Chapter 2: The Interrogation

There must have been some time before I revived myself, but it seemed as if that no time had passed at all. The symptoms started to reverse themselves, though I awoke somewhat weakened. The nurse, a lady who appeared to be about in her mid to late fifties, with light blond, curly hair, was leaning over me. The security guard who had previously been across the desk was knelling beside her, along with another of the security guards who had escorted me from the classroom. At first, only my sight returned, in black and white, and the room came into focus. The color quickly returned and the ringing in my ears subsided. The nurse mentioned something to the female security guard who had escorted me, and she left the room quickly.

The chair I had been sitting on had been moved to my left, and was now situated in the corner of the room. I was sitting, back against the wall, right where I had been before, less the chair.

“How are you feeling?” the nurse questioned.

“A little weak,” I admitted.

The female security guard returned, in her hand was a bottle a fruit juice. The nurse took it from her, proceeded to remove the cap, and then motioned for me to drink it. I raised my right arm weakly and took a sip.

“There you go,” she said, “drink it nice and slowly.”

Apparently, she had already been briefed about what was going on, as she immediately started mentioning content in the document.

The male security guard looked at me, then said, “There’s a police officer here, but by law we can’t let him speak to you until a parent is present, since you’re under 16.”

“If you’re going to call someone, call my mother, please,” I requested. I was quite worried about how my dad would react to all this.

“We did call your mother, but she can’t come down until 11:30.” My mother was a nursery school teacher, and would need to find a substitute before she could leave.

“Why don’t you want your father to be called?” the nurse questioned.
“I get along with my mother better.”

“You also mentioned your father in what you wrote,” the guard behind the desk stated. I nodded. It was true. I’d mentioned almost everybody of significance by name, after all, it was almost a complete overview of my life in those three months.

“Do you get along with him?”

“On and off. We have good days and bad. You see, sometimes he can get upset over things, little things, and that bothers me. Other times we get along.”

The nurse motioned toward the chair, which the male security guard pushed forward and I pulled myself on to it. The guard then took his place behind the desk where he was originally situated, with the female guard and the nurse sitting off to my left, on two other chairs that were in the room.

“Did he ever hurt you?”

“Hurt me? Like physically?”

“Physically or verbally. People can be abused verbally just as well as they can be physically.”

“No, he never hurt me.”

“Verbally? Was he verbally abusive?”

“He yelled sometimes. He would yell at me, or more usually, my mom. They maybe fight like once a week, once every two weeks. I mean, he doesn’t like his job, he comes home a lot and is in a bad mood because he spent all day at work and then he had to sit in traffic or has some other reason to be upset. Other times we would fight, me and him, just yelling at each other, but not nearly as much. Usually my mom would get involved. The next day he’d always apologize about it, say he was sorry, and I always forgave him. But what I really wanted him to do was just calm down and not yell so much.”

The male security guard had been flipping through the document when I was talking. At this point I was kind of rambling, I was distraught, confused, I was just talking to get my mind off what was happening to me. More than anything, I was scared about how my dad would react to this unfolding incident.

“He’s so strict sometimes. Like, about things are not such a big deal. I don’t want to be like him, I’m going to be different. Like the cars. He has two cars, and some days he has to take one, and the other days he has to take the other, because he is “rotating the mileage” on them. Like, if he takes the white car three days in a row then he’s got to take the truck two days, so that the white car doesn’t get too many miles. When I’m on my own, I’m going to take whatever car is more convenient, whatever one I feel like, I’m not going to have to take each car a certain number of days each week.”

I paused for a moment, waiting to see if I’d be interrupted. Everyone in the room was listening to me, even the guard behind the desk had stopped flipping pages. He must have found what he wanted.

“Also the phones. We always have to pick up the phones. Always. If we go outside, we have to take the phone with us, regardless of what we’re doing, if we hear the phone ring, we have to drop what we’re doing and pick it up. Doesn’t matter if we have to start all over again, we’ve got to pick up the phones. What’s the big deal? When I’m on my own, it’s not going to matter if I pick up the phones. If the phone rings, the person can leave a message, I can get to it when I have time. That’s what there’s an answering machine for.”

I paused again, and the nurse spoke up. “Honey, don’t you see you’re being just like your father. Just as rigid. He makes you pick up the phones and you won’t allow anyone to pick them up. There’s no difference.”

In my state of mind, I must not have been explaining myself clearly, and the nurse’s rebuttal only frustrated me more. “No! That’s not what I meant! I mean, you can pick the phone up whether or not you want to, it doesn’t matter. If I want to pick it up, I can, but if I’m doing something, I don’t have to.’ I’m not going to be like that, I’m not going to force people to pick up the phone.”

I seemed to have beaten the issue to death, so the security guard behind the desk spoke up. He looked down at the page he had turned to, and mentioned a passage about how I complained that I was cold in the morning, because my dad would shut the heat off at night, and it would be 58 degrees in my room when I woke up, and how I was always boiling hot in the summer because my dad wouldn’t ever turn on the one air conditioner we had (it was in his room, mind you) until it had reached at least 100 degrees that day. It was true, I explained, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have heat during the day – we did.

The people in the room seemed to take little interest and the security guard scribbled down a note or two and moved on.

The nurse had to leave the room to get back to work and she and the female security guard exited. The room returned to its original configuration, with the security guard across the desk from me, and I in the chair against the wall.

The guard flipped through the document some more.

“You mention here that the entire high school football team should be ‘taken out and shot.’”

“Not literally, of course,” I interjected, echoing the passage I had purposely included after the incendiary statement.

“Why did you hate the football team?” The guard picked up my MP3 player and started to scroll through the songs. “You know, I am the coach of the football team, so if you have an issue with my team, I’d like to hear it.”

“I don’t hate the football team. Well, I mean, it’s frustrating. It’s not just the football team. It’s just the teams in general. I was just using that as a specific example. It’s not like I hate the sport of football, it’s a great sport, and the game, and all, and the high school team is fine, it’s the just the players, the people on the team, I have nothing against the team itself. I mean, all the girls hang out with guys that are on sports teams. That’s all they talk with, they don’t talk to me, they don’t do things with me…”

“Have you ever considered joining a sports team?”

“It’s really an issue of time. I just don’t have the time to go to practice five days a week and get home at 5:30 or 6. I run a business, I have to answer phones, go to jobs, deal with people who need computer help. I just simply don’t have the time to meet the demands that a sports team requires.”

The security guard nodded, wrote something else down, and the interrogation continued on.

Around eleven thirty, the door opened. Standing in the doorway was Sgt. Reich, an officer in the Greenwood Police Department. Behind Reich was my mother, peeking into the room.

I knew Reich well through the Greenwood Police Explorers, and prior to that he had helped my family change a tire when we had a flat on the way home from a family gathering many years ago. His presence immediately relived me: the Greenwood Police knew me, they knew I was a normal person, they surely would be able to clear this issue up right away.

Reich sat down to my left and looked me in the eye. I turned to face him and he put his hand on my right knee.

“We’re going to straighten this out for you, okay?” he told me.

I immediately relaxed. He was on my side, he was here to help. This might not be so bad after all. “Alright,” I said.

“We might need to look through your computer at home, since that’s where you wrote this document.”

“Fine with me.”

“Alright then,” he said, getting up.

I was alone once again with the security guard behind the desk.

“What happens next?” I asked, noticeably relaxed.

“Well, we need you to get a psychiatric evaluation before you can return to school. Standard procedure. We’ve scheduled you a 1:00 PM appointment at St. Paul’s hospital, and we’ll let your mom know how to go through with that. Then, based on the results of that evaluation, we’ll meet next week to decide whether or not you can return to school.”

“So about a week out of school, at most?”

“Well, we’ll see. See how that meeting goes, but it could only be a week.”

Shortly, my mother entered the room and asked how I was. She seemed to be somewhat shaken, but at the same time, spoke in a reassuring voice.

“We have to go and meet the police at home, and then we have to go to St. Paul’s for a…”

“Yes, I know.” I stood.

“I’m going to go to your locker and get your things, you need to go with Sgt. Reich, and then we’ll meet out by my car.

“Where are you parked?”

“Out front, second row, right hand side.”

“Alright.”

I took a left out of the office with Reich and headed out the front entrance of the school. By now it was lunchtime, and there were a variety of students milling around outside, mostly upperclassmen, eating their lunch of the tables outside of the front entrance. I walked through the doors with Reich, and a student from my Technology of Flight class recognized me.

“Ross! What did you do to get yourself in trouble?”

Reich seemed to recognize the student and he stopped walking for a second.

“Pete, just because I’m here doesn’t mean anybody is in trouble.”

“Sure it does.”

“No, I come by the school for all sorts of things.”

“Ross, are you in trouble? Are you going to be in technology of flight today?”

I shrugged, then walked off with Reich. He’d realize soon enough what was happened when I wasn’t there for my eighth period class, everyone would be talking about it. They’d figure it out, though I’d have a lot of explaining to do when I returned the next week.

Reich’s car was parked in the fire lane by the front entrance of the school. He opened up the car, removed a long, slender steel clipboard, placed it on the top of the police cruiser, and started writing.

“Now, as I said before, we’re going to need to borrow some of your things, just to look through them. How many computers do you have?”

“Two. A desktop and a laptop.”

“What kind are they?”

“I built the desktop myself, the laptop is a Dell Inspiron 4100.”

“Do you have anything else, like an electronic organizer?”

“Yea, I have a Handspring Visor, but there’s nothing on it, its totally blank. You can look through it if you want through.”

“Yes, we’ll need to do that.” He was wrote down everything I had said on the clipboard, then put it back down on the roof of the police car.

“So, when’s the next Explorer meeting?”

“I think next week.”

We casually talked for a few more minutes about the Explorers and the Police Department in general, as if we had just run into each other on completely different circumstances, before my mom emerged from the school and walked over to where we were standing. Reich agreed to follow her to our house, and I walked over to my mom’s car and climbed in.

I didn’t live far from the school, and the drive home was a short one. My mother started criticizing a bit about what I did by sending the document, how it was a stupid decision, but we quickly began talking about how we would manage the situation with my dad. He was likely to be extremely upset and we discussed a few ways of mitigating the impact of the entire event.

As we pulled in the driveway there was already another police car waiting. Reich parked behind us, with the other car to our right. Reich and the other officer came out of their car, and shook hands with my mother. We lead them to the front door, where my mom, as usual, apologized for the normally sloppy state our home was in, and the officers shrugged it off, saying that had seen much, much worse. I tried to be as friendly and as open to the officers as possible, it seemed to make sense that if one cooperated with the police this would go away as soon as possible, but that if one acted as if he had something to hide it would make them suspicious that something was wrong and only prolong the incident further.

“There’s my police scanner,” I said, pointed a older plastic box situated on a table downstairs. “My room is up here and to the left,” I explained, pointing to the stairs now in front of us. I took the lead, with both officers behind me and my mother following up the rear. I opened the door to my room, which was emblazoned with an “Area 51 – Restricted” poster and a “KEEP OUT” sign. I showed them over to where my computer was and helped them pack it up, asking if they needed the keyboard and mouse and monitor. They wanted the monitor but said the keyboard and mouse would be fine to leave at home.

Next, I handed over my laptop case, as the second officer coiled the remainder of the cables from my desktop computer. My PDA was on the desk, and I put that in the laptop case so everything would be easier to carry out.

After packaging everything up, Reich handed me a clipboard and a pen. On it had an official-looking form with the state seal on it and an inventory of everything that was being taken.

“Now, you have two choices,” he told me. “You can sign here and let us take your stuff, and we’ll have it back in a few days, just like you gave it to us. Or you can tell us to go get a warrant. We’ll have to do all sorts of documentation, go to the courthouse, go before a judge, present everything, get a warrant written out, bring that back here, then collect all your things anyway. It’ll take much longer and be a hassle for everyone. Why don’t you just make everything easier and sign here?”

He motioned to a line on the sheet that waved my right to a warrant. I knew the officer, I trusted him, and I signed without hesitation. He took his clipboard back and we carried the computers down the stairs and into the police cruiser, saying goodbye to the police officers as my mother and I climbed into her car to head to the hospital for the school’s scheduled psychiatric evaluation.

As the car pulled out of the driveway and the house faded in the distance, I didn’t bother looking back, I was more worried about facing my father when he came home. I should have looked, though, because it would be the last time I’d see my house for the next three months of my life.