I collected my things and left his office, still holding back tears. I couldn’t afford to allow my emotions to get the better of me; I had a first-year seminar to deal with.
By the end of the day, I wanted to crawl into bed and wipe the hours from my memory. As luck would have it, that didn’t happen. An accident on the way home rerouted me off the freeway onto an unfamiliar exit. My GPS lost its signal, and I wound up in a part of the city I’d never been in before. The buildings were run down; graffiti adorned the crumbling brick and boarded-up windows of abandoned storefronts. The sun began to sink below the tree line, and the neighborhood didn’t look nearly as welcoming as where I lived now. I’d grown up in small-town Minnesota. I might not have known every street by name, but places were usually familiar—nothing like the ominous environment I found myself in now. Tears of frustration threatened as I glanced at street signs. Distracted, I ran through a stale yellow.
The flash of blue-and-red lights in my rearview mirror proved my error had not gone unseen. The tears I had been fighting all day won the battle, forging a path down my cheeks. I swiped at them with the sleeve of my shirt.
Traffic was heavy on the four-lane street, so I turned down a cul-de-sac as directed by the signals of the officer behind me. I’d never been pulled over before; I’d never even gotten a parking ticket. My fingers tapped restlessly on the wheel while I watched the officer saunter up to the driver’s side window. I rolled it down. The quiet inside the car was broken by the sound of horns honking and a man yelling somewhere in the distance. The temperature had dropped, and the chill in the air made me shiver. The officer was younger, probably in his early thirties.
“I’m sorry—”
He cut me off, sounding bored. “License and registration, please.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek and rifled around in the glove compartment for the registration, then retrieved my license from my wallet. I handed them over, then stared at the odometer, willing myself not to cry again. It wasn’t working, and the officer didn’t seem like he was all that interested in doing anything but writing a ticket.
He frowned as he inspected my license. “Says here you’re from Arden Hills, Minnesota. Seems like you’re quite a ways from home, Miss Page.”
“I moved here for school.”
“You want to tell me why you ran that light back there?” He inclined his head in the direction of the intersection I failed to stop at.
“I-I was distracted. There was an accident on the freeway and I had to get off. I made a wrong turn and I don’t know this area.”
He was cold, remote. Like he heard versions of the same story a thousand times and it no longer affected him. I wondered how long it took for that to happen, for empathy to dissolve into disdain over human error. Not very long, I imagined. A flicker of something like recognition flashed across his face as he looked from me to my license and back again.
“Wait here, please.”
He left with my personal information in hand. The sun disappeared behind the houses as I waited. Under different circumstances the flashing light of the police car would have been embarrassing, but for now I was grateful. Being stranded in a place like this, where the windows of the house to my right were taped with plastic and the screen door was hanging by one hinge, made me nervous.
It was a long time before he returned. When he did, his demeanor had changed. Gone was the detached coldness. Instead he spoke with an air of familiar apology. “You’ve had a difficult year, Miss Page.”
“Wh-what—” I stopped. I was well acquainted with pity.
“I recognized the name. When tragedy strikes a small community close by, people in my line of work tend to hear about it.” He handed me my license and registration. “You’ll need to get that changed to your new address. You know where to do that?”
I nodded and slipped them into my purse. “Thank you, Officer. I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning.” I waited for a ticket for running the light, but it never came.
He propped an arm on the doorframe and leaned in. “You really shouldn’t be driving out here alone. This is a rough part of town. You know how to get home from here?”
I’d only learned the routes from my apartment to Northwestern and to the closest grocery store. Embarrassed, I told him as much. He offered to escort me to familiar surroundings. After I gave him the address to Serendipity, he got back in his car and led the way home.