"It just is! Don't try to get under my skin, OK? My childhood was fine."
"Look, I don't want to piss you off. I'm just trying to get to know you. Because… you know… I like you. A lot. And I try to get to know the people I like."
She smiles her lopsided dimple. "Sorry, I just don't like people who try to mess with my head. My problem, not yours. OK, something unrehearsed." She closes her eyes and treats him to the smooth pinkness of her eyelids, and keeps them closed as she speaks. "I once stole a Veddic Series 7 off my mom's lot, when I was fifteen. It had all the girly safety features, including a tracker and a panic button, but I didn't think my mom would miss it. I just wanted to take it out for a drive. It's LA, right? No wheels, no life. So I get as far as Venice Beach, and I'm cruising the Boardwalk — this was just after it went topless, so I was swinging in the breeze — and suddenly the engine dies, right in the middle of this clump of out-of-towners, frat kids from Kansas or something. Mom had called in a dealer override and Sony shut down the engine by radio."
"Wow, what did you do?"
"Well, I put my shirt back on. Then I popped the hood and poked randomly at the engine, pulling out the user-servicables and reseating them. The thing was newer than new, right? How could it be broken already? The fratboys all gathered around and gave me advice, and I played up all bitchy, you know, 'I've been fixing these things since I was ten, get lost,' whatever. They loved it. I was all spunky. A couple of them were pretty cute even, and the attention was great. I felt safe — lots of people hanging around, they weren't going to try anything funny. Only I was starting to freak out about the car — it was really dead. I'd reseated everything, self-tested every component, double-checked the fuel. Nothing nothing nothing! I was going to have to call a tow and my mom was going to kill me.
"So I'm trying not to let it get to me, trying to keep it all cool, but I'm not doing a great job. The frat guys are all standing too close and they smell like beer, and I'm not trying to be perky anymore, just want them to stay! away! but they won't back off. I'm trying not to cry.
"And then the cops showed up. Not real cops, but Sony's Vehicle Recovery Squad. All dressed up in Vaio gear, stylish as a Pepsi ad, packing lots of semilethals and silvery aeorosol shut-up-and-be-still juice, ready to nab the bad, bad perp who boosted this lovely Veddic Series 7 from Mom's lot. Part of the franchise package, that kind of response. It took me a second to figure it out — Mom didn't know it was *me* who had the car, so she'd called in a theft and bam, I was about to get arrested. The frat rats tried to run away, which is a bad idea, you just don't ever run from cops — stupid, stupid, stupid. They ended up rolling around on the ground, screaming and trying to pull their faces off. It took, like a second. I threw my hands in the air. 'Don't shoot!' They gassed me anyway.
"So then *I* was rolling around on the ground, feeling like my sinuses were trying to explode out of my face. Feeling like my eyeballs were melting. Feeling like my lungs were all shriveled up into raisins. I couldn't scream, I couldn't even breathe. By the time I could even roll over and open my eyes, they had me cuffed: ankles and wrists in zapstraps that were so tight, they felt like piano wire. I was a cool fifteen year old, but not that cool. I started up the waterworks, boohoohoo, couldn't shut it down, couldn't even get angry. I just wanted to die. The Sony cops had seen it all before, so they put a tarp down on the Veddic's backseat upholstery, threw me in it, then rolled it into their recovery truck and drove me to the police station.
"I puked on the tarp twice before they got me there, and almost did it a third time on the way to booking. It got up my sinuses and down my throat, too. I couldn't stop gagging, couldn't stop crying, but by now I was getting pissed. I'd been raised on the whole Sony message: 'A Car for the Rest of Us,' gone with Mom to their Empowerment Seminars, wore the little tee shirts and the temporary tats and chatted up the tire-kickers about the Sony Family while Mom was busy. This wasn't the Sony Family I knew.
"I was tied up on the floor beside the desk sergeant's counter, and a Sony cop was filling in my paperwork, and so I spat out the crud from my mouth, stopped sniveling, hawked back my spit and put on my best voice. 'This isn't necessary, sir,' I said. 'I'm not a thief. My mother owns the dealership. It was wrong to take the car, but I'm sure she didn't intend for this to happen. Certainly, I don't need to be tied up in here. Please, take off the restraints — they're cutting off my circulation.' The Sony cop flipped up his goofy little facemask and squinted at me, then shook his head and went back to his paperwork.