Cheating at Solitaire(87)

“Okay,” she said finally. She swung her legs off the cot and stood up. They had given her a jail jumpsuit to wear, and that was like television. It was orange. She actually liked wearing it. It was loose, and soft, almost like wearing nothing at all, but at the same time it covered her up entirely. That was another difference between real home and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, she wore things that showed a lot of skin, halter tops, dresses and skirts cut way up high. At home, she wore things that kept her warm, like corduroy jeans and big, thick sweaters that had belonged to her older brothers and fell down halfway to her knees. She wished it wasn’t the case that people wouldn’t like her if she did the things she wanted to do. She wished she could dress in big thick sweaters without having stories about it written up in all the papers.

She shook out the folds of the jumpsuit. It never seemed to wrinkle. Everything Arrow owned wrinkled on sight, unless it was sparkly and had a lot of metal.

“Okay,” she said again.

Marcia was giving her one of those long looks people gave her a lot these days, as if by staring at her long enough they could reveal all her secrets. She didn’t have many secrets, though. It was hard to have secrets when people were photographing her all the time. She had just the one thing, or maybe two, and those weren’t secrets as much as they were things she just couldn’t talk about. There were a lot of things she couldn’t talk about, because it was very important not to get people angry with her.

“Life is like high school,” her mother had said once, before they had gone to L.A. “Everything is a popularity contest.”

Marcia had swung open the barred doors of the cell. Arrow looked around and wondered what real jail would be like. Everybody said she was going to go to jail, that she would be convicted of murder and sent to a penitentiary. She wasn’t supposed to hear the news, but she did. There was a little television set up at the guards’ desk at the end of the hall, and the guards always seemed to have it on blasting. She couldn’t imagine going to jail, but she couldn’t imagine singing in front of millions of people, and she’d done that dozens of times.

Marcia was waiting. Arrow went through into the corridor. Marcia started down the hall. Arrow followed her. Secretaries stood up from behind their desks, officers stood up in their cubicles. There weren’t very many people here, but all of them wanted to see Arrow pass. She tried to stand up very straight while she walked.

The interview room was a small place with a regular door and no windows, not 150 feet from where Arrow had been. There was a big conference table inside, surrounded by chairs. The conference table was made out of cheap pressed wood. It was peeling in the corners. The chairs were armless and had plastic pads on the backs and seats. Arrow’s mother was a violently blond woman with too much hair and too much jewelry. She had been like that even before they’d moved to California, but back at (real) home the jewelry had been fake.

Arrow suddenly wished that there were pockets in the jumpsuit. She couldn’t think of what she was supposed to do with her hands. Marcia gave her a little push in the small of her back, and she stumbled forward.

“I’ll leave you two alone for a while,” Marcia said, stepping back into the hall.

Arrow heard the door close behind her. Her mouth was dry. Her throat was dry. She was sure that if she tried to talk, the words would come out in a squeak.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” her mother said. “But you’ve got to stop doing it. You’ve got to let us get you out of here.”

The walls in this room were gray. Arrow seemed to remember being in another room where the walls were dingy white. She had no idea how big this building was, or how many people worked in it. When she was a child, her father used to take her to work every once in a while, holding her hand and leading her through threading corridors that were like avenues in a maze. He worked in a company that did something with insurance, Arrow wasn’t sure what. She only knew it was a dead end, and then only because her mother had told her so.

“Arrow,” her mother said. “You have to listen to me.”

“I am listening to you,” Arrow said. Then she came forward and sat down in one of the chairs.

“Whether you realize it or not,” her mother said, plowing on determinedly, as if Arrow had done something wrong and she was ignoring it, “this sort of publicity is an absolute disaster. Nobody recovers from something like this. Not if they go on trial, and not if they don’t go on trial and the police don’t have anybody else to charge. Even if they just let you walk away, if they don’t have anybody else to charge, everybody will just assume you did it. And that will be it. It will be over. You might as well pack up and go back to Ohio.”