Instead, he called the cops on me.
He told them I’d stolen over fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry.
He told them he wanted to press charges.
He stood there, glaring daggers, that damned necklace still dangling from his fingers, as they cuffed me and read me my rights.
And by the time Nico got home from practice, I was gone. Dragged to the closest police station to be fingerprinted and informed of the charges set against me. Shut into a cold anddirty holding cell while I waited for my court-appointed attorney to arrive.
I couldn’t understand.
I was so scared.
I was seventeen. I’d never broken a law in my life. I’d never even considered stealing.
Yet, there I was. Locked up. Branded a criminal.
But in the first hours of my incarceration, I was certain it would all be figured out. I was sure someone would discover the truth—whether it was the housekeeper who’d actually stolen the jewelry or if Nico’s mom had misplaced it and forgotten.
They’ll discover I’m innocent,I naively believed.Nico’s dad will apologize. Nico will show up in a panic, hugging and kissing me the second I’m released from this awful place. By tomorrow, everything will be worked out and my life will go back to normal again.
My throat goes thick as I remember how wrong I was.
Drawing my legs up against my chest, I clutch them with my good arm and rest my chin on my knees. Tears trickle down my cheeks, dripping off them to leave tiny dark marks on the fabric of my pants.
Eighteen years later, and it still hurts.
The police didn’t discover the truth, which was that I’d never even seen the stolen jewelry before, let alone touched it.
Nico’s dad didn’t apologize for his mistake.
Nico never showed up.
My only visitors were my mom and my attorney.
Life didn’t go back to normal the next day. Instead, I was still stuck in the detention center, awaiting trial.
“Since you’re a minor, they’ll hold you in the juvenile detention center for now,”my attorney told me.“This won’t be a jury trial; the judge will hear the case and makea determination about your sentencing himself. Given the charges, you’ll probably serve time. How much, I’m not sure.”
“But I’m supposed to graduate,”I told him.“In three weeks. I have a summer job. I’m going to college in August.”
“I hate to say this,”he replied,“but I wouldn’t count on any of those things.”
I didn’t want to believe he was right. But he was.
Over the next week, all the carefully arranged pieces of my life fell apart.
First, I found out there was more evidence against me. The housekeeper, who I alwaysthoughtliked me, claimed she saw me in Nico’s mom’s bedroom, rummaging around her dresser. Two students at school came forward to report that I’d been talking about selling some expensive jewelry I’d recently found. And the owner of a pawn shop in Midtown identifiedmeas the person who’d come in to sell the missing jewelry, walking out with twenty thousand in cash in my pocket.
None of it was true.
Two, three, four days on, I still believed Nico would come.
I was sure he’d know I wasn’t capable of such a terrible thing.
But he didn’t. And oh, did it hurt.
I think it hurt even more than being accused of stealing.
