“Officer Glassman,” said the officer. I looked at his name tag and saw the vague outline of a name that might be Glassman; I looked at his face instead and saw clearly Sara’s features reflected in him—the same nose, the same shape in the cheeks. He was definitely her brother. He looked at Jessica and Brielle, lingering just a little longer than he needed to on each one, then turned to look at Marci. “You’re new in town.”
And there was that old, familiar feeling again—not hate, but a sudden, almost crystalline clarity: I could kill this man without the tiniest bump in my heart rate.
No.
“Just passing through,” said Marci. Her endless joviality was gone, replaced by a brusque dismissal. She acknowledged him, gave the barest minimum of an answer, then turned away. She looked at Corey—why at Corey, of all people?—and nodded her head toward the ice cream stand. “We gonna get anything?”
The dark, near-scowl on Officer Glassman’s face showed that he didn’t like being ignored and he had the authority to make sure we noticed him. “What’s your name?” he asked. Almost as an afterthought he turned to me as well. “You too, kid. What’s your name?”
“David,” I said.
“Got any ID?”
“What flavors do they have?” asked Marci, still looking at Corey.
“I asked for your name,” said Glassman again, louder this time.
“Marci,” said Marci, looking at him again. “Are you from around here?”
It was obvious that Glassman was a jerk, and judging by the nickname Officer Cuddles, he had some kind of a reputation. Based on the way Corey and Paul looked uncomfortable, but Jessica and Brielle looked outright disgusted, it wasn’t hard to guess where that nickname had come from. The look on his face oscillated between lechery and anger; he could barely keep his eyes off of Jessica’s legs, easily visible in her jean shorts. And any time his look strayed elsewhere it was on one of the other girls, and well below their eyes. The local kids were all staying quiet, implying that this kind of thing happened often enough to be familiar, but never got bad enough to merit fighting back. I assumed he would pester us a little, maybe leer a bit, and then move on. He certainly wouldn’t try anything in the middle of Main Street like this.
But he might still insist on seeing our ID. And he looked like the kind of guy who, when we couldn’t show him any, would relish the opportunity to throw his weight around a little. We might lose everything we’d worked for, right here at Caboodle’s.
“I grew up here,” said Glassman. “Dillon’s first settlers were Glassmans.”
“Did they work in glass?” asked Marci. She didn’t smile when she said it—she wasn’t flirting—but she was definitely playing him a little. Feigning interest in his story to help him feel important, trying to defuse the initial burst of anger that had prompted him to ask for our IDs. Ignoring him had been her first gambit and it had backfired; now she was trying to keep him friendly.
“I … guess so,” said Glassman. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Maybe in England they did,” said Marci. “And then when they came over here they started farming. Or ranching, I guess.” She scrunched up her forehead and nose, twisting her lips in an adorable look of innocent confusion. I worried she was taking it too far. “Do they have a lot of ranches around here?”
“This is corn country,” said Paul. “Well, corn now. A lot of it used to be wheat—”
“It was the government subsidies that changed the focus,” said Glassman, stealing back the spotlight without even looking in Paul’s direction. “Biofuels and whatnot. It doesn’t pay to be in anything but corn these days.”
“Being a cop’s more interesting anyway,” said Marci, but Jessica’s face fell so fast when she said it that I knew Marci had made some kind of blunder, tripping over some invisible Dillon trip wire.
Officer Glassman’s eyes darkened—his eyebrows knit together and his eyeballs appeared to get darker in their shadow. “You got a problem with the state police, missy?”
“Marci,” said Marci, and Glassman and I both stared at her in shock—he was already getting angry and she’d corrected him, blunt as could be. But even as he was starting to snarl out a protest, she laughed out loud—high peals of laughter that seemed to shake her whole body. She covered her mouth with her hand and raised her eyebrows, trying to stifle the laughter, and then started spewing out a high-speed apology: “Oh, I’m so sorry I’m so sorry, I thought you were saying my name and so I was telling you it was Marci, I’m such an airhead, I’m so sorry, please, um, please—” She looked as apologetic as a person could look while trying not to laugh, and her laughter was so infectious that Glassman and Paul both started chuckling with her. None of the rest of us did, though I tried to smile to keep the general atmosphere going.
“No harm done, Marci,” said Glassman. He hesitated a moment, thrown so thoroughly off his guard that he didn’t know what to say next. “You, um, here for ice cream?”
“What flavor do you recommend?” asked Marci, recovering her composure just slowly enough to make the laughter look sincere. She wiped a tear from her eye to complete the effect.