’re not carrying, are you?” I asked.

  “Just a bag. But damn, I heard those mutts sniff out as little as a seed. Here, Bea, you take care of it.” She stuffed the baggie into my backpack.

  “Aggie! That’s not fair! What am I supposed to do with it?”

  Miss Roberts, our bio teacher, walked by. “Um, may I please use the bathroom?”

  “After the assembly, Beatrice. You’ll have to wait. We’re about to begin.”

  “But I started”—I feigned embarrassment—“you know, Aunt Flow’s come to visit.”

  “Who’s visiting you, dear?”

  You’d think a biology teacher would’ve understood the reference. “Um, I have to go ride the cotton pony?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about, Miss Washington. Now take a seat.”

  “My period!” I blurted out. “I’ve started my period!”

  Of course all the girls heard this, and having a man in the room made the giggles even louder. And Miss Roberts, embarrassed in front of Detective Daniels, dismissed me as the beagle started sniffing the air, following a scent, walked directly toward me, and bayed.

  Aggie gave me the thumbs-up, and I was out of that auditorium lickety-split, before the dog blew my cover and revealed Aggie’s stash. I threw myself into the nearest bathroom, stuffed the plastic bag under a pile of paper towels in the wastebasket, dumped a wad of fresh towels on top, and prayed that the janitor wouldn’t clean up before I could get it back to Aggie.

  My prayers went unanswered, as later in the day, after finally making it back to the bathroom, I found the trash can empty, a new, clean plastic liner clinging to its sides. Aggie was so pissed at me for ditching her weed. “What were you thinking? A trash can? Come on!” She didn’t talk to me for a week, and to make matters worse, I did start my period.

  I cursed the detective and his dog that day and now wonder if it’s the same cop I’m about to meet, and if he’s been promoted to sergeant, and if I’ll be sniffed out again.

  “Get down on the ground, hands above your head. Now!” a man’s voice demands through the cheap plywood door.

  I knock.

  A series of gunshots flies through the air. I instinctively duck; my knees hit the door, and it inches open.

  Peeking through the crack, expecting to see something gnarly going on, I instead spot two grown men playing an interactive video game—Manhunt. They are pointing their remote controls like guns, shooting and swearing at the screen in front of them.

  “Got him!” a tall, lanky cop celebrates. (Yeah, it’s the same Daniels.) “I blew you away, Cole!”

  “No way, Daniels, you missed him—you hit the dummy!” The shorter cop taunts, “I set you up, you fool!” He performs a little jig around the room.

  “Did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “OH MY GOD,” I say. And all the fear, the anxiety of confronting the “men in blue” evaporates. The shorter cop, the trigger-happy one, turns and points the remote at me, ready to obliterate my existence.

  I raise my hands in the air and feign fright. “Please, please, please don’t shoot me. I’m a good guy—really, I am.”

  The tall cop laughs a little. “Detective Cole, put your weapon, uh, I mean, the remote down.” He turns the video game off, smoothes his blond hair, rubs his almond-shaped green eyes, and attempts to look important, sound important. “Uh, I’m Sergeant Daniels, he’s Detective Cole. Can we help you?”

  “I hope so, but after that, I have my doubts.” I hold out my hand—my cold, dirty hand. “Bea. Beatrice Washington.” Sergeant Daniels takes it without hesitation.

  “And you’re here because…?” the sergeant asks.

  I don’t have time to fool around. I have no idea how I’ll explain my lengthy absence from school, so I march over to his desk and dump out the contents of my bag. The
wet shoes come clumping out first, then my wallet. The jewelry, pens, my sketchbook are tossed out with the torn pieces of the sketch.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Detective Cole approaches, placing his hand on his holster—the real one.

  “She tore it up, and I need to redraw it.” I place the hair, the ears. I think a nostril is part of the cleft and put it under his chin. “Damn, that’s wrong.” I look up at the sergeant. “Do you mind if I use your tape?” I don’t wait for the answer and pull off a few pieces from the dispenser on the desk. “This is part of his nose for sure, and his mouth goes here, with the cleft underneath…” I sigh with frustration. “It was so good, real, alive. It must have looked like him because she went hysterical, crazy wild, and then stopped like a switch turned off, denied everything, and tore it up. Suddenly it wasn’t him, even though she knew it was, even though she described him to me—everything about him. Damn. And now look at it. A mess. I’m a mess, too. This whole day is a mess.”

  I’m exhausted, confused, bewildered—and now second-guessing my decision to come here. I feel defeated and sink down onto the chair behind Sergeant Daniels’s desk. The short cop, Detective Cole, looks like he wants to pull the chair out from under me.

  “Who is ‘she’?” Sergeant Daniels asks.

  “Willa Pressman, and this face I drew—he’s the one who raped her, beat her.” I finish taping the scraps of the sketch and mourn the end product. It looks like a Picasso drawing gone bad. “There are some things still recognizable, like the cleft here on his chin, and I guess the shape of his face, his hair.” I hold it out to them.

  They look at each other as if they were just punk’d.

  “I’ll redraw for it you, no problem. It won’t take me long at all. I’ll do anything you want—even put up with the inevitable shit from Willa. We have to catch him—we do!”

  Detective Cole snorts. Sergeant Daniels rubs his jaw and decides not to take the sketch from me. “Uh, thank you for your generous offer, but Miss Pressman doesn’t remember her attacker.”

  “She remembers everything,” I argue.

  “Well, if that’s the case, Miss Washington—”

  “Bea. I would prefer Bea.”

  “If that’s the case, we’ll bring her back in here, in front of our forensic artists, and they’ll draw him,” Sergeant Daniels says.

  “But you don’t have to. I already drew him, I know I did—this is him.” I stand. “So now you just have to locate him and catch him,” I challenge, still holding out the sketch.

  Detective Cole chuckles. “Catch him? Hey, little girl, I have an idea… why don’t you go back to your crack house, or wherever you hang out. We have more important things to do here than chase a Mr. Potato Head drawing.” He laughs at his stupid joke.

  This pisses me off big time and taps into my inherited Italian fury. “Hey, I’m not a crackhead! I’m sober, have been for over three months now, and I’m damn proud of it!” I snap up my three-month chip from the pile on the desk and toss it to Detective Cole. “You think I would have walked in here if I were using? Are you nuts? And with all due respect, I wasn’t the one playing a cops-and-robbers video game a minute ago! I didn’t have to come here, believe me. I didn’t want to come here. I thought I should for once do something responsible in my life and stop another girl from getting hurt. But forget it. You don’t care. Nobody cares.” I begin to throw all the crap into my bag. “And give me back my chip!” I snatch it from Detective Cole.

  Sergeant Daniels pours a cup of coffee and hands it to me. “Detective Cole didn’t mean that, did you, Cole?”

  His subordinate rolls his eyes.

  “Congratulations on your sobriety—that’s terrific,” the sergeant continues, “and it’s great that you want to help. But I need to understand something. Are you friends with Willa Pressman? Is that why you want to help, why you’re here?”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh and almost do a spit-take with the coffee. “Do I look like her type? I mean, come on. Think about it.”

  “No, no, you don’t. Not at all.” Detective Cole scoffs.

  “So, if you’re not her friend, why the concern?” The sergeant’s blond, bushy brows furrow together. “Do you know something about this we don’t? I mean, besides this sketch?”

  I think about the girl in the Arboretum, her voice. Help me… please, help me… But I can’t go there with them, not yet—I don’t trust them with that information. “No, I don’t. Let’s just say we have a lot more in common than you’d think, Willa and me.”

  “Yeah, right.” Cole is unconvinced.

  “Well,” the sergeant interrupts, “like I said, we’ll have to get her back in here. Ask her some more questions and talk about this… this sketch you drew.”

  “No! Don’t do that,” I beg.

  “But why not?” the sergeant asks. “I don’t understand.”

  “Because she’ll deny it, I told you. She’ll deny talking with me, meeting with me. She’ll say that this isn’t the guy.”

  “Why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she want to identify him if this really is him, as you say?”

  “Just because,” I hedge.

  “Just because why?” He doesn’t quit.

  “She’ll deny everything because she doesn’t want you to know what really happened, okay? Willa won’t talk to you. She hasn’t told anyone, except for me.” I raise my voice.

  “And why is that?” the sergeant asks.

  “Because of the truth. Willa is afraid of the truth.”

  Sergeant Daniels pauses. He stares at me and squints his green eyes. The Caribbean, I think to myself. His eyes are the color of the Caribbean Sea.

  … Two years ago, Christmas, I was fifteen, and my dad was invited to attend a conference down in Jamaica. It was the first conference Mom wanted to join in on. A happy little family vacation, they imagined, I’m sure.

  Well, it didn’t turn out that way, as I immediately zeroed in on another bored teen—a nerd from California. He’d been there a couple weeks and told me that he scored amazing weed from the local maintenance workers. He wasn’t cute and was a bit of a moron, but I decided to hang out with him—for the pot—and got stoned with him on the beach.

  Stupid move on my part, because after we got high, he thought I should pay him for the weed. With sex.

  I was totally grossed out, said “no way,” and he got pissed—majorly pissed. I tried to run from him, but he was fast, caught up with me, and pulled my hair.

  “Fuck you!” I yelled and instinctively elbowed him in his skinny ribs, and he slumped over. I was surprised—kind of knocked the wind out of him. “Cool,” I thought and swung around and punched, undercutting his jaw. He stumbled back, dazed, and I ran into the ocean and started swimming—fast.

  I lucked out—apparently the stooge didn’t know how to swim, because he stayed on the shore in his tacky board shorts, giving me the finger and swearing stupid shit at me.

  I swam to an anchored raft, collapsed on my belly, and stared at the water. It was good weed, he was right. I was mesmerized, paralyzed by the beauty, the clarity, the greenness of the sea. I think I must have zoned out on that raft for a good five hours until my mom discovered where I was and called me to shore. She tended to my outrageously burned skin for the rest of the week.

  No, it wasn’t a good vacation.

  Anyway, that greenness, that clarity is what I see in Sergeant Daniels’s eyes.

  “And you happen know the truth? What happened that night?” he asks.

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  I wonder if I should dare go there—to my truth. I give him a nibble. “I sort of drew it out of her.”

  Sergeant Daniels raises his eyebrows. “Well, that sounds like quite a talent, Miss Washington. How do you suppose you were able to do that?”

  “Look, that’s irrelevant. All that matters is he’s out there, the rapist. And he looks like this.” I hold up the taped sketch again.

  They both l
augh this time.

  “Well, not like this. You know what I mean.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll see what we can do. Why don’t you give me your address and phone number, in case we need to talk to you.”

  I jot my information on a piece of paper and hand it to Sergeant Daniels. “This was a waste of my time, wasn’t it?”

  “Listen, you’re a sweet kid, trying to help a friend, or whatever she is to you.”

  “I’m not a kid—I’m almost eighteen. Oh, and by the way, can I have a note for school, you know, explaining why I’m not there?”

  The sergeant could have laughed at me, I realized after I replayed that last line in my head. But he didn’t. He handed me his card. “Give them this. They can call me if they need to.”

  I sit in my trusty Volvo, wondering if I should go to school. It was nice of Sergeant Daniels to give me his card, but I don’t know how that’ll fly with the front office. Like I’m really going to ask them to call the police to find out where I was? And with how I look right now? Not happening—not going to school.

  I am cold, wet, dirty, hungry, and man, do I have to pee.

  Why do I care so much? Why am I putting myself in this position for her? For Willa Pressman? Jeopardizing school? Ruining my favorite shoes and losing a fabulous coat?

  I think about all the sketchy situations I’ve put myself in—the dangerous places, the dishonest, abusive people I’ve confronted—the world of an addict. How have I dodged the bullet?

  Luck. Shameful, cowardly luck.

  I pull to the side of the road and redraw the sketch of Willa’s rapist.

  And in black marker, I write on the top:

  WANTED RAPIST

  (POSSIBLE MURDERER)

  CALL 734-555-1289

  WITH ANY INFORMATION!!!

  Then I pull into a Kinkos and make one hundred copies.

  I run up to my bedroom, collapse on the bed, and pull the covers over my head—and try not to think, not to feel, not to care. Just for an hour, a minute… I’d even take one second.

  Knock, knock.

  My mom opens the door to my room. “Why are you home from school? You okay, Bea?”

  I fake a cough. “I have a sore throat.”