Free Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle Page B

one. She wanted out of the jumpsuit, wanted her clothes back, her keys, her car--and the papers, the student papers. And she had to call the school and explain herself, had to go in in person and throw herself on Dr. Koch's mercy, had to meet her class and do her job--if she still had a job. Because who was going to believe her? People didn't just get thrown in jail for no reason, not in this country, anyway. Even as they began the paperwork to process her out, even as Marie Eustace arranged for the court to provide her with an affidavit proclaiming her innocence, she could picture the look of incredulity and anger on Dr. Koch's face, less than a week left in the term and one of his teachers skipping out early...
    But what she wanted most of all, sitting mutely in a colorless anteroom somewhere in the depths of the building and waiting for them to file their papers and rescind the charges and give her back her life, was a shower. She worked at her fingernails, one nail under the other, and they were black with the filth of that place, with the filth of those ugly jeering women, the prostitutes and street people and addicts and drunks, common drunks. She'd passed them in the street a hundred times, felt sorry for them, always one to reach into her purse for a handful of change or a dollar bill, but never again. They “were” common, she knew that now, common as in “not refined; vulgar; low; coarse.” And petty. Nasty. With no human feeling and no love but for themselves. The “menu peuple,” the mob, the hoi polloi. That was what they were--it was “Lord of the Flies” in that cell, on the streets, everywhere she turned, and where did that leave her? Where it left Ralph, where it left Piggy. But she was no victim, she refused to be, and once she got home, once she shut the door behind her and locked out the world, she was going to stand under the shower and scrub the dirt off her till the water ran cold and then she was going to call Dr. Koch and go straight to the impound yard, wherever that was, and get those papers out of the backseat of the car. Just the thought of it gave her a pang--she was so far behind. It was insane. Like the nightmares she'd have in the moments before waking, the ones in which she appeared in front of the class with no lesson, no plan, her hair a mess, her clothes fallen in a heap at her feet. Naked. Frozen. Unable to speak with her hands or her tongue either.
    She was so wound up she almost forgot Bridger. But there he was, rushing toward her in the hallway as she stepped through the door with Marie Eustace, Iverson and her freshly issued affidavit, his face bleeding sympathy and love. She let him hold her, though she was embarrassed by her odor and furious with him--why hadn't he “done” anything? He was saying something, saying it uselessly--she could feel his breath at her ear as he squeezed her to him--and then she pushed away from him and signed, “How could you leave me in there?”
    His signing was clumsy, nearly illiterate--he'd taken a course in ASL just for her, but his hands were like sledgehammers, bludgeoning the language. “I tried.”
    “Well you didn't try hard enough.”
    That was when a cop in a brown shirt--the bailiff--intervened. He, Iverson and Marie Eustace conferred for a moment, and then Marie turned to give her a look of consternation. She let her eyes roll and stamped her foot. “What?” Dana said. “What is it now?”
    “You're not going to believe this,” she said, and she looked to Iverson to interpret, her eyes skittering apologetically between them, “but, well, I'm afraid you're going to have to go back to County to get processed out.”
    Dana shook her head. Violently. Jerked it back and forth, and they could read that, couldn't they? “No,” she said, and she felt her voice go loud, the force of it constricting her larynx till it felt like a hard compressed ball in her throat, and she turned her back on the lawyer and the cop and signed