B00BSH8JUC EBOK by Celia Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

truth, Kotter. What do you remember most—being in the sack with Shamrock or being miserable with me afterwards?”
    “That is an unfair question. It’s been years, and everything worked out all right.”
    Randie got out of her chair and stood looming over me, as though I was one of her police recruits—and not a very good one, at that. She launched into a very humorous distortion of my Miranda rights. “Tell the truth, Kotter. You have no right to remain silent. Anything you don’t say will be held against you. There is no lawyer in the land who will dare to take your case. If you do choose to remain silent, every single one of your constitutional rights will be violated, and I will personally beat the shit out of you. Now talk!”
    “All right, all right. What can I say? It was a great first lay.”
    Randie sighed. “You got away with murder.”
    I smiled. Now it was my turn to needle her. “Hell, Randie, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t even have been worried when you walked in on us.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Back in those days, I thought you were just a red-blooded, All-American coach with your eyes on the guys. I had no idea you had any sort of appreciation for what I was doing. I didn’t know about you and Julie.”
    “No, that had to wait until your next sexual escapade.”
    I winced. “Are we going to go into that, too?”
    Randie was maddeningly serene. “You bet we are.”
    ***
     
    The summer after my encounter with Shamrock, Randie’s prediction came true. Our softball team won the state championship and I was one of the players the team counted on.
    As I entered my senior year at Hillsboro High School, I should have been feeling pretty good about myself; but I knew better. Instead, I was aware of being headed for one of those crises that mark your life forever, and naturally it had to do with my parents. Wendell and Lynn were assuming I would go to some small, egghead college—Hillsboro would be nice but not mandatory—for liberal arts, to be followed by graduate school. Well, I didn’t want to go to any stifling, antiseptic ivory tower. I wanted to be a cop.
    I put off the confrontation as long as possible by letting Wendell and Lynn think I was conforming. I enrolled in academic courses, took my SATs and even sent away for some college catalogues.
    Meanwhile, Randie had made lieutenant, faster than anyone in the history of the department. As a sidelight she started an introductory program in criminal justice for high school seniors, and I signed up, of course. There were ten of us, meeting after school at the Hillsboro police station. I loved hanging around there, usually showing up early and staying late. Randie and the other cops encouraged me and included me as much as they could, whether it was inventorying the evidence locker or simply photocopying their reports when they were too pressed to do it themselves.
    I learned a lot about police work—about the diligence and patience in the face of constant stress, long stretches of boredom and an endless parade of human suffering. I learned about the wisecracking that hid the hearts behind it, the lousy hours, the camaraderie of the force and the lethal joy of stalking crooks. The more I learned, the more I wanted to say.
    My school work was going fairly well—because it had to. I knew if my grades fell, Wendell and Lynn would yank me out of the police station faster than you could say “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”
    I probably could have kept out of trouble until the spring—except for the arrival of the student teacher.
    Her name was Deb Jaworski, and she was a physical education major at Hillsboro College. She showed up in late October in my first period gym class.
    Deb Jaworski was as fearsome an athlete as ever set foot on a playing field. She was big and strong and not very fast, but she had the reflexes of a cobra.
    In the fall she played goalie on the college hockey team, where she was heard to say, only