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I yank the blanket off of me and sit up a little straighter just as Julie rounds the corner with a dish towel in her hands.
“Yes. I’ll accept,” Wes says to the other person on the line.
Julie wrings the towel in her hands. “Who is it?”
Wes holds up an index finger. “Jared, where the hell are you?”
I scoot to the edge of my seat as I wait with bated breath.
“Yeah.” Wes rubs the back of my neck. “We’ll be down there as soon as we can. Sit tight.” He nods, like he’s answering a question that Jared’s asked on the other end. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk when we get down there.”
The moment he hangs up the phone, Julie rushes to Wes’s side. “What did he say? Where is he? And why is he calling collect?”
Wes holds up his hands. “Easy, Mom. Jared is fine, but the bad news is that he got arrested last night.”
“Arrested?!” Julie and I both say in unison.
Jail is the last place I ever expected to find Jared. He’s too straitlaced and too focused on baseball to do anything crazy enough to land himself in jail.
“What for?” I ask.
Julie shakes her head. “I can’t believe this. Jared’s never been in any trouble before. What on earth could he have possibly done?”
“Drugs,” Wes says simply. “They picked him up when he was buying weed.”
My hand instantly covers my mouth. “Oh my God. This could be—”
“Bad. I know,” Wes finishes my sentence for me. “When school finds out about this, they will most likely take away his scholarship and kick him off the team.”
My eyes widen. “No! That can’t happen! That will crush him.”
My emotions teeter on the edge and they are millimeters from falling over. I’m mere seconds away from losing my head. If Jared loses baseball, I . . . I don’t even want to think about what he’ll do. He’s already got enough to deal with. This will only make things ten times worse.
Julie sits down beside me and wraps her arms around me. “My boy needs you to be strong for him. He’s suffering so much, and it looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better. You have to be strong.”
“I’ll try.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand, but the tears continue to spill from my eyes.
We don’t waste any time. We pile into Julie’s car with Wes behind the wheel and race down to the local police station to figure out how to get Jared out of this mess if we can. The ride is quiet for the most part—none of us wanting to speculate too much on Jared’s fate until we’ve gotten to the bottom of everything and figured out the best way to help him.
Wes pulls into the parking lot and then stops. “Here we are.”
When I exit the car, my hands shake. I don’t know why I’m so nervous, but I guess maybe it’s the idea of knowing that everything in Jared’s life is about to change. It baffles me as to what would possess him to buy drugs. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s never touched the stuff because he was so into sports and keeping his body fit. Doing drugs was not something he was even remotely interested in.
It hurts to know that Jared felt like he had to go buy drugs in order to find comfort instead of seeking me out for it. I always thought I was his place of comfort—the person he can always turn to when he’s in trouble.
Inside the building everything seems very sterile and minimal. The cinder-block walls are white and completely bare with the exception of some golden plaque honoring an officer who was killed in the line of duty. Two wooden benches sit back to back in the middle of the room, and to the right is a desk separated from us by what I imagine is bulletproof glass.
Wes explains to the small black woman in a police uniform sitting at the desk who we are there to pick up.
She nods and then presses a button in order to speak through the little speaker that’s mounted on the glass. “Bail is set for fifteen hundred dollars, and he’s scheduled for arraignment on May twentieth at eight in the morning.”
Julie opens her purse and pulls out the wad of cash we stopped at her candy shop to get. She counts out the money before stepping up to the glass and placing it into the metal box on the counter so the female officer can pull it through to her side of the glass. Julie stuffs her wallet back into her purse as the officer sends a form through for her to fill out.
Once everything is complete, the woman tells us to have a seat while they bring Jared out.
I can’t imagine being trapped in this place. This visit alone is enough to scare me straight to the point where I never want to do anything that will risk my freedom.
It takes about an hour, but a loud buzzer sounds just before the dark gray steel door rolls open on the track. A few inches separate the wall and the door as it continues to slowly open and I spot Jared. His dark hair is disheveled and his normally bright blue eyes seem dull. A glimmer of a smile passes across his face the moment he spots me, and I can tell he’s happy that I’m here but is doing his best not to seem overly excited that he’s getting out of this place.
