In a Dropout Role
by Mike Cohen
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
It was midnight, and the May moon was yellow and smoky. The spring air smelled like pollen. Where I stood the interstate bridge looked so high, it seemed to arch over the whole city. As breezes thrust my hair forward flooding my face, I imagined being photographed for a movie magazine story. Louis must have noticed.
“You do look like a movie star with your hair like that,” he said.
“Hardly. I’m a mess,” I said. I wondered if Louis was about to make a pass. I changed the subject. “You must be excited about leaving home for college.”
“No big deal,” Louis said. “What about you?”
I told him about working for a while, then maybe applying to acting school. The truth was that I talked myself into believing that getting Mr. Little’s part-time job offer was like getting accepted to an acting school.
“You’re terrific with the customers,” Mr. Little had told me after my first week. It was hard not to smile inside after that, but I had to admit, in the afternoon at Little’s Stationery, shelving paper reams and envelope packages, I felt stuck. The traffic on Aurora Avenue rocketing past the front windows reminded me that everyone was moving but me.
But, up here, high on the empty bridge in the night air, anything was possible. I imagined being behind the wheel of a car, gas pedal to the floor, going seventy miles an hour, surrounded by the roar of ten lanes of traffic, the interstate taking me somewhere new.
What happened next was kind of a blur. First, Jerry took off like a zany up the bridge in the red blinking lights and the moonglow, leaning out over the bridge rail, shouting, “Hoo Ha,” the sound echoing off the roadway. It was like the black air had made him drunk.
“Knock it off, Prebe,” Bar hollered back. “Somebody will hear us.” The dark emptiness made Bar’s yelling even louder than Jerry’s blathering, and we started laughing at her. I liked making fun of Bar and her bossiness, in part because Bar had ticked me off by talking about my nose bump again.
Meanwhile Jerry had slipped his legs over the low stub wall under the bridge railing and wanted us to do it, too. “Let’s all put our legs over the edge and dangle.” Jerry’s directions sounded like he was prepping us for a line dance at a sock hop.
“We’re making history. Someday when we’re old, we’ll be able to say that we were the first to come up here and dangle.”
“Do we have to?” I asked, stepping back. I was getting tired of Jerry’s daring us to do this and that. It seemed like elementary school again, when in the dead of winter somebody dared you to put your tongue on an icy door handle. Bad idea.
“Oh, well,” Bar said, gripping her purse in one hand as she clambered onto the wall and inched into place near Jerry, at first holding the rail, then fumbling with her purse, which she left teetering on her knees. If Bar could do it, I had to follow.
As it turned out, hanging my legs over the wall next to Bar wasn’t a big deal, but, unlike her, I didn’t let go of the railing. No one said a word as we sat hip to hip on the concrete ledge in the windy air, our legs hanging into the dark, hundreds of feet above the ship c;anal and the old drawbridge that we had just crossed. The only sound was a solitary car rattling onto the metal grid below.
Suddenly Bar cried, “I’m slipping.” She jerked back as if to avoid something from below and fell flailing to the road, her butt landing with a thump, her right foot kicking off my left shoe as she flew by. I saw my shoe flicker for a second in the moonlight, then disappear into the inky night.
“My shoe’s gone,” I cried as I scrambled, in one shoe, off the ledge. Seconds later I heard tires squeal below, followed by a grinding crunch of concrete.
“Jeez, Marilyn,” Jerry said. “your shoe broke the old drawbridge.”
Bar stood up, limping a bit. She tugged at her skirt and sweater, which had gotten dirty and rumpled from her fall.
“Prebe, just shut up for once,” she said. “My hip hurts and I can’t find my purse.”
Louis was leaning over the rail looking at the drawbridge below. “There’s a car crash down there,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Bar kept peering about. “I am not going anywhere without my purse.” For a moment Bar’s voice blended with a whining siren wail of a cop car from below.
“Now we’re in for it,” she said. “I warned you we shouldn’t have trespassed.”
“We can sneak down the opposite side of the interstate,” Louis said pointing north.
“I got nothing to hide,” Jerry said. “My shoe didn’t cause the crash; hers did.”
“You’re an idiot,” Louis said. “Marilyn’s shoe had nothing to do with that.”
Bar looked about in desperation. “We are going to get arrested, I know it.”
“Cool down,” I said. “Cops are no big deal.” Cops came into Little’s Stationery all the time; some flirted with me.
“You don’t care; you’re all but a dropout anyway,” Bar said. “But I could be thrown out of school and lose my scholarship. I bet someone saw the shoe that you threw down at the bridge.”
“That’s not what happened and you know it,” I said. “You kicked my shoe off.” Bar glowered at me, hysterical, her hair tangled, her clothes soiled.
“What did you do with my purse, Marilyn?”
“You have totally lost it,” I said. “No one touched your purse but you.”
Jerry interrupted us with a warning “Uh-oh.”
Two cops with their wobbling flashlight beams were walking up the empty interstate toward us. One cop was short, his partner taller. As they got closer, none of us took a step. “A little monkey business up here?” wheezed the little cop. He was panting.
“We had nothing to do with the wreck,” Jerry said.
“What wreck?” the tall cop asked, shining his flashlight in each of our faces.
“We heard a crash down there on the old bridge,” Jerry explained.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the little cop. He took off his hat and wiped his bald head. “I just want to know who owns the dreamboat Nash that’s parked where it says no trespassing.”
“The Nash is mine,” Jerry said. In the flashlight’s beam, Jerry looked way too young to have a driver’s license; his huge ears and acne spots belonged on a thirteen-year old.
“Of course!” the small cop said. “You’re the dreamboat pilot.” He turned to the tall cop. “Fred, did you know that the seats in that dreamboat drop down into a bed?”
“I want to report a theft,” Bar said, her voice high, willowy. “She took my purse.”
“Not true,” I said.
“This purse?” the little cop asked, snatching mine before I could pull it away.
“That belongs to me,” I said, standing straight like a grown-up. “Please give it back.”
The little cop fished around inside my purse. “Aren’t you a little old to be hanging around these kids?” he asked.
“Actually, we are the same age,” I said.
“Aha,” said the little cop as his hand extracted Wayne’s flask, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “What have we here?”
Jerry and Louis stared at me, their eyes wide with surprise, Bar’s missing purse forgotten. The little cop sniffed the flask lid.
“Who gave you the booze?” he asked.
The little cop didn’t scare me — he was trying to be a heavy, like an actor in a movie — but I still had to come up with an answer. “It’s my dad’s.” No way would I give him Wayne’s name.
“It belongs to one of the dropouts she runs around with,” Bar said eagerly, wanting so badly to be of help to the little cop.
He ignored her and looked at me. “Again, who gave you the flask, honey?”
“Don’t call me ‘honey,’” I said. I stayed movie-star cool, so cool that I even surprised myself.
“Then we’ll just have to take you on a trip to Stationland.”
“Are you taking us in, too?” asked Bar. She was trembling, her clothes in disarray, her honor society pin covered by the folds of her sweater.
Louis stood there speechless. Jerry’s eyes were wide open like a puppy begging for a treat. The three of them looked so frightened that even the little cop lightened up a bit.
“Nah, you get a pass for good behavior,” he said. “So take off, and next time when the sign says stay out, do what it says, okay?”
“You got somebody you can call?” the tall cop asked me, his voice concerned.
“My mom. She just bought me new shoes. and one is missing. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Your shoe will just have to wait for Prince Charming,” said the small cop, smirking at his own joke. “You got bigger problems, believe me.” He grabbed my arm to let me know how important he was.
I pulled my arm back. “Then let me take my other shoe off so I can walk.”
After putting me into the squad car’s back seat, the tall cop got behind the wheel and drove us back over the canal bridge, its deck grid now lit up by flashing lights from an EMT medical vehicle. A car was crumpled around a concrete bridge-brace. Steam curled up from the car’s buckled hood.
“Could I get out for a minute?” I asked the tall cop. “My missing shoe could be here.”
The tall cop stopped the squad car next to an EMT medic who was checking out a man sitting on the curb, blood stains on his shirt, head in his hands.
“Did your car get hit by a shoe?” the tall cop asked. The driver looked at him hard.
“You mean a handbag,” he answered. “Goddamn thing hit my windshield.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bar’s purse on the bridge deck, crushed and torn. My shoe was nowhere in sight. It had nothing to do with the crash.
I shut my eyes with a relieved sigh, my head humming with possibilities. The night on the bridge was tailor-made for a film and, up on the interstate, Louis had said I looked like a movie star.
Sitting in the back of the squad car, I saw myself in an adventure flick, playing the tough girl. I had broken into a forbidden place, stolen a bootlegger’s booze, crashed my getaway car, after which I was chased by the cops on foot over an empty interstate bridge in the moonlight, where I lost a shoe and was busted. With the cameras rolling, I hold a cigarette between my lips and ask the cops in front if they mind if I light up, then just do it anyway, blowing a cloud of smoke at them.
So they suspend me from school, so what? I’ll just start work early. With a little walk-around money in my pocket, who knows what can happen? After all, the life of a dropout, with its wild quirkiness and ups and downs, it could make a good movie.
Copyright © 2025 by Mike Cohen
