My right leg started shaking like a newly caught fish. Was I having a stroke? I wondered, staring at my jitterbugging thigh. I hoped so. Because anything was better than facing this.

I snorted back a wet, spasming sob.

Anything.

I glanced at the back of the cop’s head as he lowered himself into the police cruiser’s front seat. Like everything else about him, his head was neat, ordered, squared off. You could probably have balanced a level on his broad boxer’s shoulders. He had good posture, bearing, my mother would have said.

Had he been in the military? my haywire brain wanted to know. I read his backward name tag in the rearview mirror. Fournier.

Officer Fournier put his head down as he typed my driver’s license information into his boxy front-seat computer terminal. Then his cropped head suddenly leveled again.

“This right?” he said without turning around. “Your twenty-first birthday was just a few days ago? You down here for spring break?”

I noticed for the first time that there was a slight Northeast-city inflection to his voice. Boston, New York, Philly maybe. Then I had another, less distracted thought. What color prison jumpsuit would they give me?

“Yes,” I said, choking back another sob. “I’m a senior at UF.”

I suddenly wanted to be back there so much I almost moaned. If only I could click my heels and be back to Frisbee and meal cards and the note-scribbled onionskin pages of my Norton Anthology of English Literature.

There’d be no more school, no more softball, no more nothing at all. I’d loved books my entire life, and ever since high school I’d dreamed of becoming an editor at a New York City publishing house. I’d vaporized my future, too, I thought. Annihilated it like a mosquito into a bug zapper.