Chapter 37
My parents are going to kill me.
As I sit on the cold bench, tapping my right toe against the concrete floor, it’s the only thought running through my mind.
There’s nothing magical about turning eighteen that erases the fear of facing your parents after an arrest. My immediate reaction is that I’ve brought actual shame onto my family.
Okay, in fairness, it’s less of a prison and more of a large holding cell.
It could maybe even be classified as a drunk tank.
There are no actual prisoners around and my hunch is that it’s almost exclusively used to toss in unruly tourists who can’t handle their liquor until they are able to sober up and rejoin society.
But a jail cell is still a jail cell and the closest I had ever been to one before was during a second grade field trip to the local police station.
When the police rounded up the involved parties, shouting commands in Italian and waving their guns, the locals who had joined in quickly fled, while us Americans froze like deer in headlights.
That means that it’s only Mari, Anya, and me, sitting across from Wes and his friends as we all look at anything but each other through the entire night.
Wes has pizza sauce in his hair and clumped in his eyebrows and to anyone else it probably looks like blood, unless you witnessed him getting a marinara-heavy pie straight to the face.
He slumps over, hanging his head in between his legs.
“I need to get the fuck out of here,” he says to no one and everyone.
Freddy, seemingly over the trauma of being hog-tied on the street by complete strangers, is standing by the prison bars, attempting to speak Italian to the prison guards.
“Denaro?” he repeats over and over, sticking his entire arm through the bars while making the universal hand gesture for money, rubbing his fingers together.
The two officers manning the front desk bow their heads and talk in hushed voices. After a minute or so of debate, they seem to have come to some sort of agreement. The less angry one stands up and approaches, his key ring jostling from his belt loop. “Denaro, you say?”
“Yes. Denaro.” Freddy perks up. “We have denaro. Lots of denaro. How much to get out right now?”
“Right now?” The guard glances back to his partner, who offers him a subtle nod. “One thousand euro per person.”
“Done,” Freddy says, not even hesitating, motioning for Wes and Graham to get up. “Us three. Do you take Amex?”
I exchange worried looks with Anya and Mari.
The guard opens the swinging metal door with his large ring of keys and grabs each of the guys, throwing them out of the holding cell and toward the front to process their payment.
Wes casts a final look in my direction as he leaves.
There’s no way Anya, Mari, and I can afford to pony up that kind of cash to buy our way out of here.
Wes knows that. We’ll have to stay here through the night, or maybe even through the entire summer, because there is no way any of us are going to call our parents and attempt to explain what just happened on the street while asking for more than a thousand dollars apiece.
The boys stand at the desk, hands tucked in pockets, as Freddy bails them out, signing his very expensive bill with a flourish before throwing the pen down.
I watch as the pen ricochets off the wood and onto the concrete floor before rolling toward us.
And then I watch as Wes walks away, leaving my friends and me in a jail cell, in a foreign country, alone.