Sleeping in the next morning wasn’t an option, as it turned out. Someone was ba
Sleeping in the next morning wasn’t an option, as it turned out. Someone was banging on my door, and it had a weird echo effect, my brain telling me the banging had been going on for a while.
“Zen, the police are here,” I heard my aunt say in a loud but totally calm voice. Like it was something that happened every day. Time to get up and go to school. Time for breakfast. Time to be interrogated by the cops.
I sat up with my heart pounding. I have two laptops, one that’s for general use, the other reserved for more sensitive work. I raised up my mat and slipped a finger into the loose floorboard that had a handy knothole in it. When I lifted up the floorboard, it made just enough space for me to slip in the for-my-eyes-only laptop, where it nestled among some weird insulation that looked like dirty snow. The power cord followed, and I rearranged the insulation to cover it up. It all felt bizarre, as if was having a paranoid nightmare, and I froze for a moment, stuck in the strangeness of it all.
“Zen?” My aunt again.
“Hang on,” I called out in a high, squeaky voice as I lowered the mat and grabbed the kimono decorated with anime characters that Monica had bought for me at Ragstock last Christmas. This is real. Don’t freak out.
Acting groggy might give me time to think. Also, I was groggy. It’s not every morning you wake up into a real-life bad dream.
“This is Detective Ivar Jensen,” Monica said, nodding at an overweight guy with gray hair and a bristly moustache who looked as if he spent too much time at a desk eating donuts and watching surveillance videos. He had a suit jacket on, and a tie, and a gun in a holster. On TV, the guns cops wear on their hips always look like some kind of high tech fashion accessory. On him, the holster and the gun sticking out of it looked like it was some office equipment that he had to hang on his belt, like for taking inventory at Staples or something. He nodded at me, and kept nodding, as if he was a 250-pound bobble head.
“Janet Jankovich,” the other cop said, as if it was an order. I hadn’t been studied so hard since the last time I’d been sent to the principal’s office. It was pretty clear which one of them had scored the “bad cop” role. I had a sudden vision of them sitting out in their car playing rock, paper, scissors. I almost started laughing. Luckily, I was able to stifle it. They wouldn’t have liked me laughing at them.
Monica was wearing her bathrobe, cinched tightly at the waist, as if she was a Terrycloth Belt grand master, standing tall and straight and looking dangerous even though she’s actually really short and not dangerous at all. She was being icily polite, but not friendly. Some people brownnose when they deal with cops, acting like they can’t wait to sign up for the Police Auxiliary or point out their grandmother in a lineup. Not Monica. She looked kind of like a school principal herself. A really mean one who ate first graders for breakfast and ordered hall monitors to shoot students